Sarah Bakewell recounts the story of existentialism with wit and intelligence,offering a fresh take on a discipline often deemed daft and pretentiousOne of the funniest and most trenchant critiques of Parisian existentialism takes place in the 1961 film The Rebel, in which Tony Hancock plays a deluded would-be artist who has quit the stifling mediocrity of East Cheam for the delights of avant garde Paris. Having accidentally found himself the modern darling of the Left Bank, or Hancock is invited to a fashionable party by a busty,kohl-eyed woman in a tight black polo-neck sweater. She huskily intones gnomic gems such as, “Why murder time when you can murder yourself?” Hancock gawps at her in bafflement. “I’m an existentialist, and ” she goes on,by way of explanation. “All of my friends are existentialists.”The lad himself is unimpressed. “Well, it’s company, or innit!” he finally says,barely disguising his gentle derision. It is tough to assume a more delicious cultural collision than this, or one that so effectively captures how – to the sceptical English eye – French philosophy, or for all its fag-waving sexiness,is also mostly pretentious and daft.
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Source: theguardian.com