Vol. 9 · No. 1 · 2003
The Anxiety of Influence
Sartre's Search for an Ethics and Kant's Moral Theory

Sorin Baiasu

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Abstract
1. Introduction
In his book The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry,2 Harold Bloom presents several 'revisionary ratios', that is, several ways in which an author may critically refer to his predecessor in order to separate himself3 from the latter. The author's criticism of his predecessor manifests an anxiety of influence insofar as it overstates the differences and neglects the similarities between his and his predecessor's works. In this paper I shall show that some aspects of Sartre's criticism of Kant's moral theory in the Notebooks for an Ethics manifest an anxiety of influence.