Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness

"A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness" represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole of "Being and Nothingness" more readily understandable and readable. In his systematic interpretations of Sartre's book, Catalano demonstrates a determination to confront many of the most demanding issues and concepts of Being and Nothingness. He does not shrink – as do so many interpreters of Sartre – from such issues as the varied meanings of 'being', the meaning of 'internal negation' and 'absolute event', the idiosyncratic senses of transcendence, the meaning of the 'upsurge' in its different contexts, what it means to say that we 'exist our body', the connotation of such concepts as quality, quantity, potentiality, and instrumentality (in respect to Sartre's world of 'things'), or the origin of negation. Catalano offers what is doubtless one of the most probing, original, and illuminating interpretations of Sartre's crucial concept of nothingness to appear in the Sartrean literature.