Jacques Martin (philosopher)

Jacques Martin (born May 18, 1922 in Paris ; † August 1964 ibid) was a French philosopher and translator who never published any of his own texts and who destroyed all of the remaining manuscripts before his suicide, although his thinking was based on the works of his fellow students Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault has left a lasting mark. Through the Althusser biography of Yann Moulier Boutang from 1992 and the dissertation Between work. Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jacques Martin von Nikki Moore at the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2005, his life is now better documented.

Life

Jacques Henri Michel François Martin was born in the 14th arrondissement , on rue Froidevaux near the Cimetière Montparnasse . Because his mother had tuberculosis , he had lived with his younger sister with his maternal grandparents in Nevers from the age of five , where he also attended the Lycée . His brilliant achievements there enabled him to be admitted to the Lycée Henri-IV after his return to Paris in 1936 . Since 1941 he studied philosophy at the École normal supérieure - for a long time undecided whether he should study literature, and against the will of his father, who would have preferred to see him as a medical student , where he gained high recognition from teachers such as Gaston Bachelard and Jean Hyppolite , for whom he will translate Hegel from German, and by fellow students such as Louis Althusser, four years his senior, and Michel Foucault, four years his junior . In June 1943, Martin, like all non-working men between 20 and 22 years of age in occupied France, was obliged to do labor service in Germany and did this until April 12, 1945 in Frankfurt am Main , although he would have bypassed it comparatively easily as a student at the École normal supérieure can. During his stay in Germany and his return to France, there was an intensive turn to the thinking of Hegel and Marx . However, Martin never became a member of the Parti communiste français . In 1947 he wrote a (later also annihilated) mémoire on the concept of the individual in Hegel, but the following year he exhibited clear symptoms of schizophrenia , thereby making it it became increasingly impossible to organize his life. Martin lived on the support of his friends and from 1951 on his mother's inheritance. In 1948 his French translation of Hegel's youth book Der Geist des Christianentums und seine Schicksal was published with an introduction by Jean Hyppolite , in 1952 that of Ernst Wiechert's novel Missa sine nomine , and in 1955 that of Hermann Hesse's novel Das Glasperlenspiel . In August 1964, after destroying all the manuscripts of his own texts, he committed suicide in his apartment at the École normal supérieure.

effect

These circumstances explain why Jacques Martin's thinking left its mark, but only in the works of his fellow students. For the young Michel Foucault , Martin as homme sans œuvre is significant for his own conception of insanity as such, which in the preface to insanity and society he equates with the “absence of a work”. Louis Althusser even dedicated his main work, Pour Marx, to the memory of his friend Jacques Martin as the one "who, under the worst trials, alone discovered access to Marx's philosophy - and who guided me". In his autobiographical draft Die Tatsachen , Althusser calls Martin the “most astute mind I was ever allowed to encounter”, which is not least due to the fact that - as Althusser in his autobiography The Future Has Time - he gave him the misleading Hegelian interpretation of Alexandre Kojève and his successors helped overcome. Althusser's thought shortly after the murder of his wife Hélène testifies to how far Martin and Althusser's mutual connection went: “Our friend Jacques Martin appears before my eyes. He died on an August day in 1964 in his tiny room on the 16th floor . Arrondissement had been found, for several days in his bed and lying chest to stem a long scarlet rose cautious: a silent message to both of us that we loved him for twenty years, as a souvenir of Beloyannis , a message from beyond of the grave. "

Translations

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel : L'esprit du christianisme et son destin (Original: The spirit of Christianity and its fate ). Introduction by Jean Hyppolite. Traduction by Jacques Martin. Paris: Vrin 1948
• Ernst Wiechert : Missa sine nomine. Roman traduit de l'allemand by Jacques Martin. Paris: Calmann-Lévy 1952
• Hermann Hesse : Le jeu des perles de verre. Essai de biographie du Magister Ludi Joseph Valet accompagné de ses écrits posthumes. Présenté par Hermann Hesse (Original: Das Glasperlenspiel ). Traduit de l'allemand by Jacques Martin. Paris: Calmann-Lévy 1955

literature

• Michel Foucault : Foreword [ on madness and society (Original: Folie et déraison. 1961)]. In: Ders .: Writings in four volumes. Dits et Écrits. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2001. pp. 223-234
• Louis Althusser : Pour Marx. Paris: François Maspero 1965
• Louis Althusser : The future has time. The facts. Two autobiographical texts. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer (Original: L'avenir dure longtemps. Suivi de Les faits. Published posthumously 1992)
• Yann Moulier Boutang: Louis Althusser. Une biography. Paris: Grasset 1992
• Nikki Moore: Between work: Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jacques Martin. Diss. MIT (Department of Architecture) 2005 ( online edition ; archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Moulier Boutang, pp. 455f
2. ^ Moore, p. 21
3. ↑ M. Foucault, p. 227
4. ^ L. Althusser, Pour Marx, frontispiece. This dedication is missing in the German translation.
5. ↑ L. Althusser, The future has time. The Facts, p. 368
6. ↑ L. Althusser, The future has time. The facts. P. 204
7. ↑ L. Althusser, The future has time. The facts. P. 24f.