Abstract
If there ever were a time in twentieth-century Europe that could be called “the existentialist moment” (Baert 2015), it would undoubtedly be October 29, 1945. On that day, at the Club Maintenant in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre gave his legendary lecture, “Existentialism is a humanism.” The Nazi Occupation of Paris had ended just a few weeks earlier and the unprecedented horrors of the Second World War were becoming ever more evident. The atomic bomb’s devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the revelation of the death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, the complicity of France’s own collaborators – these all forced an entire generation as never before to face the existential givens of death and freedom. The old ideologies and long-established “-isms” that previously seemed to carry a promise for the post-Enlightenment West – capitalism, communism, fascism, anarcho-syndicalism – were all thrown into question. Sartre seemed to be saying in 1945 that all that is real is the existing individual standing on his or her own, with no fundamental relationship to anyone or anything else. Needless to say, the public reception of the lecture was extraordinary. The auditorium was packed; Sartre’s voice was barely audible beneath the buzz; chairs were broken; people fainted (Bernasconi 2006: 53). A new world seemed to be opening.