Sartre et le fantôme du Père.

In The Words, Sartre elevates the premature death of his father to the rank of a providential event which, by depriving him of a Super-Ego and relieving him of any legacy, consigned him to contingency and condemned him to be free. In this way, Sartre derives his uniqueness from this happy lack, this salutary void, i.e. a negated father, and casts himself in the role of an Aeneas liberated from the weight of his Anchises. Fatherless son, Sartre was nonetheless condemned to return incessantly to a father who was destined to remain imaginary. The omnipresence of paternal figures in his oeuvre, from 'Childhood of a Leader' to The Family Idiot by way of The Freud Scenario and The Prisoners of Altona, is the expression of a double project, as systematic as it is paradoxical: to incarnate the Father, interrogate him and place him centre-stage-as he does with Flaubert's father-in order to eliminate all the better, through an unrelenting prosecution, that of which the Father is, in Sartre's view, the crystallization: the past, inheritance, the temptation of inauthenticity, the alienation of freedom by a foreign power. The Sartrean Father reveals in a privileged way the heart-rending paradoxes of freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]