The Death and Return of the Author
Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida
Seán Burke
Edinburgh University Press
Contents
Preface to Second Edition
viii
Prologue: The Deaths of Paul de Man
1
Introduction: A Prehistory of the Death of the Author
8
1. The Birth of the Reader
20
Authorship and Apotheosis
22
From Work to Life
27
The 'Founders of Languages'
33
Mimesis and the Author
41
Autobiographies
53
2. The Author and the Death of Man
62
Cogito and the Birth of Man
66
The Founder of Futurity
78
What (and Who) is an Author?
89
Allegories of Misreading
94
Transcendental Lures: Lacan and the Mastery of Language
99
Subjectivities
105
3. Misread Intentions
116
Authors of Absence
117
Hors-Texte
123
A History of Silence
128
Doubling the Text: Intention and its Other
138
The Myth of Writing
150
Reading and (Self-) Writing
167
Conclusion: Critic and Author
170
Critic and Author?
176
Misreceptions: Phenomenology into Deconstruction
180
The Ghost in the Machine: Authorial Inscription and the Limits of Theory
187
Epilogue
192
Technology and the Politics of Reading
'Half Dust, Half Deity': The Middle Way of Situated Authorship
201
Notes
206
Bibliography
238
Index
249
Akaky Akakievich, the little clerk made immortal by Gogol, returns from the dead to haunt the government department by which he has been humiliated. Akaky had no sooner invested his life's savings in a new overcoat than he was robbed of it by a gang of thieves. Subjected to further scorn within his department, and treated with contempt by an Important Person in his efforts to recover the stolen overcoat, Akaky succumbed to a fever and died. Seeming to undo the institutional death to which his living body had been condemned, the clerk's literal death allows him to assert the significance of a unique existence. The last act of Akaky's ghostly life is to tear the Important Person's overcoat from his back: chastened, the latter learns to respect people in their rightful singularity.
Reduced to parable, this story indicates the mixture of comedy, pathos and high seriousness with which the death of the author has needed to be treated. It also points to the ever-jagged intersections between institutional and existential mortality. In ending the first edition of this book with the image of a haunting, I suggested that the return criticism invariably makes to the author must also be acknowledged in principle. Easy to recognise, though, the duty of formulating such a return is quite another charge. It has rightly been commented of this book that, while a good case is made against the death of the author, positive alternatives are absent. If a return to the author was to be made, it was first necessary to show that such a return was justified. This task took an entire book. A positive programme—a theory of authorship perhaps — could only be distilled from many books by many authors or theorists. That said, I will briefly sketch the main issues that any such programme would confront.
Immensely valuable work is current in the areas of copyright, intellectual ownership, changing historical conceptions of authorship, the politics of authorship in relation to particular eras, cultures and social configurations. As a centre of controversy, authorship is indeed becoming an indexed item in the literary and cultural encyclopedia rather than the shortfall of theoretical, political or historicist programmes. Further work might also be attempted on the ethics of authorship, the question of legacy and the contractual nature of the signature. Comparative studies of theological, philosophical, scientific and literary authorship could be conducted with considerable gains to our understanding of the relation between human agency and knowledge. Research of this cast would clarify the field of authorship in terms of the author-function, but an area of considerable philosophical and interpretative difficulty would remain to be addressed. This issue—which I touch upon in the section 'Subjectivities' and at the close of the 'Epilogue'—is the need to arrive at a model of situated subjectivity. We are a long way off any such model, but the spectre of the inconceivable should not deter us from its adventure.
The main argument of this book remains unaltered. I have added a section on Derrida's reading of Plato ('The Myth of Writing') and an epilogue which reviews recent technological arguments whilst advocating an embodied sense of authorship. A second edition also seemed to provide a good opportunity to speak more candidly about the growing breach between academic literary criticism and broad intellectual culture. This breach is marked by a 'politics' of theory which seems to have very little to do with politics in anything like a 'real world'. The death of the author marks a significant point in this melancholy retreat. Looking back, it seems that an institutional affair of self-regulation (impersonalist reading) was all along masquerading as a dark truth of textual ontology (the death of the author). When one also takes into account the sheer incomprehensibility of 'the death of the author' to even the finest minds outside the institution, it is clear that the concept functioned to keep the non-academic at bay: thereby, one more obstacle to the re-emergence of a culture of letters was put in place. It was from an impatience with this insularity that The Death and Return of the Author emerged. Attentive readers of the subtext of this work will also notice that this impatience is not turned toward the three 'subjects' of this book—strong poets of the age as they are—but against an Anglo-American critical institution which has needed arguments from authority in the deconstruction of authority.
A reviewer has noted that this is an impersonal work. Perhaps there is some inconsistency here, but a personal defence of authorship would not be taken seriously—particularly coming from one who is not an author.
In the realm of acknowledgements, where the personal is permissible, if not the political, I would like to record the history of my debts in writing this work.
The first edition was conceived, researched and written between 1986 and 1989, with certain rewritings and additions in 1991. For two years, I was the recipient of a British Academy State Studentship for which I remain very grateful.
Circumstances dictated that I wrote this work in almost complete academic isolation, and so I count myself very lucky to have been in regular contact with Cairns Craig. The insight and intelligence which he showed in supervising this work continue to surprise me today. Also, I should like to thank Randall Stevenson, Faith Pullin, Alistair Fowler and Sandra Kemp. From my home town, it gives me pleasure to acknowledge Tim Petersen, my brother Kevin, my sister Tracey and friends at the Gower Hotel, Cardiff. I would also like to thank Tíiona Carey, Aisling Roche, John Carter, Patrick Maguire and Timothy Parry. Most of all, I want to acknowledge the unstinting support I received from my parents, John and June Burke.
With regard to this second edition, I would like to thank Robin Dix, Michael O'Neill, Bert Nutter, Fabio Cleto, Charles Martindale and especially C. J. Rowe, and—in what feels like an act of second nature - Patricia Waugh whose grace and intelligence also brighten worlds far beyond the Academy.
I am not given to retrospective self-examination and mercifully forget what I have written with the same alacrity I forget bad movies—although as with bad movies, certain scenes or phrases return at times to embarrass and haunt me like a guilty conscience. When one imagines to have felt the exhilaration of renewal one is certainly the last to know whether such a change actually took place or whether one is just restating, in a slightly different mode, earlier and unresolved obsessions . . . Thus seeing a distant segment of one's past resurrected gives one a slightly uncanny feeling of repetition.
Paul de Man, New Haven, 1983 1
Late in 1987, a short article run by the New York Times under the title 'Yale Scholar's Articles Found in Nazi Paper' set in motion a process of re-evaluation not only of Paul de Man's career as a theorist but of the deconstructive movement in whose name he worked, and of the ethics of detaching the text from its writer. At a time when critical theory thought to have dispensed with the idea of authorship, the posthumous revelation of de Man's wartime writings brought the author back to centre stage. For critical theorists themselves, all of whom owe a debt of influence to de Man and some the debt of friendship, the entire affair has unfolded like a nightmare. And the nightmare in this case, as so often, is history, a history in which, between 1940 and 1942, a young intellectual published 170 articles in the collaborationist Belgian newspaper Le Soir, a certain number of which articles express anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi sentiments.2 It is also the history of the most appalling events, events in which Paul de Man himself played no active role beyond his journalistic collaborationism, and of a radical movement in literary studies to which the breadth of his bequeathment has yet to be assessed.
De Man's life has now been scrutinised, and the picture that emerges is of an extraordinarily complex and contradictory individual. 3 A man of great modesty and kindness who was also capable of considerable duplicity in both his private and public lives, de Man could at the same time show sincere sympathy to the plight of individual Jews in occupied Belgium, and pen articles condemning Jewish literature as a decadence the West could well do without. De Man's post-war reconstruction of himself also unfolds according to similar patterns of moral ambivalence. On the one hand, he was an unimpeachable teacher and academic colleague, on the other, a de facto bigamist who maintained fundamentally dishonest dealings with his wartime and post-wartime families. Like most figures who have led a double life, Paul de Man's biography opens to sharply contrasting interpretations.
These enigmas are deepened still further by the theoretical positions he took up on authorship. Perhaps ironically, perhaps deliberately, de Man had always denied that the writer's life in any way bore upon the interpretation of his or her work. In the first phase of his career as a literary theorist, de Man had adopted a rigorous phenomenological picture of authorship whereby the self was entirely emptied of any biographical content in the constitution of a transcendental subjectivity with no personal history or empirical concerns. Latterly, as a deconstructionist, he had rejected author-centred criticism in a different mode, affirming that there is no stable subject of writing in any guise, be it transcendental or empirical. In both phases of his career, the biographical subject is entirely eliminated: an author's personality and life history disappear irretrievably in the textual machine.
Not surprisingly, since his Le Soir articles have come to light, many commentators have seen factors beyond those of textual epistemology urging this flight from the self. De Man's denial of biography, his ideas of autobiography as de-facement, have come to be seen not as disinterested theoretical statements, but as sinister and meticulous acts of self-protection, by which he sought to (a)void his historical self. The attempt to efface and deface the writer in his theoretical prose is seen as a way of detaching the Paul de Man of Yale who wrote Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Misreading from the Paul de Man of occupied Belgium who also put his name to a number of collaborationist articles. Such an interpretation allies itself with de Man's textualisation of history in general, with the always rash and now infamous opinions he issued in the essay 'Literary History and Literary Modernity': 'the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.' 4
The Le Soir articles have now put into play their own history, and the retrospective self-examination' de Man professes foreign to his nature has been practised on his behalf. What de Man might mercifully forget', his legacy will ceaselessly and mercilessly recall in order to make sense of this early moment in his career, to argue its pertinence to his work as a whole, and to determine whether his subsequent career as a literary theorist is to be read in patterns of independence, further culpability or expiation. For some, the wartime writings are to be interpreted as virtually complicitous with the deconstruction he and others have practised. A movement, so the argument runs, which avoids the subjective and the ethical has no defences against lapsing into totalitarian habits of thought, and at least one commentator has gone so far as to argue that the complex work of deconstruction serves to veil an implicitly National Socialist ethos.5 For others—mainly, but by no means exclusively, luminaries of the deconstructive movement—the wartime writings are seen as a lamentable aberration in de Man's thought, one which his subsequent work did its best, on an implicit level, to retract and rectify. Others still offer no mitigation for the wartime writings but stop short of extending their judgement to cover de Man's work as conceptual theoretician and philosopher of language.6
In the epigraph which opens this prologue (in many ways also an epitaph, lines written in the year of his death—1983—and possibly in the knowledge of cancer) de Man anticipates all the terms by which this debate has been conducted. Ostensibly he is reflecting on the volume of essays dating from the mid-1950s which have been collected as Blindness and Insight. If we read this passage against its biographical background, however, and take these statements as a secreted reflection on his Le Soir articles, de Man cuts a sinister figure indeed—a puppeteer putting in place all the strings of his legacy, an executor to his own dark codicil. The 'certain scenes' by which he is haunted may well be the harrowing footage we have of the holocaust, or they may be textual scenes, 'phrases' such as: 'one sees that a solution of the Jewish problem that would aim at the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not entail, for the literary life of the West, deplorable consequences. The latter would lose, in all, a few personalities of mediocre value and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its great evolutive laws.'7
The full extent of his embarrassment, his hauntedness, his 'guilty conscience' will ever be unknown to us, though the majority of commentators discern a fundamental unease in his later work, the question being whether this unease results from a genuine trial of conscience, or an anxiety test his historical secret betray itself. The 'exhilaration of renewal' is amply evident in the princely meditations he produced on language and literature from the 1950s up to his death in 1984. Whether, though, 'such a change actually took place', or whether he is 'just restating, in a slightly different mode, earlier and unresolved obsessions' is the central question that has been debated with such urgency throughout the literary establishment in its journalistic and academic media.
Without wishing to add to, to neutralise or to exploit the ethical and moral questions raised by the texts of this early Paul de Man, we might note how the response to his wartime writings, both in their prosecutory and mitigatory manifestations, disinter many of the loci of traditional author-centred criticism. Six cardinal intersections of author and text appear and reappear throughout this debate.
1. Intention. Did the young de Man mean what he said? Did he say what he meant? Are the intentions expressed in his early articles carried through to join the intentions of his later work? Broadly speaking, those who take the view that de Man is culpable in the extreme would answer 'yes' to these questions, those who defend would say 'no', that it was the work of a young man borne along by a historical tide whose savage shores he could never have foreseen. On both sides—that of a largely anti-intentionalist deconstruction on the one hand, and a pro-intentionalist contextualism on the other—it is assumed that what he meant matters, that what he meant means something to us, and that his later work is governed by good or bad intentions in respect of these collaborationist articles.
2. Author-ity. As far as this debate is concerned, the fact that de Man became an authority within literary theory and a certain philosophy of language means that it matters what he said, wherever and whatever, at whatever stage of adult development, and in whatever circumstances. It is this authority that commends these texts so urgently to our attention over and above the countless other, more relentless and rabid collaborationist journalism of the time. Also the fact that de Man, like Heidegger, was a philosopher-author inclines many commentators to view his association with National Socialist ideology as having more pernicious ramifications than that of other non-discursive cultural figures such as musicians, chess grandmasters and so on. 3. Biography. The importance of biographical contexts to this debate goes without saying. That he was young (in his early twenties) when he wrote for Le Soir, that he had a child and its mother to support, that he was nephew and intellectual ward to Henri de Man (a socialist minister in the Belgian government and thereafter a collaborator), that Paul de Man was not a member of the Nazi party (and, for the prosecution, that he was not a member of any resistance organisation), that de Man was hitherto in politics, in conversation, in society, a man in whom not the slightest traces of anti-Semitism or totalitarian politics could be discerned—countless biographical factors such as these are privileged whether offered up in exonerative or incriminatory contexts.
4. Accountability. That de Man must be held to account for what he had written is accepted by all parties to this controversy. On this issue, theory seems to abandon or suspend the idea that the author is a mere fiction or trace of language, for if authorship were indeed a textual illusion, there would be no charge to answer beyond that of reminding the world that in the reality of text 'Paul de Man' signs and signifies nothing. The fact is that his fellow theorists have defended de Man as a person and often with considerable dignity and passion. So much in itself confirms that, firstly, the signature 'Paul de Man' is something greatly in excess of a textual effect and secondly, his signature ties de Man ethically and existentially to the texts he has written.
5. Oeuvre. The existence of a de Manian corpus is not for a minute called into question within this debate. The three main categories of response to the wartime writings are: the interpretation of the entire oeuvre as some form of continuation of the sentiments expressed in this early work, a reading that sees the Le Soir articles as the expression of the mature de Manian philosophy in statu nascendi; the interpretation of the post-war de Manian work as an attempt to redress and retract the ideology reflected in his wartime journalism and the dissociation of the wartime writings from the de Manian oeuvre. 8 The first two positions accept the interrelationship between de Man's wartime and post-war writing, the former interpreting it as some form of continuous figure, the latter according to a corrective pattern. The third position also accepts the concept of the oeuvre, but separates an inessential juvenilia from an essential and mature canon. The debate thus differs only in the gravity of its themes from those we have witnessed concerning the relationship of an author's fledgling texts to those of his or her mature canon.
6. Autobiography. The debate postulates at its centre a concept of de Man's theoretical prose which sees it not as direct autobiographical expression but as, on the one hand, autobiographical suppression, and, on the other, as an elliptical and indirect form of confession. De Man's post-war texts are read either as the work—autobiographical in spite of itself—of a man who is attempting on a theoretical level to obliterate his own history; or, for his defenders, as a disguised confessional narrative, the attempt by de Man to construct a method of rigorous textual critique that would guard against the ideological mystification to which he had succumbed in his youth. In both modes, the de Manian text is seen to be autobiographical in essence, a text which generated an entire philosophy of language and of the absence of subjectivity in order to keep its secret or to atone for its previous errors.
The de Manian legacy draws together so many of the points with which we will be concerned here. 9 Most significantly, it shows how the principle of the author most powerfully reasserts itself when it is thought absent. This reassertion takes place not only within the debate in literary studies that the affair of de Man has provoked, but also in the context of de Man's biographical relationship to his own theoretical work. In the latter case, de Man's life and work fuse in the very figure that supposedly sets them apart. Whilst he theorised about the disengagement of an author from his work in the constitution of an anonymous literary selfhood that leaves the personal self in its wake, his own life unfolded according to similar patterns. Theoretical articulations of the void of personality find a constant analogue in de Man's voiding of his personal history. Autobiography as de-facement becomes de-facement as autobiography, a cancellation of the self that is self-willed and mirrored in the life of the self-cancelling subject; text and author are united under the signs of their disunion.10
In an essay entitled 'The Sublimation of the Self, de Man wrote: 'Because it implies a forgetting of the personal self for a transcendental type of self that speaks in the work, the act of criticism can acquire exemplary value.'11 By way of an irony to which he himself contributed (perhaps even anticipated), it was only when his personal existence had run its course that his personal self returned to haunt the austere and anonymous subject he left behind in his work. In his deaths, the putting-to-death of a past self, his own biological death, and the death of the writer he announced in his writing, Paul de Man has come to life as a biographical figure with a chilling and tragic intensity. As Derrida himself says:
He, himself, he is dead, and yet, through the specters of memory and of the text, he lives among us and, as one says in French, il nous regardeCH:151> he looks at us, but also he is our concern, we have concerns regarding him more than ever without his being here. He speaks (to) us among us. He makes us or allows us to speak of us, to speak to us. He speaks (to) us [Il nous parle]. 12
A disembodied voice, a voice that speaks strangely to us now through the fissures of seemingly impersonal and imperturbable theoretical prose. A voice that cannot be kept silent in death. And a voice that, we shall argue, can still less be quieted by literary theory.
This voice, the voice of Paul de Man, is also the voice of authorship itself as we shall trace its disappearances and returns in modern theories of the text.13 Henceforth I will make only occasional recourse to Paul de Man and, there, to arguably the most gifted literary theorist of his generation; and as often as not to contest his ideas on authorship which, as for all the theorists discussed here, is an area of blindness within his work. For with Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, albeit less dramatically, the authorial subject returns, the (auto) biographical disrupts, enhances and displaces aspects of their work, a return which I shall argue takes place almost instantaneously with the declaration of authorial departure.
As befits the cyclical nature of this project we have begun, so to speak, at the end; with a return of/to the author in critical theory. Both sides of this return will concern us here: the return of the author is as it inevitably and implicitly occurs in the practice of anti-authorial criticism; and the return to the author that poststructuralism in general has yet to make at the level of theory despite its failure to circumvent subjectivity at the level of its readings. What follows then, under the rubric of the death of the author, is at one and the same time a statement of the return of the author, a return that takes place in accordance with the guiding principle of this analysis—that the concept of the author is never more alive than when pronounced dead. Introduction:
A Prehistory of the Death of the Author
When looking at the history of modern thought it is all too easy to be seduced by linear patterns of development constructed after the event. One such path is cleared by Roland Barthes when he describes the origins of modern anti-authorialism as stretching from Mallarmé, through Valéry, Proust and the Surrealists. 1 Beguiling and fastidious as it may be, this lineage is palpably false. Of the examples cited, Proust, though he opposed conventional biographicist criticism, never declared anything remotely resembling the death of the author, Valéry as often as not militated in favour of authorial control over and against the romantic notion of inspiration, and Surrealism, whilst it may have persuaded a few writers to experiment with automatic writing, has never had a clear and unmediated impact upon critical theory.2 Every writer, as Jorge Luis Borges says, creates his own precursors (an elegant way of saying, amongst other things, that all intellectual history is post factum), and in this case Barthes is quite simply covering over a history of more humble predecessors with an august line of Gallic influences.3 Indeed, of the predecessors cited, only Mallarmé has any place as a harbinger of authorial demise.
Not only Barthes, but Foucault and Derrida have also shown themselves eager to accept Mallarmé as a precursor, and if we look at the poet's most famous remarks on compositional aesthetics, it is easy to see how he prefigures some of the central themes evoked by anti-authorial discourses:
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet-speaker who yields the initiative to words animated by the inequality revealed in their collision with one another; they illuminate one another and pass like a trail of fire over precious stones, replacing the audible breathing of earlier lyrical verse or the exalted person
ality which directed the phrase.
The structure of a book of verse must arise throughout from internal necessity—in this way both chance and the author will be excluded . . . some symmetry, which will arise from the relation of lines within the poem and poems within the volume, will reach out beyond the volume to other poets who will themselves inscribe on spiritual space the expanding paraph of genius, anonymous and perfect like a work of art. 4
The disappearance of the writer, the autonomy of writing, the beginning of écriture in an act of textual dispossession, the power of language to organise and orchestrate itself without any subjective intervention whatsoever, the notion of the intertextualising of all literature—all these proto-theoretical themes are laid out in the sparest form by this passage. With Mallarmé, the sublime origin of literature which the romantics sought alternately in imagination, or in the Muse, is now discovered within language itself. The doctrine of inspiration departs from the sublimity of divine origin and adopts its counter-sublime: the anonymous unravelling of words on the purity of a page, words written in the absence of Gods, Muses and mortals. Little wonder, then, that Barthes should establish Mallarmé as chief among the heresiarchs, or that Foucault should say:
The Nietzschean question: 'Who is speaking?', Mallarmé replies . . . by saying that what is speaking is, in its solitude, in its fragile vibration, in its nothingness, the word itself . . . Mallarmé was constantly effacing himself from his own language, to the point of not wishing to figure in it except as an executant in a pure ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself. It is quite possible that all the questions now confronting our curiosity . . . are presented today in the distance that was never crossed between Nietzsche's question and Mallarmé's reply.5
As Foucault himself knows as well as anyone, however, no historical problematic can be contained within such delicate frames. Beyond the obvious contradiction of establishing Mallarmé as the author, as it were, of the author's disappearance—a founding father of the death of the father—historicising of this kind is at best mythopoeic, and at worst, perverse. For eloquent and concise as such a picture is, it is also mystificatory in that the theoretical bases of the movement against the subject of writing are obscured and displaced. Mallarmé's discourse does not situate itself at the opening of literary theory as we know it, but represents a tenebrous culmination of the romantic doctrine of inspiration. Furthermore, Mallarmé is not tendering a theoretical or even eidetic statement about writing. Rather he is evoking, on the one hand, a certain compositional mood whereby the poet attempts to empty himself of personal concerns before the poetic act and, on the other, the aesthetic will-to-impersonality such as was to re-emerge with T.S. Eliot and others early in this century. 6 An ideal of literature is adumbrated in Mallarmé, but not its theory.
Recourse to Mallarmé in this context is of course quite convenient in that his distance from theory, and his distance in time from Barthes, Foucault and Derrida ensures that their work will not be seen in derivative colours: in much the same way, Freud preferred to look to the Greek poets rather than to the nearer and more threatening figures of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as the forebears of psychoanalytic theory. What the French poststructuralist appeal to Mallarmé shields is a more difficult and serpentine history of influences which culminated in the modern attempt to destroy the authorial subject.
One of the easier and more hospitable theoretical paths leading to the announcement of the death of the author travels along the familiar circuit by which the work of the Russian Formalists passes through Czech and French structuralism to culminate in the poststructuralism practised by Barthes, Foucault and Derrida in the 1960s. Along this route, the Formalists' reduction of the author in the interests of establishing a science of literature and language is seen to flow virtually undisturbed into the modern theory of literature. Such a history of developments, though, entirely bypasses the enormous influence of phenomenology on French thought up to the mid-1950s, an influence in which Barthes, Foucault and Derrida were immersed in the early stages of their intellectual careers.
Husserl's reformulation of the conscious subject as the ground of knowledge exerted greatest influence not in his native Germany but in a French philosophical tradition which for three centuries had lived in the shadow of Cartesianism. Faced with the development of a modern cogito, France's new generation of philosophers—most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—threw themselves into the Husserlian texts and the phenomenological revisions of Martin Heidegger. For this and a number of other reasons, the classic texts of structuralism—though they were all written in French—passed by with little or no recognition from an intellectual culture whose horizons were bound by the study of consciousness and the transcendental phenomenological subject.
Naturally, the phenomenological movement in France was by no means homogeneous and its various scions attest to different points of departure. Sartre's existential reading of phenomenology took its bearings from Heidegger, whilst Merleau-Ponty's work looked to the classical Husserlian formulation for its revisionary impetus. Yet all the versions of phenomenology that developed during this period shared a common focus in the question of subjectivity. Sartre's contribution—widely considered today as retrogressive and distorted—consisted largely in returning Heidegger's revision of Husserl to a more substantial grounding in the Husserlian subject, a revision in which is added a great emphasis on the ideal of individual freedom.
Though now largely out of favour, it was this existential reading of phenomenology which gained most currency during the 1940s largely as a result of Sartre's cultural and intellectual ascendancy over this period, an ascendancy comparable only to that of Voltaire some two centuries earlier. As philosopher, playwright, novelist, journalist and political activist, Sartre extended the notion of a free subjectivity beyond philosophy to literature and politics, and provided his generation with the model of the engaged author, a politically-committed writer whose work and whose activitie...
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