Contents · LRB 6 January 2000

« Une amère déception » Edward Said sur sa rencontre avec Sartre, de Beauvoir et Foucault
Etat d’Exception | Eugene Wolters | 25 septembre 2017 | Source : Critical Theory. |Traduit de l’anglais par SB, pour Etat d’Exception.
▻http://www.etatdexception.net/une-amere-deception-edward-said-sur-sa-rencontre-avec-sartre-de-beau

http://www.etatdexception.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Said-Sartre-Beauvoir-Foucault.jpg

« Bien sûr, Sartre avait quelque chose pour nous : un texte préparé sur deux pages dactylographiées qui – j’écris entièrement sur la base d’un souvenir vieux de vingt ans – a loué le courage d’Anouar al-Sadate dans les platitudes les plus banales imaginables. Je ne me souviens pas qu’autant de mots aient été prononcés à propos des Palestiniens, du territoire ou du passé douloureux. Certes, aucune référence n’a été faite au colonialisme de peuplement israélien, semblable à bien des égards à la pratique française en Algérie […]. J’étais anéanti de découvrir que ce héros intellectuel avait succombé dans ses dernières années à un mentor si réactionnaire, et que sur la question de la Palestine l’ancien guerrier et défenseur des opprimés n’avait rien à offrir de plus que l’éloge journalistique le plus conventionnel pour un leader égyptien déjà largement célébré. Durant le reste de la journée, Sartre reprit son silence, et la discussion s’est poursuivie comme auparavant.

How a Fabrication Differs from a Lie
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n08/mikkel-borch-jacobsen/how-a-fabrication-differs-from-a-lie

‘Was #Freud a liar?’ Ever since Frank Cioffi had the audacity to ask this question in 1973, it has continued to rock the world of psychoanalysis. Till then, things had been so simple. Children of the ‘Freudian century’, we had all learned to venerate in Sigmund Freud a man of ‘absolute honesty’ and ‘flawless integrity’, as his loyal biographer Ernest Jones called him. How many times were we told that? It was his passion for truth that enabled him to confront the demons of his own unconscious and to lift the multisecular repression that weighed on sexuality, despite the ‘resistance’ of his patients and the attacks of his colleagues. It was this scientific probity, too, which made him acknowledge his error about the fantastic ‘scenes’ of incest and sexual molestation that his patients had been bringing to him, despite the stinging professional setback that this represented for him. In Freud, science coincided with the moral fibre of the scientist, whose edifying biography we never tired of reading: Anna O.’s miraculous ‘talking cure’, the break with Josef Breuer regarding sexuality, the solitary crossing of the desert, the painful abandonment of the ‘seduction theory’, the heroic self-analysis, the tearing away from the transference on Wilhelm Fliess, the stoicism in the face of his colleagues’ attacks.

It is a nice story, but we now know it to be nothing but a vast ‘legend’ (Henri Ellenberger). One after another, historians of psychoanalysis have come forward to show us that things did not happen in the way Freud and his authorised biographers told us. No, Anna O.’s ‘talking cure’ never was the ‘great therapeutic success’ later vaunted by Freud. No, Breuer in no way denied the role of sexuality in the neuroses. No, Freud was not as intellectually isolated as he claimed, and the reactions of his colleagues were far from being unfavourable at the beginning. On the contrary, many of them – notably his friend Fliess – had a deep interest in sexuality, including infantile sexuality. Wrong again that Freud’s patients ever spontaneously told him pseudo-memories of infantile sexual seduction: it was Freud himself who extorted these scenes of perversion, despite the patients’ vehement protests. Freud had lied to us; we could no longer trust him. The era of suspicion had begun. Suddenly, scholars started to notice that he disguised fragments of his self-analysis as ‘objective’ cases, that he concealed his sources, that he conveniently antedated some of his analyses, that he sometimes attributed to his patients ‘free associations’ that he himself made up, that he inflated his therapeutic successes, that he slandered his opponents. Some even go so far as to suggest – supreme lèse-majesté – that Sigmund cheated on his wife with his sister-in-law Minna. The defenders of psychoanalysis are indignant and speak of gutter-press journalism, of paranoia, of ‘Freud bashing’, but they are obviously on the defensive.

Edward Said · Diary: an encounter with J-P Sartre · LRB 1 June 2000
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n11/edward-said/diary

‘Demain Sartre parlera.’ And so we retired in keen anticipation of the following morning’s proceedings.

Sure enough Sartre did have something for us: a prepared text of about two typed pages that – I write entirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory of the moment – praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most banal platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about the Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similar in many ways to French practice in Algeria. It was about as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by the egregious Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command, off the hook. I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual hero had succumbed in his later years to such a reactionary mentor, and that on the subject of Palestine the former warrior on behalf of the oppressed had nothing to offer beyond the most conventional, journalistic praise for an already well-celebrated Egyptian leader. For the rest of that day Sartre resumed his silence, and the proceedings continued as before. I recalled an apocryphal story in which twenty years earlier Sartre had travelled to Rome to meet Fanon (then dying of leukemia) and harangued him about the dramas of Algeria for (it was claimed) 16 non-stop hours, until Simone made him desist. Gone for ever was that Sartre.

[…]

‘For example,’ B-HL intoned, ‘Sartre’s record on Israel was perfect: he never deviated and he remained a complete supporter of the Jewish state.’

For reasons that we still cannot know for certain, Sartre did indeed remain constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism.