Sartre's Silence: Limits of Recognition in Why Write?

What is it about?

This article examines this conjunction of writing and Hegelian recognition as it appears in the second chapter of What is Literature?: Why Write? What happens when literature and recognition are brought together? Or perhaps, what does literature do to the dialectics of recognition? As this last question indicates, I believe it is significant that Sartre establishes his theory of recognition on the basis of the aesthetic experience; consequently I cannot agree with T Storm Heter’s contention that ‘Sartre might have just as easily used the model of conversation to describe mutual recognition’. Indeed, this article argues that in Why Write? Sartre’s theory of literature is precisely not only a theory of literature as conversation and communication, but also a theory about the relation to a certain silence, and since literature and recognition go together in Sartre’s text, the presence of silence has consequences for his theory of recognition.

Featured Image