Bruno Chaouat compares the tension between freedom and determinism in Sartre's Réflexions to two texts by Emmanuel Levinas, the first written in 1934, in which Levinas proposes something like Sartre's pour soi, and the other in 1947, in which the Jew is more 'grounded' in history, albeit the history of the law and the word rather than the Aryan version of blood and soil. Nevertheless, this book also contains some interesting new analyses. By positioning Sartre, Jews, and the Other in the context of discourses of race and gender, and the tension between the 'Jew' as metaphor and 'real' Jews, the editors of this volume tread ground already covered in excellent works by Sarah Hammerschlag, Jonathan Judaken (one of the contributors in this collection), and Maurice Samuels, and in edited works by Ingrid Galster and by Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb.

Such readers might also be familiar with the postmodern adoption, in the thought of Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, of Sartre's celebration of the authentic Jew in terms of rootlessness and indeterminacy. They will probably know, too, that Sartre's powerful denunciation of stereotyping is premised on a problematic understanding of subjectivity and agency: the Jew and the Black, in Sartre's vision, appear to be nothing but the negative stereotypes of the racist's gaze, simply stages in the historical dialectic towards transformed consciousness and freedom.

Readers familiar with the phenomenological/existentialist model of anti-Semitism proposed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Réflexions sur la question juive (1946), and its influence both on Frantz Fanon's analysis of anti-Black racism in Peau noire masques blancs (1952) and on Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of 'woman' in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), will know the importance of Sartre's text for post-war theories of race and gender.

Blanchot gaze of orpheus pdf editor