Boxer And The Goal Keeper

Product Description

Jean-Paul Sartre is the author of possibly the most notorious one-liner of twentieth-century philosophy: Hell is other people. Albert Camus was The Outsider. The two men first came together in Occupied Paris in the middle of the Second World War & quickly became friends comrades & mutual admirers. But the intellectual honeymoon was short-lived. In 1943 with Nazis patrolling the streets Sartre & Camus sat in a cafe on the boulevard Saint-Germain with Simone de Beauvoir & began a discussion about life & love & literature that would finally tear them apart. They ended up on opposite sides in a war of words over just about everything: women philosophy politics. Their friendship culminated in a bitter & very public feud that was described as the end of a love-affair but which never really finished. Sartre was a boxer & a drug-addict; Camus was a goalkeeper who subscribed to a degree-zero approach to style & ecstasy. Sartre obsessed with his own ugliness took up the challenge of accumulating women; Camus part-Bogart part-Samurai was also a self-confessed Don Juan who aspired to chastity. Sartre & Camus play out an epic struggle between the symbolic & the savage. But what if the friction between these two unique individuals is also the source of our own inevitable conflicts? Martin reconstructs the intense & antagonistic relationship that was (in Sartres terms) doomed to failure. Weaving together the lives & ideas & writings of Albert Camus & Jean-Paul Sartre he relives the existential drama that binds them together & remixes a philosophical dialogue that speaks to us now.