The Existentialist Offensive

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The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy: bit.ly/PBEPBwlPbk

A copy of The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy held up outside the legendary Shakespeare & Company bookshop in central Paris.
Black-and-white photo of Simone de Beauvoir signing books at a desk and surrounded by women holding books for her to sign.
Photo of Beauvoir and Sartre in a bar with Santa hats poorly grafted onto Beauvoir's head and the head of a woman in the foreground. Sartre looks like he is trying to take her hat. Beauvoir is drinking something.
Cover of first edition. Blank white cover with centred text: SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR LES BOUCHES INUTILES pièce en deux actes et huit tableaux nrf GALLIMARD
Cover of first edition. Blank white cover with centred text: JEAN-PAUL SARTRE Les chemins de la liberté II Le sursis roman nrf GALLIMARD
Cover of the third issue of Les Temps Modernes. Blank white page with the following column of centred text: Les Temps Modernes 1re année REVUE MENSUELLE n° 3 1er Décembre 1945 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR. - L'existentialisme et la sagesse des nations. JEAN GENÊT. - Pompes funèbres. RENÉ LEIBOWITZ. - Prolégomènes à la musique contemporaine (fin). JEAN-PAUL SARTRE. — Portrait de l'antisémite. NATHALIE MOFFAT. - Nuits sans importance. DOMMARCHI. — Sir William Beveridge et le destin du néo-libéralisme anglais. TÉMOIGNAGES UNGER. - Sélection. VIOLETTE LEDUC. - Le dézingage VIES Vie d'un bourgeois français, magistrat israélite. EXPOSÉS IVAN MOFFAT, PIERRE BERGER, ALBERT OLLIVIER. TM Rédaction, administration : 5, rue Sébastien-Bottin, Paris
Original front cover of the newspaper
Cover of the second issue of Les Temps Modernes. Blank white page with the following column of centred text: Les Temps Modernes 1re année REVUE MENSUELLE n° 2 1er Novembre 1945 JEAN-PAUL SARTRE. - La nationalisation de la littérature. VIOLETTE LEDUC. - Une mère, un parapluie, des gants. RAYMOND ARON. - La chance du socialisme. SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR. - Idéalisme moral et réalisme polltique. RENÉ LEIBOWITZ. - Prolégomènes à la musique contemporaine. RICHARD WRIGHT. - Le feu dans la nuée (fin). TÉMOIGNAGES LÉON AREGA. - Évasion. VIES Vie d'un Juif. EXPOSÉS MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY, CLAUDE LEFORT SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, PONTALIS. VARIETES SCIPION, PONTALIS. TM Rédaction, administration: 5, rue Sébastien-Bottin, Paris
Flag of the United Nations, which is a bright blue landscape rectangle containing a white wreath encircling a flattened projection of the continents of the world with the north pole at the centre.
Cover of the book mentioned in this post. Cover features a grainy monochrome (though browns rather than black and greys) photo of Iris Murdoch walking on a rainy street wearing a big coat and carrying two bags. There is a buss heading the other way in the distance. Photo presumably taken at some point between 1939 and 1945.
Page from Iris Murdoch's notebook. Thank you to Lucy Bolton and the Iris Murdoch archive at the University of Kingston for the photo. The page reads: Notes on a lecture given by Jean Paul Sartre. Brussels Oct 24 1945. There is a christian & a nonchristian variety of existentialism. They have in common a certain theory of subjectivity. For the subject, essence is not existence. Each man is a "projet". He trancends himself. There are however "universals." There is no "human nature " (in the sense of qualities X Y or Z in every man) but there is a universal "human condition." Existentialists are not relativists in the ordinary sense. Their theory of liberty is crucial. Liberty is not a quality of man. It is a form of act, of being. A transcendence. Man is defined from without
Black-and-white photo of at least fifteen women collecting their ballot papers, administered by four women and two men. Photo taken on 29 April 1945 somewhere in France. Photographer unknown.
Black-and-white photo of Pierre Laval testifying at his trial in a large and crowded room.
Cover of first edition. Blank white cover with photo of Sartre in centre of top one-third of the cover. Below that the centred text: Jean-Paul Sartre Œuvres romanesques EDITION ÉTABLIE PAR MICHEL CONTAT ET MICHEL RYBALKA AVEC LA COLLABORATION DE GENEVIÈVE IDT ET DE GEORGE H. BAUER BIBLIOTHÈQUE DE LA PLÉIADE nrf
Image of the central character Mathieu (played by Michael Bryant) aiming a gun from a beseiged bell tower in one of the final scenes of the TV show.
Cover of first edition. Blank white cover with centred text: JEAN-PAUL SARTRE Les chemins de la liberté I L'âge de raison roman nrf GALLIMARD
Cover of the first issue of Les Temps Modernes. Blank white page with the following column of centred text: Les Temps Modernes 1re année REVUE MENSUELLE n° 1 1er Octobre 1945 JEAN-PAUL SARTRE - Présentation. RICHARD WRIGHT - Le feu dans la nuée. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY - La guerre a eu lieu. FRANCIS PONGE - Notes premières de l'homme. RAYMOND ARON - Les désillusions de la liberté. JACQUES-LAURENT BOST - Le dernier des métiers. VIES Vie d'une sinistrée. TÉMOIGNAGES JEAN ROY - Les morts. EXPOSÉS F. PASCHE, RAYMOND ARON, JEAN-PAUL SARTRE LEENHART, PHILLIP TOYNBEE, IVAN MOFFAT, JEAN POUILLON. TM Rédaction, administration : 5, rue Sébastien-Bottin, Paris
Black-and-white image. The first ever photo of Beauvoir and Sartre together, taken at a travelling fair visiting Porte d'Orléans in Paris, 1929. Beauvoir is pointing a gun and has her eyes closed. Sartre is by her side, hand on her shoulder, pipe in his mouth. The attraction required you to fire at a target. If you hit the bullseye, a camera was triggered and you got to keep the photo. Beauvoir's eyes are closed presumably as an involuntary reaction to the gun firing. Otherwise she hit the bullseye without looking!
Cover of The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy, featuring Marie Raymond's painting Arabesques ou Variations sur la volute, 1948, oil on canvas, 91 x 72.5 cm, © ADAGP, Paris, banque d’images de l’ADAGP Painting is an abstract of bold curves, lines, rectangles, and the suggestions of triangles in yellows, whites, greys, and black.
Right-side semi-profile black-and white photo of Simone de Beauvoir looking up from writing. Taken in 1947.
Cover of The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy, featuring Marie Raymond's painting Arabesques ou Variations sur la volute, 1948, oil on canvas, 91 x 72.5 cm, © ADAGP, Paris, banque d’images de l’ADAGP Painting is an abstract of bold curves, lines, rectangles, and the suggestions of triangles in yellows, whites, greys, and black.
Cover of The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy featuring Marie Raymond's painting Arabesques ou Variations sur la volute, 1948, oil on canvas, 91 x 72.5 cm, © ADAGP, Paris, banque d’images de l’ADAGP The painting is an abstract in yellows, whites, greys, and black, combining curves, straight lines, rectangles, and partial triangles. Below it is the current Penguin Classics white band. Below that in a black rectangle are the book title and 'edited by Jonathan Webber' in white text.
Poster for VHS release of the English language version. In the main image, Jodie Foster is central and in the foreground flanked by Sam Neill and Michael Ontkean slightly behind her. They all look rather serious. Superimposed in front of them there is a knife bloodily stabbing a Nazi swastika. The film's strapline is "An obsession stronger than love. More violent than war".
Cover of first English edition of Beauvoir's The Blood of Others, published in 1948 by Secker & Warburg in USA and Lindsay Drummond in UK. Along the bottom of the cover image (which has title and author at top) is the legend: Recommended by the Book Society
Cover of the first edition of Beauvoir's novel Le Sang des Autres, in the classic and rather plain Gallimard style.
Photograph of Frantz Fanon
“It would be odd, too dismissively philosophical, to discuss an entire novel while hardly mentioning the plot or the characters, even though Nausea is essentially without a plot and almost devoid of characters.”
Abstract painting by Marie Raymond, in yellow, white, and black.
Photo of the Rethinking Existentialism panel at the 2023 UK Sartre Society conference. From left to right: Jonathan Webber, Matthew Eshleman, Kate Kirkpatrick, Komarine Romdenh-Romluc.