There are two ‘positions on objectivity’ which are constantly at war with one another, even when intellectual life falsely presents them as at peace. This salutary intolerance holds not only for individual works, but also for aesthetic genres or attitudes such as those once symbolized in the now half-forgotten controversy over commitment. If any work, without its author necessarily intending it, aims at a supreme effect, none can thereby truly tolerate a neighbour beside it. In such coexistence, they desecrate each other. Sartre was moved to issue his manifesto because he saw-and he was certainly not the first to do so-works of art displayed side by side in a pantheon of optional edification, decaying into cultural commodities. Nevertheless, the controversy over commitment remains urgent, so far as anything that merely concerns the life of the mind can be today, as opposed to sheer human survival. S ince Sartre’s essay What is Literature? there has been less theoretical debate about committed and autonomous literature.
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