April 15 is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Jean-Paul Sartre. I can still remember hearing the news. It was not unexpected — he had been seriously ill for some time — but it still came as a shock. For those of my generation who had made our way towards socialist politics in the 1950s and 1960s, Sartre had been a guide and an important influence, and he left behind an enormous body of work.
There were huge volumes on philosophy and Marxist theory, but also novels and plays that dramatized the philosophical questions and made them painfully concrete. Then there were political polemics, rooted in very specific situations. After his death, the discovery of unpublished manuscripts — among them a film script on Freud — revealed new aspects of this complex and prolific author.
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