In this volume, Joseph Catalano offers an in-depth exploration of Jean-Paul Sartre's four major philosophical writings: Being and Nothingness, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, and The Family Idiot. These works have been immensely influential, but they are long and difficult and thus challenging for both students and scholars. Catalano here demonstrates the interrelation of these four works, their internal logic, and how they provide insights into important but overlooked aspects of Sartre's thought, such as the (...) body, childhood, and evil. The book begins with Sartre's final work, The Family Idiot, and systematically works backward to Being and Nothingness. Catalano then repeats the study by advancing chronologically, beginning with Being and Nothingness and ending with The Family Idiot and an afterword on Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Readers will appreciate Catalano's subtle readings as well as the new insights that he brings to Sartre's oeuvre. (shrink)

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. A history, thought Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comparative charting of structural transformations and displacements. But for Sartre, authentic historical understanding demanded a much more personal and committed narrative, a kind of interpretive diary of moral (...) choices and risks compelled by critical necessity and an exacting reality. Sartre's history, a rational history of individual lives and their intrinsic social worlds, was in essence immersed in biography. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume work, Thomas R. Flynn conducts a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory, and provocatively anticipates the Foucauldian counterpoint to come in Volume Two. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Sociality offers new ideas and conceptual tools for philosophers and social scientists in their analysis of the social world.

From "Materialism and Revolution" through _Hope Now_, Jean-Paul Sartre was deeply engaged with questions about the meaning and justifiability of violence. In the first comprehensive treatment of Sartre’s views on the subject, Ronald Santoni begins by tracing the full trajectory of Sartre’s evolving thought on violence and shows how the "curious ambiguity" of freedom affirming itself against freedom in his earliest writings about violence developed into his "curiously ambivalent" position through his later writings.

La relation est au coeur de l'existence individuelle et les multiplicités, que déterminent les différents rapports pratiques, affectifs, sociaux et politiques, sont coextensives à l'invention continue de l'individualité par elle-même. Le présent essai veut rendre compte de la constitution, à partir de la seule activité des individus, des diverses formes d'existence et d'organisation que peut revêtir un ensemble pratique : rassemblements, dispositifs collectifs, réseaux et systèmes, associations et communautés plus ou moins étendues et diversement intégrées, institutions et Etats, sans oublier (...) les conflits et les luttes, avec leur développement historique. Affectée par des phénomènes de domination, la multiplicité reçoit la structure passive de l'union en altérité, comme si la liberté en venait à réaliser, malgré elle, la transmutation de la puissance singulière en impuissance. Mais une multiplicité active peut aussi se constituer en résistant à la servitude et en rompant avec l'être sériel : elle s'affirme alors dans l'expérience subjective du groupe, avec l'apparition du pouvoir normatif et critique appartenant à une multitude libre, qui crée de nouvelles formes de la vie sociale. (shrink)