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Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, is perhaps the best known advocate of existentialism. In this view, no external authority gives life meaning: mankind is radically free and responsible. In every moment we choose ourselves, with no assurance that we have a continuing identity or power. We set up determinisms to ease our minds, but in the face of the finality of death, only through our present consciousness do we establish our own authentic existence.

Sartre's existentialism faces the evil in human existence and sees that humans are responsible for it. He doubts mankind can make moral progress, yet he embraces the possibilities for human life and believes we can attain dignity by our own efforts. Sartre’s ideas had a profound influence on ordinary people after World War II and continue to contribute to the development of thought in Europe and America today. ... Read more

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The Philosophy of Giants - Jean-Paul Sartre
A very good summary of Jean-Paul Sartre's exitentialist views and how they changed over his lifetime.A good primer on existentialism.This introduces the concept that the choices made by individuals in the present define the meaning of past and future events in that individual's life. ... Read more

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Contrapartida de las manos sucias según algunos críticos. Nekrasof es la apasionante pieza de carácter satírico y social en la que Jean-Paul Sartre ridiculizó los medios político periodísticos de la segunda posguerra francesa. ... Read more

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Garcin, r??volutionnaire l??che et mari cruel : douze balles dans la peau ; In??s, femme d??moniaque qui rendra folle de douleur sa jeune amante : asphyxie par le gaz ; Estelle, coquette sans coeur qui noie son enfant adult??rin : pneumonie fulgurante. Morts, tous les trois. Mais le plus dur reste ?? faire. Ils ne se connaissent pas, et pourtant, ils se retrouvent dans un hideux salon dont on ne part jamais. Ils ont l'??ternit?? pour faire connaissance : quelques heures leur suffiront pour comprendre qu'ils sont leurs bourreaux respectifs. "L'enfer, c'est les autres". Tous les th??mes sartriens sont l??, orchestr??s avec brio : la valeur de l'engagement, le poids des actes, les limites de la responsabilit??. Avec Huis clos, le grand pr??tre de l'existentialisme signait l'une des ses pi??ces les plus fortes : la sc??ne se pr??tait bien ?? ces r??quisitoires concis et percutants, que l'on retrouvera dans Les Mouches et surtout Les Mains sales. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

C'EST LES AUTRES...
Mettez un lâche, une femme qui a rendu sa compagne folle, et une pyromane? Tous les trois morts dans un petit salon de l'enfer, donnez leur l'éternité (en théorie) pour faire connaissance et peu de temps après vous le saurez aussi. Comme Sartre l'a découvert; L'ENFER C'EST LES AUTRES!!!! On a peu d'éléments pour se reconnaître dans chacun d'eux (moi non peut-être que vous...?!!!) mais on peut quand même sentir leur enfer nous gagner. Ce succès suivi des Mouches est un très bon moyen pour découvrir Sartre et toute votre vie vous le saurez l'ENFER C'EST...
>>>>> Nelly

L'ENFERC'ESTLESAUTRES ...
Dans L'HUIS CLOS l'auteur nous raconte l'histoire de 3 personnages condamnés "pour l'éternité" à partager l'intimité d'un sordide chambre d'hôtel. Fusillés dans des mystérieuses circonstances, une femme de monde infanticide, une lesbienne meurtrière et un intellectuel révolutionnaire découvrent qu'ils sont en enfer par le seul pouvoir que chacun d'entre eux jette sur l'autre... (= L'ENFER C'EST LES AUTRES). Faite bien attention lorsque cette pièce en un acte est très dense. De la contingence à la liberté, cette oeuvre témoigne d'une prise de conscience, c'est-à-dire de la DIFFICULTE POUR L'HOMME D'ASSUMER SA LIBERTE lorsqu'il est confronté aux regard des autres. J'ai lu L'Huis Clos six fois: ce livre n'a PAS D'EGAL. Lisez cette oeuvre SI IMPORTANT de Sartre, spécialement pour mieux comprendre le monde d'aujourd'hui!! Je le vous conseille de tout coeur!

LES MOUCHES nous raconte le même récit comme dans ELECTRE de Sophocle, mais d'un point de vue moderne. L'histoire est bien connue: après le meurtre sur Agamemnon, Electre sait sauver la vie d'Oreste. Dans la version sartrienne le royaume d'Argos est devenue une place de pénitence permanente où les gens déplorent leurs péchés. Ceci est encouragé par les dieux, puisque comme ça le peuple vît en pleine foi et crainte des dieux... Enfin, Oreste (dans un moment de la plus HAUTE LUCIDITE), après avoir entendu les conseils de Jupiter et d'Electre - qu'il veut sauver - sent QU'IL FAUT PRENDRE UNE DECISION. Cette pièce (en 3 actes) est en fait une attaque sur l'idée de la religion. Le seul outil possible quant à la "LIBERTE" d'Oreste est ... la responsabilité. Comme ça, Jean-Paul Sartre nous montre d'une MANIERE SPLENDIDE ET REVELANTE ... L'ABSOLU DE LA LIBERTE. A lire, n'importe quand!

L'HUIS CLOS et LES MOUCHES ont beaucoup en commun. Quant au contenu: tout ce que l'on puisse se souhaiter. Le plus important que Sartre nous montre: L'IMPORTANCE ET L'UNIVERSALITE DANS LA VIE QU'EST LA LIBERTE INDIVIDUELLE. Vous trouverez encore d'autres thèmes commun. Ce bouquin est TRES IMPORTANT ET MODERNE. Personne d'autre nous a pu EXPLIQUER ces thèmes d'une façon si CLAIRE ET CORRECTE (une "signature" de Sartre...). On PARLE BEAUCOUP DE LA LIBERTE mais qu'est-ce que c'est EN FAIT? Lisez et vous saurez, j'en suis sûr. RECOMMENDE DE TOUT COEUR!!!

un brillant exercice de style!
Une oeuvre exeptionnelle.

Résumé :

L'action se déroule dans un univers fictif : l'enfer. Venant de mourir, 3 personnages y arrivent pour y subir leur damnation éternelle.

Aspect 1 :Le style crédible :

Certes, le style de « Huis clos » ne constitue pas, en apparence, un modèle de perfection littéraire, mais toutefois, ce choix volontaire rend l'histoire considérablement plus réelle.

En effet, le sujet amenait forcément à de différents styles de langage.
Par nature fantastique, l'univers des morts vivants apparaît trop irréel, une écriture classique aurait accentué l'irréalisme.

Par ailleurs, chaque personnage a sa propre identité et provient d'un milieu social différent. Il est donc naturel que les personnages aient des niveaux de langage différent, ce qui est révélateur de leur personnalité.

Le lecteur ne s'ennuie pas, car le texte est ponctué de plusieurs gammes de tons : l'ironie ( ines : au mon dieu), humour, accents tragiques et lyriques.

Ainsi donc, l'écriture de « Huis clos » se révèle plus élaborée qu'elle ne le semble de prime abord. Elle est efficace et riche, d'une vigueur en définitive exemplaire.

Aspect 2 : les temps qui rendent l'œuvre exceptionnelle :

De toute évidence, le temps estun sujet compliqué, car l'éternité est une perception compliquée à exprimer.

Sartre a réussi une prouesse en la rendant concevable.

En effet, dès le début de l'histoire, Sartre brise habilement la chronologie, le temps de la terre est décalé face à celui de l'enfer. (Estelle : la vie passe vite sur terre).
L' accélérationse fait plus rapide quand les personnages perdent contact avec la terre (...), ce qui ajoute à la perception d'un jour unique et continu.
De plus, le fait que l'éternité est omniprésente, les damnés savent tous deux, ce qui ronge leur conscience, et le lecteur comprend facilement leur torture mentale, les personnages sont à nu devant le regard des autres et donc la célèbre phrase « l'enfer c'est les autres » est facilement comprise, et cela évite de longue description mentales monotones.

Pour conclure, Sartre a merveilleusement donné l'impression d' éternité, ce qui rend l'histoire quasiment réelle.

Aspect 3 : l'univers narratif exceptionnel :

L'univers narratif fantastique de Sartreindiqueclairement ses valeurs religieuses.
Il se moque de l'enfer perçu par les chrétiens ( ..).

D'ailleurs, l'univers, montre le supplice qu'éprouvent les damnés.
Les allusions aux objets manquant (miroir, brosse à dent), réussissent à un dépaysement total au lecteur, pour marquerla différence d'avec un appartement normal et pour souligner le fait qu'ils sont morts.

En plus, les lecteurs imaginent clairement l'idée de renfermement, car l'univers narratif fait clairement comprendre l'idée sartrienne de l'enfer : c est un lieu qui englobe tout, un labyrinthe sans fin. Par exemple (...)

Voilà donc les raisons pour lesquelles, l'univers narratif rend l'histoire suggestive et concevable.

"Hell is other people"
A one-act play about three people, Joseph Garcin, Inez Serrano, and Estelle Rigault, who are put into a single room in hell where they are locked up for eternity with no mirrors, but only each other for company and yet from whom they cannot escape.Highly recommend for students of all ages.

intellectual and great
I am french, and Huis Clos is one of the most importants books i read when i was a teenager, looking for truth about adult behavior... It's really intellectual, but not artificial, and makes you think a lot about what isgoing on between people, and what you learned growing up. ... Read more

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A collection of letters written by Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir offers a candid, provocative study of Sartre's literary, philosophical, and political evolution and of the social and cultural institutions of prewar Europe. ... Read more

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An excellent introduction to the work of Sartre
This may be a 'crib' but it is possible to learn a great deal from it. It is not only about the two plays, but also contains a short biography of Sartre, and summaries and analyses of his major works, the novel "Nausea" and his major philosophical work"Being and Nothingness".It also contains a summary of the essay on 'Existensialism' one of his most influential works.
It does not however as it was published in 1983 contain the latest revelations about Sartre's life and work. At the time it was written my sense is Sartre's reputation was more unimpeached than it is today. This guide stresses how much of a 'humanist' Sartre was , and how he always focused on the human situation, and how deeply his writing is involved in the social problems of mankind.
But Sartre's gung- ho Communist Anarchism is seen by many today as less than commendable. And his personal life shown to be far more contemptible and exploitative than was previously thought.
In any case this work which rightly see Sartre more as writer than philosopher provides an excellent introduction to his overall accomplishment.

An incredible piece
Sartre's "No Exit" not only provides a version of Hell that is the complete polar opposite of Dante's vision but he succeeds in making it seem scarier...and funnier.The fact that these three strangers startattacking each other like small children causes the reader (and viewer ifwatching a produced version) to secretly chuckle.One always wondersthough as to whether they would fall into the same trap that these three dowere they in the same predicament. ... Read more

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Marxist dogma
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French author and philosopher who lived from 1905 to 1980. He was an Existentialist and believed that people projected themselves into existence by making a choice or taking a side. This ability makes people free but also causes people anguish because they must make a choice or take a side. He turned down a Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 because he perceived an anti-communist bias in the awards. That same year he declared himself to be a Marxist, though he criticized Communist suppression of individual freedom.

His work Sartre on Cuba was published in 1961 by Ballantine Books. He wrote the book shortly after Fidel Castro's Communist Party forcefully took control of the island in 1959. He had gone there and observed first hand the changes that were taking place. He had also been there before, ten years earlier, and had toured the island. In fact, he gives a detailed account of the stages of sugar production under the old government. He offers many assertions concerning the history of the island, but there are no references to outside sources of the information.

The purpose of the book seems to be a defense of communism as well as Fidel Castro's actions. The author is biased in that he shares Castro's political views. He is openly one-sided and makes no attempt at objectivity. He dismisses those who disagree and glosses over Castro's brutality against many Cubans and his disregard for property rights. His basic argument is that Cuba has been abused by "imperial" powers and that Castro is heroically establishing a just society in Cuba.

Sartre's style makes it difficult to follow his arguments. The book is a cynical tirade, mostly against the United States, but Sartre does not bother to help the reader understand his statements. For example, on page 1 he tells of meeting "Yankees" with chilled faces and wonders, "What's crushing them? Their millions or their feelings?" His heavy use of sarcasm also makes the text hard to follow. On page 9 he says that the mostly English-speaking patrons in restaurants dined with candles and, "that's the nth degree of luxury for a free citizen of the United States." Thus, there is no attempt at engaging his opposition in meaningful debate, only condescension and mockery.

Sartre is successful in stimulating interest in Cuban history and the revolution. However, someone seeking an accurate account and interpretation of these events is driven to other sources for information because of the complete lack of scholarship in Sartre's work.
A humorous example of Sartre's bias in his interpretation of events is on page 9 where he asserts that Castro's government "advised against" pleasure trips abroad. The heavy-handed treatment of those Cubans who did not support communism is common knowledge. He did more than advise against Cubans leaving the country. Whatever sincere motives Castro had to better the lives of miserable peasants, one cannot deny his authoritarian leadership style, intolerance of dissent, and suppression of individual freedom.

Sartre seems quite resentful of the United States. On page 11 he refers to the true sense of America's "ineffectual Statue of Liberty" being that "North Americans were lighting up the New World by selling it, quite expensively, its own electricity." However, he never even tries to explain how an American company can spend its own money building electrical facilities in Cuba, but that electricity "belongs" to the Cubans. One is left with the impression that Sartre believes that Americans have a moral obligation not only to not profit from Cuban trade but also to just give their money to Cubans. His approach to Cuban self-responsibility is patronizing and is perhaps racist. How else can one explain his not holding them accountable for their own choices? On page 13 he says that, "The Cubans imitated the Yankees without having their means... (they) accepted dying a little...in order to appear in public behind the wheel of a Chrysler." Are they children? Do they need the understanding and protection of Sartre, their enlightened white father?
On page 12 he laments that Cuba is only a pawn on a chessboard to an American electric company. What should it be? American neighborhoods are also pawns to an electric company. The implication seems to be that there is some intentional abuse of Cuba by immoral capitalists. Perhaps he forgot that it was the capitalists who invented the means to harness electricity and to use it for the betterment of human life. Of course it was for profit. Yet he offers no alternative motivation. He seems to see everything through the lens of his utopian Marxist dogma: rich people bad, poor people good.

Like many committed ideologues, Sartre was a conspiracy theorist. Apparently speaking of the United States and other "imperialist" nations on page 23 he says, "Men in frock coats and the military in uniform met around maps and divided the world with strokes of the pencil." That may be a good enough statement to impress an American college hippie in the 1960s but there is truly no substance to his claims. It could be true, but again, he offers no evidence. On page 24 he speaks of Theodore Roosevelt's belief in investing surplus American capital "in other American countries and particularly Cuba" as if it were a diabolical scheme. He makes the case that the eventual results were not favorable to the Cuban people but fails to show that it was all part of an American plan to subjugate Cuba. It seems that he muddies the water in order to make it appear deeper than it is. The United States offered Cuba low tariffs and top dollar for its sugar. According to Sartre, this was practically an invasion and violation of Cuban sovereignty by the "Puritans" (apparently a jab at American religiosity and hypocrisy).

Sartre was a voice for the Left in the 1960s. In an attempt to seize the moral high ground, his allies in the United States were screaming, "Give peace a chance!" The Left's hypocrisy, however, is shown on page 15. Sartre says of revolutionizing a society that, "the remedy is extreme; it is often necessary to impose it by violence. The extermination of the adversary and of several allies is not inevitable, but it is prudent to prepare for such an event." In other words, individuals will accept Sartre's political views or be slaughtered. This demonstrates that the true motivation of the main instigators of the "peace movement" during the Vietnam War was simply to break the American peoples' will to fight, and thus removing communism's most powerful enemy. They were not principled pacifists. They embraced the incredibly bloody revolutions in Russia and China and of course, as does Sartre, "Che" Guevara. Guevara was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. Sartre devotes an entire chapter to romanticizing Guevara starting on page 98.

In trying to explain American behavior toward Cuba, on page 34 Sartre asserts that, "The U.S.A. feared competition." For this reason, he says, they would not allow Cuba to industrialize. One wonders how Sartre would explain American investment in European industry through the Marshall Plan after World War II. There has been no greater source of competition for the United States than European nations. Was an island of peasants the best market for American industrial products as Sartre implies? If so, why did the United States encourage industry and even foot the bill for it in Japan after World War II?

In the same chapter, Sartre repeatedly holds the United States responsible for the actions of Cuban cattlemen, planters, and politicians who apparently were the ones who were truly committed to the status quo and preventing other industries from competing with them for labor. Thus, they were able to keep wages low and their profits high. Americans have spent more than 200 years battling similar problems in their own country with ongoing success. Apparently Sartre resents the Cubans being forced to take responsibility for their own freedom. Sadly, they have settled for "freedom" only from outside tyrants. One can hope that soon, when Castro is gone, Cuba will be allowed to blossom under a system based on democracy and rational self interest. Communism has been tried and found wanting.

Sartre's book Sartre on Cuba seeks to defend communism and Castro. In this it fails. His approach is unreasonable and condescending, resentful and cynical. His basic argument is that Cuba has been abused by "imperial" powers and that Castro is heroically establishing a just society in Cuba, but he does not support this argument with adequate evidence. Its only strength is in its ability to provoke interest in the reader to study Cuban history more deeply. It would be very interesting to read what comments Sartre would make on history and politics if he were alive now, forty-eight years into Castro's "liberation" of Cuba.
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a selection from the beginning of the first section in Book I:?

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Genet as a Living Existential Hero
In this 625-page masterpiece of psychoanalysis of one of our most complex men, the renown Existentialist Philosopher, Play write and French man of letters, Jean Paul Sartre, has turned his erstwhile compatriot, Jean Genet into his own private existential living hero -- built-up from whole cloth through literal allegory.

Jean Genet's biography is as well known, as it is scandalous. To wit: from the age of 10 Genet, a bastard "ward of the French State," became a willing societal tool and incorrigible. He was, at various times in his life: a beggar, thief, homosexual, prostitute, deserter, escapee from both reform schools and prisons, and was eventually declared by the French government as a "habitual criminal." When it was discovered that he was not just a writer, but an extraordinarily good one, Sartre and other members of the French Literati, requested and got him pardoned from an automatically earned life sentence.

Genet, then of course proceeded to continue to live out the life of what he had accepted as his defined role in society, as a vagabond, deadbeat, homosexual and criminal. Even later in life, after he had become both a famous and a wealthy writer, he traveled, continued thieving, defended revolutionary causes and never quite stopped giving "the middle finger" to the society that had previously rejected him. But to this list he could now also added the persona of writer.

As the New York Times reviewer put it so elegantly at the time of the book's release: "of all the forbidden literary fruits, Jean Genet was always the darkest and most dangerous." In this book Sartre echoes that sentiment by describing Genet's books as "an epic of masturbation ... a matchless, unholy trinity of scatology, pornography and the legitimate study of evil."

Yet, it is precisely in his unwillingness to live out the hand dealt to him by French society, that Genet emerges in Sartre's eyes as the ultimate existential hero. Sartre maintains that, only "by [actually] doing evil, could [Genet] discover the evil that [French society] had told him, he possessed. In Sartre's eyes, Genet, born into a meaningless and hostile world, filled with guilt, fear, evil, and vacillation could only be free by eventually learning how to rebel against the society that had so carefully categorized him and then so profoundly rejected him.

Much of Genet's materials were excavations from his prison dreams. In these, the whole world is but one big brothel. Genet's autoerotic visions were always populated with characters right out of central casting from the deepest, darkest and most evil of pornographic movies. Yet it was from the depths of this moral black hole, it was through these characters and dreams, that Genet awoke to an entirely different and new reality: One in which he was no longer just a hapless prop for French society, but one that he could master as a free and independent human being.

He had discovered the reality of words. Genet no longer needed to justify his existence by "treading water" through an assigned persona in a world thrust upon him by French society, he could become a hero in his own reality. And so he did. All of his writings and plays became famous. Genet became a rich man, but he remained, until his death of cancer in 1983, a man of simple counter-cultural taste. Until the bitter end, he mocked the society that had rejected.

Of Sartre, Genet himself said in his 1964 Playboy interview, that "in a world where everyone is trying to be a respectful prostitute, its nice to meet someone who knows he's a bit whorish but doesn't want to be respectable." About this biography, in that same interview, he said that "It filled me with a kind of disgust, because I saw myself stripped naked--by someone other than myself. When I strip myself I manage not to get too damaged as I disguise myself with words, with attitudes, with certain choices, by means of certain magic. My first impulse was to burn the book.I was almost unable to continue writing. Sartre's book created a kind of void which made for [me] a kind of psychological deterioration.

Fifty stars

beauty takes place..
'Grandly conceived and executed' .... 'Magnificent'.... 'Nothing less than masterly' ... critical tributes offered Sartre's Saint Genet that end as mere words. Saint Genet is an unearthly book wrought with the passion of a gospel narrative, explicit and wrenching. It is, finally, an entire act of redemption. The language is apocryphal and never operatic, epic in delivery, even greater than it seems; page upon page of an exceeding pure, andnever vulgarly rich, damask brocade! I'll not critique Sartre's thought --it's privilege enough to be presented it!-- but this seminal work is a miraculous construct of human will and unbearable genius that will live forever, a complex and magisterial book ranking among the great achievments of modern literature because of its erudition, humanity, and fierce literary reach.There is not a page that doesn't honor wisdom, nor is there a single idle component.It is indisputably Sartre's crowning achievment as a genius, and as a man.The evocative humanity of two literary giants of the 20th century plays like a dance, the captured aesthetic of which Sartre reveals; everything is taken to the temple of Genet, everything explained, everything mortified, slain and remade.Reading this book is a revealing experience; be willing to be stolen. Theft happens in broad daylight, perpetrators already known.. My favorite chapteris 'Cain,' in which Sartre makes his most profound arguments about Genet as Other, Genet as the living inverse Liturgy, and presents a stupefying image of his subject: 'Everything is possessed, worked, occupied, from the sky to the subsoil...' Intimidating in its greatness. ... Read more