individuals will experience a kind of social bond, if not community. But
the movie audience, unlike the fusing group, is a purely psychological
phenomenon. It does not mark their way of existing, their ontology, as he
will remark inBeing and Nothingness.
Then there was the magic. “I was seven and knew how to read; [the
movie] was twelve and did not know how to talk.” He hoped they would
mature together (Wo rd s 77 ). Sartre would write a youthful essay on the
cinema while at the ENS.^28 His conversion to philosophy had already taken
place when he read Bergson while attending thelyce ́e. The latter’sDonne ́e
imme ́diate de la conscience(Time and Free Will) had focused his attention
on the paradoxes and ambiguity of time and duration (la dure ́e). Hence-
forth, the “movies” would present an object lesson in these paradoxes. For
the young Sartre, they are also a source of his sense of contingency: when
the lights went on and he left the theater, he was removed from the inner
“necessity” and the absolute world of the actors that was theirs but no
longer his: “In the street I found myself superfluous” (Wo r d s 79 ).
This is the decisive moment in his young life: “I was beginning to find
myself...I was escaping from play-acting. I was not yet working, but
I had already stopped playing...I existed only in order to write” (Words
95 ). “A character neurosis, says an analyst friend of mine. He’s right:
between the summer of 1914 and autumn of 1916 , my mandate became
my character; my delirium left my head and flowed into my bones”
(Words 144 ). Sartre repeated on several occasions that his neurosis
prevented him from leaving a page blank.^29
(^28) “Apologie pour le cine ́ma. De ́fense et illustration d’un Art international,” in Jean-Paul
Sartre,E ́crits de jeunesse, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Paris: Gallimard, 1990 ),
388 – 340 ; hereafterEJwith title of text.
(^29) As Sartre will later say in the “Presentation” of the inaugural issue ofLes Temps Modernes
( 1945 ): “One makes oneself bourgeois by once and for all choosing a certain analytic vision of
the world which one tries to impose on all people and which excludes the perception of
collective realities” (Situations, 10 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, 1947 – 1976 ], II: 19 ; hereafterSit
with volume and page. Analytic reason is atomistic and determinist, atemporal and formal
(structural). In the face of historical events, the most analytic reason can offer is statistical
generalizations and covering laws. It is the rationality proper to the engineer inNotebooks for
an Ethics(seeNE 511 ). For a discussion of the conflict of rationalities that underlies Sartre’s
critique of bourgeois culture from this basic perspective, see mySFHRi: 99 – 102. Sartre’s
humanist grandfather “drove the engineer, the merchant, and probably the officer out of his
Republic” (Words 36 ). Sartre will follow suit years later, taking the engineer as the model for
calculative, analytic, metrical reasoning and placing himself on a collision course with his
stepfather.
12 The childhood of a genius