The tragic life and principled politics of Trần Đức Thảo | Aeon Essays

It took five ill-fated conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre before the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo finally broke with French philosophy. Between November 1949 and January 1950, Thảo and Sartre recorded and transcribed their conversations on the relation between Marxism and the new philosophy of existentialism, with the intention of publishing them. Sartre hoped to prove that Marxism and existentialism – of which he was the primary representative – were consistent with one another: reconcilable projects. However, the two men’s exchange of views collapsed before completion, under a series of recriminations. Thảo remained bitter about this, later referring to an ‘insidious campaign’ among Sartre’s ‘disciples’ to paint him as responsible for the failure of this planned project. Today, the conversations are still lost. For Thảo, their disagreement lay in the fact that Sartre did not recognise Marxism’s philosophical seriousness. For Sartre, traditional Marxism offered an attractive

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