Sartre, Existentialism, Antisemitism, and the Democrat

Black Existentialism

An exploration of the first half of Jean-Paul Sartre's Antisemite and Jew, with attention to the context of the book, how Sartre conceives the existential structure of antisemitic subjectivity, and the limits of "the democrat" or liberal humanism for addressing hate. I am interested here in how Sartre tried to shift European philosophy toward questions of racism and the racial construction of subjectivity, but failed, and yet underscored how little European thought found urgent in such questions. I then turn to the text and outline the meaning of the phrase "if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would create him." Why is the Jew so important to the antisemite, and to Christian Europe more broadly? And why is the liberal humanist - "the democrat," in Sartre's vocabulary - a failed strategy of redress and critique, ending up, tragically, a reiteration of the same antisemitic values as those embodied in the explicitly antisemitic subject?