Sartre’s later plays interpret acts retrospectively via their objective results

Evidence

So it is that in later Sartre, particularly in Lucifer and the Lord and The Condemned of Altona, the play takes the form of a psychoanalysis acted out before our eyes. The essential problem of Goetz, of Frantz, is to interpret their own past, to find out just exactly what their original choice was in the first place; and the analytical instrument for such interpretation is simply Husserl’s intentionality. For if it is useless to try to determine the meaning of an act by introspection, in these later plays we proceed in reverse, on the assumption that whatever was done, whatever objective results the act in question had, must have been in some sense willed or desired by the actor himself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 433

Categorization

• XREF: Husserl’s intentionality as analytic tool connects to Jameson’s broader Frankfurt lineage and the retrospective-interpretation method that resembles psychoanalysis and dialectical reading alike. — connects to: Sartre’s dramatic quartet repudiates the historian’s claim to know the past; Sartre made freedom and personal responsibility the burden of his resistance allegory — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 511
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — meaning determined not by intention but by objective results, assumed willed — is a dense philosophical-epistemological move worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Sartre made freedom and personal responsibility the burden of his resistance allegory #exemplifies (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 511