Sartre

The two-pronged nature of Sartre’s biographical method – namely,
the co-presence of existential psychoanalysis and historical materialism –
is moving more into the foreground in this work. As the translator of
the text remarks: “Sartre insists that Mallarme ́’s singularpoesisgrew
out of a series of conscious choices exercised on the basis of prior
conditions. Sartre does not minimize the immense weight of these
conditions or the strenuous efforts required to overcome them.”^24 This
problem of the “given” and the “taken” in each existential situation,
which had already been introduced inAnti-Semite and Jew, remains as
problematic as it is essential to Sartre’s growing sense of the historical
dimension of any concrete existence. We shall return to it in detail in
The Family Idiot.
Of the many features that mark Sartre’s approach to these texts,^25
let us note three topics that seem especially important for our study
of Sartrean biography in the light of his ontology, aesthetic interest,
moral thought and political commitment. We find each of these categor-
ies enlisted in a way that expands and refines their application in our
previous chapters. This will be especially evident in his Flaubert
volumes to which we shall turn shortly, but it is worth considering them
in regard to the Mallarme ́ study because they mark an advance and
an opening of topics that will be considered at much greater length in
Sartre’s massive biography of Flaubert.

Objective spirit

This Hegelian term is absent from the Baudelaire piece, probably
because that text was written before Sartre began his serious rereading
of thePhenomenology of Spirit, and two years before Hyppolite’s two-
volume commentary on that classic appeared ( 1946 ). Sartre offers two
descriptions of “objective spirit.” On the one hand, he offers a semantic
description: objective spirit is “the medium for the circulation of

(^24) M 9.
(^25) Actually, the book consists of two texts. The first, “Engagement de Mallarme ́” (“Mallarme ́
or the Poet of Nothingness”), comprises two parts, called by its editor Arlette Elkaı ̈m-Sartre
“Les He ́ritiers de l’Athe ́isme” (“The Atheist Heritage”) and “L’E ́lu” (“The Chosen”)
respectively. The second text is a concise entry in an anthology simply entitled in French
“Mallarme ́( 1842 – 1898 ),” but in English “Requiem for a Poet.” The latter appears in slightly
altered form inSitix.
390 Existential biography: Flaubert and others