circulation and mutual enhancement of creative energies among a circle of
persons is characteristic of the peak years—so often compressed into less than
a decade—of a creative movement; so too are the eventual splits. Fichte,
Schelling, or Hegel; Camus, Merleau-Ponty, or Sartre: several may be su-
premely energized, but there is space for only one to personify the group.
In retrospect, Sartre’s personality stands out from his childhood, his school-
days, his long years in the provinces. It is easy to portray him as predestined
for intellectual success of one sort or another. Fanatically writing, he produces
as many as 80 pages a day, volunteering for extra guard duty while on military
service so that he won’t be disturbed. It is always the group focus that brings
him into the local center of attraction; he blossoms in the German prisoner-
of-war camp in 1940–41, putting on camp theatricals and organizing discus-
sions, acting again like the popular class clown that he played at the ENS.
Sartre is the energy vortex of his network, reading and writing about everything
that comes into its purview. He has so much cultural capital that it explains
little of his pathway; the pre-success Sartre writes voluminously in all direc-
tions, and it is only when a social mechanism, in the form of the Gallimard
staff, selects for him the central tracks of the attention space that he becomes
a star. Later Sartre would do the same thing again with the topics of the day:
postwar politics, theater of the absurd, Marxism. Sartre is indeed a “nothing-
ness” of vital energy, not so much negating and rebelling—which was already
the dominant style of French intellectuals decades before—as a blank, ready
to fill itself with whatever is available and to transform it into the attention
center of the future.
How many other rabid young readers and writers were about during
Sartre’s youth who could have taken the same path? It is impossible to know.
But France in the 1920s was structurally set up to generate just such energies,
and to select from among these youths in an organization which focused
maximal attention upon the most successful. Sartre represents the extreme
product of the centralized French educational system, with its years of prepa-
ration for competitive examinations, its khâgne and hypokhâgne (the student
slang reflecting the tribalism of the informal group) cram courses at the elite
lycées, its make-or-break examination points—the concours for admission to
the ENS, the agrégation for the teaching certificate—with their publicly an-
nounced rankings. The organizational structure concentrated the most ambi-
tious and cultural capital–accumulating youths in one place and threw them
into intense group interaction with palpable barriers to mere mortals outside
the bounds. This is the formula for the totemic group at its most intense.^16
The philosophical capital which flowed through the larger network into
France came from Germany. The links are multiple and cumulative:
Groethuysen and Aron, with their direct and indirect links to Scheler; Koyré,
a former pupil of both Bergson and Husserl (he had lived in Husserl’s house
776 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths