What do you think?
Rate this book
Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life
One of the major accomplishments of Cohen-Solal's book is not only to place Sartre in the context of history, but to reopen the question of his role and to reassess the full import of his literary and political accomplishments. Discovering untold aspects of Sartre's private and political life, Cohen-Solal weaves together all the elements of an exceptional career. From the description of his previously unknown father to the painful last moments of Sartre's own declining years, this is biography on the grandest scale.
602 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
23 people are currently reading
502 people want to read
About the author
Annie Cohen-Solal
32 books32 followersAnnie Cohen-Solal is an academic and writer. For ever, she has been tracking down interactions between art, literature and society with an intercultural twist. After Sartre: A Life (1987) became an international success, she became French cultural counselor in the US, where she held her position from 1989 to 1992.
In New York, Cohen-Solal’s encounter with Leo Castelli led her to shift her interest to the art world. In the frame of a manyfold project which was to become a social history of the US artist, she published Painting American (2001); Leo Castelli & His Circle (2010); New York-Mid Century (2014), with Paul Goldberger and Robert Gottlieb; Mark Rothko (2013). In 2013, she became special advisor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure for the Nuit Sartre ; in 2014, general curator of Magiciens de la terre 2014 at the Centre Pompidou, publishing Magiciens de la terre : retour sur une exposition légendaire, with Jean-Hubert Martin. As a professor, she has held positions at Tisch School of the Arts (NYU), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, University of Caen, École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Freie University of Berlin, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is working on curating exhibitions for the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée Picasso and the Musée de l’Immigration in Paris. She will soon lead, alongside Jeremy Adelman, the “Crossing Boundaries” workshop at the CASBS (Stanford University). Born in Algiers, Annie now lives between Paris and Cortona.
(Taken from the bio of her official website)
In New York, Cohen-Solal’s encounter with Leo Castelli led her to shift her interest to the art world. In the frame of a manyfold project which was to become a social history of the US artist, she published Painting American (2001); Leo Castelli & His Circle (2010); New York-Mid Century (2014), with Paul Goldberger and Robert Gottlieb; Mark Rothko (2013). In 2013, she became special advisor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure for the Nuit Sartre ; in 2014, general curator of Magiciens de la terre 2014 at the Centre Pompidou, publishing Magiciens de la terre : retour sur une exposition légendaire, with Jean-Hubert Martin. As a professor, she has held positions at Tisch School of the Arts (NYU), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, University of Caen, École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Freie University of Berlin, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is working on curating exhibitions for the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée Picasso and the Musée de l’Immigration in Paris. She will soon lead, alongside Jeremy Adelman, the “Crossing Boundaries” workshop at the CASBS (Stanford University). Born in Algiers, Annie now lives between Paris and Cortona.
(Taken from the bio of her official website)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
July 11, 2015
For all its 600 or so pages, I'd be hard pressed to think of a book which I've enjoyed reading more than this one! In a very surface way I've been intrigued with Jean-Paul Sartre since the late 1950's when we were introduced to him & his thought in our seminary Contemporary Philosophy course. We spent some time on his writings, but were never challenged, nor did I ever take the initiative, to read any of his works. We relied on snippets from them. I wish now that I'd pursued him more vigorously. It would've prevented me from some very unwarranted assumptions about him & what he was about, which have lasted until I read this astounding biography.
Annie Cohen-Solal presents an incredible portrait of a man whom I think I would have very much enjoyed meeting & speaking with. Perhaps a quote of Sartre's, spoken in 1978, two years before he died at age 74, with which Cohen-Solal concludes the biography in a way summarizes what Sartre was all about: "One day, my life will end, but I don't want it to be burdened with death. I want that my death never enter my life, nor define it, that I be always a call to life." The author's account details how very much Sartre was "a call to life" as a philosopher, novelist, playwright, political figure, and most of all the global champion of causes of those oppressed. He valued truth, knowledge & generosity. He was ever thirsty for new insights from other people. He was also offbeat & quirky as a human being, often even contradictory. He was also humble. His way with women was legendary & it's remarkable that, for never marrying, he was able to sustain multiple close relationships/friendships for more years than many marriages last! He drank, he smoked: he actually was his own worst enemy & ruined his eyesight & health ultimately. He was personable. He loved young people. And was indefatigable in his fighting for human rights & dignity. Many have called him the greatest intellectual of the 20th century. We could profit from such a one today!
Annie Cohen-Solal presents an incredible portrait of a man whom I think I would have very much enjoyed meeting & speaking with. Perhaps a quote of Sartre's, spoken in 1978, two years before he died at age 74, with which Cohen-Solal concludes the biography in a way summarizes what Sartre was all about: "One day, my life will end, but I don't want it to be burdened with death. I want that my death never enter my life, nor define it, that I be always a call to life." The author's account details how very much Sartre was "a call to life" as a philosopher, novelist, playwright, political figure, and most of all the global champion of causes of those oppressed. He valued truth, knowledge & generosity. He was ever thirsty for new insights from other people. He was also offbeat & quirky as a human being, often even contradictory. He was also humble. His way with women was legendary & it's remarkable that, for never marrying, he was able to sustain multiple close relationships/friendships for more years than many marriages last! He drank, he smoked: he actually was his own worst enemy & ruined his eyesight & health ultimately. He was personable. He loved young people. And was indefatigable in his fighting for human rights & dignity. Many have called him the greatest intellectual of the 20th century. We could profit from such a one today!
June 8, 2021
Este libro es una serie de ensayos que hablan sobre algunos de los momentos más importantes de la vida de JP Sartre. No es una biografía detallada de su vida y obra como la que leí recientemente sobre Susan Sontag (muy recomendada por cierto). Este libro de menos de 200 hojas habla en resumen de los momentos más importantes de su vida como la Segunda Guerra Mundial, su estudio e influencia en su pensamiento de la obra de Heidegger, su relación con el comunismo, la famosa disputa con Albert Camus y el conflicto en Argelia , el existencialismo sartreano y su activismo político. Mucha gente detestó a Sartre y consideraban su personalidad prepotente y difícil, fue ciertamente un personaje difícil como la mayoría de la gente de su generación que vivió dos guerras mundiales. Este libro no explica su filosofía de profundis pero nombra sus obras más conocidas como La Náusea y El ser y la nada. Nada mal para una tarde de lectura dominguera.
December 1, 2020
Desconocía al Sartre que se asoma detrás de "El existencialismo es un humanismo" (libro que leí en mi adolescencia y que me hizo creer, ingenuamente, que yo sabía algo de filosofía). Cohen-Solal lo muestra con sus imperfecciones, sus desatinos y sus fortalezas, y hace de balanza intelectual para el autor galo llena de cariño y feroz autocrítica. Todo pensador querría, al final, un juicio como este.
March 18, 2024
In January 1935, Sartre was injected with mescaline and he had a short hallucination. In the 1930’s he was apolitical and then became political. At one point, in nine months, “Sartre manages to spend an average of twelve hours a day writing. At another point Sartre writes, ‘I am now a partisan of Heidegger’.” During WWII he writes lots of letters – some two thousand pages exist from that time. He is kept prisoner with 14,000 other WWII soldiers for eight months during the war, held between Strasbourg and Nancy. The author says Sartre read 300 books per year including Plato, Schopenhauer, Kant, Spinoza, Chretien de Troyes, Mallarme, Nerval, Cervantes, Aristotle, Bergson, Shakespeare, Lucretius, Saint Augustine, Casanova, Ramuz, Stendhal, and Cicero. Sartre’s relationship with Simone de Beauvoir lasted fifty-one years. During many of these years, for Sartre, “polygamy was the rule.”
The French left Vietnam to the Americans when they saw the war as costly and absurd. Henri Martin noticed that the Vietnamese people “were desperately trying to protect their independence” after a long struggle against colonialism. Henry noticed how the war was only creating more fighters against France – “now that we have killed his child and wounded his wife, our Annamite is certainly going to turn to the Viet Minh, if he isn’t already one. This is how we pacify them.’”
Sartre wrote “No Exit” for Camus, but he later breaks with Camus. The author says, “Camus remained faithful to his cultural heritage, indeed quite haunted by it, whereas Sartre betrayed his.” By 1952, it is difficult to believe that were ever any real ties between Sartre and Camus.”
Sartre wrote, “there are no good colonists and bad colonists, a colonist is a colonist.” He clearly saw French ownership of Algerian land as all “at the expense of Algerian property.” If you are a big fan of Sartre, try his diet while writing “The Critique of Dialectical Reason” – “His diet over a period of twenty-four hours included two packs of cigarettes and pipes stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol – wine beer, vodka, whisky, and so on – two hundred milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea, rich meals.” He talked to Beauvoir about taking “ten Corydranes (amphetamines mixed with aspirin) in the morning”. Good lord…
“In little more than four years – from June 1962 to September 1966 – he visited the USSR nine times” sometimes staying several weeks. Fanon dies in 1961, Camus dies in 1960 in a car accident (age 47). “Sartre’s fame depends on the work of the work of a philosopher, a novelist, a dramatist, a critic, a political and even a polemical writer.”
Who knew Sartre liked to play piano? “One day without any preparation, he played the entire score of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, without making a single mistake.” The author intentionally uses the word “score” which means Sartre looked at all the different instruments in the Stabat Mater score vertically and combining them all together on keyboard without a single mistake. I find it hard to believe Sartre could do that from a score INCLUDING reading the alto clef part for viola adding all voices together without a SINGLE mistake. I think the author means a piano reduction of the entire score where all he has to do is read the piano part. The author adds, “And there was also a good deal of Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Chopin.”
“In 1973 Sartre became blind and, thus unable to write.” Sartre’s right eye was blind since the age of four, and thus at 68 he loses his left eye. The author does not explain why Sartre didn’t then simply begin dictating books in 1973, and thus continue to write. Sartre dies in 1980 in the Broussais hospital.
That’s it. As you can see, I learned almost nothing about Sartre from this book, hence on the three stars (being generous) for it. I learned more about Sartre in Shlomo Sand’s “The End of the French Intellectual” because that book dares discuss Sartre and de Beauvoir’s unsettling accommodations during the Nazi occupation. As a child I personally spent an afternoon in the late 1960’s with Sartre in Crete, when my mother was translating for him and Martin Heidegger in a beach cafe, and she told me I must never forget this moment – and I never forgot watching him with his funny glasses and wall eye, gesturing while talking in French, often leaning on his hands or casually smoking something while listening in the dark of the café’s wooden wall. My mom was a French/German interpreter for UNRRA during WWII. Anyway, three stars for this book…
The French left Vietnam to the Americans when they saw the war as costly and absurd. Henri Martin noticed that the Vietnamese people “were desperately trying to protect their independence” after a long struggle against colonialism. Henry noticed how the war was only creating more fighters against France – “now that we have killed his child and wounded his wife, our Annamite is certainly going to turn to the Viet Minh, if he isn’t already one. This is how we pacify them.’”
Sartre wrote “No Exit” for Camus, but he later breaks with Camus. The author says, “Camus remained faithful to his cultural heritage, indeed quite haunted by it, whereas Sartre betrayed his.” By 1952, it is difficult to believe that were ever any real ties between Sartre and Camus.”
Sartre wrote, “there are no good colonists and bad colonists, a colonist is a colonist.” He clearly saw French ownership of Algerian land as all “at the expense of Algerian property.” If you are a big fan of Sartre, try his diet while writing “The Critique of Dialectical Reason” – “His diet over a period of twenty-four hours included two packs of cigarettes and pipes stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol – wine beer, vodka, whisky, and so on – two hundred milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea, rich meals.” He talked to Beauvoir about taking “ten Corydranes (amphetamines mixed with aspirin) in the morning”. Good lord…
“In little more than four years – from June 1962 to September 1966 – he visited the USSR nine times” sometimes staying several weeks. Fanon dies in 1961, Camus dies in 1960 in a car accident (age 47). “Sartre’s fame depends on the work of the work of a philosopher, a novelist, a dramatist, a critic, a political and even a polemical writer.”
Who knew Sartre liked to play piano? “One day without any preparation, he played the entire score of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, without making a single mistake.” The author intentionally uses the word “score” which means Sartre looked at all the different instruments in the Stabat Mater score vertically and combining them all together on keyboard without a single mistake. I find it hard to believe Sartre could do that from a score INCLUDING reading the alto clef part for viola adding all voices together without a SINGLE mistake. I think the author means a piano reduction of the entire score where all he has to do is read the piano part. The author adds, “And there was also a good deal of Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Chopin.”
“In 1973 Sartre became blind and, thus unable to write.” Sartre’s right eye was blind since the age of four, and thus at 68 he loses his left eye. The author does not explain why Sartre didn’t then simply begin dictating books in 1973, and thus continue to write. Sartre dies in 1980 in the Broussais hospital.
That’s it. As you can see, I learned almost nothing about Sartre from this book, hence on the three stars (being generous) for it. I learned more about Sartre in Shlomo Sand’s “The End of the French Intellectual” because that book dares discuss Sartre and de Beauvoir’s unsettling accommodations during the Nazi occupation. As a child I personally spent an afternoon in the late 1960’s with Sartre in Crete, when my mother was translating for him and Martin Heidegger in a beach cafe, and she told me I must never forget this moment – and I never forgot watching him with his funny glasses and wall eye, gesturing while talking in French, often leaning on his hands or casually smoking something while listening in the dark of the café’s wooden wall. My mom was a French/German interpreter for UNRRA during WWII. Anyway, three stars for this book…
February 6, 2022
Ik heb al respect voor het idee. Een biografie schrijven over waarschijnlijk de meest vooraanstaande intellectueel van de vorige eeuw. Om dit goed uit te werken moet je minimaal twee eeuwen Franse geschiedenis en de geschiedenis van de twintigste eeuw integraal erin verwerken. Schrijfster Annie Cohen-Solal is deze uitdaging met succes aangegaan.
Vanaf het begint lukt het haar om een uitvoerig maar boeiende biografie te schrijven. Teruggaand naar de aristocratische voorvaders van Jean-Paul Sartre laat ze zien hoe hij zich vormt tot wereldberoemde filosoof en schrijver. Ze maakt ruimte om uitvoerig zijn existentialisme, literaire werken en profiel als intellectueel te beschrijven. Het lukt haar om in ‘slechts’ 550 pagina’s een enorme hoeveelheid aan gedetailleerde informatie op te schrijven. Desondanks is het geen droge opsomming van feiten en gebeurtenissen. Annie Cohen-Solal is een geweldige schrijfster. Op een beeldende manier en met prachtige zinnen neemt ze je mee naar het Frankrijk van de twintigste eeuw.
Soms was het voor mij lastig om alles in context te plaatsen. Ze strooit met heel veel Franse bekendheden die voor mij helaas niet altijd bekend zijn. Halverwege het boek staak ik het zoeken van alle namen. Daarnaast beschrijft en benoemt ze veel plekken in Frankrijk en vooral Parijs waarbij het mij niet altijd lukt om er een goed beeld van te krijgen.
Om dit extreem gedetailleerde boek uit te lezen moet je een bovengemiddeld interesse hebben in de, met name Franse, geschiedenis van filosofie, literatuur en het intellectuele landschap. Desalniettemin kan ik zeggen dat ik nooit eerder met zoveel plezier een biografie heb uitgelezen. Daarnaast geeft het fijne houvast om de filosofie van Sartre beter te plaatsen.
Vanaf het begint lukt het haar om een uitvoerig maar boeiende biografie te schrijven. Teruggaand naar de aristocratische voorvaders van Jean-Paul Sartre laat ze zien hoe hij zich vormt tot wereldberoemde filosoof en schrijver. Ze maakt ruimte om uitvoerig zijn existentialisme, literaire werken en profiel als intellectueel te beschrijven. Het lukt haar om in ‘slechts’ 550 pagina’s een enorme hoeveelheid aan gedetailleerde informatie op te schrijven. Desondanks is het geen droge opsomming van feiten en gebeurtenissen. Annie Cohen-Solal is een geweldige schrijfster. Op een beeldende manier en met prachtige zinnen neemt ze je mee naar het Frankrijk van de twintigste eeuw.
Soms was het voor mij lastig om alles in context te plaatsen. Ze strooit met heel veel Franse bekendheden die voor mij helaas niet altijd bekend zijn. Halverwege het boek staak ik het zoeken van alle namen. Daarnaast beschrijft en benoemt ze veel plekken in Frankrijk en vooral Parijs waarbij het mij niet altijd lukt om er een goed beeld van te krijgen.
Om dit extreem gedetailleerde boek uit te lezen moet je een bovengemiddeld interesse hebben in de, met name Franse, geschiedenis van filosofie, literatuur en het intellectuele landschap. Desalniettemin kan ik zeggen dat ik nooit eerder met zoveel plezier een biografie heb uitgelezen. Daarnaast geeft het fijne houvast om de filosofie van Sartre beter te plaatsen.
August 15, 2017
Biography Presents Compelling Portrait of Life, Times, and Mind of Jean-Paul Sartre
The rich flow of historical details, intellectual insights, and political dynamics that make up the powerful pages of Annie Cohen-Solal’s “Sartre: A Life” are both is primary assets and, for some, its principle liabilities.
In the afterword to the Sartre Centennial 1905-2005 edition of the book, the authors lets us in on her adopted goals and methodology:
“I adopted from the beginning, a different perspective, that of interactionist micro-sociology, which tries to understand society from the subjective side of its actors, proposing to trace the process of intellectual creation and cultural production through an articulation of the individual with the intellectual milieu. Above all, I sought to shed light on the conditions of possibility of a subversive discourse which inversed power relationships by bringing historical and sociological interpretations together… Within this framework, I decided on the following methodological principles: I would adopt a triple approach—phenomenological, generative, and holistic…” (Cohen-Solal, p. 531)
It is a brilliant strategy superbly executed. The outstanding aspect of it for this reader was the propositions to “trace the process of intellectual creation and cultural production through an articulation of the individual with the intellectual milieu.” And: on the dynamics of possibility pertaining to a sociologically- and historically-informed subversive discourse.
That Annie Cohen-Solal was only 32 when she dared tackle the job of writing a biography on Jean Paul-Sartre and stuck with it through the completion of some 524 pages half a decade later was worthy of a literary prize in itself. Her chosen framework, however, generates some of the same intimidating challenges as certain of Sartre’s tomes themselves––say, for example, his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol 2, or the nuclear astonishment known as The Family Idiot 1: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, which enraptured his soul throughout his later years.
Just as the intellectually-uninitiated––as well as many who have crossed said threshold––are bound to find themselves confused and frustrated attempting to hold on to the thread of Sartre’s reasoning and non-reasoning, so are they likely to experience the same clinging to the hem of Cohen-Solal’s virtuosity as she constructs, deconstructs, analyzes, reconstructs, labels, and defines the mass of public and private components that comprised her subject’s phenomenal life. None of that should discourage readers from enjoying the mind-stimulating ride.
What makes this book so mesmerizingly extraordinary is the succession of dual portraits of Sartre as a flawed and at times wounded soul in contrast to him as the emerging-and-then-dominant French intellectual of his time. He was the litterateur par excellence who could simultaneously advance is working theses in multiple formats: as journalism, plays, lectures, philosophy, novels, and movie scripts. Yet he was also the doting son who saw to his mother’s well-being, as well as, the pied-piper mentor to aspiring writers, hopeful actresses, and political activists who would follow in his footsteps.
In addition–– whereas he may have been properly lauded as a prominent member of the French resistance and unexpected author of Being and Nothingness, he was also an unlikely kind of Casanova and a borderline drug addict. Capable of deep loyalty to either an individual (as he was for a time to fellow Nobel Laureate Albert Camus) or a cause (per the Cuban Revolution) he could quickly and brutally eject them from his public and private embrace. In short, his was a unique personality unleashed during one of the most volatile periods of modern history and how the prolific author interacted with it on multiple levels is fascinating almost beyond belief. Were it not for Cohen-Solal’s insistence on balancing the great man’s achievements with his human shortcomings one would be tempted to say he was nearly larger-than-life.
PLEASE NOTE: This is the first half of my official essay review of Sartre: A Life; for the second part please visit this url: http://www.author-poet-aberjhani.info...
Aberjhani
author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
and The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois
The rich flow of historical details, intellectual insights, and political dynamics that make up the powerful pages of Annie Cohen-Solal’s “Sartre: A Life” are both is primary assets and, for some, its principle liabilities.
In the afterword to the Sartre Centennial 1905-2005 edition of the book, the authors lets us in on her adopted goals and methodology:
“I adopted from the beginning, a different perspective, that of interactionist micro-sociology, which tries to understand society from the subjective side of its actors, proposing to trace the process of intellectual creation and cultural production through an articulation of the individual with the intellectual milieu. Above all, I sought to shed light on the conditions of possibility of a subversive discourse which inversed power relationships by bringing historical and sociological interpretations together… Within this framework, I decided on the following methodological principles: I would adopt a triple approach—phenomenological, generative, and holistic…” (Cohen-Solal, p. 531)
It is a brilliant strategy superbly executed. The outstanding aspect of it for this reader was the propositions to “trace the process of intellectual creation and cultural production through an articulation of the individual with the intellectual milieu.” And: on the dynamics of possibility pertaining to a sociologically- and historically-informed subversive discourse.
That Annie Cohen-Solal was only 32 when she dared tackle the job of writing a biography on Jean Paul-Sartre and stuck with it through the completion of some 524 pages half a decade later was worthy of a literary prize in itself. Her chosen framework, however, generates some of the same intimidating challenges as certain of Sartre’s tomes themselves––say, for example, his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol 2, or the nuclear astonishment known as The Family Idiot 1: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, which enraptured his soul throughout his later years.
Just as the intellectually-uninitiated––as well as many who have crossed said threshold––are bound to find themselves confused and frustrated attempting to hold on to the thread of Sartre’s reasoning and non-reasoning, so are they likely to experience the same clinging to the hem of Cohen-Solal’s virtuosity as she constructs, deconstructs, analyzes, reconstructs, labels, and defines the mass of public and private components that comprised her subject’s phenomenal life. None of that should discourage readers from enjoying the mind-stimulating ride.
What makes this book so mesmerizingly extraordinary is the succession of dual portraits of Sartre as a flawed and at times wounded soul in contrast to him as the emerging-and-then-dominant French intellectual of his time. He was the litterateur par excellence who could simultaneously advance is working theses in multiple formats: as journalism, plays, lectures, philosophy, novels, and movie scripts. Yet he was also the doting son who saw to his mother’s well-being, as well as, the pied-piper mentor to aspiring writers, hopeful actresses, and political activists who would follow in his footsteps.
In addition–– whereas he may have been properly lauded as a prominent member of the French resistance and unexpected author of Being and Nothingness, he was also an unlikely kind of Casanova and a borderline drug addict. Capable of deep loyalty to either an individual (as he was for a time to fellow Nobel Laureate Albert Camus) or a cause (per the Cuban Revolution) he could quickly and brutally eject them from his public and private embrace. In short, his was a unique personality unleashed during one of the most volatile periods of modern history and how the prolific author interacted with it on multiple levels is fascinating almost beyond belief. Were it not for Cohen-Solal’s insistence on balancing the great man’s achievements with his human shortcomings one would be tempted to say he was nearly larger-than-life.
PLEASE NOTE: This is the first half of my official essay review of Sartre: A Life; for the second part please visit this url: http://www.author-poet-aberjhani.info...
Aberjhani
author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
and The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois
Read
August 5, 2023"Ele soube articular saberes parcelares a um saber global. Soube igualmente criar as condições para que cada excluído social pudesse pensar a relação de poder de maneira subversiva.
Tentou, enfim — e talvez tenha sido esse o sentido profundo de todo o empreendimento sartriano —, dar ao Outro os meios de legitimar seu próprio projeto, sem reivindicar para si, em nome de seu saber, um poder, uma superioridade, uma hierarquia."
Tentou, enfim — e talvez tenha sido esse o sentido profundo de todo o empreendimento sartriano —, dar ao Outro os meios de legitimar seu próprio projeto, sem reivindicar para si, em nome de seu saber, um poder, uma superioridade, uma hierarquia."
May 15, 2017
okay. I give up. annie cohen-solal writes well. she really researches her subject. but I gave up halfway through the book. of course I like satre, but it was too much information on his life for me. so I yield to anyone to has the patience to read this tome.
January 30, 2014
A very detailed and comprehensive biography on the life of Sartre. Full of information I knew nothing about, going through each period with all of his activites and acquaintances. Well worth reading.
November 16, 2024
A very long book and, because I wanted to learn more about Sartre, I dug into it. I ended up really disliking Sartre, child of money and attention, who claimed to disavow both, but actions are louder. He was doted on by many women, took all his meals at cafes, and traveled the world. He never learned a language other than French, and so everyone had to adapt to him. He was involved with many revolutionary movements but would end up renouncing most of them. And he certainly did not share the type of existence that most revolutionaries had. In the end, he didn’t want to be buried in Pere Lachaise by his stepfather, but he sure had no problem benefitting from his money.
August 3, 2023
An okay biography of Sartre the writer, a weak biography of Sartre the philosopher. Cohen-Solal is perhaps overly cautious of revealing her own inadequate understanding of Sartre's philosophy, so she chooses to avoid any mention of his ideas - except for two or three excerpts from his books which she throws in without analysis, explanation or context. A disappointing read.
February 13, 2018
Although very insightful, detailed and rich in its articulation of the inhumane number of events, articles, political happenings etc JP participated in, I missed more time spent analyzing Sartre's way of thinking, his intuition, his philosophy as a whole.
October 5, 2025
eu achei que seria uma introdução a sartre [filosofia, conceitos] (como diz na edicao que comprei) porém é uma introdução a sartre [pessoa, indivíduo]. ótimo livro para saber mais das origens, formas de pensamento disruptivos com os da sociedade vigente na epoca etc.
June 21, 2019
A vida do gigante francês. Muito bom.
December 18, 2020
very detail in events but lack of correlation on how the events gave birth to Sartre's philosophical ideas.
January 23, 2021
Demasiada información superflua. Entiendo que es una biografía, pero se echa de menos hablar más sobre sus ideas y menos sobre su vida cotidiana.
September 20, 2024
Leuk, beetje dik
March 20, 2021
Es una biografía, no un estudio de su obra. La autora, ante un reto complicado, sale más que airosa.
November 15, 2010
Pubblicato in occasione del centenario della nascita di Jean Paul Sartre dalla BNF insieme a Gallimard
In effetti è il catalogo della mostra allestita dalla stessa BNF che per una serie di circostanze avverse non ho potuto visitare
Il libro è imperdibile per gli appassionati biografi: ripercorre cronologicamente la vita di Sartre ed è denso di fotografie, riproduzioni di manoscritti, giornali dell'epoca, manifesti
Anche esteticamente è un oggetto meraviglioso: copertina nera e taglio rosso, fa un figurone nella mia libreria!
In effetti è il catalogo della mostra allestita dalla stessa BNF che per una serie di circostanze avverse non ho potuto visitare
Il libro è imperdibile per gli appassionati biografi: ripercorre cronologicamente la vita di Sartre ed è denso di fotografie, riproduzioni di manoscritti, giornali dell'epoca, manifesti
Anche esteticamente è un oggetto meraviglioso: copertina nera e taglio rosso, fa un figurone nella mia libreria!
August 16, 2013
Ik ben met dit boek gestopt, ongeveer halverwege. Misschien leuk als je in de jaren zestig in Frankrijk woonde, maar voor iemand die geboren werd in het jaar dat Sartre stierf, is het te gedetailleerd. Al die franse 'intellectuels' uit de '68 en daar voor en na zeiden mij vaak niets meer. Ofwel: gedateerde biografie, helaas.
November 2, 2011
Buena biografía de Sartre, buena explicación de su pensamiento.
July 3, 2013
Sartre is veel sympathieker dan ik dacht, maar wat werd hij op een verkeerd moment communist. Goed geschreven bio, met uitschieters naar beneden.
September 21, 2015
Amazing work on the great man, tremendous attention to details and not a stone left unturned.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews