Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophical and political thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings had a potency that was irresistible to the intellectual scene that swept post-war Europe, and have left a vital inheritance to contemporary thought. The central tenet of the Existentialist movement which he helped to found, whereby God is replaced by an ethical self, proved hugely attractive to a generation that had seen the horrors of Nazism, and provoked a revolution in post-war thought (...) and literature. In What is Literature? Sartre the novelist and Sartre the philosopher combine to address the phenomenon of literature, exploring why we read, and why we write. (shrink)

Bad faith is defined as the attempt to hide from ourselves as free and responsible agents. Antiblack racism is shown to be the self-deceiving choice to believe that black people are inferior to all other races and that black people are not fully human beings; as such, it is shown to be not only a form of denial, but also a form of self-denial. The possibility of self-denial is developed through an examination of Sartre's theory of pre-reflective consciousness, the imagination, (...) and the contradictory and ironic "nature" of human reality. Using Sartre's interpretive method of existential psychoanalysis--where human reality is guided by an "original choice" to achieve what Sartre calls the "in-itself-for-itself," the self-contradictory object of all desire--I provide a description of a number of antiblack attitudes, among which is the notion of white supremacy out of which the ascription of an identity relation of blackness with absence and hunger is shown. I argue that the interpretation of blackness as absence and hunger in an antiblack world entails the convergence and conflation of race and gender since femininity is also traditionally interpreted as absence and hunger. I further argue that the existential-theological problem of whether human reality can exist without the desire to be the in-itself-for-itself is transformed in an antiblack world into the question of whether blacks and whites are human in virtue of a white object of desire. An antiblack world calls for blacks to justify their right to exist, which suggests a group--whites--whose existence is self-justified, which is tantamount to whites being the in-itself-for-itself. ;I then discuss the various challenges posed by a Sartrean treatment of antiblack racism, among which are that Sartre does not have a social philosophy in Being and Nothingness and that Sartre's categories of subject and object militate against the egalitarian goal of a world in which both blacks and whites are subjects. (shrink)

Racism confronts contemporary social life with an apparent paradox: Moral reason surely condemns antipathetic discriminatory beliefs and practices. Racism is clearly of this sort. But racist ideas and acts, generally considered irrational, pervaded forms of social life simultaneously with the widespread admission that all human beings are by nature rational. Most try to resolve this apparent paradox by insisting that racists fail to realize their rational potential, and to that degree are immoral. Focus by social scientists on the sociology and (...) psychology of 'race relations' and fascination with the mythological appeals of racism have entrenched the presumption that racism is inherently irrational. Nevertheless, those selfsame philosophers concerned to widen the cast of rationality expressed also virulently racist beliefs and arguments. This apparent paradox cannot be resolved simply on the basis of racism's irrationality. Disturbing features of our moral ideas and relations are uncovered by pursuing the other horn of the dilemma. Analysis of our moral conceptions and of the history of racism reveals that the language central to modern expression of our moral relations is coterminously the language of expression of racial relations, hence of racism. We shift focus from social scientists' prevailing concerns with phenomenal appearances of race relations to the intellectual roots of racism. 'Race' became popular scientifically only during the Enlightenment. This rise in 'race conciousness' encouraged the peculiarly modern development of racism. We show that racism's rise was determined both by contemporary forms of colonial exploitation and by the establishment of modern biological and anthropological science. The conceptual media by which racism can be expressed are embedded in intellectual discourse. Without the scientific and philosophical discourses of 'race,' racist discriminations would be inconceivable. Racist forms of social relation, action and belief were rendered possible only by a dominant, hence rational, mode of representing the natural and social world--scientific, philosophical, moral, aesthetic, economic, political, legal. The structure and grammar of the discourse are laid out, and an alternative moral discourse is outlined to compete against racist discourse and encourage non- and anti-racist acts. (shrink)