ABSTRACT
Looking back to France in 1944, Gilles Deleuze recalled, “We were still weirdly stuck in the history of philosophy. Quite simply, we got into Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger; we threw ourselves like puppies into a Scholasticism worse than the Middle Ages. Fortunately, there was Sartre. Sartre was our Outside, a fresh breeze from the back garden…. [Phenomenology and existentialism] were already history by the time we got to them: too much method, imitation, commentary and interpretation, except for the way Sartre did it” (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 18–19; Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 12). How is that Sartre, who certainly belonged to what Paul Ricoeur called the generation of “the three H’s” (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) (Ricoeur 1970: 32) could be a way out of the new phenomenological scholasticism? If Sartre’s take on Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger was always slightly off kilter, this was in no small part because it was mediated by the work of philosophers writing in French: Emmanuel Levinas for Husserl; Jean Wahl for Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger; Henri Lefebvre for Hegel and Marx; and Alexandre Koyré for Hegel.
