Earlier this week, the magazine Prospect published an article about the FBI's surveillance of (and theft of notebooks from!) Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. J. Edgar Hoover initially unleashed his hounds on "ALBERT CANUS" before one of his guys gently corrected him, saying the mistake was totally understandable and that "Canus" was probably just an alias.

The story is mostly a lark through a silly moment in surveillance history, but it has surprising passages about FBI agents playing intellectual detectives, parsing the philosophers' work for traces of Marxism and attending lectures. An enterprising grad student could make a project of thinking about a newly discovered FBI school of critical theory.

The philosophers' attitudes towards surveillance is also illuminating:

Sartre expected to be spied on. But he was never undercover. He valued total transparency. Hence his scorn for the Freudian unconscious and his anticipation and appreciation of the role that visibility plays in celebrity culture. Sartre proved a mystery to the FBI: it was impossible to steal information from him because he was desperate to give it away. Even so, after a quarter century of puzzling over his work, noting his links with Che, Russell, the Black Panthers, and the anti-Vietnam War movement they had to conclude, in their 1970 synopsis of his oeuvre, that, on the one hand, he can be “described as pro-communist” (and “encouraged youth to believe in nothing spiritual”) while at the same time is “also described by some sources as anti-communist.”

Camus, following in Sartre’s footsteps in 1946, was held briefly by immigration owing to Hoover’s stop notice. In contrast to Sartre, Camus proposed an aesthetics of discretion and privacy. Whereas Sartre tended towards a maximization of information, to the point of obscenity, Camus believed that there can be such a thing as too much information...

Narrative, philosophy, and espionage share a common genesis: they arise out a lack of information. Sartre’s expectation of a world of total information would kill them all stone dead. There would be no need of the FBI, novelists, or French philosophers. Existentialism and Absurdism insist on an asymmetry between being and information. Agent James M. Underhill, who heroically pursued the elusive “Albert Canus,” encapsulated the theory in a resonant phrase: “The file does not show the final disposition.”

But my favorite tidbit from the story is this:

One of the agents, having stolen some notebooks and diaries (“obtained from the personal effects”) in early 1945, complains that this “material [is] all in French...”

An FBI agent steals private, unpublished notebooks from Sartre and Camus—a great literary find!—and complains that they're in French.

Très absurde.

Thanks to Luke for the tip.