“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” It was phrases like this that stirred a whole generation of French intellectuals. Sartre's star ma“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” It was phrases like this that stirred a whole generation of French intellectuals. Sartre's star may have waned significantly since the 1950s and 1960s, but his legacy remains indisputable, complex, and contested. He was a champion of individual freedom who sided with the most awful totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. He was the epitome of the hyper-social cafeteria intellectual who quarreled ceaselessly with almost every other eminent thinker in France. Reflecting and revealing all these contradictions, Gary Cox has provided a fun and fast-paced biography that is hard to put down. It (mostly) avoids the pitfalls of hagiography, on the one hand, and muckraking, on the other hand. At its best, it serves a good, factual, and fast-paced introduction to Sartre. It mostly succeed in summarizing his whole life in less than 300 pages. However, this must come with the caveat that, for more advanced readers, the book offers nothing new (although it may serve as a handy reference source for quotes and events). The book borrows most of its juicy details and biographical facts from prior, better books.
There is no shame in standing on the shoulders of giants. Cox has great skills in rearranging and (re)presenting old facts in a compelling way. He has opted for a rather enjoyable, rapid-fire approach to storytelling. However, speed is not always good (which is a fact that Sartre himself did not appreciate during his pill-popping period). Indeed, the author often proceeds so quickly that many of the intimate details, sounds, and sights of each scene and character get lost. In that regard, I feel that At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails does a much better job at painting a picture of the sensibilities, desires, inner conflicts, and personal relationships of the existentialist authors. Stylistically, Cox writes like a journalist with a real passion with Sartre but little patience for any deeper analysis or commentary. His editorial comments are consistently banal and uninspired. His attempts at normative judgement, although infrequent, are frequently shockingly bad. We are told, for example, that Camus was not as good of an existentialist writer as Sartre. (But no evidence is given to support this claim.) We are also told that Fidel Castro's initial efforts at lifting people out of poverty were rather impressive. (No mention is made of the torture, oppression, and concentration camps.) To be fair, Cox does grill Sartre for his continued apologia for Maoist China and the U.S.S.R., but only when it becomes absolutely impossible to see in them anything but self-deception. By failing to dig deeper, the book gives us little new insight into the roots of the perverse paroxysms of Sartre's revolutionary politics. Overall, the analytical dimension of the book is very weak. It even ends with a whimper. However, none of this matters much for an average reader who is looking for a fun book on Sartre. So, although it bothered me, I cannot imagine that it will (or should) bother most people.
So, I have to give the book two ratings, calibrated to one's level of expertise in Sartre:
1) For beginners and casual readers, this is a good introduction. 4/5 stars. 2) For intermediate and advanced readers, this book is too quick and superficial. 3/5 stars.
Pick your poison, I suppose. After all, we are always responsible for our choices.
PS. Straussians: I have made the job (too) easy for you. Sorry....more
"Foucault is unlikely to go away soon or get “cancelled” for being too neoliberal – anymore than for being too libertine, immoral, obscurantist, or ep"Foucault is unlikely to go away soon or get “cancelled” for being too neoliberal – anymore than for being too libertine, immoral, obscurantist, or epistemically relativistic. None of these descriptions exhausts his philosophy. Despite the vast cottage industry of cliched, substandard, and rote uses of Foucault in the social sciences, there is still much untapped potential in his output for serious intellectual engagement. The publication of the Collège de France transcripts has opened up a treasure trove of many new “Foucaults” (in the plural). The neoliberalism controversy is only the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, I hope that ideological debate does not overshadow his theoretical work. But Dean & Zamora’s gripping narrative demonstrates that Foucault’s rather brief theoretical encounters with neoliberalism had deep and long-lasting connections to his anti-totalitarian and emancipatory normative commitments. It also demonstrates the fluidity of his political alignments, united only by a common concern for reimagining and reinventing relations of power and knowledge in ways that leave more room for minority practices, experimentalism, and “limit experiences.” After books like this, it is no longer possible, without qualification, to characterize him as a “man of the left,” although it would be equally wrong to describe him as a “conservative” or “neoliberal” either. To the extent that he partook in the project of the “Second Left” and other manifestations of post-60s radicalism, he was part of the “neoliberal-curious” segment(s) of the libertarian left. As such, he was interested in expanding the repertoire of 20th century “left governmentality” in ways that can break away from the dogmatic, statist, and totalitarian tendencies underlying the Marxist dreams of a perfected revolution. (...) Scholars should pursue further synergistic connections between the Foucauldian and neoliberal analyses of emancipation, experimentalism, decentralized “power-knowledge,” and agential self-creation. And new questions should be asked: “Are our old conceptual tools and ideological categories ill-equipped to tackle the novel challenges of 21st century emancipatory politics? What does it mean to rethink social emancipation, beyond the hegemonic left-right mapping, after Foucault?” Dean & Zamora’s book, aside from being an informative, provocative, and fun read, prompts many questions and challenges us – in one of Foucault’s favourite phrases – to think and act differently."
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