At the Existentialist Café
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Along with the fiction came a new kind of non-fiction from a new breed: the sociologist, psychologist or philosopher as existentialist rebel. David Riesman led the way with his study of modern alienation, The Lonely Crowd, in 1950. A flurry in 1956 included Irving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, William Whyte’s Organization Man and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. The most dramatic work of existentialist non-fiction was written a little later by a member of the old guard: Hannah Arendt. Her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem.--At the Existentialist Café (2016) by Sarah Bakewell "Sartre developed a squeamishness about viscosity or gluey sliminess (he expressed disgust at the “moist and feminine sucking” that occurs when a sticky substance sticks to fingers) that led to his use of the term “viscosity” to express his horror of contingency."--At the Existentialist Café (2016) by Sarah Bakewell "[...] the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man — one of the best mid-century expressions of paranoia about the disappearing powers of authentic humanity."--At the Existentialist Café (2016) by Sarah Bakewell "Existential anxiety is more closely intertwined with technological anxiety than ever in films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the Wachowskis’ Matrix, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Existentialist heroes of more traditional kinds, wrestling with meaning and decision, feature in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, Steven Knight’s Locke, and any number of Woody Allen films, including Irrational Man which takes its title from William Barrett’s book. In David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees of 2004, rival existential detectives battle over the difference between gloomy and positive visions of life."--At the Existentialist Café (2016) by Sarah Bakewell "When the marginally better-informed English writer Colin Wilson asked Mailer what existentialism meant to him, he reportedly waved his hand and said, ‘Oh, kinda playing things by ear.’ His biographer Mary V. Dearborn has suggested that his knowledge of the subject derived, not from the as-yet-untranslated Being and Nothingness as he liked to pretend, but from a Broadway production of No Exit combined with a hasty reading of Irrational Man, a popular guide published in 1950 by William Barrett — the philosophy professor who had earlier written about Sartre for the Partisan Review."--At the Existentialist Café (2016) by Sarah Bakewell "The door opened — rather as happens in The Magic Mountain, where the slinky love interest Clavdia Chauchat habitually enters the dining room late and with a careless bang of the door."--At the Existentialist Café (2016) by Sarah Bakewell |
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At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails is a 2016 book written by Sarah Bakewell that covers the philosophy and history of the 20th century movement existentialism. The book provides an account of the modern day existentialists who came into their own before and during the second world war. The book discusses the ideas of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, and how his teaching influenced the rise of existentialism through the likes of Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, who are the main protagonists of the book. The title refers to an incident in which Sartre's close friend and fellow philosopher Raymond Aron startled him when they were in a cafe, by pointing to the glass in front of him and stating, "You can make a philosophy out of this cocktail."
Blurb
Paris, near the turn of 1933. Three young friends meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their friend Raymond Aron, who opens their eyes to a radical new way of thinking. Pointing to his drink, he says, 'You can make philosophy out of this cocktail!'
From this moment of inspiration, Sartre will create his own extraordinary philosophy of real, experienced life–of love and desire, of freedom and being, of cafés and waiters, of friendships and revolutionary fervour. It is a philosophy that will enthral Paris and sweep through the world, leaving its mark on post-war liberation movements, from the student uprisings of 1968 to civil rights pioneers.
At the Existentialist Café tells the story of modern existentialism as one of passionate encounters between people, minds and ideas. From the ‘king and queen of existentialism'–Sartre and de Beauvoir–to their wider circle of friends and adversaries including Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Iris Murdoch, this book is an enjoyable and original journey through a captivating intellectual movement. Weaving biography and thought, Sarah Bakewell takes us to the heart of a philosophy about life that also changed lives, and that tackled the biggest questions of all: what we are and how we are to live.
Summary
Bakewell structures At the Existentialist Café by focusing each chapter on a particular philosopher or period within the existentialist movement, starting by introducing the early existentialists Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kafka, and then moving on to the lives and philosophies of Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Karl Jaspers, and Merleau-Ponty.
See also
- Chestnut tree at Cobham Park
- Sophie Tucker, ‘Some of These Days’, Columbia Records (1926)
- Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
- Great Boyg
- Old Man River
- Donald Duck
