The Existentialism Information: How the FBI Focused Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assassination
Right this moment, as you have to positively know, marks the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and in addition positively marks a revival of interest within the myriadvert conspiracy theories that abound within the absence of a satisfactory explanation for the occasions at Dealey Plaza on November twenty second, 1963. One theory I’ve never heard floated earlier than involves us through Andy Martin, lecturer in French at Cambridge University and creator of The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus. In an article for Prospect magazine, Martin writes:
To the massed ranks of the CIA, the Mafia, the KGB, Castro, Hoover, and LBJ, we will now add: Jean-Paul Sartre. FBI and State Department studies of the Nineteen Sixties had drawn attention to Sartre’s membership of the Truthful Play for Cuba Committee, of which Lee Harvey Oswald was additionally a member. And—prophetically?—Sartre had “dismissed the US as a headmuch less nation.” […] Might he, in spite of everything, have been the Second Shooter?
It’s probably honest to say that Martin’s tongue is wedged agencyly in his cheek byout this opening of his fascinating chronicle of the FBI’s surveillance of Sartre and his onetime buddy and editor Albert Camus. However Martin’s interest within the misalliance of Sartre and the Feds could be very serious. What he finds during his investigation of the FBI information on existentialism is that “the G‑men, initially so anti-philosophical, discover themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They turn out to be (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemales.”
Whereas we’ve got turn out to be accustomed, because the days of Joe McCarthy, to ideological witch hunts, plainly Sartre and Camus served as check cases for the type of factor that frequently performs out in overwarmthed Congressional hearings and media denunciations—brokers with furrowed brows and little philosophical practiceing desperately striveing to work out whether or not such and such abstruse academic is a part of a grand conspiracy to belowmine reality, justice, the American Approach, and so forth.. Sartre appeared early on the anti-Communist radar, although, ironically, he did in order a plant of types, brought over in 1945 by the Workplace of Battle Information as a part of a bunch of journalists the United States’ government hoped would put out good professionalpaganda.
“Hoover receiveddered,” however, writes Martin, “what sort of good professionalpaganda you may hope to get out of the creator of Nausea and Being and Nothingness.” It turned out, not a lot, however a yr later Hoover latched on to Sartre’s buddy and editor Albert Camus, whose title he and his brokers spelled, variously, as “Canus” or “Corus.” The place Sartre had breezed into the nation—obsessed with its literature and music—Camus was held at immigration on Hoover’s orders. He would spend a quick, depressing time and never return.
How we get from post-war surveillance of French existentialist philosophers to Sartre and the grassy knoll is an extended and complicated story, befitting the paranoid imaginings of J. Edgar Hoover. He was, in spite of everything, the conspiracy theorist par excellence and “he wanted to know,” writes Martin, “if Existentialism and Absurdism had been some form of entrance for Communism. To him, eachfactor was potentially a coded re-write of the Communist Manifesto.” What Hoover feared from Sartre, however, was that the latter was himself an influential believer in a conspiracy, one which solid doubt on the FBI’s robustly-held perception that Oswald was the lone gunman.
Regardless of gathering years of NSA-worthy surveillance on the philosophers, Hoover’s brokers had been never capable of discern the ideological professionalgram of the French. “I can’t work out,” wrote one in a notice in Sartre’s file, “if he’s pro-Communist or anti-Communist.” The black-and-white, spy-vs-spy world of the FBI left little room for philosophical nuance and literary ambiguity, in spite of everything. However they never stopped watching Sartre, convinced that “there should be some form of conspiracy between communists, blacks, poets and French philosophers.” Because it seems, there have been a number of—political and aesthetic conspiracies involving such terrifying figures as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. These poets and shut relations of Sartre did, certainly, assist foment revolution within the Caribbean and elsewhere—however theirs are stories for another day.
Learn Martin’s Prospect article here.
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How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War
Josh Jones is a author and musician primarily based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness