Description of the World – Part 25
Postwar French Thought, Volume II:
Literary Debate, Texts and Contexts, ed. Denis Hollier and Jeffrey
Mehlman (To tell the truth, I haven’t made very good use of this impressive
anthology. Nevertheless, it made one strong impression. Reading the 1945
manifesto J.P. Sartre’s wrote to inaugurate Le Temps modernes, I was
surprised how credible and relevant it seemed after so many years of thinking
of Sartre as very old news indeed. When I was a kid, my friends and I would
never consult the paper to find out when the movie started. We just went to the
theater and stayed there until we’d seen everything and somebody announced, “This
is where we came in.” Reading this old piece, which came out the year of my
birth, I had a sudden sense of “this is where we came in.” Of course the moment
in my own life I’m speaking about wasn’t my biological birth, but the time in
my early adolescence when I became aware of existentialism. My sister let me
come along with her to a party of her college friends at the apartment of a guy
who everybody called Crowbar. My sister’s circle wasn’t all that advanced, but
there were genuine beatniks in attendance that night and one of ‘em was amused
to ask a fifteen year old what he thought of Sartre’s idea of radical freedom.
I think I said something grave about the reality of human nature or some such
thing as if my opinion mattered. I knew I was talking through my hat and subsequently
attempted to read Being and Nothingness, realized I needed to understand
Kant first, and then hurled myself at the First Critique like a pigeon
flying into a plate glass window. I eventually found some potted explanation of
what existentialism was, though that didn’t help a great deal. When I could
read a serious philosophy book, the Sartre that mattered even a little was the
author of the Critique of Dialectical Reason and at that, his flirtation
with Maoism was making him seem like a foolish old man trying to hang with
teenagers. By the time de Gaulle decided, “You don’t arrest Voltaire,” he had
become something of a mascot. Personally, I was rather less tolerant of his
blind eye for communism. I assigned one of his books, I forget which, at the beginning
of a course I taught on contemporary approaches to Marxism. It was rather a
gesture since what the students and I really wanted to do was try to make sense
of Foucault and Derrida. They had just appeared on the horizon—the Marxism in
the course title was something of a cover story—and Sartre was in the dead zone
between active thinker and revered or despised ancestor. Reading the old piece
in this anthology made me wonder if he might be coming back into focus again.
The editors apparently thought so: the last item in the book is Derrida’s
reappraisal of Sartre.)
Fernand Braudel, The Identity of
France: Volume One: History and Environment (Braudel was a geographer as
well as a historian. The first volume of his book on France is essentially
geographical. I wish more historians would begin with geography because it is
the structure of the scene and diversity of environments that keeps narratives
from turning into soapbox operas. Besides, people just don’t know much
geography, even the geography of their own country. It’s a routine complaint
that Americans can’t find this or that country on a map, but I wonder how many
of ‘em have a gestalt of the way North America is laid out? The maps in
conventional history books don’t help much, and it is the historian’s
obligation to supply the requisite “describing, seeing, making others see”—that
Braudel is so good at. It would also help if, at least once in a while, the
places mentioned in the text of
history books were marked on their maps! Of course I have a bias towards
geography, which why this exercise is labeled a description of the world, even
if I’m trying to be the Strabo of a library rather than of a planet.)
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