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and each individual was inevitably acting on his own or at most in
"groups in fusion," but groups that lacked a transcendental figure, a
deity or Leader or Head. (Sartre did, however, still see himself as a
humanist - for which the structuralists and poststructuralists roundly
condemned him - but his humanism precluded any stable or com–
plete concept of "Man.") Yet if that was the case, what room was
there in the world for an intellectual whose very function, at least as
conceived by Sartre, is to
speakjor
others, who in spite of everything
therefore leads them? To speak for others under whose authority, in
the name of what? In the name of an ungraspable notion of "Man"?
The fragmentary, ephemeral nature of his later writings was the em–
bodiment of, and perhaps the expiation for, the guilty conscience of
the privileged intellectual who "represented" others, but who could
never fully validate that act through his own philosophy, and who
could thus never justify to himself his own activity in general. For
Sartre, the intellectual was always "merely" an intellectual. Young
Hugo in
Dirty Hands
is ashamed that he is
only
a political writer, and
nothing in the play convinces us that Hoederer is right when he tells
Hugo that there is a place in the political struggle for able jour–
nalists, just as there is for macho "men of action."
The writing becomes less important, then, as the public activ–
ity, the public image, is magnified. Sartre's biography toward the
end becomes a chronicle of his various positions of support, as when
he spoke for the Algerian independence fighters, for Third World
revolutionaries in general, or against the war in Vietnam in both its
phases (French and American). But by this time he was pure public
act; an appearance of Sartre at some event guaranteed its coverage
in the press and on television. His writings had nothing to do with it;
they seemed to lose importance even as they became more bloated.
His gestures were important, and they served as a kind of moral ed–
ucation for many people; he was the nation's conscience, but as a
philosopher, political theorist, and writer of literature, he was noth–
ing. He ignored recent philosophy; he insulted the structuralists,
Foucault, Lacan,
Tel Quel.
All that remained was Sartre the bio–
grapher: after three massive volumes of the Flaubert biography and
just before he started the fourth, which was to have been an analysis
of
Madame Bovary,
he went blind.
In recounting Sartre's life in this way, I have been giving it an
order, in a sense rewriting (and rationalizing) Hayman's biography
while retaining what appear to be his prejudices. I've replaced the in–
congruous juxtaposition of daily private and public acts and ac-
