The Aftermath of War

The Aftermath of War brings together essays written in Sartre’s most creative period, just after World War II. Sartre’s extraordinary range of engagement is manifest, with writings on post-war America, the social impact of war in Europe, contemporary philosophy, race, and avant garde art. Carefully structured into sections, the essays range across Sartre’s reflections on collaboration, resistance and liberation in post-war Europe, his thoughts and observations after his extended trip to the USA in 1945, an examination of the failings of philosophical materialism, his analysis of the new revolutionary poetry of ‘negritude’, and his meditations on the visual arts, with essays on the work of Giacometti and Calder, both of whom Sartre knew well.

‘In the summer of 1974, in a hotel room in Rome, Simone de Beauvoir tape-recorded a series of conversations with her lifelong companion, Jean-Paul Sartre. He was already almost blind and beginning to suffer the illnesses that would take his life six years later. De Beauvoir asked Sartre what works of his he thought had the greatest chance of surviving. Sartre replied, “I think it’s Situations, articles related to my philosophy but written in a very simple style and speaking of things that everybody knows.” Of the fifty or so volumes of Sartre’s work that have appeared in English so far, there is no complete translation of the ten volumes of Situations despite Sartre’s high regard for them. The Aftermath of War translates Situations III in its entirety and is therefore to be welcomed if only as a further addition to the English-language body of this most significant series of works.’—Canadian Dimension [read the review here]