Being and Nothingness
Many of the Absurdists were contemporaries with Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosophical spokesman for existentialism in Paris, but few Absurdists actually committed to Sartre's own existentialist philosophy, as expressed in "Being and Nothingness", and many of the Absurdists had a complicated relationship with him. Sartre praised Genet's plays, stating that for Genet, "Good is only an illusion. Evil is a Nothingness which arises upon the ruins of Good".