SARTRE, MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY, AND THE HOLOCAUST IN THE AGE OF DECOLONIZATION
Jacques Derrida's memorial reflections on the impact of Sartre's journal Les temps modernes in shaping his generation's projects highlighted the legend of the courier from Marathon who died while running to deliver his message of victory to the Athenians. Sartre alluded to the fable in his manifesto for engaged writing. “It's a beautiful myth,” Sartre wrote in his précis for the politics of commitment, for it shows that for a little while longer the dead act as if they were living. A little while—one year, ten years, maybe even fifty . . . and then they're buried a second time. This is the standard we offer for the writer: as long as his books provoke anger, embarrassment, shame, hatred, love . . . he shall live! This moment in Sartre's text captured Derrida's attention for he sought to point out that political involvement often has effects that are deferred. It is these detours of memory—signals and signatures from a once-buried moment that ramify politically anew in different contexts—that are wound into the complex circuitry of what Michael Rothberg has called “multidirectional memory.” And it is the signature of Sartre, whose anticolonial provocations remain prescient and provocative, that enable us to link these two books that are united by the word “decolonization” in their subtitles. Each tome is a touchstone for new openings at the intersection of postwar French intellectual history, postcolonial theory, and critical race and Holocaust studies. Both books ask us to reconsider racism and empire; memory, alterity, and history; temporality and trauma; identity both individual and collective; and the singularity versus the generalizability of instances of oppression and calls for liberation. Each beckons us to do so in light of the unfinished project of coming to terms with Europe's colonial legacy in a globalized world.