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Existentialism Reading List

Where do we begin, and where do we go from here? A reading list on Existentialism and Sartre:

    Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, by Thomas R. Flynn provides an excellent guide to his life and work. Flynn’s Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction, is the best general work of its kind, and his massive interrogations of ideas of history in Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 1: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History, and Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, are great followup studies.

    For an insightful discussion of Existentialism which gives you a seat at the table during its founding, read Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others.

     The Labyrinth: An Existential Odyssey with Jean-Paul Sartre, by Ben Argon is a graphic novel of rats caught in a maze and trying to discover a path to freedom, as are we all.

     Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It,

by Ronald Aronson details the 1952 rupture and the fragmentation of the postwar Left.

      Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, by Tilottama Rajan is an excellent history of relevant ideas.  

     The A to Z of Existentialism, by Stephen Michelman is a dictionary of 300 entries clarifying the ideas of its major figures including Sartre, De Beauvior, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and others.

    The Pursuit of Existentialism: From Sartre and de Beauvoir to Zizek and Badiou, by Irwin Jones examines Existentialism as a historical force.

     Movies with Meaning: Existentialism through Film, by Daniel Shaw is an essential guide to an intriguing field of study.

                               Primary Works and Studies by Author

     Existentialism is a Humanism, Nausea, No Exit, The Wall, Being and Nothingness, To Freedom Condemned, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975, Literary Essays, Truth and Existence, Existential Psychoanalysis, Notebooks for an Ethics, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Mallarmé or the Poet of Nothingness, Baudelaire, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, The Family Idiot, Jean Paul Sartre

Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, by Thomas R. Flynn

     The Second Sex, The Mandarins, Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir

     The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, The Rebel, The Possessed, Albert Camus

A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, Robert Zaretsky

    Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Geneology of Morality, The Case of Wagner, The AntiChrist, Twilight of the Gods, Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rüdiger Safranski

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, C.G. Jung

On Nietzsche’s Side, The Step Not Beyond, Maurice Blanchot

     Thomas the Obscure, The Last Man, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day,  The Infinite Conversation, The Space of Literature, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Community of Lovers,  Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, Christophe Bident

     The Thief’s Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, Treasures of the Night: collected poems, The Declared Enemy, Fragments of the Artwork, Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet

Genet: a biography, Edmund White

     The Hélène Cixous Reader, Cixous, Sellers ed, foreword Jacques Derrida

Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, Verena Andermatt Conley

     The Magic Lantern, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews, Ingmar Bergman

The Odyssey, a modern sequel, Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis

     The Essential Kierkegaard, Hong eds.

     Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard,Clare Carlisle

     I and Thou, Between Man and Man, Martin Buber

Martin Buber, Diamond

The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology, Steven Kepnes

Learning Through Dialogue: The Relevance of Martin Buber’s Classroom, Kenneth Paul Kramer

         Waiting for Godot, The Unnameable, Samuel Beckett

A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, Hugh Kenner

     Kangaroo Notebook, Beyond the Curve, The Face of Another, The Ruined Map, Secret Rendezvous, Woman of the Dunes, Kobo Abe

     The Idiot, The Crocodile, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

     Diary of a Madman, Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol

     Strange Library, 1Q84, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

     The Trial, The Castle, The Complete Stories, The Zürau Aphorisms, Franz Kafka

Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janouch

Franz Kafka: a biography, Max Brod

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari

The Nightmare of Reason: Kafka, Pawel

             Existentialist Psychotherapy

Sartre and Psychoanalysis: An Existentialist Challenge to Clinical Metatheory, Betty Canon

 Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy, by Viktor E. Frankl

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, by Lacan

Philosophy of Existence, by Karl Jaspers.

Of general interest to literary scholars:

     Écrits: A Selection, Jacques Lacan

Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Žižek

     The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, Paul Rabinow

     Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, Specters of Marx, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida

     Desert Islands: And Other Texts, 1953-1974, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, Gilles Deleuze

Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Slavoj Žižek

    The Theory of the Novel, Soul and Form editors John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis, The Historical Novel, Goethe And His Age, Essays on Thomas Mann, Solzhenitsyn, György Lukács

     Žižek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation?, In Defense of Lost Causes, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, First as Tragedy Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek

The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, by Jean Baudrillard, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor)

       What are they all arguing about? Origins of Existentialism in                                 Husserl’s Phenomenology: an outline

Phenomenology: The Basics, Husserl’s Phenomenology, by Dan Zahavi

Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, Maurice Alexander Natanson

Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,

by Jacques Derrida

Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, by Leonard Lawlor

Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, by Theodor W. Adorno Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, by Lawrence Hass

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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