Face the absurd

I’ve never forgotten this book.

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges con María Kodama, 1970

Jean-Paul Sartre y Nada (Rien), su gato.

Demasiada foto; García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar; Barral y Castellet. Barcelona, 1972

[x]

“Foucault insults the police”, photograph by Elie Kagan from 17 January 1972

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre selling the banned newspaper La Cause Du Peuple. Paris. 1970. Photo: Gilles Peress.

(By arresting them - together with newspaper’s editors and reporters and press freedom activists - the French police made exactly what both philosophers had in mind: call all attentions to the banned newspaper and the fact that free expression didn'r exist in France. The police tried to release Beauvoir and Sartre a few minutes later, but they denied and said they would only leave the police station if they released also the others. And so it was done.)

Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre et Claude Lanzmann, Egypte, 1967. Photo: Gallimard.

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Nida, Lithuania, 1965. Photo: Antanas Sutkus. 

Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, in Paris, 1970, distributing the banned leftist newspaper La Cause du Peuple. Photo: Bruno Barbey.

[x]

(a brief summary of the part of the Camus/Sartre dispute that didn’t involve women)

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes. What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.” -Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”