ABSTRACT
It will be useful to begin with a general view of Sartre’s output, from start to finish, if only to provide a series of points of reference with respect to which the arguments developed later can be located. For Sartre is, always and above all, a writer; by his own account his vocation as such was explicitly established in infancy, and his self-conscious being consisted, as the title of his autobiography indicates, of words. At the other end of his career the monumental study of Flaubert opens with a question: ‘What can we know of a man, today?’ whose implicit identification of ‘man’ with ‘writer’ is characteristic. Not that this makes him any less a philosopher: philosophy was forced upon him, partly because his ambition to be a novelist and professor of literature led through the philosophical requirements of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, partly by the intrinsic interest of what he found in Bergson and in phenomenology (PI 70). But his properly philosophical writings constitute cuts into a long and almost unbroken syntagma that includes other segments: fiction, criticism, theatre, reportage, political manifestos, editorials; and the whole could not have been produced by a single individual if the mode of its production had not been more or less continuous, rapid, and immediate. The coherence of this oeuvre is to be found in the man himself, in his intellectual development and his changing situation. In what follows I shall give some details of minor texts that are unlikely to be alluded to again in the body of the book but shall merely indicate, without elaboration, the occurrence of topics (contingency, bad faith, and so on) which will occupy a major share of attention later on.
