The Existentialist Offensive
The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy: bit.ly/PBEPBwlPbk
- Reposted by The Existentialist OffensiveUK Sartre Society conference 2026 Maison Française d'Oxford :: 1 – 2 July Keynote Speakers –– Jane Hiddleston (Oxford) Marguerite La Caze (Queensland) Mark Wrathall (Oxford) :: CALL FOR ABSTRACTS :: :: deadline: 31 January :: Full details: mailchi.mp/3907c01fb30b...
- “If truth be told, one is not born, but becomes, a genius; and the feminine condition has, until now, rendered this becoming impossible.” - Happy 118th birthday, Simone de Beauvoir!
- Joyeaux Noël !
- 11 December 1945: Beauvoir gave a lecture titled ‘Roman et métaphysique’ at Club Maintenant in Paris. Beauvoir argued that novels can provide richer and more nuanced metaphysical visions of human reality than is possible using the skeletal abstractions of philosophical prose.
- Beauvoir’s lecture was at the same venue as Sartre’s famously chaotic event six weeks earlier, but seems to have been rather calmer. A written version was later published in Les Temps Modernes issue 7 (April 1946).
- It is in The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy under the title ‘Literature and Metaphysics’.
- 7 December 1945: Beauvoir’s play Les Bouches Inutiles, which had been first performed on 29 October, is published. An English translation is available as The Useless Mouths.
- 2 December 1945: Sartre publishes the second novel in his series Les Chemins de la Liberté –– Le Sursis is set during ‘the phoney war’ of September 1939 to March 1940, after the war was declared but before the fighting had begun. An English translation is available from Penguin as The Reprieve.
- 1 December 1945: Les Temps Modernes issue 3 is published. Beauvoir’s ‘L’existentialisme et la sagesse des nations’ – by far the best short introduction to existentialism ever published – is the lead article. Sartre’s highly influential ‘Portrait de l’antisémite’ is in the same issue.
- Translations of both articles — as ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’ and ‘Portrait of the Anti-Semite’ — are at the centre of The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy.
- Reposted by The Existentialist Offensive#philsky 30-minute interview with me on Dublin City FM about The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy ::
- 15 November 1945: An interview with Camus appears on the front page of Les Nouvelle’s Littéraires headlined: ‘NON, je ne suis pas existentialiste’, nous dit ALBERT CAMUS
- (Newspaper image from gallica.bnf.fr) 80 years later the full article becomes available in English for the first time in The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy.
- Reposted by The Existentialist Offensive✨✨ The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy edited by me is published today in the UK! (Australia and North America publication is next February.) ✨✨
- 1 November 1945: Issue 2 of Les Temps Modernes is published Beauvoir’s essay ‘Idéalisme moral et réalisme politique’ addresses a theme of her novel La Sang des Autres and her play Les Bouches Inutiles – the place of morality in political action and the foundational value of each person’s freedom
- 29 October 1945: Premiere performance of Beauvoir’s play Les Bouches Inutiles (aka Useless Mouths or Who Shall Die) at Théâtre des Carrefours (now Théâtre des Bouffes-du-Nord) by Gare du Nord in Paris.
- In a besieged medieval town faced with starvation, the (all male) council decide that food should be reserved for soldiers and workers — so denied to women, children, and elderly men. It is Beauvoir’s only play.
- One of the characters was played by Olga Dominique (née Kosakiewicz). She and her sister Wanda are the inspiration for the character Xavière in Beauvoir’s novel L’Invitée (She Came To Stay). Getty Images has a publicity photo for the original production featuring her and Jean Berger ––
- Olga is also the inspiration for the character Ivich in Sartre’s Roads To Freedom novels. She had made her theatrical debut two years earlier as Electra in Sartre’s play The Flies. Getty Images also has this rather striking photo of her in The Flies, though dated to 1951 ––
- 29 October 1945: Sartre gives a lecture titled ‘L’existentialisme – est-il un humanisme?’ at Club Maintenant in Paris. Far too many people turned up. Sartre had to push his way through to the stage, much to the annoyance of the crowd. He spoke for about an hour without notes and took questions.
- The event was chaotic. Chairs were broken. People fainted and had to be carried outside. The discussion was cut short for the sake of public safety. This made its reputation as the defining event of the existentialist offensive.
- Even so, someone managed to take comprehensive notes, which were edited into a transcript. The resulting publication became one of the best selling and most widely translated philosophy books of the twentieth century -- its most recent English title is Existentialism Is a Humanism.
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View full threadFor this reason, The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy does not include this confusing attempt to introduce existentialism. It has instead Beauvoir’s much more coherent and focused essay ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’, published just a few weeks after Sartre’s lecture took place.
- 24 October 1945: The United Nations officially comes into being, as the UN Charter has now been ratified by the majority of its signatories including the five permanent members of the Security Council. 24 October has been celebrated as United Nations Day since 1948.
- 24 October 1945: Sartre gives a lecture on existentialism in Brussels and one Iris Murdoch is in the audience. From her notes, this was clearly a version of the now rather famous lecture he was to give in Paris five days later.
- A week later Murdoch wrote in a letter –– "Last week I had a great experience. I met Jean Paul Sartre. He was in Brussels to lecture on existentialism, & I was introduced to him at a small gathering after the lecture, & met him again at a long café seance the following day ...
- I begin to like his ideas more & more ... his writing and talking on morals – will, liberty, choice – is hard & lucid & invigorating. It’s the real thing – so exciting, & so sobering, to meet at last – after turning away in despair from the shallow stupid milk & water ‘ethics’ of English ‘moralists’
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View full threadSources: The Iris Murdoch archive at the University of Kingston for the notebook. Thank you to Lucy Bolton for the photo. Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries, 1939-45, edited by Peter J. Conradi for the letter.
- 21 October 1945: A general election to the legislative assembly is held. This is the first time women can vote in a French national election. A referendum asks whether the newly elected legislature should draft a new constitution. 96% of the votes cast are in favour.
- (Women first voted in French municipal elections on 29 April 1945.)
- 15 October 1945: Pierre Laval, who had the official title Prime Minister of France in the collaborationist Vichy government, is executed by firing squad.
- 2 October 1945: The day after Les Temps Modernes is launched, Sartre publishes the first novel in his series Les Chemins de la Liberté: L’Âge de Raison is set in the summer of 1938 as Europe teeters on the brink of war.
- It will be followed two months later by Le Sursis (The Reprieve) … … and then four years later by La Mort dans l’Âme (Iron in the Soul). The BBC broadcast a superb thirteen-episode TV adaptation of the first three novels in 1970.
- Two chapters of the projected fourth and final novel in the series were published in Les Temps Modernes in 1949, but the book was never finished. Fragments of the book were gathered together in a posthumous edition of Sartre’s novels. They are available in English as The Last Chance.
- 1 October 1945: The first issue of Les Temps Modernes is published –– a monthly cultural and political journal led by Sartre and Beauvoir, with a host of other major figures on the editorial board. The journal is named after a Charlie Chaplin film. Pablo Picasso designed the cover.
- This first issue includes Sartre’s essay ‘The End of the War’ –– which now opens the middle section of The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy – 'The Existentialist Offensive'.
- Agnès Poirier tells the story of the journal’s first year here:
- It is 80 years since Beauvoir and Sartre gave the word 'existentialism' a definition ... ... in a campaign of publications and events that Beauvoir later called 'the existentialist offensive'. To celebrate, this feed will mark each key moment (including political events) for the next three months.
- #philsky #fanon "The collective unconscious is not governed by cerebral heredity: it is the consequence of what I shall call an impulsive cultural imposition" — Frantz Fanon
- #philsky #beauvoir "Existentialist thought is an effort to reconcile the objective and the subjective, the absolute and the relative, the timeless and the historical" – Simone de Beauvoir
- #philsky #sartre "If the whole of humanity continues to live, it will do so not simply because it has been born but because it will have decided to prolong its life" – Jean-Paul Sartre
- Reposted by The Existentialist OffensiveBe existential to each other…
- #philsky The cover art for the forthcoming –– ✨The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy ✨ –– is Marie Raymond's painting: ✨ Arabesques ou Variations sur la volute ✨ (1948) For more on Marie Raymond, including images of many paintings, visit her archive's website: marieraymond.com
- Reposted by The Existentialist OffensiveComing soon –– The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy edited by me :: available now to pre-order from all good bookshops (and that bad one) :: –– contents pages are in the thread below. #philsky
- Reposted by The Existentialist Offensive'This is the Simone de Beauvoir Society' fits to that song in The Italian Job, in case you're wondering what will be looping through your mind 5 hours from now
- Reposted by The Existentialist Offensive✨Congratulations to our doctoral student Thom Hamer ✨ whose paper ✨ 'A Case for Contingent Absurdity' ✨ has just been published in ✨ European Journal of Philosophy ✨ Llongyfarchiadau, Thom! Gefeliciteerd!
- 80 years ago today ... 1 August 1945 Beauvoir published her second novel, Le Sang des autres. Set in Paris during the outbreak of the second world war, the novel explores tensions between individual relationships and political commitment.
- It is available in English under the title The Blood of Others
- In 1984, HBO made a three-hour TV film of it starring Jodie Foster, which was then edited down for the French market into a 40-minute cinema release with dubbed dialogue.
- Probably best to read the book.
- Two more free Rethinking Existentialism articles to celebrate #Fanon100 from the ever excellent @aeon.co magazine :: 1. A short piece on sedimentation in the existentialisms of Beauvoir and Fanon ::
- 2. A longer read on what social psychology can learn about prejudices and stereotypes from the existentialisms of Beauvoir and Fanon :: #Fanon100 #philsky
- (Beauvoir readers: apologies for the erroneous ‘de’ in these articles.)
