La religione de Le parole. Una lettura antropologica dell'autobiografia di Jean-Paul Sartre

Published in 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre’s autobiography provides an extraordinary sample of the secular intellectual religion, which spreads in Europe after the Romantic age and transformed writers in a sort of saints and prophets. Les Mots is the description of a literary “vocation” that maintains all the typical traits of its mystical model, but testifies a new laic faith and a new spiritual power. Rereading the text and highlighting its religious vocabulary, this article uses some historical-critical, sociological and anthropological tools to interpret Sartre’s Les Mots as the product of a wider tradition, the meeting point for individual and history.