Being and Nothingness that among them the work usually went unread. Being and Nothingness Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (), sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author asserts the individual's existence as prior to the individual's essence ("existence precedes essence") and seeks to demonstrate that free will exists. While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" (1927). Heidegger's work, an ontological investigation through the lens and method of Husserlian phenomenology (Edmund Husserl was Heidegger's teacher), initiated
Being and Nothingness sexual act". The critic Camille Paglia, writing in "Sexual Personae" (1990), equated Sartre's term for slime, "le visqueux", with "Dionysus' swamp, the fleshy muck of the generative matrix." The philosopher Thomas Baldwin, writing in "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy" (1995), described "Being and Nothingness" as a work of pessimism. He wrote that Sartre's argument that Freud's theory of repression is internally flawed is based on a misunderstanding of Freud, and that Sartre's attempts to adapt Freud's ideas are of greater interest. The director Richard Eyre recalled that "Being and Nothingness" was popular among British students in the 1960s, but suggests