Abstract
Both in his life and in his thought Jean-Paul Sartre was frequently theatrical, as exaggerated as his prose. He really believed that “the chief source of great tragedy is human freedom.” In this spirit he rewrote several ancient myths and was not at all bothered by the ironic incongruity of asserting that “Oedipus is free; Antigone and Prometheus are free. The fate we think we find in ancient drama is only the other side of freedom. Passions themselves are freedom caught in their own trap.”1 Sartre’s continual invocation of freedom and his own experience of being free pervade all his writings.
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Notes
Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Theater (New York: Random House, 1976), 3.
Konstantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art, (New York: Meridian, 1956), 466.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 59.
Ibid., 39.
See James M. Edie, “Sartre as Phenomenologist and as Existential Psychoanalyst,” Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Lee and Mandelbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 139–178, and Edie, “The Question of the Transcendental Ego: Sartre’s Critique of Husserl,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 24, no. 2 (1993).
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination (New York: Philosophical Books, 1948), 273. Translation corrected.
Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 42.
Frederick A. Olafson, Principles and Persons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 19ff, gives a good historical disquisition on “medieval Franciscan voluntarism” and shows its affinity with Sartre’s theory of freedom.
Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1957), 84ff.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Braziller, 1963). This is certainly the most successful of Sartre’s attempts at the existential psychoanalysis of a particular life’s project and it apparently hit home. Genet said that reading the book filled him with “a kind of disgust because I saw myself stripped naked.” He needed six years to get over the analysis, during which time he ceased writing; when he did begin again it was not to continue with the short novels and short stories or the early one act plays of the kind Sartre had studied (along with other evidence), but to write a new kind of theater, much more symbolic, much larger in scope and in a completely new style. So it seems that Sartre’s subject, in this case, recognized himself in the analysis, which is certainly not to say it “cured” him of anything. Both Sartre and he would have scoffed at such a suggestion. See James Edie, “Sartre as Existentialist and as Existential Psychoanalyst,” op. cit.
Bertolt Brecht, “On Experimental Theater,” in Theater in the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert W. Corrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 107.
Ibid., 96ff.
This is presented in Centeno y Rilova and D. Sutherland, The Blue Clown, Dialogues, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971). Though I take these dialogues as my inspiration for applying these distinctions to Sartre’s work, I have considerably “interpreted” Centeno’s original presentation.
Carlin Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 60ff.
Francis Jeanson, Sartre par lui-méme, (Paris: Seuil, 1956).
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Edie, J.M. (1995). The Philosophical Framework of Sartre’s Theory of the Theater. In: Crowell, S.G. (eds) The Prism of the Self. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8408-1_15
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