This study explores the existentialist themes in the life and work of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The testimony of secondary sources demonstrated that Guevara was well read in the works of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Though Guevara did not mention his existentialism explicitly in his works, significant correspondence exists between his perspective and that of the French authors. / The primary correspondence between Guevara and the existentialists is their attempt to reincorporate the individual into an understanding of revolutionary struggle. In this attempt, they returned to the radical humanism of the early Marx that the dogmatic heritage of Marxist positivism and scientism rejected. The existentialists portrayed the individual as the creator of history, not a passive cog or victim of historical processes. / Sartre and Guevara analyzed the "bonds of interiority" that held the individual to the fighting group and the ways that the fighting group expressed the freedom of the individual. For both writers, the fighting group was not only a means of revolutionary struggle, but was also the incarnation of free praxis within a group structure. / Guevara's revolutionary existentialism attempted to reinstall the acting person at the center of history and to underscore the quality of adventure in every historical undertaking. But Guevara's leap into the future demonstrated that history is both more resistant to change and more open to contingency than he had expected. His life and death were a striking example of the way hope and futility are mixed in every historical project. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-12, Section: A, page: 4146. / Major Professor: Donald Clarke Hodges. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_78367 |
| Contributors | Carefoot, David Rollins., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 113 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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