ABSTRACT
The remodelling of some Sartrean aesthetics demands a thinking experiment that spans from the particular to the general, from the part to the whole, in order to shine light on a blind spot in his work that has been ignored for too long. The very ambivalence in Sartre—who was both a writer and a philosopher, and who wished to be both Spinoza and Stendhal—does not make the discerning process easy. It may indeed prove difficult to distinguish Sartre’s aesthetics as an author (i.e., the one he created in the course of his literary work) from his aesthetics as a philosopher (i.e., the one he could build up after meeting with a given art, a given artist, or a given work of art). Indeed, Sartre seems to ignore or even refuse all traditional forms of aesthetics, be it art theory which is based on mimicking reality, or an idealized concept of nature. As in all these cases, beauty would only have one face, and the artist’s freedom would be hampered by academic rules or conceptual chains. Thus, Sartre’s texts about art will first and foremost be portraits through their titles, in reference to specific individuals. They will also be personal processes rather than art streams or general themes: “L’individuel me paraît la chose la plus importante en art” he will state (Sicard 1989: 234). Sartre’s visits to artists’ workshops in the 1940s will have proved more beneficial to him than his visits to museums, which he was not too keen on.
