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Interview

Aaron James

Skye Cleary interviews Aaron James about his new book, Surfing With Sartre.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s not normally associated with surfing: he much preferred being in a Parisian café than in nature; and as you say, surfing is more often associated with waves than wisdom. My first instinct was that Albert Camus would have been more connected with a Mediterranean lifestyle of sun, sand, and surf. So why Surfing with Sartre?

Sartre has long passages in Being and Nothingness (1943) about why skiing exemplifies freedom. At one point he pauses to note that waterskiing, a kind of ‘sliding’ upon water, is even better; he calls it ‘the ideal limit of aquatic sports’. So he’d be the first to welcome a phenomenology of surfing.

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