ABSTRACT
1On numerous occasions, Robert Misrahi has said that what makes Sartre great is his status as the first philosopher to have truly demonstrated freedom. Sartre understood individual freedom as neither a hope nor a preference, for in each instant one must decipher the world and oneself—nothing is given to consciousness. Being is, quite simply, and as for the rest, man decides freely (Misrahi, 2017). From this perspective, we see Misrahi radically bring Being and Nothingness firmly into line with The Transcendence of the Ego in which Sartre defines consciousness as the “tireless creation of existence” (TE, 1960/1937,2003, p. 99). In other words, “transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity. It determines its existence at each instant, without our being able to conceive anything before it. Thus each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex nihilo” (ibid., pp. 98–99). From this compelling formulation, we can posit Sartrean consciousness as a transcendental and impersonal field or, put more incisively, it is the “cause of itself” [cause de soi] (ibid., p. 82). For Misrahi, German Occupation was the occasion to live Sartrean freedom concretely with all the risks that this entailed. In 1942, Misrahi chose to no longer wear the yellow star, which meant risking immediate deportation and a probable death; but to wear it meant certain death. This is the sense in which we can most fully understand Sartre’s formulation “Never have we been as free as under German Occupation” (Lettres françaises, September 1944). The Occupation did not designate a given situation in which the French of 1940 were plunged, but rather signaled the reaction of certain men and women to the consideration of their situation, the presence of German troops on French soil.
