Introducing Existentialism: A Graphic Guide

Richard Appignanesi goes in personal quest of Existentialism in its original state. He begins with Camus’ question of suicide: Must life have a meaning to be lived? Is absurdity at the heart of Existentialism? Or is there a question as yet unexplored in Sartre’s warning that Existentialism is the least scandalous, most technically austere of all teachings? The answer is found in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, the first technically austere investigation of consciousness, from which Heidegger, Sartre and others depart. There are other deviant trails bringing encounters with Kierkegaard, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, who might or might not connect to Existentialism. Always there in the background is a history of dark times - our legacy of Nazism and the Cold War - that overcasts the search.

This is a book of undergoing Existentialism in its meaning for our own age of postmodern crisis.