Andrew's Wiki
Sartre Notes

• 156: footnote, “American literature is still in the stage of regionalism”
• 157: “club life is less suitable for spreading their influence than salon life has been in spreading ours” (France versus England)

• 162: Third Republic writers “could no longer consider himself as a pure consumer; he directed the production or supervised the distribution of goods or he was a civil-servant; he had duties towards the State; in short, a whole part of him was integrated into the bourgeoisie… Twenty years after symbolism he had not forgotten about the absolute gratuity of art, but at the same time he was involved in the utilitarian cycle of means-ends and ends-means. A producer and destroyer at the same time.”

Around 1900

• 164: Barres and his followers “will not serve utilitarian ideology….he will disclose all the gratuity in the exquisite hothouse of the bourgeois soul”
• 165: stamp or coin collecting “it is the very essence of destructive consumption” (the people of this generation tried to prove that the bourgeois family is crazy, is surrealismer than surrealism
• 166: “They addressed a new generation and explained to it that there was a strict equivalence between production and consumption and between construction and destruction; they demonstrated that order was a perpetual festival and disorder the most boring monotony.”
• Sartre does not approve….

Around 1918

• 169: writers coming to age after 1918: “whereas their predecessors had confined themselves to combatting the utilitarian ideology of the bourgeoisie by consumption, they more deeply identified the quest of the useful with the human project.” They are very bourgeois.
• like Cocteau

Surrealists

• Try to multiply the little explosions that ruin normal logic, that ruin the typical differentiation between subject and object
• 172 “it is always by creating…that it destroys” (b/c it adds new art to a history of art)
• 173 “the surrealist wants to be perpetually on the point of seeing lake and drawing-room; if, by chance, he encounters them, he gets disgusted or he gets scared and gets into bed with the blinds drawn”
• WWII made surrealism irrelevant: 207: “What need had we patiently to construct self-destructive objects since each of the moments of our life was subtly whisked away from us…?”
• 209: “simply spread mischief”
• 279: as the limit of consumption: “the purpose…of the surrealists was to destroy conjointly the subject and the object; but it was the extreme point of the literature of consumption. But today, as I have shown, it is necessary to construct.” (best candidate for a thesis, I think)

Contemporary to Surrealists

• Prevost, Bost, Chamson, Aveline, Drieu
• 193: thought of themselves as “workmen in a room, like bookbinders or lacemakers…. one learns a trade”
• 197: they were Radical Socialists (1910 crystallized, ruled until 1940, destroyed by the war)
• 210: Like Comte, “they radicals? held progress to be the development of order”
• 210: republican humanism after the war: Leon Brunschvicg, liberal regimes of tolerance, where integration will solve all horrors, “annihilated as soon as one overthrew the barriers which compartmentalized systems and collectivities”

Quotables

• 200: “we were gently led to see in literature the kingdom of untimely considerations”
• 201: lit about “beyondness”
• 202: “This whole literature is literature with a thesis” (Gide, Breton)
• 203: “A work is never beautiful unless it in some way escapes its author”
• 204: “art was the lucid and desperate balance sheet of our perdition” (ie, the “alibi literature” 171 b/c of guilt about not foreseeing WWII)
• 209: WWII made them anticosmo: “understood that we were not citizens of the world”

Etc

• 257 “the work of art, which is an absolute end, is opposed in essence to bourgeois utilitarianism”