I'm reading Sarah Bakewell's book At The Existentialist Cafe, on the existentialists Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. More about the culture and narratives surrounding them, like apricot cocktails and listened to Claude Luter and Boris Vian who died of a heart attack at 39 upset about an interpretation of his novel, and Juliette Greco who had straight long "existential hair", drowned victim look. Sartre and de Beauvoir had an open relationship and Sartre used to entice women up to his room with promise of some Camembert cheese.
The book is a gloss of many people, but it's a fun light overview that includes Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It's a real sort of surf over very deep, complex and abstract ideas.
I was trying to think of something that represented Sartre's freedom ideas in modern culture, and I came up with I'm ready from the Star Trek musical episode, sung by Jess Bush in the show Strange New Worlds, season 2, episode 9. Of course Sartre never joined the academy, but he did study, so she's going there to study. It also leads to the song by Spock "I'm The Ex."
Supposedly Marguerite Duras was upset when during the 1969 occupation of the Sorbonne, it was only the 63 year old Sartre who was invited in to speak to the occupiers.
You can see footage of Sartre's funeral in the 80's.
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