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Hello there at Sartre.org... maybe you can answer to my question... I'm finishing my cd album, there will be a song that will use the text by J.P.Sartre: Dan la Rue del Blanc Monteaux do you know if there is any copyright pending on it? is there someone or a structure where I have to ask about this issue?
Nora’s Exit/No Exit A Sartrean Look Inside Ibsen’s Doll House
The three protagonists of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” are literary progeny of Henrik Ibsen’s Nora of “A Doll House.” As 20th-century existentialism is both a response to and an intensification of 19th-century social realism, Sartre’s triumvirate of the condemned is both a response to and an intensification of Ibsen’s proto-feminist rebel. Sartre’s characters are a distorted but illuminating counterpart of the stages of Nora’s journey from idealism through disillusionment to liberation. The nature of this liberation is what Sartre leads us to call into question. Was Nora’s liberation merely a step from one hell into another?
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Henrik Iben’s A Doll House (1879) deserves to be noticed as a significant precursor text for Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1944). As 20th-century existentialism is both a response to and an intensification of 19th-century social realism, Sartre’s triumvirate of the condemned is both a response to and an intensification of Ibsen’s proto-feminist rebel. When Nora slammed the door, the sound that reverberated was a critical challenge to conventional views on the proper role of women and the nature of love and marriage. How can human beings--women in particular--attain personal fulfillment within a society that encloses them within rigid roles and expectations that they themselves had no part in creating? When Garcin exclaimed, “Hell is--other people,” the gasp that was evoked from audiences signified the radical impasse between our fundamental human aspirations for love (or at least personal validation by others), and the self-directed, egoistic means we use to fulfill them. How can human beings--women and men--attain an ideal of fulfillment when the very resources we can put to such use compel us by their very nature into alienating forms of behavior toward others? The two questions are different, and yet somehow the same. Garcin, Estelle, and Inez are literary progeny of the self-liberated Nora Helmer. Sartre’s characters, trapped in an endless cycle of bad faith and frustration, are a distorted but illuminating counterpart of the stages of Nora’s painful journey from self-deceptive idealism through despairing disillusionment to final liberation. The nature of this liberation is what they lead us to call into question. Just as beyond No Exit’s small room in Hell there lies only “more rooms, more passages, and stairs,” beyond the Helmers’ house of Victorian confinement there lies only more houses of the same type, governed by the same repressive values. And even when, three generations after Ibsen, most of the old social strictures have been dismantled, intimate human relationships can still appear as hopelessly oppressive to individuals. Is Nora’s liberation, then, merely a step from one hell into another? The distinct forms of Sartrean bad faith manifested by Garcin, Estelle, and Inez can, in fact, all be seen in Nora. Before her moment of awakening, she largely exhibits the type that Sartre delineated through the character of Estelle; during her struggle to tear herself free, she resembles the bad faith of Inez; and after her decision, when she explains herself and makes her exit, she resembles the bad faith of Garcin. Ibsen’s final tone of hopefulness requires significant qualification--liberation is haunted throughout by questionability. It was Bernard Shaw, in 1913, who pointed out, in his The Quintessence of Ibsenism, that Nora’s progress is one from happy idealism, through unhappy idealism, to disillusioned realism. In the Helmer household, we at first have “the sweet home, the womanly woman, the happy family life of the idealist’s dream.” After Nora perceives the consequences of her committing forgery in order to borrow enough money to send her husband on a life-saving vacation in the south, she falls into despair, and “resolves to kill herself rather than allow him to destroy his own career by taking the forgery on himself to save her reputation.” But Torvald’s self-serving rage in response to his discovery of Nora’s forgery leads Nora to an epiphany in which “she sees that their whole family life has been a fiction: their home a mere doll’s house in which they have been playing at ideal husband… and wife… So she leaves him then and there and goes out into the real world to find out its reality for herself.” The happy young wife and mother that Nora is in her first phase--the one Torvald likes to call “skylark” and “squirrel”--already has an unseen shadow self, the one who carries out a business arrangement and runs a domestic money-making enterprise intended to preserve that very carefree conventional surface. Her young-wifely mannerisms are all literally an act, a performance. This is in fact a woman in the throes of desperation; her private entrepreneurial activities and her contrasting public persona are both linked to a desperate attempt to preserve the all-important appearance of domestic respectability. Individual initiative has been placed in the service of a classically “feminine” form of bad faith; this is what we will later see delineated from Sartre’s perspective in the character of Estelle. The threatened destruction of the respectable surface then drives Nora into a despairing self-destructiveness that thinly conceals a will to destroy the institutions that are oppressing her; we will see this delineated in Sartre’s character of Inez. ....
A while ago Sparkler and I went to see a production of the play No Exit. Even if you've never heard of it, you've probably heard Jean-Paul Sartre's signature line from it:
"Hell is other people."
I came away thinking something I've never seen anywhere: that Sartre surely wrote the play with a polyamory theme in mind, which reviewers and commentators have missed over the years because they didn't lead Sartre's poly life.
So here goes. (If you're not into lit-crit type stuff, move along now, nothin' to see here....)
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The play goes like this. Three strangers, freshly dead and just arrived in Hell, are escorted by a demon valet into a nice hotel room, where they will be sealed up together for all eternity. They are a man and two women, one of them a lesbian. Within the first hour and a half they are trying to kill each other and themselves, using a letter-opener that the managers of Hell thoughtfully left in the room for them. Only to discover that in Hell, you can't even die. Bwahaha!
I'd never seen the play performed before. But I knew about it ever since I had deep discussions of it in high school with my first love, when I was 16. (Sartre was taught in high school back then.) I insisted to her that if hell is other people, heaven must be too. The difference is *all up to us.*
Watching the play, it became clear that the hotel room is meant to be not a hell but a purgatory, a place where salvation is still possible — if the characters could only get it together. For instance: early on, when the characters realize that they are intended to be each others' torturers (no demons required), the man proposes that they can beat the system and save themselves by sitting silently apart from each other in the corners and contemplating repentance.
Of course they can't keep this up for long. The lesbian behaves as a vicious domme toward the bubblehead socialite girl; the socialite displays stupid hots for the guy; the guy is disgusted with her but goes along with it in order to spite the jealous lesbian to her face.
Along the way, we learn that a defining sin for each of these three people in life — a reason why each one has been sent to Hell — was his or her behavior in a truly horrid triangle relationship of one sort or another. And here they are locked together forever, in another three.
Now, Sartre had one of the first famously open relationships involving threesomes: with his lifelong partner, Simone de Beauvoir (though he's often judged to have treated her poorly.) I looked up some biography, and found that the two of them at times brought a third partner into their couple relationship. In fact, says a recent biographer, de Beauvoir's own first novel, *She Came to Stay,* "was based on the trio that she and Sartre formed with a younger woman called Olga Kosakievicz." And if I'm reading the history right, Olga was apparently in the first group of three actors to rehearse No Exit when Sartre wrote it!
So Sartre was quite familiar with living and functioning in MFF threes (yes, de Beauvoir was actively bi). And even when not in one, he and de Beauvoir (their relationship lasted 50 years) famously agreed to tell each other everything about their other lovers.
This had to affect his thinking and writing about bound-together, sexually interested threes.
I say that No Exit has a little-noticed poly message that's quite different from the unrelenting bleakness that most people see in Sartre. If the characters were literally at each others' throats 90 minutes after their arrival in the room, where will they be after a year in there, or 20 years, or 600? Their hell was arranged to fit their sins. It is up to them to redeem themselves: by learning to treat partners in a triad with the love and kindness and devotion they failed to show in life, and thus create their own salvation there in that room — since they'll be in it for eternity. If they want to get to heaven, *this* is where they must make it.
Consider: Sartre makes a big point of stating that the room is furnished with no mirrors, and that even the women's make-up mirrors have vanished out of their purses. Therefore, as he has a character say, the only way they can ever see themselves again is by the tiny reflections that show when they look deep into one another's eyes. There's a message of redemption here overlooked by critics who lack Sartre's poly life experiences (even considering how dysfunctional those experiences sometimes were). Because if hell is other people, heaven is too.
Heck, if it was just a man and a woman in the room, and they'd been sent to Hell for their bad behavior as parts of couples, every reviewer would say it's obvious they're supposed to save themselves by learning to love well as a couple. Duhh.
And then, I found a statement by Sartre himself (in the preface he narrated for the Deutsche Grammophon recording of No Exit), that the characters in the play are indeed supposed to be able to create their own redemption:
-------- What I wanted to suggest is precisely that many people are encrusted in a series of habits and customs... but that they don't even try to change.... I wanted to show by way of the absurd the importance freedom has for us, that is, the importance of changing our actions by acting differently. No matter what circle of Hell we're living in, I think we're free to break out of it. --------
Like the Phoenix, the phenomenological movement has been reborn many times from its own ashes during the last century. In the present volume the editors decided to address the rich multiplicity and the fruitful complexity of the phenomenology as a philosophy of thought and as a style of thinking. Contributions from all over the world and from a wide range of disciplines are presented here, along three main axes in which phenomenology can be seen within human science research: theoretical framework, methodological thinking and research practice.We are convinced that the essence of phenomenology can be found in its practice. In this sense, the key question for understand this philosophy is not “what is phenomenology”, but “how to do it.”Phenomenology is a way to educate our vision, to define our posture, to broaden the way we look at the world. That is why phenomenology is not only explicable as a method (or style) for philosophical research, but also as a powerful tool for research in human science.
*Luigina Mortari and Massimiliano Tarozzi*, Phenomenology as Philosophy of Research: An Introductory Essay
/Phenomenology as a Method: Concrete Studies / *Mia Herskind*, Changing a Shared Repertoire in the Kindergarten: A Moving Process Giancarlo Gola, Narrative Research on Adult’s Informal Learning
*Solfrid Vatne*, Development of Professional Knowledge in Action: Experiences from an Action Science Design Focusing on “Acknowledging Communication” in Mental Health
*Luigina Mortari and Chiara Sità*, Analyzing Descriptions of Lived Experience: A Phenomenological Approach
/Phenomenological Practice: Methodological Reflections/ *Scott D. Churchill*, Methodological Considerations for Human Science Research in the Wake of Postmodernism: Remembering Our Ground while Envisioning Our Future *Letizia Caronia*, Rethinking Post Modernism: On Some Epistemic and Ethical Consequences of the Researcher’s Commitment to Postmodern Constructivism *Joseph J. Tobin*, Susanna Mantovani and Chiara Bove, Methodological Issues in Video-Based Research on Immigrant Children and Parents in Early Childhood Settings *Peter Willis and Sally Borbasi*, The Ethical Work of Expressive Research: Revealing the Remoralizing Power of Pathic Action
/Phenomenology as Theoretical Perspective / *Christopher M. Aanstoos*, Holism and the Human Sciences *Daniela Verducci*, Going through Postmodernity with the Phenomenology of Life *Alan Pope*, Metabletics in the Light of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism
ArchiPhen is simultaneously architecture and phenomenology, architecture's phenomenology, phenomenology in architecture. The name was coined in a moment of conviction that an invitation to ArchiPhen is timely for practitioners, scholars and students unaware of the importance of phenomenology for architectural discourse and making within a contemporary context. Phenomenology is rooted in the first person perspective and seeks inter-subjectivity, the shared cognition that shapes our ideas and relationships with the world surrounding us. With reference to architecture, the study of phenomenology may inform architectural discourse by borrowing from phenomenologists-philosophers, by implementing phenomenological thought in architectural making, analysis and interpretation, and by applying phenomenology, as radical empiricism, to the realm of architecture. Although phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, it came into its own in the early 20th century, and was explicitly related to architecture for the first time in the 1950's. Many scholars have since contributed, to the discussion of architecture-phenomenology, themes for consideration that have evolved with the metamorphosis of architectural history and its context. Shedding light on the most profound concerns of architecture, the field is attracting new generations of scholars in a variety of events, among them participants in the Architecture and Phenomenology Conference, held at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in May 2007. Based on a selection of conference presentations, this publication of short, illustrated essays intends to provide an accessible entrance into the field of architecture and phenomenology. (Iris Aravot)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
* Iris Aravot*: Preface * Iris Aravot*: Phenomenology as Architectural Method * Eran Neuman*: The Present State of Phenomenology in Architecture * Danit Baruch*: Bangkok (or a Tel-Aviv love song) * Michael Asgaard Andersen*: Utzon’s Bayview House * Ana Paula Baltazar dos Santos*: Trans_Ports 2001: A Virtual Phenomenon * Aviv Livnat*: Space that Sees: James Turrell (1992) * Derya Yorgancioglu*: Steven Holl: A Translation of Phenomenological Philosophy into the Realm of Architecture * Gianluca Fedi*: Church of Saint John Baptist in Florence * Benoit Jacquet*: A place of Immanence: Hiroshima’s Ground Zero * Jin Baek*: Empty Cross and Shintai: Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light * Leslie Kavanaugh*: Koen van Velsen’s Folded Cinema:A Plea for Le Pli * Nili Portugali*: Taken on the Site Itself - A transformational Planning Process * Kasper Lægring Nielsen*: The Phenomenology of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum Berlin * Alexander (Sasha) Ortenberg*: Of Diamonds and Dust * Ulrike Passe*: House Marxen, Germany, 2001 * Stephanie Brandt*: The Art of Memory Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals
* Uri Jacob Matatyaou*: Memorial Architecture as Storyteller
I am getting interested in applying the concept of mauvaise foi/bad faith to understand better literary characters, does anyone of you any researchers that have done this before or if not this concept applied any of Sartre's existentialist theories to understan better litterary charcters, to use Sartre's existentialist theories for literary research?
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Expression Productions Presents a Double Bill:HELLUVA NIGHTTwo critically acclaimed one acts: NO EXIT by Jean Paul Sartre & TAPE by Stephen Belber NO EXIT- Three darned souls are brought to the same room in hell by a mysterious valet. As they expect medieval torture devices to punish them for eternity, they eventually realize that the punishment is going to be far more cruel and unusual. The three of them are forced to confront and interrogate each other in this hell of a game where at the end the main torture may be facing your own true self.
TAPE- The action is set entirely in Vince's room at the Motel 6 in Lansing, Michigan. Vince, an ill te mpered outgoing party animal/drug dealer, is visited by his old high school friend Jon, a documentary filmmaker. As they reminisce about the good old days, things take a turn when Vince records their conversation which includes Jon admitting to a possible date-rape of Amy, Vince's old high school girlfriend. Later, when Amy shows up, she opens a new wave of talk and arguments about whose story is fact and whose is fabricated.
Also Presented: Photo Exhibit Lightning in a Bottle- A solo exhibit of new works by Stacy Marshall
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Where: ROYCE GALLERY: 2901 Mariposa Street SF, CA 94110
When: May 30th - August 15th Thursday - Saturday at 8pm. half-price previews May 28 & 29th
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Tickets :$40 for double bill or $25 per show . Buy on-line at www.helluvanightsf.com or via phone at 866-811-4111 student, senior & group discounts available
Group discount requests can be made via email: info@expressionproductions.com
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NO EXIT Cast: Diana Brown, Carole Swann, Andrey Esterlis and Giancarlo Campagna
TAPE Cast: Don Keenan, Tim Meehan and Emily O'Keefe
Jean Paul Sartre- Born in Paris in 1905, philosopher, existentialist, writer and dramaturge, author of "Being and Nothingness", "Huis Clos", "Les Mouches", "Les Mains Sales","La Nausee" "Critique of Dialectic Reason","Les Mots" for which he received, in 1960 the nobel prize that he declined. Sartre was a professor of philosophy when he joined the French Army at the outbreak of World War II. Captured by the Germans, he was released, after nearly a year, in 1941. He immediately joined the French resistance as a journalist. He joined the Communist Party (PC) because of the need to take active part in the fight for the proletarian.
His existentialist philosophy, proposes no god, no ethic, no moral, and was meant to be a cleaning of the old secular values, where god is replaced by some ethical statements; and completely denied the existence of some kind of rules or clues to behave. The solution, was the subject being conscious of his position towards the world, and the good faith, whose former question was "what would happen if all acted this way" The decision of the subject in good faith, and freedom, was the real act of man.
In the postwar era, Jean-Paul Sartre, became one of the most influential men of this century. He died in Paris in 1980.
Stephen Belber - Stephen was born in Washington D.C. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and moved to New York at the age of 25. There he unwittingly moved in with a roommate with AIDS, and helped nurse him for two years until he died. He held a variety of jobs including waiter, substitute teacher, and wire service operator for the United Nations. Plays include Match (Broadway), McReele (Roundabout Theatre Company), Tape (Naked Angels, NYC/LA/London), One Million Butterflies (Primary Stages), Drifting Elegant (Magic Theatre), The Transparency of Val (Theater Outrageous, NYC), The Wake (Via Theater, NYC), Through Fred (Soho Repertory Theatre), and The Death of Frank (The Araca Group, NYC). Mr. Belber wrote the screenplay for Tape, directed by Richard Linklater (Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals). He is a member of Tectonic Theater Project and was an Associate Writer (and actor) for The Laramie Project, later made into an HBO movie (Emmy nomination for screenwriting). He is a graduate of Juilliard's Playwrights Program, and has received commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights Horizons, Huntington Theatre Company, Arena Stage, and Philadelphia Theatre Company. His television credits include "Rescue Me" and "Law & Order: SVU" (staff writer). Mr. Belber is currently working on several film projects, including a film of Drifting Elegant.About Expression Productions:
Expression Productions is an independent production company. Our artistic style and script selection are based on several simple principles: We favor small- cast and/or short form material as we feel they allow for a more informal, close communication with an audience, and tend to have higher density of thought and action. We like to be a channel for powerful voices: we'd rather express and found a strong opinion than stay ethically neutral and politically correct. We believe in the essential goodness of living beings, and are committed to carefully exploring and speaking for their fundamental interests.
