Abstract

Sartre's writings consistently correlate the evolution and constitution of the ethical subject with the difficulties Sartre sees as inherent in the father-son relation. When he condemns the bond of paternity as hopelessly iniquitous , Sartre evokes the image of a father forever astride his son's back, crushing his freedom. In L'Etre et le neant, however, he declares that man becomes ethical only at the precise moment that he endorses universal responsibility by ballasting his light freedom with the weight of the world. I contend that the similarity between these allegories is not coincidental. That Sartre embraces the one while condemning the other illuminates a crucial interference which his ambiguous attitude toward paternity and its inseparability from the feminine brings to bear on his more general concerns with ethical intersubjectivity. ;In reading several of the very texts in which Sartre condemns paternity , I demonstrate that this negative position is not as unwavering as has been thought. His saga novel, Les Chemins de la liberte, reveals Sartre at a point of extreme indecision concerning what to do about paternity . The little-known play, Bariona, and Sartre's political writings of the early 1950's offer glimpses of paternity in a positive light : paternity is advocated as an ethical panacea. Finally, Sartre posits his own unique form of bastard as the quintessential ethical subject . The Sartrean bastard introjects paternity, becoming a hybrid being composed of both father and son. ;Each of the positions that Sartre adopts in regard to paternity is ethical in tenor. Consequently, I argue, although he never wrote the ethics promised at the end of L'Etre et le neant, his obsessive returns to aspects of paternity constitute a unique framework within which the ethical Atlas could be realized