| dc.description.abstract | The purpose of the study is to investigate two aspects of Sartrean atheism: one is religious and the other literary. Since childrood, Sartre has considered literature as a representation of Religion, from which he could find not only salvation of himself but the world. If Les Mots is a farewell to literature, by means of questionning the genesis of his literary neurosis, Sartre intends to explain here the functions and the limits of literature as those applicated in his revolutionary enterprises.
The first part presents the precocious genesis of Sartrean religious atheism and its auto-theorization. In the first chapter, with regard to Marxist analysis, we attribute Sartrean “idealistical atheism” to social and family mediations based on the diegesis of Les Mots and La Nausée. The infantile atheism could be then reflected as well to child’s existential anguish caused by his orphanhood and bourgeois solitude. The second chapter focuses on the theoretical explanation of Sartrean “materialist atheism”. In fact, Sartre adopts in L’être et le néant both ontological phenomenology and existential psychoanalysis to describe the conscience and human reality. These methods are also implied in the narrative of Les Mots. According to ontology, God is considered ens causa sui, a combination of the in-self and the for-self. For Sartre, human desire is to become God; however, it is contradictory for human beings to be actually synthesized into the two regions of conscience. Thus, the idealistic notion of God is impossible.
The second part is concerned with Sartrean literary atheism, namely, his farewell to literature. In the third chapter, firstly, we analyze Les Mots’ literary topography in relation to its historical constitution of autonomic champ of literature. Secondly, we utilize the actantial schema and Eliade’s chronotope of sacred to scrutinize Sartre’s narrative of literary calling. Finally, his vocation must be involved in certain religious aims such as immortality and salvation. The forth chapter deals with Sartrean’s literary politics. Compared with historical farewell commented in Qu’est-ce que la literature?, the Sartrean one’s in Les Mots is precisely his Orphic gaze at literature, which differs from Blanchot’s eschatological perspective. Therefore, the writing of Les Mots is a deliberate full degree which contasts sharply with the terrorist writing degree zero triggered since the late nineteenth century. In the end, we discuss certain distinctive features of writer and intellectual and try to insist that Sartrean littérature engagée must be considered the cruel and lont-term business of atheism.
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