Berghahn Books

Sartre and the Return of the Living Dead

Author(s): Colin Davis
Source: Sartre Studies International, Vol. 11, No. 1/2, Sartre Today: A Centenary
Celebration (2005), pp. 222-233
Published by: Berghahn Books
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23512970
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 Sartre and the Return of
the Living Dead
Colin Davis

Spectral Worlds

Th e dead wiil remain with us, Sartre remarks at the end of Les Mots, for as long
as humanity roams the earth.1 The dead are never quite dead; they survive in
what Sartre, in L'Etre et le nant, calls 'la vie morte' (dead life).2 In Huis clos,
Sartre envisages an afterlife in which, although they can no longer act, the dead
continue to agonize over the meaning of their lives and their now irrevocable
actions. Sartre's script of Les Jeux sont faits, filmed by Jean Delannoy and
shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1947, goes a step further. It depicts two
dead people given the chance to return to earth in the pursuit of love and, at
the same time, the opportunity to rectify their earlier mistakes, to change the
meaning of their lives by intervening more effectively in their worlds. Despite
its supernatural story line, the stakes of Les Jeux sont faits are recognizably
Sartrean. The film serves as an opportunity to probe the themes of freedom,
responsibility, choice, the role of the individual agent in history, the selPs opac
ity to itself, the conflict endemic in the human condition and the ways in which
external circumstances make a mockery of our endeavours. It asks the question,
if we were given a second chance, could we revisit the scenes of our failures and
transform them into successes? Could we learn from our mistakes and lucidly
remodel the world in the form of our desires? Or are we condemned only to
fail again, to make the same mistakes twice over?
Ghost stories typically revolve around a temporary breach in the barriers which
separate the worlds of the living and the dead, so that for a period the dead walk
amongst us again. L'Etre et le nant describes the dead as being with us always;
they are an objective part of our situation, a factor which cannot be ignored in
our decisions and actions. Moreover, Sartre's version of phenomenology entails

Sartre Studies International, Volume 11, Issues 1 & 2, 2005, 222-233

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 Sarin and the Return of the Living Dead I 223

a suspension of the separation between appearance and reality, material objects

and mere illusions, spectral presences and living beings. Sartre announces this
from the opening sentence of the book: 'Modern thought has made consider
able progress by reducing what exists to the series of appearances [apparitions]
which manifest it' (EN 11 ). The French word apparitions means both 'appear
ances' and 'apparitions', and Sartre's use of the word effectively erases the dis
tinction between what is materially and tangibly present and the ghost which
merely appears. In the phenomenology of Hegel and Heidegger, the phenom
enon is the means by which something elseSpirit or Beingappears in the
world. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates how Spirit works its way
through history without ever being directly manifested in it. In Heidegger's
Being and Time, the phenomenon is that which shows itself, and through
which is announced something that does not show itself: the Being of beings,
for example. In these instances, the phenomenon is the mode of appearance of
something else. Sartre's world, on the contrary, is a world in which the appear
ance hides nothing except other appearances: 'The existant no longer has an
exterior, if by that is meant an outer skin which would hide the true nature of
the object.... The appearances [apparitions] which manifest the existant are
neither interior nor exterior: none is worth more than any other; they all refer
to other appearances and none of them is privileged' (EN 11 ).
So there is nothing hidden in the phenomenon, no Being, Spirit, essence
or identity that grounds reality and saves it from the ceaseless play of appear
ances. The phenomenon is both nothing other than itself and a sign that no
appearance can ever be fully, finally itself. When we see a cup, for example, we
know that there is no essence of the cup lurking behind its appearance, but we
also know that our perception of it can never be complete: '[WJhat appears, in
effect, is only an aspect of the object and the object is entirely in this aspect and
entirely outside it. Entirely within in so far as it manifests itself in this aspect:
it indicates itself as the structure of the appearance [apparition], which at the
same time explains the series. Entirely outside, because the series itself will never
appear nor can it appear' (EN 13). The cup is thus fully present, because there
is no other dimension in which its essence might be located, but also largely
absent, because its appearance does not exhaust its reality. Sartre's use of the
word ''apparition'' is entirely apposite, because the phenomenon both is yet can
never be fully itself; it is both present and absent, real and ghost-like. This is a
point which makes of L'Etre et le nant an important, unacknowledged precur
sor of what is now called hauntology. Particularly in the wake of Derrida's Spec
tres de Marx,3 critics of post-structuralist inclination have become interested in
ghosts in part because they epitomize the deconstructive disturbance of binary
opposites: the ghost is neither properly dead nor fully alive, it is neither here
nor not here, it is neither in the present nor in the past. Sartre's apparitions
prefigure Derrida's ghosts and their role in his ongoing project to disrupt
the metaphysics of presence.4 They divest perceptible reality of its material or
transcendental grounding and thrust us into a world of appearances and appari
tions in which, at the same time, everything is only what it seems and nothing
is quite what it seems.

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224 I Colin Davis

Moreover, the paradoxical status of the phenomenon as both nothing other

than itself and never fully itself is reproduced in Sartre's account of conscious
ness. Consciousness is described as ' being for which in its being there is ques
tion of its being to the extent that this being implies a being other than itself (EN
29). It never fully coincides with itself; its being consists in its lack of being.
The Sartrean pour-soi (for-itself) is 'a presence to itself which lacks a certain
presence to itself, and it is as lack of this presence that it is presence to itself
(EN 137); or, as Sartre famously puts it, it is a being 'which is not what it is
and which is what it is not' (EN 32). The pour-soi pursues a doomed project
of self-coincidence. It desires to be other than it is, but it can never attain what
it wants without its desire being instantaneously deflected elsewhere. It strains
to be what it can never be, and it can never achieve the impossible status of
the en-soi-pour-soi (in-itself-for-itself), in which project and being would be at
one. Consciousness, then, is eminently ghost-like in that it is both there and
not there; it is self-present only in so far as it is absent from itself. However,
the knowledge that the pour-soi can never coincide with itself cannot prevent
it from attempting to realize its desires, because its destiny is to try and to fail.
It is 'haunted [hant]' (EN 138) by a self-presence which remains elusive. Les
Jeux sont faits is a more lucid rewriting of L'Etre et le nant because it boldly
presents the union of humankind with its actions and their meanings as nothing
more than a fantastical ghost story.
L'Etre et le nant and Les Jeux sont faits are, then, both concerned with
unrealizable desires and failed projects. They also both consider the possibility
of second chances, of revisiting the scenes of past failures with the prospect of
rectifying them. In L'Etre et le nant Sartre suggests that there are no second
chances, because the situations in which we act and choose can never be repro
duced (EN 604-605). Les Jeux sont faits allows its protagonists to revisit their
lives, offering them an opportunity to make good their former failures, only to
show that they cannot truly grasp the occasion.

Second Chances

Second chances and alternative realities have long been stock themes of film,
and there are, I believe, good reasons for this. Film as a medium is tied to
the nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies which made possible the
photographic reproduction of imagesand then of moving imagesand of
sound. Repetition without significant variation is the formal condition of film
art. A film is made to be shown again and again, and to be always the same.
There have been cases of films shot and screened with alternative endings, and
the release of directors' cuts also ensures that the earliest versions to be released
may not be definitive. On the whole, though, variance is a relatively minor phe
nomenon in film form, and this may be why it has acquired such significance
as a theme. Utterly bound to the technologies of reproduction and the unvary
ing repetition of the same, filmmakers have rebelled against the limitations of
their medium by making film a place where second chances are offered, where

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 Sartre and the Return of the Living Dead I 225

repetition becomes an opportunity to correct the errors committed the first

time around. The senseless chance encounters which form our reality could,
with only the tiniest of adjustments, have led to quite different results. Film
can show us how this is possible by forging fundamentally different worlds out
of near-identical data.
Examples which use film in this way include Kieslowski's Blind Chance, which
traces three alternative lives for a man who misses a train; Tykwer's Run Lola
Run, in which minor variants produce, once again, three quite different con
clusions; and Resnais's Smoking/No Smoking, in which the decision whether or
not to smoke a cigarette produces two alternative films with a total of twelve
possible endings. The film that pushes the device to its extreme point is perhaps
Ramis's Groundhog Day, in which a cynical weatherman relives the same day
over and over again until he finally gets it right in every detail. For the purposes
of this essay, the most important example of the 'alternative worlds' theme is
Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. A man driven to the brink of suicide is
shown by his guardian angel what the world would have been like had he never
existed. He learns that life, for all its flaws, compromises, abandoned hopes and
imperfections, is precious, and that a well-meaning individual really can make
a huge, positive impact on the world he inhabits. Capra's film was released in
1946, the year before Les Jeux sont faits, and I am tempted to regard Sartre's
scenario as a direct rewriting and inversion of Capra's version of American liberal
individualism, in which the benevolent subject changes the world for the better.
Any apparent link between Capra's hopeful individualism and Sartre's existen
tialism is only superficial. Sartre's script demonstrates, rather, that motives are
obscure, decisions are flawed, actions backfire and nothing really changes.
A theoretical framework for understanding second chances and alterna
tive worlds in film is provided by Slavoj Zizek, particularly in his book on
Kieslowski, The Fright of Real Tears.5 According to Zizek, the growing percep
tion of our reality as but one of innumerable alternative or possible worlds is
at odds with the predominantly linear forms most frequently adopted in the
storytelling media. This clashes with a growing perception of our reality as
'one of the possible, often even not the most probable, outcomes of an "open"
situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply cancelled out
but continue to haunt our "true" reality as a spectre of what might have hap
pened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency'
(FRT79). Such is the reign of blind chance that things so easily could have
been totally differentand perhaps somewhere they are. Films such as those
mentioned above develop alternative narrative lines in an attempt to depict
the 'ghosting' of our reality by other possible worlds. This might appear to be
liberating since it offers us a vision of redeemed contingency: things may go
wrong for us here, but somewhere there is a world in which everything runs
according to our desires. However, Zizek asks whether this sense of alternative
realities is liberating or oppressive. If there is only one 'real' world, we might
make choices which would change it meaningfully; but if all possibilities are
in some way played out in alternative worlds, then there is, as Zizek puts it,
'no freedom of choice precisely because all choices have already been realized'

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226 I Colin Davis

(ibid.). The proliferation of realities might look as if it holds out the prospect
of ultimate freedom, but in fact it negates it utterly.
Alternative reality movies characteristically back away from their most radi
cal suggestion that all the possibilities they depict are equally real and that our
randomly contingent world has no ontological priority over any other. Perhaps
because film remains a linear, sequential medium, it tends to imply that the final
alternative shown is also the most real one. In Kieslowski's Blind Chance, the
protagonist 'really' becomes a doctor and dies in a plane explosion; in Run Lola
Run, Lola 'really' does save herself, her boyfriend and the money. As Zizek puts
it: '[I]n both cases, one can interpret the film as if only the third story is the
"real" one, the other two staging the fantasmatic price the subject has to pay
for the "real" outcome' (FRT 81). These films seem to explore the possibility
of alternative worlds but end up endorsing only one. The linear form of the
medium wins out over its thematic musings about parallel realities. Capra's
It's a Wonderful Life also refuses to give equal weight to the two worlds it
proposes. The world finally sanctioned as 'real' is the wonderful one to which
James Stewart joyfully returns at the end of the film, even though, as Zizek sug
gests, everyone will be aware that the squalid alternative world of prostitution,
alcoholism and crime is in fact at least as real as the saccharine small-town vision
of happy families and virtue rewarded (FRT63-64).
A variant on the alternative worlds form is the second-chance scenario,
wherein characters are given the opportunity of taking again the decisions and
actions that went wrong in the past. The implication here is thatlearning
from our mistakes and those of otherswe can go back and replace failure
with success. Following Annette InsdorPs book Double Lives, Second Chances,
Zizek sees Kieslowski's films as a cinema of second chances. Fatal choices can be
repeated and put right. A prior mistake can become what Insdorf calls 'a base
for successful action'.6 But the second chance is also the opportunity to make
the same mistake again, or new mistakes, because in our botched, contingent
and senseless world, the 'right' answer can never be assured. So on the one
hand, as Zizek puts it: '[W]e are given a second chance, we can learn from the
past' (FRT 138). But at the same time, the revised choice, the 'wise' choice
informed by previous mistakes, may simply be a different kind of mistake. In
Kieslowski's La Double Vie de Vronique, for example, the second Vronique
extends her life by giving up her sinking career, but in the process she compro
mises her desire and commits what Zizek calls an 'ethical betrayal' (FRT 138).
The second chance may after all be merely the chance to fail differently.
Sartre's script and Delannoy's film of Les Jeux sont faits post the questions
that arise in the course of Zizek's discussion: If we were given a second chance,
could we learn from our mistakes and make a better, wiser choice capable
of reinventing the world? Sartre's high existentialist optimism, his belief in
humankind as the creator of its own future, would seem to commit him to a
positive response; but the film suggests that the second chance is not in fact
real, that we are destined to repeat our mistakes, making (to misquote Marx
misquoting Flegel) a farce out of the tragedy of our historical failings.7 The film
revolves around two characters, Eve and Pierre. Eve is dying, poisoned by her

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 Sartre and the Return of the Living Dead I 227

husband who has married her for her dowry and who now wants to marry her
younger sister for the same reason. Pierre is the leader of an imminent insur
rection against a proto-fascist dictatorship. He is shot and killed by a police
informer, but he dies confident in the belief that the forthcoming insurrec
tion will succeed in overturning the government. Once dead, Eve and Pierre
become ghosts in a bizarre afterlife in which they are free to roam wherever
they want, though they cannot touch or communicate with the living. Curious
to see at close quarters the dictator against whom he has conspired for many
years, Pierre goes to his palace and learns that the government knows all about
the planned insurrection, and that it intends to use it as an occasion to repress
all opposition brutally. Pierre has failed, just as Eve has failed to save her sis
ter. The two ghosts meet, and it is suggested that they might even have had a
romance, if they were still living.
At this point they are returned to the offices of the administration where
they initially signed on as ghosts, and Article 140 is explained to them. Accord
ing to this article, if two beings who were destined to one another never met
during their lifetimes, they may return to earth for 24 hours, with full memory
of their experiences as ghosts. If, in those 24 hours, they can form a flawless
union, they will be allowed to continue their lives together; but if there is any
distrust between them, they will return to the afterlife. Eve and Pierre accept
this opportunity. However, an ambiguity remains throughout the film as to
whether they return in order to find love, or to rectify their earlier mistakes.
In the climactic sequence, Pierre tries to persuade the revolutionaries to delay
the insurrection, but it is too late, and he is killed again; and Eve tries to make
her sister see the truth about her husband but does not succeed in persuading
her, and she dies at the same moment as Pierre. The final scene shows them as
ghosts again, still unsure about whether or not they could have achieved true
love. Finally, two young ghosts run up to them and ask them if they know
about Article 140. The youngsters believe that they were destined for one
another and hope that they may return to life in order to pursue the chance of
happiness. Eve and Pierre advise the couple to give it a try, and they then go
their separate ways. They had been given a second chance and failed to take
advantage of it; perhaps others will fare better.

The Living Dead

There is a clear element of whimsy in Les Jeux sont faits, particularly in the
depiction of the afterlife administration as an officious bureaucracy with regu
lations and rule books. At the same time, the philosophical seriousness of the
work should not be underestimated. The drama of haunted consciousness
endeavouring and failing to realize its projects, staged in L'Etre et le nant, is
literalized in Les Jeux sont faits as the story of ghosts striving to make them
selves and their desires real. Moreover, Sartre's film script depends directly on
his discussion of death in L'Etre et le nant ('Ma mort', EN 576-598), and
even the title of the film is anticipated in the earlier philosophical work.

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228 I Colin Davis

In L'Etre et le nant, Sartre works out his views on death through a critical
engagement with Heidegger's Being and Time. There, Heidegger insists that
Being is Being-fbr-death. Death is always my own; it is 'my ownmost pos
sibility'. I cannot die for anyone else, and no one else can die for me.8 Sartre
counters by wondering whether death can be individualized and personalized
in this way. How can I know that it is my death that awaits me? Sartre gives
the example of a man condemned to death who prepares himself bravely for
his final moments on the scaffold, only to be carried off prematurely by Span
ish flu (EN 578). His 'ownmost' death has been stolen from him by chance.
For Sartre, death is something that happens to us, rather than something
that belongs to us in our most authentic being. Moreover, Sartre questions
whether Heidegger is right to say that no one can die in our place. In a sense,
it is obviously true that at the moment of our death, no one can die for us; but
in another sense, one death can substitute for another: '[I]f dying is dying in
order to edify, to bear witness, for one's country, and so on, then anyone at all
can die in my place' (EN 581). For Sartre, Heidegger's account of death makes
of it something too personal, too much the property of the individual. Whereas
for Heidegger, death is my most authentic possibility, for Sartre it is rather 'an
always possible destruction of my possibilities, winch is outside my possibilities' (EN
595). Heideggerian Dasein lives with its eye firmly focussed on its own mortal
ity. Sartrean pour-soi, on the other hand, does not dwell on death. Restlessly, it
projects and plans for possible futures, never giving up the aim of transforming
itself and its world. In this perspective, death is absurd. Striking from the out
side, it always comes too soon or too late. It is not what gives life meaning but
rather robs life of its capacity to create and to renew its meanings.
For Heidegger, the dead are no longer part of our world. For Sartre, on the
other hand, the dead are all around us; they are still present even if no longer
active. In Les Jeux sont faits, the dead roam amongst the living, but remain
unseen by them. From the perspective of L'Etre et le nant, the failure to see
the dead is a choice of the living, because the dead do not simply disappear
or survive only in the memories or consciousness of the living. They continue
to constitute the world as they did before their demise; the onlynot insig
nificantdifference is that they can no longer play an active part in determin
ing its meaning. It is now up to the living to take responsibility for the dead,
and they cannot refuse to do so: 'In reality, the relation to the deadto all
the deadis an essential structure of the fundamental relation I have called
"being-for-the-other".... It is true that the dead choose us, but first of all we
must have chosen them. Here we find again the fundamental relation linking
facticity to freedom: we choose our attitude towards the dead, but it is not
possible for us to choose none at all' (EN 586-587). Sartre differs from Hei
degger in maintaining that a relation with the other persists beyond death. But
the dead subject has lost all agency, and it has been defeated in its struggle to
control the meaning of its acts. It is now the living who will decide to recall
or to forget me, to give my acts meaning or to rob them of their justification.
The living can fight to control their own meanings, while the dead have them
assigned by the surviving other.

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 Sartre and the Return of the Living Dead I 229

Two key points emerge from this discussion of death in L'Etre et le nant.
First, living subjects are engaged in a drama with the dead. Whether they accept
it or not, they play out a conflict over the significance of the past and its inser
tion into the present. Indifference to the dead is merely a relation to them
which we have chosen from amongst other possibilities. Second, death is not
a property, the 'ownmost possibility', of the subject; rather, it is a contingent
event which strikes from the outside and destroys my capacity to play a role
in the future determination of meaning. Except in the rarest circumstances,
death will never come at the perfect moment, and it will never be fully my
own: 'We have in fact every chance of dying before completing our task or, on
the contrary, of surviving it. So there is a very weak chance that our death will
be presented, like Sophocles', for example, as a perfect culmination. But if it
is only chance which decides the character of our death, and therefore of our
life, even the death which would be most like the end of a melody cannot be
expected as such: chance, as it decides on the matter, takes away any semblance
of a harmonious end' (EN 581 ).

Failing Again

The principal characters of Les Jeux sont faits will be given a lesson in the
harsh contingencies that characterize the world of L'Etre et le nant. This is
illustrated, for example, by Pierre's loss of control over the significance of his
life. After his death, he is confident that his work is complete: the insurrection
he has been preparing for years will be successful, and his actions will have the
meaning he intended them to have. He believes that 'the essential is to have
done what one had to do'.9 He has done his job properly, and now the insur
rection is bound to succeed: 'It can't go wrong' (JSF41 ). The future meaning
of his life is assured by his past actions. He learns, though, that being dead, he
no longer has a role to play in the determination of meaning. He has in fact
miscalculated: the insurrection will fail, and his work will prove to have been
pointless. Rather than a heroic leader who died on the eve of his greatest suc
cess, he will be remembered as a failure whose efforts were in vain.
The expression les jeux sont faits, front which Sartre's script takes its title,
refers to the moment in, for example, a game of roulette when bets have been
laid and it is too late to revoke them, but the spin of the wheel has not yet
determined who will win or lose. It is a moment of uncertainty: decisions have
been taken, but their consequences are not yet known. This recalls the situa
tion of the dead in L'Etre et le nant, and indeed Sartre's discussion employs
the expression which would provide the title for his film script. He argues
that the dead are still with us, but that the meaning of their acts and of their
legacy is still undecided because it is up to the living to accept or to transform
them. To be dead means no longer to be able to intervene in the human proj
ect of giving sense to the world. The life of the dead is both fully complete
and incessantly changing: 'That means that, for them, the chips are down [les
jeux sont faits] and they will now undergo their changes without being at all

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230 I Colin Davis

responsible for them' (EN 601 ). The dead are dispossessed of their acts. They
have made their choices, but it is up to the living to allocate meaning to those
choices and to decide their success or failure, their importance or irrelevance.
Sartre continues the gambling metaphor a few pages later when referring to
the irreversibility of time and choice. He suggests that there are no second
chances because time does not run backwards and circumstances will never be
repeated: 'From that point, even if I were immortal, I could not "change my
bet" [ reprendre mon coup\, it is forbidden by the irreversibility of temporality,
and this irreversibility is nothing other than the character proper to liberty
realizing itself in time' (EN 604). Eve reflects these lines in the closing scene
of Les Jeux sont faits in the script's only reference to its title: 'The chips are
down, you see. You can't change your bet [Les jeux sont faits, voyez-vous. On
ne reprend pas son coup |' (JSF 141 ).
For the dead, then, there is no second chance, even if the meaning of their
now-irrevocable actions has yet to be settled. Whilst haunting the regent's pal
ace and still confident in the success of the insurrection he has prepared, Pierre
believes that his life has been a success: 'I haven't failed in my life' (/ST43).
In L'Etre et le nant, though, Sartre tells us: 'The story of a life, whatever it is,
is the story of a failure' (EN 538). The other ghosts in Les Jeux sont faits echo
this view: 'Everyone fails in life. You always fail in your life, from the moment
that you die. You always die too soon ... or too late' (JSF42). Pierre's claim
that he has not failed exhibits an entirely false belief that the consequences of
his actions are determined in advance by his decisions. Because he has carefully
planned and prepared the insurrection, he is convinced that it must succeed.
He believes that he controls the meaning of his actions because their success
will flow directly from his choices. He has not yet discovered that the authori
ties know all about the insurrection, and that it is in fact bound to fail. When
he returns to the world of the living, Pierre attempts to make up for his errors
by delaying the insurrection, but again he does not succeed. Even his standing
as a leader slips away as his former comrades become persuaded that he has
betrayed them. Leader or traitor, hero or fool, revolutionary or unwitting agent
of repression, Pierre cannot determine the significance that will be attached to
his own life. His freely taken decisions set up a chain of events in which he is
not free to intervene, and to which he is not free to give the meaning he might
wish. This is a key respect in which Les Jeux sont faits rewrites and inverts the
optimistic individualism of the previous year's It's a Wonderful Life. In Capra's
film, the goodness of one man really does affect the community for the bet
ter; in Les Jeux sont faits, the consequences of actions are incalculable and will
most likely turn out for the worse. Whereas Capra's world is kept in order by
benevolent guardian angels, Sartre's is governed by chance, contingency and
the near inevitability of failure.
Capra's hero decides to kill himself because he believes he has failed. In
being given a second chance, he is shown that in fact he has succeeded in ways
he could never have anticipated, and is allowed to return to his former life in
the knowledge of his success. Sartre's protagonists in Les Jeux sont faits are
given the illusion of a second chance as they are permitted to return to earth

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 Sartre and the Return of the Living Dead I 231

with the knowledge that they have acquired in the afterlife. But this knowledge
does not allow them to redeem their failures. Eve will not persuade her sister
to abandon her murderous husband, Pierre will not prevent the suppression
of the opposition movement he had founded, and the couple will not find the
flawless love that had eluded them during their earlier lives. They do have one
not insignificant success when they rescue the child of a fellow ghost from her
abusive stepfather and give her the chance of a better future. But in their major
projects they fail just as decisively as they had the first time around, even if for
different reasons. Given more time, Eve still cannot persuade her sister of her
husband's wickedness. Pierre, now compromised by his relationship with the
wife of a leader of the hated militia, is no longer trusted by the insurgents,
and his warnings are ignored. In his last attempt to save the insurrection,
he inadvertently aggravates the disaster he had hoped to avoid. He leads his
future assassin to the hangar where his comrades are gathered; the assassin then
telephones the militia, who arrive on the scene and capture or kill the insur
gents. The consequences of Pierre's actions are precisely the opposite of what
he intended. For the dead, and even for the living, there are then no second
chances, except perhaps the unhoped-for chance to fail for a second time.
The films discussed earlier hold out the prospect of second chances pre
sented to us as if by a benevolent destiny which allows us to try again, informed
by our failures; or else they depict alternative worlds in which our projects are
realized, however improbably. I might fail here, now, but in some parallel reality
the senseless contingent encounters that have impeded me conspire instead to
bring all my dreams to fruition. Elsewhere, I am the hero of circumstance, not
its victim. Les Jeux sont faits, on the contrary, is a film about second chances and
alternative outcomes which shows that in fact the future cannot be modelled
in the form of our desires. There is no second chance for the dead, as there is
none for the living. For Sartre in the 1940s, we are, of course, freeterribly
free; however, this does not mean that we can simply do whatever we want. A
prisoner is not free to leave her prison, for example (EN 540). She is free to
plan her escape or work for her liberation, but there is no guarantee that her
projects will succeed. Sartrean freedom is a far cry from the promise that desire
can be realized, and in Les Jeux sont faits, Eve and Pierre learn that inscrutable
contingency rather than benevolent destiny causes their projects to falter.
Les Jeux sont faits offers a filmic vehicle for Sartre's uncompromising vision
of human reality as conflict and failure. Freedom is a terrible given and a
doomed project. The second chance is missed as surely as the first one, the
revolution fails, love fails. However, we should not forget that the film is also
haunted by Sartre's incorrigible optimism. It ends, despite everything, with the
possibility of a fresh beginning, as a pair of new ghosts announce their desire
to appeal to Article 140, to see if it is after all possible to make up for one's
past failings. 'Can one try to begin one's life again?' asks the young man. 'Try
[Essayez]', Pierre advises, to which Eve adds 'Try, all the same [Essayez tout tie
mme\ (JSF143). This 'Essayez tout tie mme' sums up the position of the free
subject knowing itself to have little prospect of success, but taking its chances
anyway. It recalls Kieslowski's comment on the ending of one of his films in

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232 I Colin Davis

which 'everything is still possible, although we already know that nothing is

possible' (quoted in FRT181).
The ending of Les Jeux sont faits reflects Sartre's own stubborn, perhaps
admirable, refusal to accept his own bleakest insights. Knowing that every life
is a failure, that the world is not changing for the better, that we kick against
history and history kicks back harder, that our actions and our meanings escape
us, that we are the playthings of contingency, Sartre refuses to draw the lessons
that might inescapably flow from such insights. 'Essayez tout de mme' are the
last words spoken in Les Jeux sont faits, and they are its final expression of hope
that there might be, after all, second chances and alternative futures. And even
if failure is the inevitable outcome of our endeavours, there is yet another twist
to the tale. By the spiralling logic of qui perd gagne (loser wins), failure may be
a form of successeven if success is also a form of failuresince failure is an
aspect of human freedom. Pierre and Eve were, we are told, destined for one
another, but their failure to stay together breaks the chains of a causality which
was not of their making. Pierre and Eve fail because of the choices they make,
and choosing to fail is still choice, freely made whatever the cost. Destiny can
after all be cheated, even if there is still a grim price to pay for denying its rule.
So failure is one of the ways in which human beings contrive to remain centres
of indeterminacy, not fully subject to the shackles of history even as it seeks to
make us submit to its intolerable conditions.10
Les Jeux sont faits suggests that we have little prospect of learning from our
mistakes and realizing a future in the likeness of our desires in a world given
over to absurdity and blind, senseless contingency. But the game goes on. Our
best chance may be, as Beckett advises, to try again, to fail again and to fail bet
ter.11 And perhaps we can learn to hold on to our failures, to make them our
own, because they are the stuff our lives are made of.

Notes

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Pms: Gallimard, 1964; Folio edition), 209.
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Etre et le nant( Paris: Gallimard, 1943; dition Tel, 1998), 586; here
after cited EN. All translations from French are my own.
3. See Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galile, 1993).
4. This point is made eloquently by Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, 'Anachrony and Anatopia: Spec
tres of Marx, Derrida and Gothic Fiction', in Ghosts: Deeonstruction, Psychoanalysis, History,
ed. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 128: 'Non-present pres
ence, pre-originary anteriority: in the spectre's defiance of space and time, Derrida finds the
embodiment of his most consistent project, the deeonstruction of the metaphysical desire
for presence and origin.'
5. Slavoj Zizek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-theory
(London: The British Film Institute, 2001); hereafter cited FRT.

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 Sartre and the Return of the Living Dead I 233

6. Annette Insdorf, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (New
York: Hyperion, 1999), 165; quoted in FRT, 93.
7. The allusion is to Karl Marx, 7he Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in The Portable
Karl Marx (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 287: 'Hegel observes somewhere that all
great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add:
the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' A note to the text observes: 'Generations of
scholars have been unable to find this remark in Hegel' (287).
8. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979), 250.
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, Ij:s Jeux sont faits (London: Methuen, 1956), 26; hereafter cited JSF.
10. I am grateful to Elizabeth Fallaize for pointing out the potential significance of qui perd
gagne at the end of the film, and to Christina Howells for helpful references.
11. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983), 7.

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