NM's blog

A critical review of Paige Arthur's   Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of  Jean-Paul Sartre (2010) Alexander Zevin, Critique of Neo-colonial Reason, NLR, July-August 2011 Excerpts There is no shortage of either scholarly or popular works on Jean-Paul Sartre,  or on the intellectuals with whom he sparred in post-war France. Yet if the number of studies continues to expand, the themes they treat tend, at the  same time, to narrow: friendships, paramours and quarrels are laced into  larger, moralizing narratives of alleged Sartrean backsliding on camps in the Soviet Union and show trials under its client regimes in Eastern Europe. This tradition found its own shrill champion in Tony Judt, whose Past Imperfect ( 1992) dwelt on the silence or complicity of intellectuals in and outside the  PCF  who, ‘in the name of the proletarian and the class struggle made a daily  contribution to the legitimation of the enslavement of the sat...

“Let’s take a good look at ourselves, if we have the courage, and let’s see what has become of us. “First of all we must confront an unexpected sight: the striptease of our humanism. Not a pretty sight in its nakedness: nothing but a dishonest ideology, an exquisite justification for plundering; its tokens of sympathy and affectation, alibis for our acts of aggression. The pacifists are a fine sight: neither victims nor torturers! Come now! If you are not a victim when the government you voted for and the army your young brothers served in, commits “genocide,” without hesitation or remorse then, you are undoubtedly a torturer. And if you choose to be a victim, risking one or two days in prison, you are simply trying to take the easy way out. But you can’t; there is no way out. Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, e...