SartreandhisSuccessors:ExistentialMarxismandPostmodernismat ourFindeSicle

SartreandhisSuccessors:ExistentialMarxismandPostmodernismatourFinde Sicle

byWilliamL.McBride

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:1/1991,pages:7892,onwww.ceeol.com.

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ARTICLES

SARTRE AND HIS SUCCESSORS: EXISTENTIAL MARXISM AND POSTMODERNISM AT OUR FIN DE SICLE
William L. McBride Sartre never, to the best of my knowledge, used a word processor, or even, at least for literary purposes, a typewriter. In one of the innumerable interviews that he gave during the last years of his life, he spoke of the joy of writing his ideas down on paper, in the old style. I suppose that this fact would, for those who revel in the temporal identity game, make him pre-modern. Nevertheless, it is unquestionably true that in the minds of many, over a period of many years, Sartre epitomized the modern intellectual. That he was editor of a small-circulation but influential publication that bore the title, Les Temps Modernes, seemed to reaffirm the impression that he was a sort of worldhistorical bearer of the modern Zeitgeist, little matter that the choice of this title, out of various suggestions made by the initial team of the journal, had represented an ironic borrowing from Charlie Chaplins film, Modern Times, which savagely satirized what passed for modernity. It is rare today to find a writer who fails to word process, or indeed even to find a writer in English who would bother objecting that to word process is an ugly neologism involving a split infinitive. Jean-Franois Lyotard, that arbiter elegantiae, identifies postmodernism with, among other things, heavy reliance on computer usage and the permanent lack of consensus in matters of taste or in pre-established rules of language.1 Many of the other diverse published efforts at articulating the meaning of postmodernism concur with him on these two characteristics, while disagreeing on many others. Clearly, then, by these significant standards, Sartre cannot be classified as un homme postmoderne. Still less, I imagine, would a French speaker be inclined to classify him as une personage postmoderne, even though it would not be grammatically incorrect so to label him. But I am not going to be concerned here either with computer technology or, unfortunately, with feminist issues to any significant extent. With respect to the latter, a few remarks made by Sartre in his posthumously-published Cahiers pour une morale and in those interminable late interviews show that his heart at least was not entirely in the wrong place, even if one might want to raise questions about some of his other body parts, but at the same time I readily concede that his work contributes virtually nothing of value to current discussions about theory or local narrative or language in this area. I am, however, going to be concerned with Redigitized 2004 by Central and Eastern European Online Library C.E.E.O.L. ( www.ceeol.com )

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other aspects of political action and political thought, the landscape of both of which gives the appearance of having changed enormously since the time, about a quarter-century ago, when Sartres fame was at its height. This paper will be at once a partial vindication of Sartres later, post-Being and Nothingness, philosophy in light of more recent trends; a necessarily superficial survey of contrasts between todays global political and cultural landscape and the old one that most of those of us who are not still students knew when we were students; and a brief advertisement - all that I can reasonably afford at todays free market rates of the possibilities for political thought analogous to what once was called progressive in a postmodern condition that views progress as a mega-myth. There will be three parts to it, of decreasing length, The first will be a highly impressionistic survey of some general definitions or conceptions of postmodernism, with respect to many of which Sartres philosophy will be seen as an important though usually unacknowledged immediate ancestor. The second part will trace the origins of some of Sartres political stances and their corresponding theoretical conceptualizations, in contrast to some that are prominent among postmodernists; special attention will be paid to his reflections on historical totalization, as he called it, and on One World as found primarily in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The final mini-part will reach a few conclusions, some of which, it is to be hoped, will appear outrageous. I One of the characteristics that postmodernism seems most obviously to share with Sartres philosophy, even with his early philosophy, is the rejection of essentialist thinking. In his later writings, in particular, Sartre goes even further, evincing a suspicion not only of attempted essentialist definitions, but even of universal concepts as such; Joseph Catalano has developed this point very well in his study of the Critique of Dialectical Reason2 Hence, it would seem extremely paradoxical for anyone to try to capture the essence of postmodernism, although that is in a sense what Lyotards effort, however, reluctant he may have been about it, amounts to. At best, one may try to describe or identify a few of the theoretical or anti-theoretical moves made by those writers who have labelled themselves, or who have at least frequently been labelled, postmodern. One individual whom I have frequently seen so labelled, and who has the advantage of being at a distance from the local distortions and revisions of the movement that are traceable to the North American and French cultural scenes, is Umberto Eco. So I find it consoling to see that his own uncertainties about what to say postmodernism is have much in common with my own. In the postface to the later Italian edition of Il Nome della Rosa, he writes the following:
Unfortunately post-modern is a term that is good tout faire. I have the impression that today it is applied to whatever pleases whoever uses it . . . I believe . . . that the post-modern is not a chronologically delimitable

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tendency, but a spiritual category, or rather a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. We can say that every epoch has its own post-modern . . .3

If we go along with this, there are few, I think, who would hesitate to assign to Sartre the role of post-modernist of his epoch, however one chooses to designate the long epoch of Sartrean dominance in both literature and philosophy. More than one commentator has pointed to his first great literary splash, Nausea, as exuding a post-modernist atmosphere in its clear break with the dominant literary conventions of its time, the 1930s; William Spanos essay, The Un-Naming of the Beasts: The Postmodernity of Sartres La Nausee,4 epitomizes this tendency. On the philosophical side, even Being and Nothingness already undertakes conceptual moves that are dazzling departures from tradition for example, the ironic labelling of its anti-idealist demonstration of the existence of a sheer, indifferent, virtually meaningless being of phenomena as The Ontological Proof. Some post-modernist critics would counter, of course, that this makes Sartre a modernist but not a post-modernist, since his announcement, however ironic and even self-consciously quixotic, that this constitutes an ontological proof shows him still using the terminology of being and presence and merely reversing, rather than discarding entirely, traditional dualities or binarisms. This type of criticism, however, is cogent only to the extent to which one wishes, in opposition to Eco, to Lyotard (who identifies the postmodern as undoubtedly a part of the modern5), and to what I perceive as the inner logic of the postmodern spirit, to assert the existence of a binary opposition between the modernist and the post-modernist. But in any case the philosophy of the later Sartre, the one that has always interested me more, makes very little use of the canonical terminology of Being and Nothingness; he connects this terminology to his later thought in only one very brief footnote in the entire lengthy Critique. In fact, one of the later Sartres traits that endears him most to me and that would probably help establish his postmodern credentials in the minds of some is his utter insouciance about defending earlier theoretical stances from whatever period, as exhibited in his late interviews with Simone de Beauvoir and others. The claim, made in the title of this paper, that post-modernists are Sartres successors, with its implication that they have absorbed some influence, some intellectual heritage, from him is undoubtedly much more likely to invite rejection than the milder assertion that he was a post-modernist for his own time. The fact is that self-styled post-modernist writers in general, and French post-modernists in particular, seldom invoke Sartres name or his ideas as such.6 Jacques Derrida, for instance, who in the eyes of many appears as the quintessential French postmodernist, generally refrains from mentioning Sartre at all; when he does so, in Margins of Philosophy, it is in order to valorize Heideggers move away from the Western philosophical obsession with subjectivity and presence over Sartres alleged championing of this worldview7 a hierarchization within the ranks of twentieth-century philosophers that Derrida has consistently maintained.

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Now, it is true that Sartre in Existentialism Is a Humanism (which, as Derrida recalls, triggered the writing of Heideggers Letter on Humanism) defended simplistic conceptions both of humans as subjects and of ethical conduct that merit serious criticism. That text was, after all, a popular lecture, the publication of which Sartre originally permitted in what he expected to be small quantities, and he later came to regret it. In fact, as readers of Sartre are well aware, in later years he deliberately eschewed the language of subjectivity (as he explained in an interview with Pierre Verstraeten8), and both Nausea, though a very early work and not a philosophical treatise, and The Family Idiot contain trenchant critiques of humanism as it is more commonly understood. The latter goes into considerable detail about both an optimistic version of humanism connected with property ownership that was propagated in France after the political events of 1830 and a contrasting pessimistic version that came upon the French cultural scene after the revolution of 1848 and its suppression two variants of humanism that Sartre, though his stance is primarily that of dispassionate narrator, obviously finds more or less equally repellent. The general point here, I suppose, would be that there are (have been) many humanisms and many corresponding versions of subjectivity; but in The Family Idiot Sartre, postmodernist avant la lettre, appears to be increasingly loath to make such general points. What I suggest, then, is that Sartre moved increasingly toward viewpoints that have come to be identified as postmodernist during the many years, more or less a quarter-century, of his active career following the publication of Being and Nothingness in 1943 and the presentation of Existentialism Is a Humanism in 1946; that the deep skepticism about the Cartesian philosophical heritage concerning subjectivity and theorizing in the grand manner about grand entities that is to be found even in the grand theory of Being and Nothingness laid the intellectual foundations sit verbo venia for both this personal evolution of his and the evolution of the next generation of thinkers, for whom Being and Nothingness has been virtually obligatory reading at one time; and finally that the failure of most French philosophers of the next generation to acknowledge this important contribution constitutes a phenomenon that itself warrants suspicion and investigation. Let us consider this last point a little further. I had originally planned to make it in the highly accusatory manner to which my classical, male-biased education in rhetorical devices from Cicero to Marxs Poverty of Philosophy to Sartres polemical attack on Claude Lefort9 has accustomed me; I was, in short, prepared to write of nothing less than a conspiracy of silence about Sartre on the part of the younger generation of contemporary French Catalines. But it then occurred to me that someone consistently speaking the language of postmodernism as I would like to understand postmodernism would probably note that I was employing the outdated terminology of an intellectual police, and she or he would be right. Sartre himself, in his various references late in life to the distinction between the classical intellectual, of which he had been one, and the revolutionary or at any rate non-classical intellectual of the future, and particularly in that curious three-way

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conversation among himself, Philippe Gavi, and Benny Lvy entitled On a raison de se rvolter a postmodern-style document if ever there was one, in my opinion , articulated and lived out a new, more democratic way of probing issues that dispensed with the old, self-assured dogmatic style of the academic Grand Seigneur. Interestingly and ironically enough, in the dialogue in question Levy himself, still a very young man at the time, often shows traces of that very style. Unfortunately, the same intolerant and supercilious tone marks a great deal of writing and personal posturing in the postmodernist movement, despite its contrary pretensions. Consider, among many possible examples, Derridas dismissal of Sartres very deliberate substitution of la ralit humaine for Heideggers Dasein as a monstrous mistranslation in the passage in Margins of Philosophy previously mentioned; or Lyotards rather infamous appeal to wage war on totality in the course of his final-paragraph linkage of Hegelian thought with terrorism in What Is Postmodernism?;11 or the self-righteous fury that undergirds Anna-Maria Boschettis historical study of Sartre and Les Temps Modernes;12 or, to take only one of many possible North American examples, Richard Rortys disdainful manner of rejecting philosophical projects of the past in favor of the search for perfection in oneself that makes him, as Richard Shusterman has expressed it, into the hero of his [own] postmodern narrative.13 What Sartre in his late years finally saw clearly as the hierarchy-perpetuating, oppressive system of the vedettariat, the star system, is still in full force in the intellectual Foire sur la Place, as Romain Rolland put it. And there are many today who do not scruple to victimize the memory of Sartres contributions to thought in the interest of establishing their own place in that system even while theoretically renouncing hierarchy, just as Sartre himself in his own day did the same to the memory of, among others, Romain Rolland. In this deplorable respect, too, as well as in more constructive/deconstructive ways, postmodern stars are more Sartres successors than they would care to admit. To attempt to understand the phenomenon of Sartre-rejection or Sartredismissal on the part of so many postmodernist writers requires introducing considerations other than those of traditional, technical philosophical argumentation, since it seems clear to me that the extent of this distancing is inexplicable on the latter grounds. One of the striking features of postmodernist thought is its tendency to break down the boundary-lines among disciplines such as philosophy, literature, and the so-called human sciences; in this regard, as well, Sartre surely led the way with his simultaneous ventures in many genres, although I must admit that he always clung to a sense of there being an in-principle distinction between philosophical and literary writing that is challenged by much of what he himself wrote. Since I myself am very sympathetic to the breakdown of technical disciplinary boundaries,14 it does not disturb me to acknowledge that the kinds of considerations that must be brought into play here are not of the traditional philosophical sort. One ought, for one thing, to advance some Freudian/Lacanian hypotheses, pace Deleuze and Guattari, about murdering

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the father-figure. Above all, I think, one needs to consider the notion, so central to Sartres treatment of Flaubert, of there being something like an objective spirit the term to be understood in a highly complex and nonHegelian sense of different generations. It is noteworthy, in this regard, that one highly popular recent publication in France is a long series of interviews and accounts, a sort of cross between a novel and an enormously detailed piece of journalism that the authors call a rcit, or narrative, entitled Generation.15 Its focus is the events of 1968. This, virtually everyone agrees, was the most significant single historical turning-point for the future development of postmodernism in all of its aspects: the gateway to the end of the century, the period in which we now find ourselves. As Calinescu16 and others have noted, the idea of an apocalyptic, once-forall Revolution with a capital R is one that postmodernism strongly denigrates. Indeed, it is right to do so. Sartres analysis of the phenomenon of the group in fusion, the culminating point in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, employing the capture of the Bastille at the outset of what we now call the French Revolution as its principal example, was designed in such a way as to show this: the group in fusion is a moment of Apocalypse, a word that he deliberately employed, but it would be utterly illusory to think that it would last. Retreat into more segmented or what Sartre calls serialized forms of behavior must follow. This point was central to my own 1964 Doctoral dissertation discussion, later published, of Sartres treatment of fundamental change in society, in which I played with the idea of Apocalypse by tracing it to its Scriptural source,17 and the same sort of thing is done, at much greater length and with wider references, by Jacques Derrida in his 1972 lecture, Dun ton apocalyptique adopt nagure en philosophie.18 The events of 1968 were regarded by many participants and observers alike as being as close to an apocalypse as anything this-worldly can be. Their long aftermath, from which we may just now finally be beginning to escape, has followed the general path of denouement organization and reorganization, institutionalization, and in short reaction traced by Sartre himself in the later pages of the Critique. This is the political climate, French and virtually worldwide, in which postmodernism has developed, and it is with respect to politically-relevant issues that, in my view, the distance between Sartre and those I am calling his successors seems on the whole to be greatest. It is the attitude of complacency towards or simply acceptance of the dominant institutions of global late capitalism on the part of elements of the postmodernist movement an attitude that is fully intelligible in light of progressive disillusionments culminating in that of the aftermath of Paris and Prague 1968 - which to my mind sanctions the soupon of decadence implicit in the reference, in my title, to our fin de sicle. But by saying elements of the postmodernist movement I mean of course to avoid condemning postmodernism tout court, and indeed there are strong tendencies within postmodernism that I see as aiming at resurrecting Sartres old political agenda by other means. In order to develop this point, however, I need next to try to recapture, briefly, just what that agenda was.

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II The commonplace, shorthand expression that I have invoked is existentialist Marxism. Sartre never abandoned his belief in human freedom both as an important truth about our world and as a socio-ethical goal, and in his case the word existentialism serves above all to name those twin commitments. During the years following World War II, however, despite the dogmatic intransigence of the official French Communist Party ideology that was constantly and very publicly reinforced by their own internal intellectual police, he discovered much that was of value in Marxist philosophy as he became increasingly convinced that the road to freedom lay through socio-political analysis and action. Among the highlights of his most pervasively Marxist-influenced years were, I would like to recall, his 1946 essay, Materialism and Revolution, in which he combined trenchant criticism of the deterministic theses of so-called orthodox Marxist theory with an acknowledgement that no political philosophy of a more libertarian stripe had as yet been developed that could motivate a revolutionary elan comparable to that theory but without its fundamental misconstrual of human existence and its oppressive long-term consequences; his Koreanwar-period series of three essays, The Communists and Peace, originally occasioned by the French Communist Partys failure to orchestrate massive demonstrations against government policy, in which he argued that the glee expressed by other elements of the non-Communist Left over this failure was ill-founded, since the Party was for the moment the only effective political means for striving to meet the needs of the working class; and, finally, Search for a Method, eventually published as an introductory essay to the Critique of Dialectical Reason, which begins with the assertion that Marxism is the dominant philosophy of the epoch. All of this is old intellectual history now, but I have mentioned it not only because it is important to recall, but also because I wish, more controversially, to express agreement with Sartres overall positions in these essays as I have summarized them. Later on, to be sure, through a series of developments that culminated in Paris and Prague in 1968 as remote from the time of writing of Materialism and Revolution as we are from then , the Communist Party proved to Sartre and to many others to be hopelessly and irretrievably opposed to movements favoring greater human freedom; or, as Sartre expressed it in a preface to a collection of post-1968 essays by Vaclav Havel and other Czech intellectuals, propos of assurances given him by Soviet acquaintances in the early 1960s to the effect that improvements would come eventually in a liberalization process within the Soviet system that was slow but irreversible: I sometimes have the feeling that nothing was irreversible except the implacable and continual deterioration of Soviet socialism.19 But if one shares with Sartre, as I do, the conviction that history is not predetermined, one can make a strong argument both for the defensibility of Sartres more positive earlier hopes and for the importance of maintaining a principled opposition to some of the major Cold War policies of the Western powers at the time.

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Sartres assertion, in Search for a Method, of the intellectual dominance of Marxist philosophy in 1957 was, to begin with, a simple statement of fact about the intellectual climate especially in France at that time and for some time to come, and it was also, at a deeper level, a recognition of the sense in which the phenomena identified by critical Marxist thought as central for human social existence- alienation, classes, ideological mystification, and so on - were indeed more central than those with which any other extant philosophical movement was grappling. The remainder of the essay was in fact a very substantial contribution, from a historical point of view, to the discrediting and deconstruction of Marxist orthodoxy as a thought-system. It was brutally honest in expressing Sartres judgment about the sclerosis of that system and in denying some of its core tenets, notably its strong insistence on historical determinism and on the overwhelmingly greater importance of social over individual factors in explaining human action and history. Accompanying these points that I consider valid, in the text in question, was a very peculiar stageist account of great epochs in the history of Western philosophy that I have always criticized20 and still wish to. First there was the epoch of Descartes and Locke, he says, then there was the epoch of Kant and Hegel, now we have that of Marx, and next there will be the era of a philosophy of freedom, the contours of which are by definition as yet unknowable to us. That a post-Marxist philosophical era, whether or not appropriately labelled the era of a philosophy of freedom, was such a short distance over the horizon - this was a thought that Sartre probably did not entertain when he wrote Search for a Method or the Critique that followed. But his commitment at the time to a non-dogmatic form of critical Marxism, including in particular a belief in the importance of material factors in history, cannot be doubted. It was a Marxism in the traditions of Korsch and Gramsci more than of Lenin, and of course it was complemented by the existentialist insights from Sartres previous writings that I have already noted. Sartres own fidelity to Marxism in some form lasted through the 1960s, when he prepared some very interesting manuscripts about Marxism and ethics and participated actively, for instance, in a two-day discussion of the ideas of his Critique with members of the Italian Communist Party intelligentsia at the Gramsci Institute in Rome.21 As late as 1969 his deep interest in a Marxist problematic is made clear in a long interview taped for Yugoslav television by Eleonora Prohic in Dubrovnik. However, this commitment to Marxism eo nomine did not survive the enormous revulsion against the political movement that had all too successfully and for too long appropriated this label, the Communist Party, which swept France and much of the rest of Europe after 1968. In an interview that he gave in the mid-70s for the Sartre volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, Sartre rather casually, offhandedly tried to explain his ultimate disaffiliation with Marxism; I shall cite a few excerpts:
The analysis of national and international capitalism in 1848 has little to do with the capitalism of today. A multinational company cannot be explained in

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the Marxist terms of 1848 . . . [The philosophy of freedom that is being born today] is a philosophy that would be on the same level . . . as Marxism - a philosophy in which theory serves practice, but which takes as its starting-point the freedom that seems to me to be missing in Marxist thought . . .22 While I am not interested here in critiquing these remarks, as one certainly could, in light of the Marxism of Marx himself, I would like to maintain that there was no fundamental inconsistency, much less dishonesty, involved in Sartres abandoning the Marxist label after having accepted it for so many years. As he made clear in Search for a Method the era was identifiable as Marxist by virtue of the dominance of Marxs name, that is, as a convenience or shorthand. This conventional identification made intellectual (in principle) sense for many reasons having to do with the nature of Marxs philosophy: Marxs descriptive critique of the dominance of socioeconomic factors in the structuring of so many aspects of capitalist society, his understanding and use of dialectical rather than purely analytic methodology in social explanation, his implicit critique of all interpersonal or group relationships of dominance and subordination as unjustifiable, his awareness of the real possibility of an advanced, complex society rendered better than the present one by virtue of the prevalence of cooperative social arrangements over competitive, antagonistic ones, and so on. But the continued adherence to views and practices often the polar opposites of these (e.g., emphasis on primarily political rather than socioeconomic descriptions and solutions, positivist methodologies, and highly authoritarian, elitist, New Class social structures) on the part of self-styled orthodox Marxists risen to power had by the 1970s severely eroded the conventional association between Marxism and the vision that Sartre had been attempting to express in 1957, and by now that association has been virtually obliterated, at least in the popular mind. What needs to be retained for future reference, on the other hand, from the remarks by Sartre that I have just cited is that the new philosophy that is being born today will supposedly still be one in which, as in Marxist philosophy, theory serves practice. Maurice Clavel and others have noted the interesting fact, if something so impressionistic deserves the name of fact, that Volume One of Sartres Critique was overshadowed, upon its publication in 1960, by the more or less simultaneous appearance of Foucaults Madness and Civilization, despite the disparities in age and fame of the two authors.23 Thus, the process of eclipse of Sartres intellectual dominance had begun well before 1968, of course, and by 1968 structuralism, and in particular the Marxist quasi-structuralism of Louis Althusser, had become the rage in many student and other circles in France, England, and North America. Clavel himself apparently tries to interpret the contrasting receptions, at least as he reports them, that were accorded to the Critique of Dialectical Reason and Madness and Civilization in terms of a valorization of reason/attack on reason dichotomy that distorts both Sartres and Foucaults messages; Clavel views the rising suspicion of reason as a prelude to the appearance and, as it has turned out, rather brief heyday of the violently anti-Hegelian, anti-Marxist Nouveaux Philosophes during the 1970s.

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Should we think of Andre Glucksmann and the other Nouveaux Philosophes as being among the avant-gardes sit verbo venia once again of postmodernism? I think so. The level of vicious polemics in their work sometimes approaches, by anticipation, that of contemporary American political campaigns, and their gratuitous misinterpretations of texts (I am thinking particularly of Glucksmanns The Master Thinkers and of BernardHenri Levys Barbarism with a Human Face, now deservedly forgotten, but for a time all the rage) should have made Jacques Derrida weep, if it did not do so; therefore many admirers of postmodernism might be disinclined to claim affinity with them. But they were among the shock troops of the radical change in intellectual climate that took place in France in the 1970s and that is still exerting such a profound influence throughout the rest of the world. They combined revulsion against all Marxist and Marxizing (marxisant) politics with a forceful rejection, in the area of theory, of all talk of totality. In this way, they intended to attack the entire broad Hegelian heritage of systematic philosophy, including both its neo-structuralist Althusserian avatar and the existential Marxism of Sartre. And in this wholesale rejection of totalizing thought they anticipated some of the core insights later refined by Lyotard and other heralds of postmodernism. Although, as many critics have already pointed out, Lyotards effort to demarcate postmodernism as a radically novel condition and way of thinking is an obvious violation of this very canon, it does seem to me to offer a salient clue to real differences between the philosophy even of the later Sartre and the philosophies of some postmodernists, differences about history and theory that might help explain the soupon of decadence in political matters that I have mentioned, and that I would like to see settled more in Sartres favor. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the idea of historical totalization is a constant theme, almost an obsession. But those who would seize upon the pervasiveness of this word as proof of a close linkage between Sartres philosophy and totalitarian political tendencies are simply being blind to the subtlety of his idea of totalization and, above all, blind to the key distinction between totalizations and totalities as developed in his later thought. Totalization on the level of a given society or sub-group is the rough equivalent for Sartre of the notion of project at the level of the individual. It does not imply Aristotelean teleology in the sense that any given individual or unit has a predetermined end, the attainment of which would constitute the optimal development of that individual or unit. While there are texts in Being and Nothingness that seem to suggest that every individual has one single most fundamental project, and while Sartre tacitly employs the general ideal of a fundamental project as a fil conducteur in analyzing his own life in Words and even, in some sense, Flauberts life in The Family Idiot, this does not mean that he ever thought it possible to give an univocal, single-variable explanation of the trajectory of a life. The extreme detail and complexity of his analysis of Flaubert decisively refutes any such interpretation. Moreover, the all-pervasive intrusion of the social and historical environments in his post-Being and Nothingness conceptions of what human beings are greatly transforms the context within which all

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references to projects, much less to fundamental projects, within the earlier work are to be understood. Is it not perhaps the case, however, that the modernist temptation to oversimplify and falsely to unify accounts was merely resituated, in Sartres philosophy, at the level of society and history once he began to read and to be influenced by Marxian grand narratives about the so-called end of history the very peccatum mortale with which postmodernists, almost without exception, charge their philosophical predecessors? Let us consider the evolution of his thinking about this. We can see Sartre struggling repeatedly, in the unfinished Cahiers pour une morale of the late 1940s, with Hegelian notions of an end of history, attempting himself to combine this with a vague, idealist vision of a radically converted, morally redeemed world. But it is evident, as one reads the texts, that this type of approach is already becoming archaic within his own philosophy and accords ill with other elements of it, including a well-articulated skepticism about the notion of progress; it is because of his understandable dissatisfaction with the mix that he never published this manuscript. In Volume One of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, sub-titled Theorie des ensembles pratique, the transitions from one sort of social whole that he analyzes to another are all said to be reversible; there is no necessary direction, no inevitable progress, and indeed if anything there seems to be a quasi-necessity, as I mentioned earlier, for the most completely together ensembles, groups in fusion, to degenerate into rigid caricatures of what they originally were, namely, ongoing, freelychosen and -rechosen movements of individual members associated in a common, totalizing project. Totalization, for Sartre, is a process-word, denoting activity; as that activity becomes more and more passive as, for example, a once-vibrant and successful revolutionary movement turns into a regime of automaton-like bureaucrats , the social whole in question begins increasingly to resemble a totality, a rigorously determined, rigorously definable entity. Looking back, an historian can always characterize the society that he or she is describing in this analytic fashion as a totality, as if it all had had to turn out the way it did. The standpoint of totality, then, is that of the imaginary omniscient external observer; the standpoint of totalization is that of ongoing free human praxis. In short, through the device of totalization, as contrasted with totality, Sartre is simply rendering more intelligible the meaning of sociohistorical narratives. But what of history as a whole? Is it in fact permissible or even meaningful to speak of such an entity, much less to refer to it, as Sartre did in a number of texts, as one vast totalization in course? As the concluding paragraph of Volume One of the Critique24 indicates, the second volume was to be an investigation of the hypothesis hypothesis, not established fact , selfvalidating if successful, that history is such a totalization. But the second volume was never completed, and the detailed study of a segment of historical totalization that occupies the bulk of what was completed is the study of a stunning and enormous deviation, as Sartre puts it, that of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. It is in effect a long but still local narrative, organized around the proclaimed goal of building socialism, and it shows just

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how that deviated goal could have become incarnated in a single individual to whom absolute sovereignty was attributed, Joseph Stalin. When deviation reaches this point, it becomes equivalent to total failure. Right now, more than a half-century after the period upon which Sartre focused in his analysis, we are witnessing some of the final steps in that historical collapse. Since it is the Marxist tradition, in which Stalin claimed to situate himself, that most emphatically asserted that history was moving in a certain direction with a certain end, it is unsurprising that this collapse is widely seen as discrediting the very idea that history could conceivably be viewed as taking any particular course, however complex, multi-spiralled, and lacking in sharp contours. But I would like to argue that if this hypothesis of history as totalization in Sartres existential Marxist sense, as distinguished from the crudely simplistic accounts of history as inevitable progress offered by Hegel, Engels, and sometimes Marx himself, is discarded as utterly illegitimate, then we may indeed be left, in the arena of social philosophy, only with Rortyan rhetoricians chattering endlessly at each other from mutually incommensurable positions. We may, in short, have to discard the very idea of social theory itself, and with it whatever social practice a postMarxist philosophy of freedom, as Sartre put it, might be able to serve. This is, of course, precisely what Rorty among others has urged. As he has said, The attempt of leftist intellectuals to pretend that the avant-garde is serving the wretched of the earth by fighting free of the merely beautiful is a hopeless attempt to make the special needs of the intellectual and the social needs of his community coincide.25 Despite Sartres own comparative failure, in the Critique, to get much beyond a very primitive comprehension of the totalization of history as a process, in which we are all participants, that is becoming increasingly one in its increasing internal diversification,26 I myself have become more sympathetic to this hypothesis than I was when I read the conclusion of Volume One of the Critique soon after it was first published. My reasons are twofold. The first is, quite simply, a matter of observing the world in which we live. In a few scattered but important texts in Volume Two, Sartre wrote about the overall tendency of contemporary human beings and human groupings to move in the direction of One World; significantly, he used the English words.27 As description, this seems to me incontestable. The very sense of distance, or remoteness, between any two points on the planet Earth has lost most of whatever edge it still had when I was a child. Sartres point is that either we find a means to comprehend this ongoing and increasingly interactive process through what he calls dialectical reason (a term referring, by the way, to the complex and potentially or actually conflictual interrelations that constitute the movements of individuals in society, and having only the remote connection with the caricatures of dialectic as thesis/ antithesis that I have read in some postmodern literature); or else we give up intellectually and lapse into the strictly analytic habit of treating small segments of history as if they in fact had taken place and were continuing to take place in isolation from the other segments. But to do the latter would be conscious self-deception: we know that ours is, increasingly, One World,

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and the successive generations of what our Western conventions designate as the twentieth century have become and are becoming increasingly clear on this point. Someone, however fallible, would be doing a service by undertaking the task of trying to understand more clearly and to make more intelligible what is going on. If this is so, what is so wrong with the idea of recruiting volunteers for this from, inter alios et alias, the ranks of those who are paid to be philosophers? III My second reason for being sympathetic with the Sartrean hypothesis, in addition to the need for finding/constituting intelligibility, has to do with political ideals and politics. Without some vision, there can be no action. No single catchword or slogan can by itself construct a vision; hard theoretical work is required. Freedom by itself will not suffice. Neither will two catchwords that I see as being at the forefront of todays conversations, the one in philosophy and the other in politics: difference and free market. It would be a serious theoretical and practical mistake to regard the multiplying of all possible differences as equally desirable: for example, some of the differences in income, in life expectancy, and in the very possibility of implementing ones desires that are created under the circumstances of scarce resources in an unrestrained free market system lead to social outcomes against which I am prepared on ethico-political grounds to protest and to take what action I can. The nihilistic tendencies of some strands of postmodernism, if seriously followed, would render such a stance, based as it must be on a certain theoretical perception of todays society (societies) and of the ongoing temporal process in which they are embedded, unintelligible. In other words, either we achieve some comprehension, however painfully tentative, of history as an objective reality that is composed of the free, responsible, constantly-evolving and -interacting praxes of billions of human beings, including ourselves as long as we are alive, or there is no defensible standpoint from which to assess the relative merits of one groups projects over anothers; we might as well give up conscientious thinking about such things and become involved in the crack racket or the hostile takeover game or whatever other activity, engaged in by like-minded people, turns us on. It was the first of these options that constituted the core of Sartres agenda. A number of thinkers who have been strongly influenced by postmodern philosophies appear to me to share in this same agenda, even though most or all of them would no doubt abjure the Sartrean language in which I have couched it. Prominent among these within my own circle of American colleagues, for example, are Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Iris Young, Drucilla Cornell, and some members of the Critical Legal Studies movement. Chantal Mouffes work shows that even contemporary French philosophical culture has not been entirely purified of such tendencies. There are Critical Theorists both in and outside of Frankfurt-am-Main who would like to get beyond the Habermas-Derrida debate over postmodernism and Enlightenment rationalism and move on to the new tasks of social critique in

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our radically altered historical landscape: it is not entirely irrelevant that the university in Frankfurt a few years ago hosted what was perhaps the largest conference thus far on Sartres thought. It does, I think, make sense to speak of the possibilities for social progress, meaning the overcoming of specific current practices of oppression, without assuming a stance of omniscience concerning the alleged progress of history up to now, much less concerning the future. This should, in fact, be somewhat easier to do now than before, now that the enormous historical deviation that most ostentatiously utilized the language of progress in its self-understanding, the Socialism that came from out of the cold as Sartre put it in his essay on Czechoslovakia, is in the process of being liquidated. Meanwhile, however, I am seeking to maximize my own options in the spirit of not falling behind the times. For one thing, there is the matter of investment in the free market. A recent issue of the Lafayette, Indiana, Business Digest, to which a friend had given me a subscription, contained the headline: Post-Modernism Next Architectural Trend. As it reported, Rob Galbraith, vice president of Keystone Architecture Inc., says well see an influx of post-modernism locally.28 I need to prepare myself for this, in order to be able to identify the kinds of buildings that will have the greatest resale value. In addition, it should be known that I am prepared, despite all misgivings and my nearly lifelong love affair with the modern typewriter, to make increased use of my word processor henceforth. Sartre in his later years may not quite have gotten with the program, but I intend to do so.

NOTES
1. Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 81. 2. Joseph Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason (Chicago and London, 1986). 3. Umberto Eco, Il Nome della Rosa (Milano, 1985), p. 528 (my trans.). 4. Criticism XX, 3 (summer 1978), pp. 223-80. 5. Lyotard, op. cit., p. 79. 6. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Capitalisme et Schizophrenie, Tome 1, Lantidipe (Paris, 1972), for instance, make one favorable mention, in passing, of Sartres treatment of spontaneity as being a function of groups rather than of large social classes, and in an early footnote they endorse the claim of a critic, Maurice Gavel, that it is un-Marxist to regard scarcity as a sort of primitive given as Sartre does in the Critique of Dialectical Reason; aside from these two references, I have found nothing else about Sartre in this long, muchreferenced book. 7. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982), pp. 115-16. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre (and Pierre Verstraeten), LEcrivain et sa langue, in Situations, IX (Paris, 1972), p. 51. 9. Jean-Paul Sartre, Reponse Claude Lefort, in Situations, VII (Paris, 1965), pp. 7-93. 10. Ph. Gavi, J.-P. Sartre, and P. Victor (pseudonym of B. Levy), On a raison de se rvolter (Paris, 1974). 11. Lyotard, op. cit., pp., 81-82. 12. Anna-Maria Boschetti, An Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modernes, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, 1988). 13. Richard Shusterman, Ethics and Aesthetics Are One: Postmodernisms Ethics of Taste, in Gary Shapiro, ed., After the Future (Albany, N.Y., 1990), p. 124.

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14. See my essay, The Case of Sartre, Social Research 56, 4 (winter 1989), pp. 849-75. 15. Herv Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Generation (Paris, 1987). 16. Matei Calinescu, Introductory Remarks, in Calinescu and Fokkema, ed., Exploring Postmodernism (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 11-12. 17. Fundamental Change in Law and Society: Hart and Sartre on Revolution (The Hague Paris, 1970), ch. on Totalization, pp. 176-86. 18. Paris, 1983. 19. Jean-Paul Sartre, Le socialisme qui venait du froid, in Situations, IX, p. 227 (my trans.). 20. See, e.g., Fundamental Change in Law and Society, p. 116. 21. I hope that at least some of this material will eventually be published through the good offices of Professors Robert Stone and Elizabeth Bowman, who have called it to my attention. 22. An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, in Paul Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of JeanPaul Sartre (La Salle, Ill., 1981), p. 21. 23. Clavels comments are reported and discussed by Peter Dews, The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault, in Mike Gane, ed., Towards a Critique of Foucault (London and New York, 1986), pp. 75-76. Histoire de la folie was actually published in 1961. 24. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, Tome 1, nouvelle dition (Paris, 1985), pp. 893-94. 25. Richard Rorty, Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity, Praxis International 4,1 (April 1984), p. 43. 26. This phrase, the original referent of which is the truth (about history), is taken from the last sentence of Volume II of the Critique (my trans.). 27. See, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, Tome II (Paris, 1985), p. 310. See also Tome I, p. 166. 28. Business Digest, Vol. 8, No. 11, March 19, 1990, p. 5.

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