In 1940, Jean-Paul Sartre complained in his notebooks, “You are supposed to be made of mud, but I am of the wind.” It was considered spiritual in the 20th century. He was a womanizer, loved to travel for pleasure, burst into tears when he heard a song, and admired great artists such as Chopin, Baudelaire, and Tintoretto. Against bourgeois hypocrisy, the philosopher, who also commanded transparency, succumbed to his whims, but as a relentless analyzer of his mental processes, he could not help leaving them in writing.
François Noudelmann As an expert in his work, he now shows unconventional aspects of his personality in A Very Different Sartre, published in Spanish by Ediciones del Subsuelo. He does this through unpublished documents provided by Arlette Elkaïm, an Algerian Jew who, at the age of 19 and 51, became his adopted daughter after an affair that began as a casual affair between an eager young woman and one of the world’s most famous. The overwhelming minds of the last century. A very different Sartre shows the father of existentialism in a constant tension between the high expectations he imposes on himself in his role as the secular Pope, and his real character as mutable and contradictory as everyone else’s. “A thinker does not always agree with everything he thinks” becomes the thesis of the book.
If Simone de Beauvoir, the woman of his life, was “Beaver” to Sartre because of her industriousness, she dedicated Situations IV to Arlette Elkaim and called her “sparrow” or “comb”: “In the liveliest and most affectionate love. old raven”, her signature put before throwing. Although Elkaim began as her lover, she soon moved away from the “contingent loves” that Sartre pursued in parallel with his relationship with Beauvoir, and both showed complete transparency: four women at once in their hottest years.
Sartre had always hated having children, but after returning ill from a trip to the USSR in 1964 and about to turn 60, he asked Arlette Elkaïm: “What if we adopt each other?” He said yes, and as blindness was added to the brain accidents he had in 1973, he became a practitioner of not only his job but also his health. This did not mean that the philosopher gave up alcohol with daily consumption. Other drugs such as amphetamines (Corydrane) and mescaline – after injecting Naúsea – began to take a toll on his health. Beauvoir also adopted a young woman, Sylvie Le Bon, in the last period of her life.
a strange philosopher
One of the episodes of A Very Different Sartre is strikingly “Sartre queer?” He had grown up in a fatherless, female philosopher universe: “I always thought there was a woman in me,” he admitted to Beauvoir. The author of The Second Sex was surprised that his seventy-year-old anti-capitalist and anti-colonial partner had never talked about women, after considering all the oppressed on Earth.
Sartre loved to chat with women, admired their sensibilities, which he judged to be different, and even went so far as to wear the opposite sex in a black velvet dress and a tall blonde at a costume party while on a cruise in Norway. Braids Empathizing with the female gender may explain why women don’t resist him. François Noudelmann attributes to Sartre’s continued fondness for the USSR after the invasion of Hungary in 1956, his emotional relationship with Lena Zonina, who translated her works into Russian.
The philosopher invents excuses to meet with Zonina and even organizes events of the highest level, such as his 1963 effort at UNESCO to promote an intellectual exchange between East and West. “You are the East-West conflict. More precisely, East and West meet in our bed. The best the West can do is hug you. The best thing the East can do is close her eyes and smile at me with joy like you.
However, Sartre’s clarity makes him fully aware of the contradictions that torment him. The intellectual, who experienced the Second World War as a turning point in his life and was imprisoned for nine months in a prison camp in Germany, confesses that he is tired of politics, but remains loyal. He prefers to get lost in Italy, which he loves so much, than to organize trips for intellectuals to China or the USSR, but is uncomfortable with the contradiction of writing about the working class from the luxury hotels he stays in.
Although he never dared to write poetry and persevered in the endless articles that stood in his way in defense of communism, he was nonetheless a determined literary master who surrendered himself to the genius of Flaubert and Baudelaire. «There is happiness, it is important; why would you refuse? Accepting this does not increase the misfortune of others, moreover, it helps to fight for them.” Albert Camus warned him. He also told him: “I find it sad that people feel shame about being happy today.” He never succeeded in executing the story.