The status of writing in postwar Paris was a fraught subject. Some of the most high-profile figures punished for collaborating with the occupying German forces were authors and publishers, most famously Robert Brasillach and Bernard Grasset. Equally, the acts of writing and printing, whether a victory sign on a misted window or a propaganda leaflet, put writers such as Vercors and publishers such as É ditions de Minuit at the forefront of resistance.¹ The city of Paris was released from a conqueror whose iconic book-burnings hint at a broader cultural war against France and its artists. In the political melee of the liberated city, the figures who quickly rose to cultural prominence were writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus whose outspoken political engagement promised to stage a break with the failures of the past, while asserting continuity with the tradition of the public intellectual so often considered a marker of French society. This process of renewal was marked by a number of important interventions by the intellectual community, the most prominent of which was Sartre's own What is Literature? (1947). Beckett's Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1949) and Levinas's "Reality and its Shadow" (1948) represent a cogent challenge to Sartre's interpretation of art, and can be understood better in this light.