In his critical review of Crisi della ragione, a landmark publication that helped set the tone for postmodern philosophy in Italy in the 1980s, Umberto Eco remarked that reason wasn’t in crisis so much as undergoing a search for its limits—a search that had been undertaken in one form or another since the beginnings of Western philosophy. In effect, reason had always been in “crisis.” As apparently it had been nearly forty years before Eco wrote this when, in the wake of World War II, the newly fashionable philosophy of French existentialism attained notoriety, rightly or wrongly, as a philosophy of irrationalism. The existentialism in question of course was Sartre’s, which came to stand for existentialism tout court. This identification of Sartre with existentialism was made partly on the basis of his success de scandale “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” his lecture of October, 1945, published as a book the following year, and partly because, unlike Camus and others associated with existentialism, he embraced the name. As far as the public was concerned, Sartre was existentialism, and existentialism was Sartre.

But not all agreed. Just a few years after his lecture was published, Sartre’s existentialism was challenged by English poet and one-time Surrealist David Gascoyne in the article “After Ten Years’ Silence,” which appeared in 1949 in the London literary journal Horizon. In his piece, which ran to nearly 6600 words, Gascoyne argued that Sartre’s existentialism wasn’t a true existential philosophy; rather, that honor belonged to the philosophy of the late Jewish-Russian philosopher Lev Shestov (1866-1938). (The “ten years’ silence” of the title referred to the decade that had elapsed since Shestov’s death.) Although by design Gascoyne’s article didn’t go beyond a brief overview of Shestov’s philosophy, it does provide a concise introduction to what Gascoyne saw as the Shestovian alternative to Sartre’s existentialism— an existential philosophy in contrast to the “existentialism” that had come to pass for such. Gascoyne’s essay, recently republished in a handsome edition by Black Herald Press, not only is an interesting souvenir of a specific, historical philosophical controversy, but is a reminder that the salient questions of the time—questions about reason and its limits, about the authenticity of received ideas, and about the relationship between human existence and the world—are still relevant, and that Shestov’s answers remain thought-provoking even today.

 

The Polemical Context—contra Sartre

Because the context for Gascoyne’s article was the ascendancy of Sartre’s existentialism, its immediate purpose was polemical. But even as he contested Sartre’s philosophy, Gascoyne had a constructive point to make as well. He was concerned above all to clarify what he felt was a misunderstanding of the meaning of existential philosophy, particularly as that misunderstanding was held by a specific readership— “the intelligent reading public in England.” Gascoyne felt that this public was likely to have a confused idea of what existential philosophy was because,“being as usual about a decade behind” Continental Europe,it had taken Sartre’s existentialism as exemplary of the philosophy of existence as such. How this came to be Gascoyne doesn’t say, but it’s possible that his readers’ idea of existential philosophy came by way of Sartre’s 1945 lecture, which had been translated into English by British journalist Philip Mairet and published in 1948. (Sartre’s magnum opus L’Être et le néant wouldn’t appear in English until the 1956 publication of Hazel Barnes’ translation.) Gascoyne was, if anything, harsher on the situation in France, the intellectual confusion of which he considered to be “dense and inextricable” (p. 37).

Gascoyne didn’t attempt to refute Sartre’s existentialism in its specifics. He was content to summarize it as a perversion of the thought that inspired Kierkegaard and Dostoievsky based on a typically French Cartesian misunderstanding of the essence of the special contribution of these solitary individualists to European philosophical speculation. (p. 40)

Polemical rhetoric aside, he was quite correct to characterize Sartrean existentialism as Cartesian. The ontological analysis of human being in L’Être et le néant starts with the pour-soi, or for-itself: consciousness as present to itself. And Sartre himself, in his 1945 lecture, explicitly asserted that it was the Cartesian cogito,as “the absolute truth of consciousness confronting itself,” that provided the foundation and starting point from which his existentialism proceeded (Sartre 1945, p. 40). Although Gascoyne didn’t dispute the details of Sartre’s existentialism, he really didn’t need to. It would be enough for his purposes to reject its foundation in Cartesianism.

If existential philosophy isn’t Cartesian, then what is it? It is, Gascoyne says, “actual spiritual activity” (p. 38) as it concerns itself with “the universal, a priori condition of human existence” (p. 41). It isn’t something intellectual or intellectualized, with its starting point in the “I think” of consciousness. Instead, what “makes Existential Philosophy existential” is its insistence on holding to “the inner position” in which existence is experienced rather than thought about (p. 43). For Gascoyne, there is “one great modern thinker” who espouses such an “authentically existential philosophy,” and that is Lev Shestov (p. 38). He is

of all the great existential philosophers—the others are Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—the one who is nearest to us; and he is of all recent philosophers the one who is most necessary to a true understanding of the significance of existential philosophy in general and of its role in the crisis of modern thought. He is the philosopher of Tragedy and of Paradox; a seeker after the 'one thing needful', a solitary thinker whose despair does not counsel us to come to terms with defeatist resignation, but can inspire in those capable of it the violence with which alone is the Kingdom of Heaven to be taken. (p. 59)

 

Shestov’s Anti-Idealism

What, then, of Shestov’s existential philosophy? For Gascoyne, one of its core princples was its anti-Idealism. Gascoyne defines Idealism as  

thinking which treats ideas as though they were the completed final end-product of thinking, whereas they can for the existing individual never be more than the means by which he thinks, convenient approximate reflections from which the thinker should continually re-detach himself… (p. 51)

As Gascoyne presents it, Shestov’s anti-Idealism consists of a refusal to reify the idea—to put the abstract concept before the actually existing, concrete individual thing or contingent situation the concept is meant to represent. To do so is to mistake the idea—the momentary mediation through which we grasp something–for a capital– “I” Idea: a concept or ideal existing sub specie aeternitatis. To make this mistake is to take the idea as being more than it in fact is, when all it is is a more or less ad hoc abstraction that models reality with a greater or lesser degree of fidelity. Gascoyne is quick to acknowledge that Shestov’s anti-Idealism isn’t a rejection of ideas altogether; it recognizes them as a necessary aspect of our engagement with, and attempts to comprehend, the world, but qualifies them as provisional in nature—or, in Gascoyne’s phrase, “convenient approximate reflections” of what it is they are meant to reflect. But for precisely that reason, we must step back from them in order that we not lose sight of their provisional nature and mistakenly take them for absolute truths—for Ideas.

Certainly, they cannot be absolute truths for us as concrete individuals. Gascoyne emphasizes that one key to Shestov’s anti-Idealism is the critical attitude it takes toward the provenance of those ideas we use to navigate our way through the world. Gascoyne explains Shestov’s critical attitude as consisting of a questioning of the passively accepted ideas one absorbs through one’s education or, to put it more comprehensively, through one’s enculturation. These ideas aren’t ours as such but rather are something like the conventional wisdom promulgated by the anonymous “they” of  “they say…” Gascoyne describes these necessarily hand-me-down ideas as “readymade”—a term the one-time Surrealist must surely have borrowed knowingly from friend-of-Surrealism Marcel Duchamp. The main charge against these readymade ideas is that what they give us is something potentially misleading about our world, something Gascoyne describes as “only a very approximate, and to a large extent second-hand, hearsay idea” of the world and of our place within it. Rather than putting us in touch with reality, the readymade idea “secure[s us] against reality” (p. 51). In short, the received ideas of our time and place only seem to us, to the extent that we maintain an uncritical attitude toward them, to correspond to the world with think we know through them. And for this reason we must take a critical stance toward them in order to understand just how “conditioned” and “dependent” we are on them. It is only once we become aware of this conditioning and dependence that we can in fact become “perceptibly more realistic and objective” (pp. 52-53).

Perhaps the most frequent characterization of Shestov’s anti-Idealism was that it was anti-rational. But Gascoyne holds that this is a misinterpretation. Just because one questions conventional, readymade answers to existential questions doesn’t mean that one therefore rejects reason altogether; it “simply indicates that [one] is not limited by the common confusion between what man has discovered, and what he has invented for purposes of convenience, in his mind” (pp. 56-57). As Gascoyne points out, Shestov did in fact respect reason, but at the same time, he understood that it had “limitations” and didn’t always provide the appropriate way to respond to any given human situation. What existential wisdom demands is that we acknowledge these limitations and refuse to allow reason to “hypnotize” and “enslave” us (p. 42). Shestov was quite clear about this. As he put it in Speculation and Revelation,  “Reason is indeed necessary...it helps us cope with the difficulties that we run up against in our life path. But it also happens that reason...is transformed into [a] jailer” (Quoted in McLachlan, p. 177). When we lose sight of its status as a human invention imposed on reality, in other words, reason becomes an impersonal “jailer” confining the personal and contingent and forcing them into the straitjacket of the impersonal necessity of the Ideal. If we let it, reason traffics in universals sub specie aeternitatis, which erase the particular and the finite.

In refuting the charge that Shestov was an anti-rationalist, Gascoyne quotes the following passage from Shestov’s book All Things Are Possible:

To discard logic as an instrument, a means or aid for acquiring knowledge, would be extravagant. Why should we? For the sake of consequentialism? i. e. for logic's very self? But logic, as an aim in itself, or even as the only means to knowledge, is a different matter. Against this one must fight even if he has against him all the authorities of thought—beginning with Aristotle. (p. 57)

In sum, Shestov wasn’t against reason or rationality per se, but rather held that reason’s role, while well-suited to some, and even many, purposes, was not suited to all. Existence is a multifaceted thing that doesn’t always and in every instance allow itself to be reduced to rational reflection or abstract models; it may at times defy or outstrip our attempts to engage it in terms of the kind of knowledge reason and logic can secure. At times like those our reliance on reason is liable only to frustrate and mislead us. And ultimately, conceal from us the true nature of the world and our existence within it. This becomes a particularly acute problem when we use reason to conceal from ourselves the ultimate fact of our existence: our finitude.

 

Finitude, Courage, and “Bad Faith”

Gascoyne emphasizes the importance of the confrontation with, and consequently the recognition of, finitude for Shestov’s philosophy. He notes that an awareness of death “is like a constant ground-note...a starting point as well as the ultimate goal for speculative thought;” the essential question for Shestov is thus whether one wakefully confronts the fact of finitude, or instead attempts to evade it through denial or the simple acceptance of the purportedly reasonable explanations offered by materialist philosophy (p. 49). Gascoyne goes on to point out that for Shestov the fact of our finitude and the need to confront it with open eyes means that the “most indispensable prerequisite” for philosophy is “courage” and a “victory over fear,” rather than “the rational faculty or cogitative power,” because we often use the latter “less for the purpose of arriving at the truth than for that of protecting ourselves from fear of the unknown” (p. 43). Strikingly, in Gascoyne’s description rational thinking appears as a variety of what Sartre would term “bad faith,” although of course Gascoyne doesn’t call it by that name.

Beyond the confrontation with death and one’s inevitable finitude, there are other situations that call for courage in the face of the unknown. Gascoyne credits Shestov’s reading of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov for the insight that we sometimes find ourselves given over to a sense of “dislocation” and “panic” brought on by the “abrupt unfamiliarity and questionableness of everything hitherto regarded as certain.” Faced with these situations, we realize that the reflexes of everyday coping are no longer adequate, and that

the ordinary, reassuring truths and assumptions upon which we all base our everyday life and which it might well seem outrageous even to question publicly, are no longer able to satisfy [us], but seem to the contrary to have been simply the easily available, conventionally legitimized means whereby men commonly stupefy themselves so as to continue to be able to remain fast asleep (p. 44).

These “ordinary, reassuring truths and assumptions” are precisely those “readymade” ideas that conceal as much as they reveal. As such, they provide a refuge for one who would flee from the wakeful confrontation with the reality in front of him or her. But there is another sense in which these “readymade” ideas obscure rather than disclose the reality they purport to model. That they are provisional approximations means that something of the world as it really is will escape them. And this is where Shestov’s thought takes a radical turn. For him, our ideas are provisional and approximate because reality by its very nature is something they cannot entirely comprehend. Gascoyne notes that for Shestov the “actual world” has an “unknowable objectivity” and that “reality...in reality is inevitably mysterious [and]...still full of astonishing surprises and things of which we had never dreamed” (pp. 51-52) Or, as the title of one of Shestov’s works famously put it, “all things are possible.”

 

The Unknowability of the World and the Leap of Faith

With the thesis of the world’s ultimate unknowability, we pass over from an epistemological crisis suggested by the recognition of reason’s limits to a deeper problem. For when we acknowledge the limits of reason and what that means for our ability to know the world as it really is, we acknowledge our own relationship to the world as something uncertain. This uncertainty is in effect something that arises in the gap between the human need to impose an intelligible order on the world and the world itself, which doesn’t always cooperate with that human need. At those times when it doesn’t, the world appears to us as a place within which we feel somehow out of place and strange, or atopos, to use the ancient Greek term. It is, in other words, an atopia. Or, to invoke an expression that was fashionable at the time Gascoyne’s article was published, Absurd.

In fact, Shestov was one of the inspirations for the idea of the Absurd, as Albert Camus acknowledged in “The Myth of Sisyphus.” It was largely on the basis of Camus’ essay that the Absurd became identified as a key concept of postwar French existentialism, from which it made its way into the popular consciousness. And in citing him as an important source, Camus brought Shestov’s name out of the obscurity into which it had fallen since his death, and put it before a broader audience than Shestov likely had during his lifetime.

Camus’ essay, as unsatisfactory as it is in many ways, diagnosed a crisis to which Shestov’s existential philosophy provided one possible response. That crisis was a crisis of reason, as Camus implied when, explicitly agreeing with Shestov, he wrote of reason’s “uselessness” in coming to grips with the world in its “denseness” and “strangeness.” Camus’ own response to the crisis he identified, with the help of Shestov, nevertheless diverged from Shestov’s. Although he agreed with Shestov that reason was useless for grasping a world that refused to conform to its laws, he held that there was nevertheless nothing beyond reason (Camus, pp. 18 & 33). This, in essence, was the position of existentialism as popularly understood. But it wasn’t Shestov’s position. As Gascoyne was at pains to show, if for Shestov the world appears strange and unknowable in its evasion of the rational categories with which we attempt to make sense of it, and hence renders reason “useless,” then—again, for Shestov but not for Camus–an alternative to reason must be found if we are to exist within such a world. That alternative, for Shestov and for Gascoyne after him, is the leap into faith in a god unconstrained by our rational categories.

Given Shestov’s faith in a god who escapes humanity’s attempts to confine him to the rational categories we ourselves have contrived, it seems to be the case that, as Camus concedes, the Shestovian world is not truly absurd. And in fact Camus does write that Shestov “does not say: ‘This is the absurd,’ but rather: ‘This is God: we must rely on him even if he does not conform to any of our rational categories’” (Camus, p. 32). If it is only in terms of those rational categories that we can declare something as absurd—something that inverts or otherwise appears to subvert them, then with the leap into theology, we find ourselves on entirely different ground.

When, as Shestov did, we frame the problem in theological terms, we see clearly that the crisis of reason he diagnosed is, at bottom, a spiritual crisis. But his theistic solution to that problem was not something that could easily coexist with postwar French existentialism. This latter, at least to the extent—and it was a great extent–that Sartre and Camus were associated with it, was understood to be atheistic. Beyond that, as Gascoyne acknowledged, there was the more general problem that “real faith in God is not at present natural to man in the world.” And yet he also acknowledged that even the “deliberate atheist” shared with the theist the “tendency” to strive toward an engagement with existence “more highly developed” than the everyday attitude. (By the same token, in an article of 1944 in which he defended his philosophy against criticisms from the Communist Party, Sartre conceded that although French existentialism tended to be atheistic, that stance wasn’t “absolutely necessary” [Sartre 1944, p. 88].) Gascoyne, for his own part, was a professed believer who claimed that the atheist will come up against a limit by refusing to “recognize that there is a Ground of Being” (p. 41). But it isn’t just postwar French existentialism that would stop short of recognizing such a ground. The lack of belief in a transcendent ground of being is one of the defining attitudes of the time we live in. Is there a solution to the spiritual crisis of reason compatible with that attitude?

 

The “Weak” Solution

We might think of the leap of faith as representing a strong, theistic, solution to the problem of the ultimate uknowability of the world. But I want to suggest that there’s a weaker solution implied by Shestov’s critical anti-Idealism alone, one which doesn’t necessitate a theistic conclusion. (I term this solution “weak” not as a judgment of its efficacy but as a kind of homage to the “weak thought” of the late philosopher Gianni Vattimo.) Consider how the intuition of an absurd or irrational world naturally arises from Idealism. The world can only appear to be irrational when we insist on seeing it through the lens of a rational Ideal we have imposed on it from outside—an Ideal that we have come to reify, or posit as prior to, and more real than, the necessarily contingent realities it is meant to define for us. That’s the paradox, or better, irony, of an Idealism that doesn’t acknowledge its own limits. Rather than bringing order into the world our Ideas, to the extent that they posit a world that can only exist in theory and then—around the edges, maybe—fails in practice, leave us with an actual world that appears disorderly in comparison. In other words, Idealism itself creates the Absurd by positing as standards eternally valid structures that the contingent nature of things as they are can never meet.

What this implies, to me at least, is that “the Absurd” is something like a category error—it’s just a more dramatic way of saying that our ideas break down under certain, extraordinary circumstances. This doesn’t mean they’re entirely fraudulent or somehow illegitimate, only that as abstract models they, and with them our ability to know and to predict, have their limits. When we reach those limits the world does seem absurd—I prefer to call it “atopos”—but really this doesn’t necessarily mean that the fault is in the world in itself, but rather in our conceptualization of it or, more locally, of that part of it that appears to break down before us. If this is so, then the world is “absurd” only because we make it that way; “absurdity” is simply a measure of human disappointment rather than an essential quality of the world itself. In effect, the appearance of the world as absurd arises in the gap between what Sartre, in his review of Camus’s The Stranger, called the “divorce...between man’s longing for the eternal and the finite character of his existence” (Sartre 1943, p. 27).

Here I find Shestov’s anti-Idealism salutary. What I take away from it is the idea that by taking a critical attitude toward the concepts we use to describe and enclose the world and our existence within it, we remove the risk of taking them for being more real than they are—and more real than the reality they approximate. They can no longer shame reality into appearing senseless. In qualifying our concepts in this way—in acknowledging and accepting their provisional, and I would add pragmatic, nature, we regain our freedom to look beyond them and to engage our existence in other terms, terms more adapted to the uncertainties and needs that are inseparable from our situation. In effect, Shestov’s critical anti-Idealism just is the weak solution to the spiritual crisis of reason.

Gascoyne is right to describe Shestov’s existential philosophy as a “struggle for liberation” (p. 58) from what I have described as the reification of the Ideal. And crucially, he also was right that faith isn’t something that comes naturally to us under the conditions of modernity—not to mention the conditions of postmodernity. This suggests that liberation for us may need to find another path; the leap of faith may not be the only off-ramp from the narrow road of Idealism. But if not a leap of faith, what else to take us beyond reason as such? As I’ve suggested elsewhere*, there are two possible alternatives—and I don’t rule out the possibility that there may be others--inspired both by early Surrealism and by Freud: availability, and humour.

 

Availability and Humour

If I may paraphrase what I’d written previously, encountering what others have called the Absurd in an attitude of availability or humour involves the adoption of an interpretive stance that allows us a certain kind of subjective mastery of the world when it presents itself to us in the unknowable or uncooperative guise of an atopia. Consider that the intuition of the world as an atopia arises in the gap between the human need to impose an intelligible order on the world, and the world as it is. When we run up against this gap or misfit between our conceptual repertoire and the reality it attempts to make sense of, we experience what the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon described in Paris Peasant as an “eruption of contradiction within the real.” But what Aragon is referring to here isn’t an experience of the Absurd, but rather the experience of the marvelous breaking through the mundane. To be sure, an eruption of irrationality where we neither expect nor desire it can be a frustrating, potentially anxiety-producing experience. How can it equate to something marvelous? If we take it as a hermeneutic provocation, as a goad to confront it as something carrying a significance for us – if only we can find the interpretive key to unlock that significance. This requires adopting a stance of what the early Surrealists called “disponibilité” or availability: making oneself open to the possibility of finding meaning of personal significance in unlikely places. The contradiction or obstruction we encounter may have something to tell us. This isn’t a matter of our discovering a pre-existing, occult truth in disruptive circumstances, but rather of the application of an interpretive process which can derive a meaning whose relevance is specific only to ourselves as unique individuals – the existents that we are and that have been provoked into taking this hermeneutic stance relative to the unexpected and (perhaps) unwelcome event disrupting us as we make our (formerly) complacent way through the world.

The second alternative is humour. I use this spelling to distinguish it from ordinary humor, of which it is a special case. Humour as I intend here it derives from the humour noir— “black humour”– of André Breton, which was itself indebted to the concept of humor set out in Freud’s 1928 article of that name. In essence, humour consists in the darkly comic attitude we might take toward the setbacks we experience, an attitude in which we derive a kind of perverse pleasure by making a joke out of our misfortune. Breton defined humour succinctly as the “paradoxical triumph of the pleasure principle over real conditions at the moment when they are considered the most unfavorable” (Breton, p. 11). When we approach them in the spirit of humour, we confront circumstances at their most unfavorable – at their most Absurd – in a way that, in essence, gives us the last laugh, at their expense.

The key to humour is its refusal to grant victory to adversity. As Freud wrote, humour

is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies the triumph not only of the ego, but also of the pleasure-principle, which is strong enough to assert itself here in the face of the adverse real circumstances...It refuses to be hurt by the arrows of reality or to be compelled to suffer.  (Freud, pp. 2 & 3)

Through humour’s refusal to allow us to be compelled to suffer, we as individuals assert our subjectivity over an external situation that has no regard for our concerns or desires. Humour is, in effect, a manifestation of freedom in the face of adverse determinants. To be sure, Freud’s pessimism impelled him to assert that with humour one was “really repudiating reality and serving an illusion.” Nevertheless, he conceded that taking such an attitude has “a high value...a peculiarly liberating and elevating effect” (Freud, p. 5).

With humour we return in a way if not to the letter of Shestov’s philosophy of existence, then to its spirit. That spirit is tragic. Humour recognizes the tragic in the real even as it laughs at it; its laughter is nothing if not the expression of courage and a victory over fear. With humour, we still have tragedy, but in its comic guise; it’s tragedy as played in a major key. And if there really is a capricious god who enjoys playing games with us, wouldn’t he perhaps appreciate knowing that we’re in on the joke?

 

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* In my piece on Benjamin Fondane’s Existential Mondays, which appeared in OffCourse 99. Fondane has been called Shestov’s only real disciple, and so it isn’t surprising that many of the problems he identified and positions he took in Existential Mondays overlap with those in Gascoyne’s article. In fact it was through Fondane, whom Gascoyne knew when he was in Paris between the wars, that Gascoyne discovered Shestov’s work. My response to Gascoyne in this essay’s final section is to a large extent a restatement of my response to Fondane.

 

References

André Breton, “Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism” in Free Rein, tr. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline D’Amboise (Lincoln: U NE Press, 1995). Internal cite to Breton.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, tr. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1991). Internal cites to Camus. Accessed at https://dn710009.ca.archive.org/0/items/persepolis_202107/The%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus%20-%20Albert%20Camus.pdf

Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin Books, 2006). Internal cites to Freud.

David Gascoyne, After Ten Years’ Silence: Lev Shestov (Paris & London: Black Herald Press, 2020). Internal cites are to page numbers only.

James McLachlan, “Shestov’s Reading and Misreading of Kierkegaard,” Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, June 1986. Internal cite to McLachlan. Accessed at https://www.academia.edu/118061703/Shestov_s_Reading_and_Misreading_of_Kierkegaard

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism: A Clarification,” in We Have Only This One Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (New York: NY Review Books Classics, 2013). Internal cite to Sartre 1944.

Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Stranger, Explained, in We Have Only This One Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (New York: NY Review Books Classics, 2013). Internal cite to Sartre 1943.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, Including a Commentary on The Stranger, tr. Carol Macomber, ed. John Kulka and with an introduction by Annie Cohen-Solal and a preface and notes by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (New Haven: Yale U Press, 2007). Internal cite to Sartre 1946.