Volume Two of Sartre's intellectual masterpiece, introduced by Fredric Jameson.

From one of the 20th century’s most profound philosophers and writers, comes a thought provoking essay that seeks to reconcile Marxism with existentialism. Exploring the complicated relationship the two philosophical schools of thought have with one another, Sartre supposes that the two are in fact compatible and complimentary towards one another, with poignant analysis and reasoning. An important work of modern philosophy, Search for a Method has a major influence on the current perceptions of existentialism and Marxism. “This is the most important philosophical work by Sartre to be translated since Being and Nothingness.”—James Collings, America

Most readers of Sartre focus only on the works written at the peak of his influence as a public intellectual in the 1940s, notably "Being and Nothingness". "Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts" aims to reassess Sartre and to introduce readers to the full breadth of his philosophy. Bringing together leading international scholars, the book examines concepts from across Sartre's career, from his initial views on the "inner life" of conscious experience, to his later conceptions of hope as the binding agent for a common humanity. The book will be invaluable to readers looking for a comprehensive assessment of Sartre's thinking - from his early influences to the development of his key concepts, to his legacy.

There are perpetual debates about the extent of freedom in politics. Are we free to choose? Are we overdetermined by our material conditions? Some hybrid between the two? What is more, how are we to comprehend ourselves as creators of history if freedom itself is a problematic concept? And what would it mean if self-comprehension were foreclosed by this problematic? In this text, Austin Hayden Smidt analyzes an oft-overlooked text by Jean-Paul Sartre in order to ground a logical framework for exploring this paradox. In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre sought to develop an historical and structural heuristic; one that would enable future theorists and activists alike to assess the pressing problems facing the various milieux of capitalist life. Through this heuristic, his intent was to develop an orientation enabling humans to transform their world in their perpetual creation of themselves (and vice versa). However, the stylistic difficulties of the text, as well as a general agreement among previous interpreters, has prevented the richness of the investigation from taking root. This book sets a new course, and invites further collaboration as – together – we create society as a work of art.

The first English translation of Sartre's unfinished fourth volume of Roads of Freedom, exploring themes central to Sartrean existentialism.

Jean-Paul Sartre, at the height of his powers, debates with Italy’s leading intellectuals In 1961, the prolific French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre was invited to give a talk at the Gramsci Institute in Rome. In attendance were some of Italy’s leading Marxist thinkers, such as Enzo Paci, Cesare Luporini, and Galvano Della Volpe, whose contributions to the long and remarkable discussion that followed are collected in this volume, along with the lecture itself. Sartre posed the question “What is subjectivity?”—a question of renewed importance today to contemporary debates concerning “the subject” in critical theory. This work includes a preface by Michel Kail and Raoul Kirchmayr and an afterword by Fredric Jameson, who makes a rousing case for the continued importance of Sartre’s philosophy.

Master philosopher and cultural theorist tackles the founder of modern dialectics In this major new study, the philosopher and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson offers a new reading of Hegel’s foundational text Phenomenology of Spirit. In contrast to those who see the Phenomenology as a closed system ending with Absolute Spirit, Jameson’s reading presents an open work in which Hegel has not yet reconstituted himself in terms of a systematic philosophy (Hegelianism) and in which the moments of the dialectic and its levels have not yet been formalized. Hegel’s text executes a dazzling variety of changes on conceptual relationships, in terms with are never allowed to freeze over and become reified in purely philosophical named concepts. The ending, on the aftermath of the French Revolution, is interpreted by Jameson, contra Fukuyama’s “end of history,” as a provisional stalemate between the political and the social, which is here extrapolated to our own time.

Cultural critic Fredric Jameson, renowned for his incisive studies of the passage of modernism to postmodernism, returns to the movement that dramatically broke with all tradition in search of progress for the first time since his acclaimed A Singular Modernity . The Modernist Papers is a tour de froce of anlysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernist poetics, including intensive discussions of the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust, and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarties of the American literary field, taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression; while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Challenging our previous understanding of the literature of this pperiod, this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modernism.

This book presents a full decade of Sartre’s work, from the publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, the basic philosophical turning-point in his postwar development, to the inception of his major study on Flaubert, the first volumes of which appeared in 1971. The essays and interviews collected here form a vivid panorama of the range and unity of Sartre’s interests, since his deliberate attempt to wed his original existentialism to a rethought Marxism. A long and brilliant autobiographical interview, given to New Left Review in 1969, constitutes the best single overview of Sartre’s whole intellectual evolution. Three analytic texts on the US war in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the lessons of the May Revolt in France, define his political positions as a revolutionary socialist. Questions of philosophy and aesthetics are explored in essays on Kierkegaard, Mallarme and Tintoretto. Another section of the collection explores Sartre’s critical attitude to orthodox psychoanalysis as a therapy, and is accompanied by rejoinders from colleagues on his journal Les Temps Modernes. The volume concludes with a prolonged reflection on the nature and role of intellectuals and writers in advanced capitalism, and their relationship to the struggles of the exploited and oppressed classes. Between Existentialism and Marxism is an impressive demonstration of the breadth and vitality of Sartre's thought, and its capacity to respond to political and cultural changes in the contemporary world.