Sartre, Existentialism, Antisemitism, and the Democrat

Show Notes

An exploration of the first half of Jean-Paul Sartre's Antisemite and Jew, with attention to the context of the book, how Sartre conceives the existential structure of antisemitic subjectivity, and the limits of "the democrat" or liberal humanism for addressing hate. I am interested here in how Sartre tried to shift European philosophy toward questions of racism and the racial construction of subjectivity, but failed, and yet underscored how little European thought found urgent in such questions. I then turn to the text and outline the meaning of the phrase "if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would create him." Why is the Jew so important to the antisemite, and to Christian Europe more broadly? And why is the liberal humanist - "the democrat," in Sartre's vocabulary - a failed strategy of redress and critique, ending up, tragically, a reiteration of the same antisemitic values as those embodied in the explicitly antisemitic subject? 

What is Black Existentialism?

Podcasted process pieces from my course Black Existentialism. The course introduces one of the most important and potent mid-century intellectual movements - the existentialist movement - through a series of black Atlantic thinkers. Our keystone will be Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which is arguably the most important work of Black existentialism from this period. Across the semester we will see why existentialism, with its focus on the ambiguities and ambivalences of lived-experience, had such a deep impact on Black thinkers across the diaspora. We will see these existentialist insights register in literature, philosophy, and film. Old and new.