MÉSZÁROS, István. The Work of Sartre

The Work of Sartre
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Satire and Reality, Szpirodalmi Knyvkiad, Budapest 1955

La rivolta degli intellettuali in Ungheria, Einaudi 1958
Attila Jzsef e larte moderna, Lerici 1964
Marxs Theory of Alienation, Merlin Press 1970
The Necessity of Social Control, Merlin Press 1971
Aspects of History and Class Consciousness (ed.), Routledge 1971
Lukcss Concept of Dialectic, Merlin Press 1972
Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness: The Work of
Renato Constantino (ed.), Merlin Press 1978
The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1979
Philosophy, Ideology and Social Science, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1986
The Power of Ideology, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1989
Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition, Merlin Press 1995
Lalternativa alla societ del capitale: Socialismo o barbarie,
Punto Rosso, 2000
Socialism or Barbarism: From the American Century to the Crossroads,
Monthly Review Press, 2001
A educao para alm do capital, Boitempo Editorial 2005
O desafio e o fardo do tempo histrico, Boitempo Editorial 2007
The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, Monthly Review Press 2008
A crise estrutural do capital, Boitempo Editorial, 2009
The Structural Crisis of Capital, Monthly Review Press, 2009
Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness:
Vol. 1, The Social Determination of Method, Monthly Review Press 2010
Vol. 2, The Dialectic of Structure and History, Monthly Review Press 2011
The Work of Sartre

Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History
by ISTVN MSZROS
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright 2012 by Istvn Mszros

All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mszros, Istvn, 1930The work of Sartre : search for freedom and the challenge of history / by
Istvn Mszros. [Expanded ed.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (pp. 331, 357) and index.
ISBN 978-1-58367-292-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-58367-293-8
(cloth : alk. paper) 1. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905-1980. I. Title.
B2430.S34M42 2012
194dc23
2012026841
Monthly Review Press

146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W
New York, New York 10001
www.monthlyreview.org
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface to the Expanded Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Introduction to the First Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
PA R T O N E
The Unity of Life and Work: Outline of Sartres Development

1The Writer and His Situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2Philosophy, Literature and Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3From The Legend of Truth to a True Legend:
Phases of Sartres Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
PA R T T W O
Search for Freedom

4Search For the Individual: The Early Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
5Freedom and Passion:
The World of Being and Nothingness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
A Note on Being and Nothingness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
PA R T T H R E E
The Challenge of History

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
6Material and Formal Structures of History:
Critique of Sartres Conception of Dialectical
Reason and Historical Totalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
7Lvy-Strauss Against Sartre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
8The Role of Scarcity in Historical Conceptions . . . . . . . . . . . 295
9The Missing Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
For Donate lla
A M A N C A R R IE S A WHOL E E POCH WITHIN HIM,

JU ST AS A WAVE CAR R IE S THE WHOL E OF T HE SEA.
The Purposes of Writing
I D E P E ND ON LY ON THOSE WHO D E PE ND ONLY O N G O D,

A ND I D O N OT B E L IEVE IN GOD . TRY AND SORT T HIS O UT !
Words
I T I S NOT M Y FAULT IF R E AL ITY IS M ARXIST.
Sartre Quoting Che Guevara
TH E FUNDAM E NTAL QUE STION IS :

W H AT HAVE YOU M ADE OF YOUR L IFE?
La Question
Preface to the Expanded Edition

I N A P R I L 1992 T HE QUARTERLY JO URNA L Radical Philosophyin an interview
published in its Number 62asked me the question: You met Sartre in
1957. Why did you decide to write a book about him?
This was my answer:
I always felt that Marxists owed a great deal to Sartre because we live in an
age in which the power of capital is overbearing, where, significantly, the
resounding platitude of politicians is that there is no alternative, whether
you think of Mrs Thatcher, or also of Gorbachev, who endlessly repeated
the same until he had to find out, like Mrs Thatcher, that after all there had
to be an alternative to both of them. But it goes on and on, and if you look
around and think of how both Conservative and Labour politicians talk,
they always talk about there is no alternative, and the underlying pressures
are felt everywhere.
Sartre was a man who always preached the diametrical opposite: there
is an alternative, there must be an alternative; you as an individual have to
rebel against this power, this monstrous power of capital. Marxists on the
whole failed to voice that side. I dont say that you have to become therefore
an existentialist in order to face it, but there is no one in the last fifty years
of philosophy and literature who tried to hammer it home with such singlemindedness and determination as Sartre did: the necessity that there has to
be a rebellion against the wisdom of there is no alternative and there must
10
TH E WOR K OF SARTR E
be an individual participation in it. I dont embrace Sartres philosophical

ideas but I fully share the aim. How you realize that aim is up to you in the
context of your own approach; but the aim is something without which we
wont get anywhere.
Sartre today in France is a very embarrassing person even to mention.
Why? Because what happened is that in the name of privatism and
individualism they have totally sold out to the powers of repression, a
capitulation to the forces of there is no alternative, and that is why Sartre
is a terrible reminder. When you also look into the background of the people
we are talking about, post-modernists of a great variety, they very often
were politically engaged people. But their engagement was skin-deep. Some
of these people, around 1968, were more Maoist than the extreme Maoists
in China, and now they have embraced the right in a most enthusiastic
way; or they were in the French Socialism or Barbarism group and have
become the peddlers of the most stupid platitudes of post-modernity.
What these people have lost is their frame of reference. In France
intellectual life used to be dominated in one way or another by the
Communist Party. That goes also for Sartre who tried criticizing it from
outside and pushing it in a direction which he advocated until he had to
come to the conclusion that work in collaboration with the Communist
Party is both necessary and impossible; which is a terrible, bitter dilemma.
He said that at the time of the Algerian war when the role of the Communist
Party was absolutely disgraceful. Necessary because you need a movement
to oppose the repressive force of the state; and impossible, because look
what that movement is like.
What happened, of course, was the disintegration of the French
Communist Party like several other parties of the Third International in the
last two decades. And with the sinking of that big ship in relation to which
the French intellectuals for a long time defined themselves in one way or
another, here are these intellectuals left behind: the ship has disappeared
and they find themselves in their self-inflated rubber dinghies throwing little
darts at each other. Not a very reassuring sight: and they are not going to
get out of it by simply fantasizing about some individuality which doesnt
exist; because true individuality is inconceivable without a community with
which you relate yourself and define yourself.
In this sense the relevance of Sartres uncompromising message about the

necessary alternative to there is no alternative is greater today than ever
before. That is so even if Sartres passionate advocacy could be spelled out,
P R EFAC E TO T HE E XPAN D ED ED ITIO N
11
right from his early writings onwards, only in the form of a radical negation
of the existent.
Already way back in 1939, in his beautiful essay on the novel by Faulkner,
The Sound and the Fury, Sartre insisted that Faulkners despair precedes his
metaphysics: for him, as for us all, the future is barred. Everything we see, everything we live through, incites us to say: It cannot last, and meanwhile change
isnt even conceivable except in the form of a cataclysm. We live in an epoch
of impossible revolutions, and Faulkner employs his extraordinary artistry to
describe this world which is dying of old age, and our suffocation. I love his art
and I dont believe in his metaphysics: a barred future is still a future.
The stubborn determination with which Sartre could carry on defying
all odds against those who were (and continue to be) pressing for a radical
change remains exemplary also in our age. For the stakes are getting higher
all the time. At this critical juncture of history they amount to nothing less
than threatening the very survival of humanity. Threatening it in a make or
break historical epoch when the future seems to be fatefully barred by capitals deepening structural crisis and by the all too obvious power of wanton
destruction emanating from it against the necessary revolutionary transformation and emancipation.
However, it is highly significant that Sartre did not stop at focussing
simply on the grave facticity of the barred future. His work is most relevant
precisely because he could stress even in his darkest and most pessimistic
moments that a barred future is still a future, underlining at the same
time every individuals direct responsibility to face up to the corresponding
historical challenge. That is the reason why he had to becomein a world
of shabby compromises and evasions pursued as a blindly self-imposed
response to the worsening crisisan embarrassing reminder and a disturbing presence.
More than fifty years ago, in 1958, in an article entitled Of rats and
men, Sartre expressed in a most inventive way his concern about the apparently prohibitive magnitude of the task to be faced. This is how he had put
it at the time:
I remember seeing a puppy after the partial removal of the cerebellum. . . .
He pondered before going around an object, requiring a great deal of time
and thought to accomplish movements to which he had previously paid no
attention. In the language of the time, we said that the cortex had assumed for
him certain functions of the lower regions. He was an intellectual dog. . . . he
either had to die or reinvent the dog.
12
So we othersrats without cerebellawe are also so made that we must

either die or reinvent man. . . . without us, the fabrication would take place
in the dark, by tinkering and patching, if we, the debrained, were not there
to repeat constantly that we must work according to principles, that it is not
a matter of mending, but of measuring and constructing, and finally, that
mankind will be the concrete universal, or that it will not be.
Could it be true that the partially debrained dog reinvented the dog as
an intellectual dog, in order not to die? The simple fact is that it is quite
immaterial whether the puppy really succeeded in reinventing the dog. The
issue at stake is not the literal truth (or not) of the described situation but
something incomparably more fundamental than that. It is the same vital
truth which indelibly affects the life of all human beings in their unavoidable
historical setting; the life of every one of them no less than the vision of their
deeply committed poets and philosophers who try to render explicit the
shared concerns of their time in tune with the changing historical predicament of humankind. This non-literal truth is the same which was highlighted in the first half of the nineteenth century by the great poetic genius
of Hungary, Sndor Petfi, when at the time of celebrating the appearance
of the first railways all over Europe he asked and answered his fundamental
question in this way:
Why did you not built railways before?
Did you not have enough iron?
Break and melt down all your shackles,
You shall have plenty of iron!
Petfis truth is the same as Sartres vital existential belief concerning the
survival of humanity. Only the circumstances have changed. They share their
meaning also in the sense that the necessary reinvention of man which
cannot be accomplished, as Sartre rightly says, by tinkering/patching and
mending in the dark but only by constructing guided by principlesis quite
impossible without breaking and melting down all our shackles. Literally
as well as in the broadest figurative sense. And that makes imperative the
revolutionary opening up of the barred future before it becomes too late.
This is why the Sartrean message, going to the roots of our problems, is even
more relevant today than in the past.
P R EFAC E TO T HE E XPAN D ED ED ITIO N
13
I N 1 9 7 9, WHE N T H E WO R K O F SA RTR E : S E A R CH F O R FR E E D O M was first

published in the Harvester Philosophy Now series, edited by my very
dear friend Roy Edgley, the book was meant to be followed by an analysis of
Sartres conception of history in a second volume, under the subtitle of The
Challenge of History. Other work intervened to delay the completion of this
project and modify some of its originally intended details. The complicated
problems involved in it had to be explored in their most comprehensive
settingattempted especially in my books on The Power of Ideology and
Beyond Capital, as well as in the recently published two volumes of Social
Structure and Forms of Consciousnessincluding the positive dimension of
the necessary alternative that had to remain to the end missing from Sartres
radical negation of the existent. Without undertaking such complementary
work in its required overall framework, Sartres passionate outcry about
the paralyzing burden of impossible revolutionswhich marked his final
years with unredeemable pessimismcould not be put in its historically
challengeable proper perspective.
At the time of publishing the first edition of this book to which an extensive Part Three is now added, a reviewer wrote that Mszross work is a
philosophical study . . . It not only provides a telling critique of Sartre, but
situates him in relation to twentieth century thought. Its approach to Sartre
comprehends all his manifestations novelist, playwright, philosopher, and
politicianand does justice to this most extraordinary man. While never
sharing Sartres openly confessed or implied pessimism about the feasible
solutions, the general orientation and spirit of the now completed project is
the same as originally intended. It is to put into relief, against diametrically
opposed but equally tendentious misrepresentations, not only the insoluble
dilemmas and antinomies of Sartres radical negation, as formulated from
the perspective of his class against which he rebelled with the greatest integrity, but also their representative value and relative historical validity for the
whole of our critical epoch. So as to do justice to this most extraordinary
man: our real comrade in arms.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Without falling into manicheism, one ought to intensify intransigence.
At the extreme limit any Left positionin the measure that it is contrary
to what they try to inculcate to the whole of societyis found to be
scandalous. This does not mean that one should look for scandal
that would be absurd and inefficaciousbut that one should not dread
it: it has to come, if the position taken is right, as a side-effect, as a sign,
as a natural sanction against Left attitude.1
JEA N -PAU L SART R E IS A MA N W H O LIVED half his life in the limelight of

extreme notoriety. An intellectual who already in 1945 had to protest
against attempts aimed at institutionalizing the writer, turning his works
into national goods, for which he had to exclaim: it is not pleasant to be
treated in ones lifetime as a public monument.2
What must be equally unpleasant is to be constantly subjected to abuse.
And the fact is that no writer in his lifetime has been the target of so many
attacks, from the most varied and rather powerful quarters, as Jean-Paul
Sartre.
What are the reasons? How should we approach the work of this man,
our contemporary?
16
1.
I N O CTOB E R 1960 A M AS S D EMO NSTRATIO N of war veterans on the ChampsElyses marches to the slogan: Shoot Sartre. In the same period, ParisMatch carries an editorial with the title: Sartre, civil war machine.
Some of the demonstrators or readers of Paris-Match mean business: his
flat is bombed on 19 July 1961, and again, a few months later, on 7 January
1962. For how could one leave in peace a civil war machine?
Nor is October 1960 the first time he is called a war machine. In June
1945that time from the opposite side of the barricadehe is attacked as
manufacturer of war machine against marxism.3 The irony of it all. Is it
Sartre who has changed so much? Or is it, perhaps, that this passionate
advocate of every individuals full responsibility in the midst of the forces
of impersonal institutionalization is deemed irrecoverable and thus, by
a curious logic, must be declared to be an alien body, a machineindeed
a mythical war machine at that? How revealing is the shared, bombastic
imagery? Why is it that powerful institutions in their confrontations with solitary individuals represent the relation of forces upside down and denounce
the voice of dissent as sinister sounds of a powerful enemys war machine?
In 1948 no less a power than the Soviet Government takes an official
stand against Sartre: its diplomatic representatives in Helsinki try to pressurize the Finnish Government to forbid the performance of Sartres play:
Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands). It is supposed to be hostile propaganda
against the USSRnothing less, nothing more!
Who is this man, this machine de guerre, armed with such mythical
powers? During the war, when Churchill tried to back his own arguments by
making references to the Pope, Stalin remarked with a sense of realism and
candid cynicism: How many Divisions, did you say, the Pope had? Did the
aging Stalin think, in 1948, that Sartre was about to launch an invasion, with
many more Divisions at his disposal than the Pope could ever dream about?
And while we are talking about the Pope, we should recall that in the
same year, on 30 October 1948, a special decree of the Holy Office puts
the whole of Sartres work on the Index. It is in the spirit of this Index
that sixteen years later, in October 1964, on the occasion of Sartres rejection of the Nobel Prize, the gentle Gabriel Marcel, spokesman of Christian
existentialism, thunders against him in a very non-Christian voice, calling
him inveterate denigrator, systematic blasphemist, man of pernicious
and poisonous views, patented corrupter of youth, grave-digger of the
West.4 Thus the decree of the Holy Office under the reign of Pope Pius
I N T R O D U CT ION
17
XIIthe same man who blessed Hitlers arms in their Holy Crusade
becomes the license to open the floodgates of unholy venom, in the name of
Christianity and as upholding the values of the West.
It seems, then, that Sartre is responsible for inflicting a mortal offense
not only on the great powers of this world of ours, but also on the earthly
representatives of the world of beyond. No mortal is likely to accomplish
much more.
2.
Y ET, EV E RY C OIN HAS T WO SID ES , and Sartres case is no exception to the rule.
And the rule is that institutions also try to neutralizeabsorb, recuperate,
assimilate (Sartres words)their rebels.
To describe in any detail the temptations extended toward Sartre
would fill too many pages. We must be satisfied with the mention of just a few.
Characteristically, offers of integration arrive from both directions. Not
long after being elected Vice-President of the Association of France-USSR
(a post he keeps up to his resignation following the events of Hungary in
1956), he is received with the greatest honors on his journey to Russia.
Once denounced by Stalins literary spokesman, Fadeev, as the Hyena of
the pen, now his booksproducts of the same penare published, and
some of his plays performed, in the USSR. Even Les Maines salesonce
the subject of a diplomatic exchange between the Soviet and the Finnish
Governmentsis performed in the East, though not in Russia but in Prague.
Ironically, not before but after the Soviet intervention in 1968. Equally, his
relations with the French Communist Partynotwithstanding some major
setbacks, as in Hungary in 1956are on the whole quite good between
1949 and 1968. Until, that is, Sartres evaluation of May 1968 leads to a
complete, and it seems irreparable, rupture.
As to the other side, the number of offers is literally legion; from that of
the Lgion dHonneur to the award of the Nobel Prize.
In 1945, in recognition of his merits during the Resistance, he is offered
the Order of the Lgion dHonneur, but declines it. In 1959, though
almost as a clumsy attempt to take back an offer that has not been accepted
Malraux accuses Sartre of collaboration, on the absurd ground that he
allowed the performance of his anti-fascist play, Flies, during the German
occupation, while in fact it all happened in complete agreement with the
Resistance group of writers.5
18
In May 1949, following Mauriacs attack on his political position,6 Sartre

turns down Mauriacs offer to get a seat for him among the selected few living
immortalsthe forty members of the Academie franaiseinsisting, in a
tone of irony, that he is not going to learn equality in the company of those
who display their own sense of superiority.7 In the same spirit, he rejects
the idea of joining another pinnacle of French culture, the Collge de France,
though his former friend, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, gladly did so.
Sartres stature has to be recognized even as high as the very apex of the
institutional pyramid: several Presidents of the French Republic address him
with respect. Vincent Auriol, in 1952, confides in Sartre that he finds Henri
Martins sentence excessive, but he cannot reduce it until he is allowed to get
off the hook of political protest in which Sartre plays a prominent part. (Sartre,
characteristically, does not oblige.) Giscard dEstaing, twenty three years
later, hastens to assure him that he had found much spiritual nourishment
and inspiration in Sartres writings on freedom. And even the proud General
de Gaulle, who considered himself Frances destiny, calls Sartre Mon Chr
Matre, to which the latter retorts: It is to mark well, I believe, that he intends
to address himself to the man of letters, and not to the president of a tribunal
[the Bertrand Russell tribunal on VietnamI. M.] which he is determined not
to recognize. I am no Matre, except for the waiter in the caf who knows that
I write.8 There cannot be much left to be said after that.
But perhaps the most scandalous of Sartres refusals is his public
rejection of the Nobel Prize,9 in 1964. Though he makes it amply clear in
his letter to the Nobel Prize Committee that he would turn down with equal
firmness the Lenin Prize, in the unlikely event that it was awarded to him,
Andr Breton accuses him of performing a propaganda operation in favor
of the East bloc.10 Sartre is condemned for an allegedly premeditated, calculated publicity stunt (as if he were in desperate need of publicity, like surrealism gone stale), although he writes privately to the Swedish Academy
the moment the rumors start to circulate that he might be awarded the Prize,
trying to prevent a decision in his favor, thus rendering unnecessary all publicity. This confirms again Fichtes wisdom, namely that when the facts do
not fit the preconceived ideas, umso schlimmer es fr die Tatsachen, all
the worse for the facts.
The only institution that remains curiously aloof from this race for Sartres
soul is the church. But then the church has a well established tradition of first
burning the alleged hereticsas Jeanne dArcs fate reminds uselevating
them to the ranks of sainthood long after they are dead and gone.
19
3.
T H US NO ON E C AN DE NY that Sartre generates intense passions. And when
he rejects the generous offers of integration, he is attacked with all the greater
indignation: for what could be more wicked than biting the hand that wants
to spoon feed you?
There is another stratagem: pretended indifference, but this is not of
much use with Sartre, as his old adversary Mauriac illustrates very well.
When Sartre assumes responsibility for the persecuted Maoist groups
journal, La Cause du Peuple, Mauriac writes in a tone of superiority: The
thirst for martyrdom which Sartre possesses is no reason for putting in
prison this incurably inoffensive character.11 Sartre answers a few weeks
later to all those who adopt Mauriacs line of approach: They often say,
for the ruse of the bourgeoisie is like this, that I want to be a martyr and get
myself arrested. But I dont care at all for being arrestedquite the contrary!
What I am interested in is that one should not arrest me, for in that way I can
demonstrate, and my comrades with me, Louis Malle or someone else, that
there are two weights, two measures.12
Here we can clearly see how Sartre, surrounded by the establishment
chorus of self-complacent laughter, succeeds not only in extricating himself
from a difficult situationdespite the uneven odds that characterize nearly
all the confrontations in which he is involvedbut also, a somewhat unlikely
outcome, in ending up on top. For if they arrest him, there will be an outcry
the world over for imprisoning Sartre for a crime of opinion (i.e. a political,
and not a criminal offense); and if they do not arrest him, fearing the consequences in world opinion, it is a humbling admission that the crime of those
who are prosecuted by the Government is in fact a political crime. A crime
of opinion which can lead to imprisonment only in the form of trumpedup charges, under the conspiracy of silence (often condemned by Sartre) of
liberal public opinion.
This is how Sartre squeezes victory out of what is supposed to be a hopeless position of defeat. The positive outcome does not just happen: Sartre is
highly conscious of the paradoxical constituents of his precarious position.
It is by no means accidental that he returns time and again to the problem of
winner loses. He explores the complex dialectic of defeat and victory in
order to grasp and lay bare the ways through which one can reverse the prefabricated odds: so as to show how it does come about that Loser wins;
indeed that at times loser takes all.
20
4.
H OW I S IT P OS S IB L E for a solitary individual, whose pen is his only
weapon, to be as effective as Sartre isand he is uniquely soin an age
which tends to render the individual completely powerless? What is the
secret of this intellectual who defies, with immense pride and dignity, any
institution that interposes itself between him and the realization of the
values he cares for?
The secret is no real secret: Sartre loudly speaks it out when he defines
the essence of living literature as commitment. All the controversy, indeed
scandal, follows from such definition. It is this passionate commitment
to the concerns of the given world; the Finite (as against the fictitious
pursuit of literary immortality), that acts as a powerful catalyst in the
present, and a measure of achievement linking the present to the future.
Not the remote future over which the living individual has no control
whatsoever, but the future at hand, the one within our reach which
therefore shapes and structures our present life. Other than such commitment to ones own, however painful, temporality, there is only the world
of evasion and illusion. This is the measure we propose to the writer: as
long as his books arouse anger, discomfort, shame, hatred, love, even if he
is no more than a shade, he will live. Afterwards, the deluge. We stand for
an ethics and art of the finite says Sartre.13 And in every sense he lives up
to his own measure.
He is a strange grave-digger of the West. For one could hardly even
imagine a writer more intensely concerned with moral values than this systematic blasphemist and corruptor of youth. This is how he sees the
writers task:
The most beautiful book in the world will not save a child from pain: one does
not redeem evil, one fights it. The most beautiful book in the world redeems
itself; it also redeems the artist. But not the man. Any more than the man
redeems the artist. We want the man and the artist to work their salvation
together, we want the work to be at the same time an act; we want it to be
explicitly conceived as a weapon in the struggle that men wage against evil.14
If talking in such terms means grave-digging for the West, who can say
that the West does not deserve the fate of being buried forever?
The work, as we can see, is defined in its total setting, and emphatically
not on its own. It is its dimension of being an act in the struggle against evil
21
that compels the reader to define his or her own position on the issues at
stake; and since the act is always clearly in evidence in Sartres works, no
one can bypass him with indifference. They can reject the moral intensity
of his measure but they cannot ignore it. Throughout his development
he applies with great consistency his criteria of commitment in literature,
even though he changes inside permanence.15 Almost twenty years after
writing the passage quoted above, he asks the question: Do you think
that I could read Robbe-Grillet in an underdeveloped country? And he
answers it with a self-critical affirmation: Facing a dying child Nausea has
no weight.16
It goes without saying, the literary world recognizes, with hostility,
its own indictment and defends Sartre against himself (not to mention
Robbe-Grillet). For did they not try, as long ago as 1945, to praise Sartres
first work, Nausea, as his literary testament,17 so as to lock him into the
walls of this national good, produced by its author at the age of thirty?
5.
I T I S N OT E ASY TO LOC K SA RTRE into anything, let alone into the prison
cell of timeless literary excellence. His view of the writers commitment is
a total one:
If literature is not everything, it is worth nothing. This is what I mean by

commitment. It wilts if it is reduced to innocence, or to songs. If a written
sentence does not reverberate at every level of man and society, then it makes
no sense. What is the literature of an epoch but the epoch appropriated by
its literature? . . . You have to aspire to everything to have hopes of doing
something.18
This conception of literature as a critical mirror19 of man and the

epoch shared by the writer with his fellow men sounds outrageousa
scandal to all those whose sensitivity has been modeled on lart pour
lart and on the self-contemplating irrelevance of various isms. Goethe
could still take for granted that every poem was a Zeitgedicht, a poem of its
time. But that was before the ravages of alienation succeeded in inducing
the writer to fall back upon his own inner resources. And while this isolation of the writer from its epoch and from the fellow human beings is the
real scandal, as a general acceptance of alienation by prevailing literary
22
opinion, Sartres passionate rejection of it appears as unforgivable scandal,

as betrayal, indeed as blasphemy.
To challenge established opinion, with all its institutions and institutionalized values, requires not only a set of firmly held beliefs but a very strong
ego as well. And Sartre undoubtedly possesses them all. The articulation of
his lifework is characterized by immense pride and dignity. For what could he
accomplish with humility in a hostile environment? An insane pride is necessary to write you can only afford to be modest after you have sunk your
pride in your work, writes Sartre.20 And he is by no means alone in this. His
vision of total commitment reminds us of a great Hungarian poets words:
Pushing aside intruding Graces,
I didnt come to be an artist,
But to be everything,
I was the Master;
The poem: fancy slave.21
In Sartres view, Art in its totality is engaged in the activity of a single

man, as he tests and pushes back its limits. But writing cannot be critical
without calling everything into question: this is its content. The adventure
of writing undertaken by each writer challenges the whole of mankind.22
To take upon oneself the burden of this challenge, and consciously so, as
happens to be the case with Sartre, is far from being an easy decision. But
once the writers fundamental project is defined in such terms, he cannot
shrink from the magnitude of his task without losing his own integrity (or
authenticity). He has to articulate the concerns of the whole of his epoch,
and follow them through, no matter what.
His vision of the whole carries with it a constant reminder of his own
responsibility for it all. Even if they want to absolve him of this responsibility, he must by calling everything into question assert and reassert his
own inalienable right to assume the burden of total responsibility. For the
whole of his epoch and the whole of mankind. This is why he cannot
help being intransigent in an age dominated by evasion and subterfuge,
compromise and escape; in short by reified institutional self-assurance, in
place of facing and tackling the contradictions which in their chronic nonresolution ultimately foreshadow the prospect of collective suicide. And
since this unflattering truth cannot be brought home to ears deafened by
the self-complacent noise of comforting compromise except by the loudest
cry of the voice of intransigence, uncompromising moral and intellectual
23
intransigence (not to be confused with the quarrelsome pursuit of narrow

self-interest) becomes the fundamental virtue of the epoch, a sine qua non of
significant achievement.23
6.
Y E S, EVE RY M AN C AR R IES A W H O LE EPO CH within him, just as a wave carries
the whole of the sea. But there are waves and waves, as there are seas and
seas. The sea which is our own epoch is far from being a quiet one, even in
its most peaceful moments; it is the turbulent sea of a make or break age of
transition from one social order to another, and Sartre is a giant wave of this
mighty sea. He can express many aspects of the dynamic turmoil, following
its changes in many different ways, but he categorically refuses to assume the
shape of entertaining ripples on the surface of the sea, so as to hide under
some cheerful diversion the gathering storm.
It is not comforting to be reminded of the coming of the storm, but
Sartre cannot help being a constant reminder: one would look in vain for
playful serenity in his massive oeuvre. No one in this century has summoned
up with greater intensity the combined resources of philosophy and creative literature in order to demonstrate the possibilities and the limitations
of the individual as situated at this crucial juncture of human history. If the
tormented articulation of his vision is disturbing, it is not his fault. Nor is it
surprising that precisely the most valid and farsighted elements of this vision
as we shall see latershould meet with the greatest incomprehension and
hostility, leading to isolation: the ironical predicament of lonely notoriety.
In this again he shares the fate of the great poet Jzsef, who says:
No easy comfort for men:

My words are rising mould.
Clear and heavy to bear
I am, like the cold.24
Comfortless, cold clarity pervades many of Sartres works, and no

reader can assume in relation to them the attitude of cool detachment.
There are two principal factors which make such detachment impossible:
the organic connection of the methods of literature and philosophy, and
the careful situation of every detail in relation to the complex totality to
which they belong.
24
From the beginning, Sartres work has been characterized by a conscious effort to combine philosophy and literature in order to intensify the
powers of demonstration and persuasion. We shall see later the specific
forms of this effort across his development. The point here is simply to
stress the purpose behind this method. It arises out of the authors conviction that against the power of prevailing myths and vested interests the
force of analytical reason is impotent: one does not displace an existing,
firmly rooted positive (in the Hegelian sense positive) reality by the sheer
negativity of conceptual dissection. If the weapon of criticism is to succeed,
it must match the evocative power of the objects which it opposes. This is
why the real work of the committed writer is . . . to reveal, demystify, and
dissolve myths and fetishes in a critical acid bath.25 The imagery clearly
displays the nature of the enterprise. It is to prevent opting out with cool
detachment. What is at stake is nothing less than a general assault on the
well established positions of cosy comfort, whether they appear as the
complicity of silence or in any other form. Sartre wants to shake us, and
he finds the ways of achieving his aim, even if in the end he is condemned
as someone constantly in search of scandals.
The other point, the concern with totality, is equally important. Sartre
insists that the beauty of literature lies in its desire to be everythingand not
in a sterile quest for beauty. Only a whole can be beautiful: those who cant
understand thiswhatever they may have said have not attacked me in the
name of art, but in the name of their particular commitment.26 Indeed, the
real character of a particular commitment is not recognizable without laying
bare its links with the given totality. Particularism can and must claim the
status of universality in the absence of a comprehensive frame of reference,
since the failure to be in a proper perspective necessarily transforms particularism itself into its own perspective, and thus into the measure of everything
else. Any attempt to reveal the proper connections with totality must therefore clash with the interests of the prevailing particularisms. At the same
time, the unveiling of particularisms does not leave only their champions
naked but suddenly exposes also the vulnerability of all those who were
previously able to find self-assurance and (however illusory) comfort in the
sheltered corners of various particularisms.
But there is no other way. The critical mirror cannot fulfill its functions if it is fragmented into a thousand pieces. Such a broken mirror can
only show distorting details even when they appear to be faithful in their
immediacy: distorting because severed from the whole which alone can
confer upon them their full (i.e. true) significance. The choice is therefore
25
unavoidable. Either one abandons the aim of bearing witness to the age in
which one lives, and thus ceases to be a critical mirror; or one appropriates
the epoch in the only way in which this can be done through writing by the
uncomforting, cold clarity of a work which reveals, shows, demonstrates
the connections of the parts with the whole, demystifying and dissolving the
fetishes of the seemingly rock-solid, established immediacy in the dynamic
framework of constantly changing totality. There can be no doubt of which
is Sartres choice.
7.
T H E F OC U S OF SART R E S GRA P P LING with totality is his search for freedom.
Everything appears in relation to this concern. He calls his novel cycle Roads
to Freedom: a title that might well sum up the character of his work as a
whole. (This applies as much to his literary as to his philosophical/theoretical work.) And precisely because his work has the focus it does have, Sartre
never gets lost in the sociohistorical totality of which he is a tireless explorer.
Of course, his preoccupation with freedom goes through many metamorphoses. There is a world of difference, even if accomplished linterieur dune permanence (inside permanence), between saying that man
is free so as to commit himself, but he is not free unless he commits himself
so as to be free27 and recognizing that no one is free unless everybody is
free . . . Freedom is conditionednot metaphysically but practically by
protein.28 The first quotation offers a solution only in the form of a verbal
paradox; the second, by contrast, assumes a more modest posture, but indicates some tangible targets for human action. All the sameand this is why
he is right to talk about change inside permanencethe organizing centre
and structuring core of Sartres work remains his all-embracing concern for
freedom. The removal of hunger and exploitation do not appear as ends in
themselves but as necessary stepping stones towards the liberation of man,
towards the realization of his freedom.
Sartres work covers an enormous area and shows an immense variety:
from occasional articles to a novel cycle, from short stories to massive philosophical syntheses, from film scripts to political pamphlets, from plays to
reflections on art and music, and from literary criticism to psychoanalysis, as
well as monumental biographies, attempting to grasp the inner motivations
of unique individuals in relation to the specific social-historical conditions of
the age which shaped them and which in their turn they helped to transform.
26
Yet one cannot say that the trees hide the wood. Quite the contrary. It is
Sartres lifework as a whole that predominates, and not particular elements
of it. While one can undoubtedly think of unique masterpieces among his
numerous writings, they do not account by themselves for his true significance. One might go as far as to say that it is his total fundamental project,
with all its manifold transformations and permutations, which defines the
uniqueness of this restless author, and not the accomplishment of even his
most disciplined work. For it is an integral part of his project that he constantly changes and revises his previous positions: the many-faceted work
articulates itself through its transformations, and totalization is achieved
through ceaseless de-totalization and re-totalization.
Success and failure thus become very relative terms for Sartre: they turn
into one another. Success is the manifestation of failure and failure is the
reality of success. As Sartre puts it, in the domain of expression, success
is necessarily failure,29 and he quotes his friend, Giacometti, according to
whom when failure reaches its climax and all is lost, at this point . . . you
can throw your sculpture in the rubbish bin or exhibit it in a gallery.30 The
reason is (though this is not quite how Sartre puts it, tending at this point
towards a timeless explanation) that the writer and the artist in our age have
to assemble their work from fragmented pieces. For fragmentation and compartmentalization (or, at another level, isolation and privatization) are not
mere figments of the intellectuals imagination but objective characteristics
of contemporary socio-historical reality. And this makes the work, even
when it consciously aims at totalizationinherently problematical.
There are many different ways of facing up to this problem; the names
of Proust and Thomas Mann indicate two clearly contrasting attempts. But
neither Prousts ordered subjectivity, nor Thomas Manns disciplined and
restrained objectivity can be compared to Sartres project. The relevant
comparison is Picasso, whatever their differences: both devour, with insatiable appetite, everything that comes their way, and produce not so much
representative works as a representative lifework.
Thus it does not matter that particular works are not paradigm summations of the artist, in the sense in which la recherche du temps perdu
and The Magic Mountain certainly are. It does not matter that the particular
works (even Guernica) are more problematical than the ones which, by contrast, are constituted on the basis of a most careful sifting and elaboration
of the given moments of reality. If Picasso and Sartre have to move on from
a particular kind of synthesis to something on the face of it quite different,
it is because what is involved in their quest is a type of totalization which
27
always refers to the artists lifework as its immediate ground. Theirs is a

singular form of subjectivity in comparison to Proust and Thomas Mann.
The former produces his synthesis by dissolving the world of objects in his
interiority and subjectivity; the latter makes the writers subjectivity recede
quietly behind a carefully reconstructed objectivity. In both Sartre and
Picasso, subjectivity is always in evidence but uses as its vehicle the world of
objects, not to subjectivize it but to nihilate it (to use Sartres expression)
in the course of depiction. As a result of this dialectical process of objectivation-nihilationa first cousin of Brechts Verfremdungseffektthe lifework is enriched, paradoxically, at the expense of the particular work which
it uses to stand on its own shoulders, so to speak. We are captivated by
the process of nihilating objectification that produces the lifework, and not
necessarily by particular results. Just how many individual works survive in
the long run is irrelevant. What matters is the constitution of a representative
lifework: a singular fusion of subjectivity and objectivity.
The great variety and mass of Sartres particular projects readily combines into a coherent whole. The extraordinary coherence of his lifework
is not preconceived. It is not the result of an original blueprint which is
imposed on every detail as time goes by: that would be an artificial, external
unity. Here we have to do, on the contrary, with an inner unity that prevails through the most varied manifestations of formal divergence. This is an
evolving unity that emerges through more or less spontaneous explorations
of the roads to freedomor, for that matter, of the manifold obstacles to
freedomwhatever they happen to be. The unity is therefore structural and
not thematic: the latter would be far too restrictive for a lifework. (Some of
Sartres works are, though, characterized by an attempt to achieve a thematic
unity, and by no means always with a happy result, most notably his novel
cycle; but this is another matter.) Thus Sartre is right in rejecting suggestions
that his conception of commitment in literature leads to thematic restriction
and political illustration as well as to a paralysis of artistic spontaneity.
But to stress how the exploration of the roads to freedom produces
the structural unity of Sartres work is not enough to take hold of its specificity. It is equally important to put into relief the structuring role of Sartres
conception of the individual in his work as a whole. For freedom does not
appear in its generalitythat would be thematically restrictive political illustration or abstract symbolism, both rejected by Sartrebut always as manifest through particular existential predicaments, whether the subject is from
Greek antiquity or from Modern France. It is in this sense that he is and
remains an existentialist.
28
Kant asserted the primacy of practical reason (i.e. the supremacy of moral
judgement) in the architectonic of his system, and he carried through this
principle with exemplary consistency. Sartrenot only as a young man, but
also as the author of an ethical work written at the age of sixty31 quotes
Kants you ought to, therefor you can, and insists on the primacy and centrality of individual praxes vis--vis collective and institutional structures.
Such a statement clearly assigns a prominent place to the world of morality.
This could not be otherwise without undermining the inner unity and consistency of Sartres work. For, as he remarks in 1944, Morality is . . . my
dominant preoccupation; it always has been.32 And so it has remained
ever since, directly or indirectly, in theoretical and in literary forms. It is this
primacy and centrality assigned to individual praxes, in close relation with
the problematics of freedom, which defines the specificity of Sartres fundamental project through all the variety of its manifestations.
8.
T H E P O INT OF R E AD ING A CO NTEMP O RA RY is to recognize and examine
ourselves in his critical mirror. This is not a one-way business. For reading
is interpreting and thus necessarily implies not only an examination of
ourselves, but at the same time also a critical examination of the mirror and of
its relationship to the epoch which it reveals. As Sartre puts it, recognizably
in terms of his own central concerns, the reader freely allows himself to be
influenced. This fact alone is enough to quash the fable of his passivity. The
reader invents us: he uses our words to set his own traps for himself. He is
active, he transcends us.33
This is particularly true of reading a contemporary author. For there are
many crucial junctures of experience which we share with him. This confers
a privileged position on the reader in his critical dialogue with his living
contemporary. But saying that only accounts for the credit side of the equation. The debit side consists in the particular difficulties of evaluating the
lifework of a living contemporary. All my works, says Sartre, are facets of
a whole whose meaning one cannot really appreciate until Ill have brought it
all to an end.34 This is true enough. But not quite. Were it categorically true,
evaluation of a contemporary author would be a priori impossible. The job
of the critic would oscillate between arbitrary subjectivity (inventing
the author entirely out of ones own concerns, using his words only as a
pretext for pseudo-objective self-exhibition) and the dead objectivity of mere
29
description of the works reviewed: a superfluous and hopeless venture.

To be sure, evaluation can proceed only from the whole, which is, by
definition, incomplete so long as the lifework has not been brought to its
end. All the same, when one deals with a significant author, whose individual
works are facets of a whole, new and possible additions are not capricious
attempts at a radical break, but additions which are feasible in relation to the
given and self-evolving whole. In other words, all modifications represent
change lintrieur dune permanence, in accordance with the dialectic
of continuity and discontinuity. The structuring elements of an original lifework are clearly visible at a relatively early age; and the tendencies of a writers quest are displayed through the type of variations the particular works
represent in relation to one another.
And there is a crucialone might say strategicpoint of reference:
the stubborn recurrence of some basic concerns which assume the form
of incomplete or unfinished (for within the given writers project unfinishable) works. When a writers lifework is suddenly brought to its end, what
happens is that the former incompleteness is elevated to the level of completion. Paradoxically, in the shape of works unfinishable for inner reasons we
find anticipations of the completed lifework; and we find these in particular
abundance in Sartres oeuvre. A closer look at themnot in isolation but
in relation to the restmay help to provide the vantage point from which a
critical assessment of a living contemporary becomes possible.
P A R T
O N E
The Unity of Life and Work:

Outline of Sartres Development
The important thing is not what one is but what one does.35
1. The Writer and His Situation

1.
A WR I T E R C R E AT E S HIS WO RK from the raw material of experience given to
him by the contingency of his situation, even if, as in Kafka, the end result
seems to have very little in common with the immediate ground from which
the work emanates. Some writers, like Villon, throw themselves right in
the middle of the turmoil of their epoch, and live through the events with
great intensity at the level of particularized human conflicts and adventures.
Others, like Schiller or Hegel, leave the ground of their direct experience
much more radically behind them when they articulate in works their view
of the meaning of their age. And, of course, there can be a virtually endless
number of variations between the two extremes.
The interchange of life and work of which Sartre is intensely awareit
is enough to mention in this respect Saint Genet and The Idiot of the Family
on Flaubertconstitutes the writers life in the interest of his work and vice
versa; he makes his work and his work makes its author. But, of course, it
all happens within a given social framework which constitutes both the
horizon and the ground of human achievement. The writer does not lead
a life of double book-keeping. He reaches out for experience in the spirit
of his work in the course of its articulation, and he transforms the acquired
experience into work. Thus he turns contingency into necessitywithin
the broad framework of his social reality: the ground and the horizon of a
34
free and conditioned workand at the same time he turns the necessity
of this ground and horizon into the new contingency of a somewhat modified starting point for his contemporaries, who are now challenged to define
themselves also in relation to his work.
Three important questions arise in this context:
1. How and why does a writer choose writing as the specific form in which
the interaction of life and work is carried out?
2. Given his original choice, how does he erect from the scraps of
contingency at his disposal the structured necessity of his work? For no
man comes in direct contact with the World Spirit, not even Hegel
who thinks to glance at it in the shape of Napoleon on horseback on the
battlefield of Jena.
3. What is the spectrum of his feasible work, that is, what can be successfully
accomplished in the framework of his fundamental project, given the
dialectical interchange between the sum of the writers lived experience
and the particular projects on which he embarks? In other words, what
kind of work can he make while being made by them?
The first question concerns the nature and constitution of the writers
fundamental project. In a generalized form (i.e. asking the same sort of
question about individuals in general, to whatever walk of life they may
belong) it can be phrased like this: By what activity can an accidental individual realize the human person within himself and for all?36 This makes it
clear that the form in which we encounter the problem in so many of Sartres
works (Words, Saint Genet, Of rats and men, The Idiot of the Family, for
example) is a searching confrontation of a typical modern problem rendered increasingly acute by a certain type of social development: a process
of individualization and privatization inseparable from the advancement of
alienation. As Marx puts it: The present condition of society displays its
difference from the earlier state of civil society in that in contrast to the
pastit does not integrate the individual within its community. It depends
partly on chance, partly on the individuals effort, etc., whether or not he
holds on to his station.37 The accidental individual, divorced from his
universal being, must therefore embark on a project of great complexity:
a journey of discovery how to realize the human person within himself
and for all. A journey that ends only by death: either the suicide of a
T H E W R IT E R AN D HIS S I TUATIO N
35
self-complacent coming-to-a-halt (for example, the institutionalized and

recuperated writer) or the natural death which is the completion of life.
Thus, the fundamental project and its articulation through particular projects become the same, and the originally envisaged discovery assumes the
form of a constant rediscovery of authentic self-renewal in accordance with
the individuals changing situation, in the interest of realizing the human
person within himself and for everyone else. Accordingly, Sartres often
recurring examination of the constitution of a writers project whether his
own or someone elseswhich might appear to the superficial observer as
a narcissistic obsession, is in fact concerned with the meaning of every individuals enterprise. A quest for a meaning in society in which he cannot help
being an accidental individual but which he must in some way transcend
if he is to snatch back his own humanityfor himself and for allfrom the
powers of alienation.
2.
TO A N SW E R T HE S E C OND Q UESTIO N in detail is a truly forbidding undertaking.
For it involves the collection and evaluation of a virtually infinite number of
data. And once infinity enters an equation whether in quantum theory
or in the Sartrean project on Genet and on Flaubert (not to mention those
abandoned, after some hundreds of pages, on Mallarm and on Tintoretto) the
whole equation becomes methodologically problematical to an extreme degree.
It is by no means accidental that Saint Genet, originally intended as a
short preface to a volume of Genets writings, grows into a massive work
of 573 pages, only to be dwarfed later by the several thousandand always
incompletepages of the study on Flaubert, also originally envisaged as
a much more limited project. If one adds to these the considerable mass
of Sartres abandoned works of this kind there is clearly something to be
explained. This will be attempted in its proper context, in Part Three, for it
is inextricably linked to Sartres conception of history as singular and nonuniversalizable; a conception that seeks to demonstrate the dialectical
intelligibility of that which is not universalizable.38 Here the point is simply
to emphasize the relevance of the question to an understanding of Sartre
himself in two respects. First, Sartre always combines the investigation of a
writers fundamental project with an enquiry, in extenso, into the concrete
ways in which he squeezes necessity out of the contingencies of his situation,
thus producing the exemplary validity of a work whose constituents are, in
36
principle, readily available in each and every one of us. Secondly, turning
into necessity the scraps of contingency as encountered in everyday circumstances is much in evidence in Sartres own development. This is the sense
in which the unity of his work emerges, not out of some mythical original
blueprint, but on the basis of a totalizing determination which aims at integrating the elements of transformed facticity into a coherent whole. We
can only indicate a few particular events and circumstances as types of such
transformations, thus violating Sartres own rule about the non-universalizability of the singular.
In 1940 41, while prisoner of war, Sartre obtains the works of Heidegger
a persona gratissima with the Nazis and gives a course on his philosophy
to some fellow-prisoner military chaplains. Naturally, Kierkegaard is also an
integral part of their discussions, which in their intensity lay the foundations
of Being and Nothingness, drafted a year later. Around Christmas, in the
same company, Sartre writes his first play, Barionaor the Son of Thunder.
Both events acquire a major significance for his future. The experience of
writing Bariona and its reception by his comrades determine Sartres view
that the theatre ought to be a great collective religious experience39a
view reaffirmed by him on many occasions, stressing the organic connection between theatre and myth. (The idea goes well beyond theatre only, as
we shall see in the next chapter.) Similarly, the integration of Kierkegaard
and Heidegger into Sartres world of ideas and images carries far-reaching
consequences. His book Saint Genet adopts as its structuring principle
(for interpreting Genets metamorphoses) the Kierkegaardian stages: the
ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious, though the third metamorphosis is now identified as the predicament of the Writer. But as we learn
in many places, in my imagination, literary life was modeled on religious
life. . . . I had transposed religious needs into literary longings.40
Also, the depth of his contact with Kierkegaard can be measured with
Sartres innumerable references to the singular, or indeed to the singular
universal. The same goes for Heidegger. His role cannot be overestimated
in the formation of Sartres structure of thought. It would be useless to speculate what would have happened had Sartre been given the experience of
a Russian instead of a Nazi prisoner of war camp, with the works of Marx
and Lenin on the shelves. Useless not only because of the inherent sterility
of counterfactual conditionals but also because his first acquaintance with
Heideggers writings, though not very deep, predates the war experience by
some ten years. In any case, Sartre puts Heidegger to his own use. It would
be as mistaken to read Sartre through Heideggers eyes as the other way
37
round. All the same, one cannot build a crystal palace from stone. Thus,
while Sartre is right in defending himself against sectarian attacks on account
of Heideggers Nazi past, his arguments on the real issue are far from convincing. He says: And then Heidegger, so what? If we discover our own
thought propos of another philosopher, if we ask him for techniques and
methods susceptible to make us accede to new problems, does that mean
that we marry all his theories? Marx had borrowed from Hegel his dialectic.
Would you say therefore that Capital is a Prussian work?41 The point is not
only that Sartre borrows from Heidegger much more than techniques and
methods but alsoand this is far more importantthat he never submits
Heideggers work to that radical settling of accounts which characterizes
Marxs relationship to Hegel.
What we can see in all these instances is that contingency is in a sense
superseded. Not that the writer can do whatever he pleases. (As a matter of
fact, Sartre has to pay a high price for adopting a great deal from Heideggers
truncated ontology which can found only itself and therefore must coil back
into itself. More about this later.) Contingency does not give way to some
mystical freedom emanating from the intellectuals subjectivity but to a
structured necessity. What happens before our very eyes is that the accidental character of contingency is transcended and metamorphosed into
the necessity of inner determinations.
3.
T H E T H IR D QU E ST ION RA ISED A B OVE the spectrum of a writers feasible
work is directly linked to the range of his personal experiences. In 1959,
after praising Franoise Sagan for producing something new on the basis
of personal experience,42 Sartre indicates that one of the main factors in
his decision to abandon writing novels was his awareness of the deficiencies
(manque) in his own personal experiences. In a more generalized sense,
his decision is linked to a definition of the novel as prose which aims at
the totalization of a singular and fictive temporalization,43 and since
his own personal experiences cannot provide the ground of the kind of
representative totalization required by the novel form, Sartre has to adopt
in the end someone elses singular temporalization by producing, in The
Idiot of the Family, what he calls a true novel.44
This is not as simple as it looks. To be sure, Sartres life is not very adventurous. In fact most of it is spent on a demonic dedication to work. The
38
sheer mass of his production is staggering. Some five or six million words
already published, and perhaps another two to three million sunk in manuscripts lost or abandoned, or yet to be published: more than enough to keep
half a dozen scribes busy all their life during the Middle Ages just to copy
out such an amount. When asked about his extraordinary wealth of production, he explains half-apologetically: One can be productive without too
much work. Three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening: this
is my only rule. Even on journeys. I carry out little by little a consciously
elaborated plan of work.45
It is daunting to learn that six hours of intensive work, every day, even on
journeys, is considered little by little. The whole truth, however, is even
more daunting. For we know from other sources (primarily from Simone de
Beauvoirs memoirs) that often he writes day and night, and is prepared
to spend twenty-eight hours in one stretch on revising a single article.46 Nor
is such intensity reserved for rare occasions. On the contrary, it seems to be
the rule rather than the exception. Many of Sartres literary works are written
in a few days or weeks. More amazing still, his two monumental theoretical
works, Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason were each
written in a few months.47 Moreover, Franois Erval tells me, often whole
chapters are rewritten from beginning to end just because Sartre is dissatisfied with some details. If one adds to all this the endless number of hours
spent on discussions, correspondence, interviews, rehearsals of plays, lectures, political and editorial meetings, and so on, clearly there cannot be
much time left over for personal experiences. One book authors, like
Sagan, may abundantly afford them; not Sartre, who just cannot stop, to
take life as it comes: he must be active all the time.48
In any case, the meaning of a writers personal experience is dialectical:
it should not be turned into a frozen fetish. Does not Sartre always insist,
rightly, that the work makes its author while he creates his work? This dialectical interchange between work and experience could not find a clearer
manifestation than in Sartre. We can sense it already in his first original
piece of theoretical writing, a letter contributed to an enquiry among students published in Les Nouvelles littraires at the beginning of 1929. There
is only one earlier theoretical work by Sartre, an essay entitled Theory of
the state in modern French thought,49 but that is a very different proposition. It shows nothing of Sartres future path. It merely puts a few sultanas
of originality in the insipid dough of academic conventionality. By contrast,
in the letter to the Nouvelles Littraires we get the first glimpse of the real
Sartre: a formidable figure. It is not what he says but the way he approaches
39
the problem that makes this letter a truly original beginning, well worth a
longer quotation:
It is a paradox of the human mind that Man, whose business it is to create the
necessary conditions, cannot raise himself above a certain level of existence,
like those fortune-tellers who can tell other peoples future, but not their
own. This is why, at the root of humanity, as at the root of nature, I can see
only sadness and boredom. It is not that Man does not think of himself as a
being. On the contrary, he devotes all his energies to becoming one. Whence
derive our ideas of Good and Evil, ideas of men working to improve Man.
But these concepts are useless. Useless, too, is the determinism which oddly
enough attempts to create a synthesis of existence and being. We are as free
as you like, but helpless. . . . For the rest, the will to power, action and life
are not only useless ideologies. There is not such thing as the will to power.
Everything is too weak: all things carry the seeds of their own death. Above
all, adventureby which I mean that blind belief in adventitious and yet
inevitable concatenation of circumstances and eventsis a delusion. In this
sense, the adventurer is an inconsequential determinist who imagines he is
enjoying complete freedom of action.50
No doubt this is already a synthesishowever preliminary: the result

of much questioning and dissecting. It is the summation of all the personal
experiences which made possible such reflection and generalization in the
relatively trivial context of a student enquiry. The mark of a commanding
and imposing personality is well evidenced by the fact that he elects to voice
precisely such heavy-going metaphysical fundamentals on such an occasion, when others might be content to complain about digs and catering.
This is not simply an occasional piece, though it is that too. What matters
more is that it is the project of life, whatever the implications it may carry for
the personal as well as literary-intellectual development of its author. He
grasps a major paradox, which in turn takes hold of him, and thus he gets
involved in the lifelong project of reaching the roots of being (italicized by
Sartre) through questioning Man and nature, mind and existence, humanity
and ideology, good and evil, freedom and adventure, death and determinism.
What a maiden speech for a student learning to fly in the world of ideas!
This quest for the roots of being is of necessity a project of totalization
par excellence. It is the whole that predominates in so far as the elements and
details of reality must be always brought into relation with the foundation
of being. Thus the overriding characteristic of the work must be synthesis
40
and not analysis: the latter can only assume a subordinate position, as a well
marked preliminary stage to the emerging synthesis. This is why Sartre considers himself diametrically opposed to Proust, despite his great admiration
for this French classic writer, insisting that Proust takes delight in analysis
while the inherent tendency of his own work is synthesis.51 Sartres description of his religious model of literatureconceived as an all-encompassing
and all-fulfilling enterpriseis only another name for this synthesizing,
which profoundly affects every facet of life and work, from character to work
method, from personal relations to the writers perception of and attitude to
the world of objects, and from the style of life to the structure and style of
the work itself. And since the ultimate point of reference is being, with its
existential bearing on everything, the surveyed facets of the whole cannot
be approached with detached objectivity (we are always inside the perimeters of the quest: integral parts and not sovereign observers of it) but with
a powerful fusion of subjectivity and objectivity, more often than not under
the predominance of the former. Kierkegaard spoke of infinite compelling
subjectivity.52 In Sartre we are faced also with compelling subjectivity
(sometimes identified as voluntarism), even if with a more restrained form
than in his great predecessor. No matter how abstract a problem may be in
itself, it is always converted into a lived idea in the course of it being situated in relation to being.
4.
A F EW E X AM P L E S M U ST SUFF ICE to illustrate this interpenetration of
subjectivity and objectivity. Take the concept of space and distance. We
are told by Sartre that distance was invented by man and has no meaning
outside the context of human space; it separated Hero from Leander and
Marathon from Athens, but does not separate one pebble from another.
The point is hammered home by describing a personal experience of
absolute proximity in a prison camp where my skin was the boundary
of my living space. Day and night I felt the warmth of a shoulder or a thigh
against my body. But it was never disturbing, as the others were a part of
me. This is contrasted with his return home: I had rejoined bourgeois
society. Where I would have to learn to live once again at a respectful
distance.53 And all this is to prepare the ground for an exploration of
Giacomettis handling of space and distance, in relation to the plenitude
of being and the void of nothingness.
41
Simone de Beauvoir writes of Sartre that if it had been necessary, he

would have been willing to remain anonymous: the important thing was that
his ideas should prevail.54 This is all very well, except that anonymity and
the prevalence of Sartres ideaslived ideasis a contradiction in terms.
Ideas like those of Sartre must be dramatically asserted, if necessary through
the most extreme manifestations of compelling subjectivity. Thus notoriety and scandal are necessary concomitants of his all-embracing project
towards being, and anonymity must remain at most some momentary
longing for peace under the strain of scandal and notoriety.
Sartres relations to people, works of art, everyday objects and so on,
are sketched, in his works as much as in real life, with dramatic colors
He does not simply like or dislike what he sees in the Prado Museum but
loaths and detests Titian and admires Hieronymous Bosch. One look at
a gathering in an Oxford College is enough to make him detest the snobbery of Oxford society and never to set foot in that city again. It is part of
the economy of life that he has to make up his mind about everything with
great speed and intensity, always looking for an overall evaluation which
can be integrated into his totalizing search. Similarly with personal relations, even some of the closest friendships have to be dramatically terminated (for example those with Camus and Merleau-Ponty) as soon as he
perceives that continued friendship would interfere with the realization
of his aims. He orders all his personal relations, including the most intimate ones, in such a way that he shall never be diverted from his singleminded dedication to the central concerns of his life. He refuses to accept
the responsibility and burden of family life precisely for that reason. He
refuses to be trapped by the conditions of bourgeois comfort and tries to
banish money and possessions from his personal life.
Equally, he explores, with great passion and imagination, modes of experience which to a less compelling subjectivity would appear to be, in principle, a book closed forever. Thus he gets involved in a passionate discussion
of Negritude, totally indifferent to the possibility that his eidetic analysis of
it (since it cannot be other than that) might be, as it has been, dismissed as
disastrous55 by those who experience it from the inside. Problematical as
such a venture might be, how could he do without it in his totalizing quest
for being when racism looms so large, with the most devastating implications, in the totality of our predicament? Thus, paradoxically, compelling subjectivity is the necessary condition of some degree of objectivity
(the objectivity of facing up to the problem with real concern), whereas the
objectivity of modest withdrawalthe acknowledgement of a white mans
42
inadequacies to such a taskwould mean the worst kind of subjectivity, that

of evasive complicity.
A similar manifestation of Sartres compelling subjectivity is when
he tells Daniel Gurin that he doesnt understand anything of his own
book.56 Preposterous as such a statement must appear from the point of
view of the criticized author, the relative justification for it is that the context
into which Sartre inserts Gurins account of the French Revolution (the
Sartrean dialectical assessment of the ontological structure of history)
imposes a significantly different angle on the particular events discussed
and thus it puts into focus dimensions which remained hidden or secondary to the historian in the original context. One may thoroughly disagree with Sartres conception of the ontological structure of history, born
out of his own specific concerns and clearly exhibiting the marks of his
compelling personality, but it is impossible to deny that it throws radically
new light on our understanding of the structures and institutions we can
identify in the course of historical development.
The I is in the foreground of virtually everything Sartre writes, and
his subjectivity is carried, if necessary, to the point of belligerence. He
emphatically refuses to withdraw into the background and assume the role
of an objective guide whose function is merely to point at objects, works,
and events, or at some well established connections between them. In his
view, just like distance, objects must be brought to life by presenting them
through the writers subjectivity before they can be inserted into meaningful
human discourse, otherwise they remain dead things and fetishes. Critics
have often wondered why Sartre does not write lyric poetry, not noticing
that he does it all the time, though not as a separate genre, but as diffuse
throughout his work. What could be more lyrical than his description of
Giacomettis handling of distance as linked to his own homecoming from
prison camp to live life at a respectful distance?
Sartres style is determined by the great complexities of his overall project
of totalization. Talking about the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical
Reason, he admits that its length (nearly 400.000 words) could be somewhat
reduced if he could spend on it much time and effort, but he adds: All the
same, it would very much resemble the work as it is now. For, basically, its
sentences are so long, so full of parentheses, quotation marks, of in so far as
etc., only because every sentence represents the unity of a dialectical movement.57 It is impossible to convey the unity of a dynamic movement, with all
its complexities, by using static devices such as short root sentences, simplified meaning, or by concentrating on one aspect, for the sake of clarity, while
43
neglecting many others. The deceptive translucency of analytic dissection,

disregarding the need for meaningful syntheses, produces only irrelevance or
misrepresentation. Style and method must match the full complexity of the
task itself, otherwise they are prefabricated devices artificially superimposed
on any subject matter, irrespective of its specific nature and inner demands.
Sartre consciously opposes to this practice of Procrustean superimposition
(frequently witnessed in modern art and thought, from philosophy to sociology and from economics to anthropology) his own method of capturing
movement and intricacy. If sharply focusing on one aspect at the expense of
others represents distortion, since only the proper conjunction of the one with
the many constitutes the relevant whole, he aims at clarifying and revealing
indeterminacy, paradoxical as this may sound. This is what he praises in
Giacometti, stressing that it should not be confused with vagueness the
result of failure. For the indeterminate quality that comes from lack of skill has
nothing in common with the calculated indetermination of Giacometti, which
could more accurately be termed overdetermination (surdetermination).58 It
is the adoption of this principle of overdetermination, corresponding to the
structure of totality, in conjunction with what Sartre terms the principle of
individuation,59 which defines the specificity of his style and the vitality of
his method as arising from the soil of his totalizing quest for being. The whole
is grasped through the simultaneity of calculated indetermination (overdetermination) and the shifting presence of graphic individuation whereby even
absence becomes tangible as a vital dimension of totality (see for example the
discussion of Pierre missing from the caf in Being and Nothingness). Thus
movement and rest, the whole and its parts, the centre and the periphery, the
premier plan and the background, the determinations from the past and the
anticipations of the future converging on the present, all come to life in the
synthetic unity of a dialectical totalization in which subjectivity and objectivity
are inextricably fused.
5.
AS WE C AN S E E T HE N , the work carries the marks of the writers personality in
every respect, from the choice of astonishing subject matter (like Negritude)
through modes of analysis and depiction to the style and method of writing.
Viewed from the other side, the inner determinations of a certain overall
project determine in their turn a belligerent character, a compelling
subjectivity, a writers own way of defining himself in relation to institutions,
44
people and property; in short, his style of life and the experiences he will
embark on in accordance with his vision of the world and of his own place
in it. Thus we can see the singularization of the work by the man and the
universalization of the man by the work.60
In Sartres case the spectrum of his feasible work is circumscribed by that
all-encompassing quest for being we have already seen in the groping words
of the student confronting man and nature, mind and existence, humanity
and ideology, good and evil, death and determinism. Since the target is being
itself, conventional forms will not provide the ways of its unfolding; and since
Sartres works always aim at revealing being, or at indicating the roads towards
it, they must a priori exclude anything whatsoever to do with naturalism.
Symbolism is also excluded as it would merely inflate isolated chunks of the
given immediacy into some abstract and static generality, instead of reproducing the dynamic multiplicity of relations which characterize the whole.
What is called for, then, is some form of mediation capable of conveying
the plenitude of being and the void of nothingness without falling into
abstract symbolism. He finds the mediation he needs in what he calls myth:
a condensation61 of traits of character (in line with the density or plenitude
of being) that elevates the perceived and depicted reality to the level of being
without abandoning the ground of sensibility. Thus condensation provides
the ground on which calculated indetermination and graphic individuation can flourish as truly creative principles.
We shall see in the next chapter the place of myth in Sartres work in
general. Here we are interested in its implications for our present context:
the range of works the author can successfully accomplish on such grounds
in the framework of his totalizing quest. The first is his novel cycle, Roads to
Freedom. Considered not in isolation but in the totality of his development,
Roads to Freedom is a failure in the sense of being a blind alley from which
there can be no exit, no further explorations, no branching out, no roads
not even a footpathto freedom. Despite its partial accomplishments,
numerous and impressive though they may be, this work remains completely peripheral in Sartres lifework. He has to tear himself away from it, as
late as 1949, extricating himself form the consequences of a false choice, in
order to continue his quest in other directions. Ten years after abandoning
work on the fourth volume, he gives his reasons as follows:
The fourth volume was to speak of the Resistance. The choice was simple
in those dayseven if one needed much strength and courage to stand by
it. One was for or against the Germans. The choice was black or white.
45
Todaysince 1945the situation is complicated. One needs less courage,

perhaps, to choose, but the choices are much more difficult. I could not
express the ambiguities of our epoch in a novel situated in 1943.62
T H E SE AR E WHAT SARTRE CA LLS
elsewhere his internal difficulties63 for
abandoning Roads to Freedom.

In reality the issue is much more complicated, for it is not only the fourth
volume which is problematical but the project as a whole. Reaching 1943
means that things become more visible, at a point of climax, but they are
there from the beginning. The problematic character of the work manifests
itself structurally in a disturbing tension between straightforward everydayness, depicted in its immediacy, and an abstract rhetoric which tries to
project everydayness onto the plane of universality.64 In other words, it is the
missing intermediary of myth or condensation that renders the work
structurally abstract and problematical in the framework of Sartres totalizing quest. The perception of a whole epoch within the parameters of an
extremely simplified conflict of black or white is in fact the consequence
of this abstract structure, rather than its massively objective cause as Sartre
curiously suggestsvery much out of character with his dialectical conception of subject and object, author and work, cause and effect in literature.
Examining the conditions under which Roads to Freedom was written we
find that Sartre allowed himself to be manoeuvred into the adoption of its
abstract structure, first, by the scandal65 that followed the pervasive negativity of his early short stories and Nausea, making him unwisely promise a
positive continuation, secondly (more understandable but artistically just as
problematic), by the abstract heroism66 of his perception of the Resistance
movement in which he cannot assume more than a very peripheral role, no
matter how hard he tries. While it is true to say that his dramatic work as a
whole is free from this structural abstractness, it would be quite wrong to
see as the reason for it simply that here we are concerned with a novelwith
prose which aims at the totalization of a singular and fictive temporalization, as he had put it. It is the type of prose which is in question: one that
resists the necessary condensation of characters and situations and thus
tempts the author to intervene repeatedly, in the form of abstract rhetoric,
in order to compensate by producing some philosophical condensation.
Prose showing affinity with Kafka, or with the works of E. Th. A. Hoffmann,
as a much earlier example, would be a very different proposition. However,
as things stand, the structure of Roads to Freedom opposes that calculated
indetermination which is so vital to the realization of the Sartrean project.
46
We find the exact opposite in Huis Clos (No Exit). Written in a fortnight in the Autumn of 1943 and first staged in Paris in May 1944 (and
banned by the censor in England in September 1946), Huis Clos is a most
suggestive pice de circonstance. The occasion that calls it into being is
a friends request for a play easy to stage, with few actors, by a traveling
theatre company. And since Sartre wants to create roles of equal weight for
his friends who are the principal actresses, he devises a situation in which
they must remain together on the stage all the time. First he thinks of a bomb
shelter, with its exit caved in, offering no escape. The time of writing is not
far from the completion of Being and Nothingness,67 and Sartre wants to
explore in the medium of drama the conflict inherent in interpersonal relations, the threat to freedom represented by the other. Thus the setting
of a bomb shelter would, clearly, produce a failure. Such a situation would
offer at least as much room for the display of human solidarity and fusion
towards a shared end as for the intended manifestation of reciprocally paralyzing enmity. Sartres brilliant inspiration to locate the stage in hell from
which there can be no exit, turns the work into a masterpiece. Elevating
a human situation of consuming conflict to the level of a mytha myth in
which the devastating negativity and all-consuming character of the conflict
is intensified, to a degree inconceivable in whatever other form, by giving
a dimension of eternity to destruction and consumption, which are normally paradigms of temporal limitation and determination, bringing things
to a predictable endSartre creates a tangible intermediary in which the
concerns of everyday life and some of the most fundamental dimensions of
the structure of being converge. In such a medium of extreme condensation sentences like hell is the other arise spontaneously from the situation,
whereas they could be superimposed only in the form of abstract rhetoric in
the medium of, say, Roads to Freedom. Calculated indetermination, graphic
individuation, multiple layers of ambiguous meaning, condensation and
overdetermination, claustrophobic enclosure and its negation through the
totality of being, constitute the hypnotic unity of movement and paralysis
which characterizes Huis Clos. It is certainly No Exit for Ins, as well as
for Estelle and Garcin; but many roads lead from it towards the realization
of Sartres project. It illustrates very well how much the very nature of his
overall quest for what might appear at first sight as mere abstractionthe
plenitude of being and the void of nothingnessbrings with it forms of
mediation through which even the most abstract ontological determinations
can be conveyed as tangible manifestations of human destinies.
2. Philosophy, Literature and Myth

1.
is by no means confined to Sartres conception

of Huis Clos. He sees in the same terms Bariona, Flies, The Trojan Women and
Kean, as well as Lucifer and the Lord, Altona, and others. Concerning Altona,
which he describes as a kind of Gtterdmmerung (crpuscule des dieux)68
he stresses his aim as demystification through inflating its subject matter to the
proportion of a myth.69 And in a conversation with Kenneth Tynan he reveals
that he would like to write a play on the Greek myth of Alcestis in such a way
as to be able to condense into it the drama of womens liberation.70
Equally, he praises the works of his contemporaries in the same key. In
an article entitled Forgers of myths the young playwrights of France71
he singles out Anouilhs Antigone, Camuss Caligula and Cross Purposes,
and Simone de Beauvoirs Useless Mouths as examples of the same approach
to characters and situations that animates his own plays. And twenty years
later, in December 1966, he gives a lecture in Bonn with the title Myth
and reality of the theatre in which he counterposes the form of drama he
stands for to the bourgeois realist theatre whose aim was the direct representation of reality.72 In the same spirit, shortly after his lecture he characterizes Georges Michel as a truly original playwright who succeeded in
transcending realism through a deformation towards myth,73 sharply contrasting this with the abstract symbolism of Ionescos Rhinoceros.
T H E I MP ORTANC E OF MY TH
48
As we can see, ever since the time of writing Barionawhen Sartre

reaches the conclusion that theatre must be a great collective religious experiencehe remains consistent to a conception of drama and myth. The
function of the theatre is to present the individual under the form of myth74
says Sartre in an interview. And he reiterates the same point again and again,
with variations in stress and with clarifications. He insists in the conversation with Tynan that the theatre must transpose all its problems into mythic
form, and he spends much time clarifying his position in the interview given
to New Left Review:
For me the theatre is essentially a myth. Take the example of a petty-bourgeois
and his wife who quarrel with each other the whole time. If you tape their
disputes, you will record not only the two of them, but the petty-bourgeoisie
and its world, what society has made of it, and so on. Two or three such
studies and any possible novel on the life of a petty-bourgeois couple would
be outclassed. By contrast, the relationship between man and woman as we
see it in Strindbergs Dance of Death will never be outclassed. The subject
is the same, but taken to the level of myth. The playwright presents to men
the eidos of their daily existence: their own life in such a way that they see
it as if externally. This was the genius of Brecht, indeed. Brecht would have
protested violently if anyone said to him that his plays were myths. Yet what
else is Mother Couragean anti-myth that despite itself becomes a myth?75
It does not matter here that Sartres assessment of the possibilities of the
novel is highly debatable. What is important is the definition of myth in
drama as the eidos of daily existence. This makes it clear that the issue at
stake transcends the limits of the theatre, and leads us right into the heart of
Sartres overall quest. Indeed, this is the key that opens not only the door of
his literary vision but also of his conception of art in general, and beyond.
In an earlier essay on Giacometti, Sartre emphasizes the totality of this
artists vision, saying that his characters are complete wholes, arising fully
made in an instant and gushing forth in my field of vision as an idea in my
spirit. He adds: only the idea possesses such immediate translucidity, only
the idea is in one blow all that it is. Giacometti accomplishes the unity of
multiplicity as the indivisibility of an idea.76 His myth as eidos is not some
mysterious hidden absolute but the visible absolute, grasped as the unity of
the act, in evidence as appearance in situation.77
Similar considerations are applied to the work of Masson, which is
described as mythological in its essence so that the project of painting
P H I LO S OP HY, L IT E R AT U RE, A ND MY TH
49
does not distinguish itself from the project of being man.78 And there is no
contradiction whatsoever between the concern with myth and the absolute
on one hand and our historical predicament on the other. On the contrary,
just like Giacometti, who grasps the absolute as appearance in situation,
Massons monstrous universe is nothing else than the comprehensive representation of our own universe.79 For the absolute cannot be taken hold of
except precisely through the well defined temporality of human existence.
How to make a man out of stone without petrifying himthis is the great
question for the sculptor. It is a question of everything or nothing80just
like the question of literature, as we have seen above. This applies everywhere, even when the medium is not representational, like Calders mobile
constructions which traversed by an Idea81 capture live movements and
are, thats all; they are absolutes . . . strange beings, midway between
matter and life.
2.
F R O M T HIS B R IE F S U RV EY of Sartres conception of his own work as well as of
the work of those he values highly it becomes clear that the crucial terms of
reference are: myth, drama, absolute, idea, act, totality, conflict and situation.
Philosophy fits organically into this picture.
Today I think that philosophy is dramatic in nature. The time for

contemplating the immobility of substances which are what they are, or
for laying bare the laws underlying a succession of phenomena, is past.
Philosophy is concerned with man who is at once an agent and an actor,
who produces and plays his drama while he lives the contradictions of his
situation, until either his individuality is shattered or his conflicts are resolved.
A play (be it epic, such as Brecht, or dramatic) is the most appropriate vehicle
today for showing man in action,i.e. man full stop. It is with this man that
philosophy, from its own point of view, should be concerned. That is why the
theatre is philosophical and philosophy dramatic.82
Thus philosophy is not abstract self-reflection and detached contemplation but total involvement in the drama of being. The project is concerned
with choice and original choice is absolutely the same as destiny.83
Exploring human destiny84 at its greatest intensity is not confined to
Sartres plays but characterizes all his synthesizing attempts, from a general
50
definition of contemporary European culture as only one aspect of a much

greater problem, the whole destiny of Europe,85 to his fundamental works
on philosophy. Both Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical
Reason are centrally concerned with conflict as inherent in the ontological
structure of being as manifest in human destiny. The same drama is indicated in Sartres definition of the core of his moral philosophy, structured
around a fundamental antinomy:
In the choice I make of my freedom, the freedom of others is reclaimed.
But when I find myself on the plane of action, I am compelled to treat the
other as means and not as end. Here we are evidently in the presence of
an antinomy, but it is precisely this antinomy which constitutes the moral
problem. I shall examine this antinomy in my Morale.86
The fact that after 2,000 pages of examination Sartre remains dissatisfied
with the solutions he arrives at and abandons the project does not mean that
he changes his mind about the fundamental underlying drama, but, on the
contrary, that he finds it even more overpowering than originally thought, as
the evidence of his later work clearly shows.
The conflict and drama in question is not the quarrel between the pettybourgeois and his wife: philosophy and theatre in his view do not operate
at that level. The drama of philosophy is the same as that which makes him
conclude that plays are the most appropriate vehicle today for showing man
in action: man full stop. The difference is that while philosophy, being a
discursive form, can address itself directly to the fundamental question of
being, theatre, a representational form, must proceed indirectly, through the
presentation of individuals under the form of a myth, and thus producing an
adequate artistic mediation between sensible reality and the most general
determinations of being. They are similar in that they represent the highest
level of synthesis or condensation, and thus they get the closest to the
heart of being. This is why drama, in its Sartrean conception, is the most
appropriatein Hegels term the most representativeliterary form today;
and this is why philosophy, if it wants to be relevant, must be dramatic.
3.
do not comprehend everything.

More precisely, they cannot take hold of all levels of the human totality. In
NAT UR A L LY, P HILOS OP H Y A ND D RA MA
51
fact, according to Sartre, the sphere of singular universality87 is beyond

their reach. Philosophy is dramatic but it does not study the individual as
such.88 Nor does drama, for that matter. Consequently, if Sartre wants to
study Flaubert as an individual, he cannot do it in drama, nor in philosophy.
We have seen his definition of the novel as the totalization of a singular and
fictive temporalization. Accordingly, he could tackle this task in the form of a
novel, incorporating as best he can all the available factual evidence needed
for a satisfactory totalization of the singularity of a historical individual. The
consequence of this approach would be an inevitable overflow of the factual
documentary material and a tendency to subdue the novelistic elements.
Alternatively he could proceed from the available material and fill in the
gaps as they appear with the novelists imagination. Paradoxically, the more
he seeks to present a total portrait, the more inadequate the documentary
evidence must appear, and consequently the more the fictional elements will
tend to predominate. Thus, he either abandons full portrayal, or accepts
its consequences for the nature of his work. This dilemma is expressed in
the curious answer Sartre gives to the question: Why have you personally
stopped writing novels?
Because I have felt no urge to do so. Writers have always more or less chosen
the imaginary. They have a need for a certain ration of fiction. Writing on
Flaubert is enough for me by way of fictionit might indeed be called a
novel. Only I would like people to say that it was a true novel. I try to achieve
a certain level of comprehension of Flaubert by means of hypotheses. Thus
I use fictionguided and controlled, but nonetheless fictionto explore
why, let us say, Flaubert wrote one thing on the 15th March and the exact
opposite on the 21st March, to the same correspondent, without worrying
about the contradiction. My hypotheses are in this sense a sort of invention
of the personage.89
The beginning of the answerwhich is simply I dont feel like it

gives way to a redefinition of fiction in general, leading to the conclusion
that his Flaubert, in the course of his kind of totalization, turned out to be an
invented personage and thus a form of novel or fiction.
All this is inherent not in some a priori determination of the relationship
between philosophy and drama, and philosophy and fiction in general, but
in their characteristic Sartrean conception. The crucial determining factor
is the conception of his overall quest into which everything is integrated
with great vigor. In this vision the overriding determinations are levels of
52
generalitydramatic philosophy and philosophical theatre at one pole and

the totalization of individuality at the otherand this tends to blur the lines
of demarcation between the discursive and the representational forms in
Sartres work. There are three clearly distinguishable forms of manifestation
of this tendency:
1. In his shorter essaysfor example on Giacometti, Nizan, Merleau-Ponty,
Gorzs Traitordiscursive and representational forms are often fused
in lyric passages and in a conscious effort to give an evocative unity,
a forceful Gestalt, to the essay as a whole, no matter how abstract the
problems tackled in particular contexts.
2. Representational elements abound in his major philosophical works
(e.g. the treatment of bad faith in Being and Nothingness), and
philosophical elements in his plays and novels.
3. Perhaps the most significant in this respect: fictional totalization tends to
turn into philosophical discourse, to the point of forcing him to abandon
it (see Roads to Freedom, especially the fourth volume), and his most
important critical monograph, on Flaubert (and this is by no means the
only one) tends to turn into fiction.
These characteristics cannot be isolated from the innermost nature of
Sartres totalizing quest. For the concern with singular universality cannot
stop at that level but must strive through totalization towards universality
or the absolute, whatever formal transformations may necessarily follow
from such movement. On the other hand, the Sartrean absolute is not
some rarefied abstraction occupying a mysterious sphere of its own, but
is existentially situated and therefore must always be rendered tangible
through the evocative power of condensation and individuation at the
writers disposal. This is why, despite his boundless admiration for Kafka,
the latters fictional style and method of representation, with its hidden yet
threateningly mysterious omnipresent absolute, constitute an altogether
different universe of discourse which cannot conceivably be adopted by
Sartre as the model of his novels.
Problematical as some of the formal characteristics of Sartres work may
at times appear, they are necessary manifestations of his overall vision in particular contexts, and thus cannot be properly weighed up without comprehending the nature of the whole. Significantly enough, his closely integrated
53
conception of philosophy and literature appears at a very early age. The

same year that he writes the letter contributing to the student enquiry
(1929) he also conceives The Legend of Truth:90 a strange mixture of philosophy, myth and literature of which only a fragment has been published.
It is a kind of Urnebel (the Kantian primeval fog) from which the later
creations emerge, through manifold differentiations and metamorphoses.
What is clearly in evidence from the very beginning is that for Sartre form
and meaning are always linked,91 indeed in an organic fashion. The overall
configuration of meaning determines the form, and the articulation of form
carries with it the concrete definition of meaning.
The not very happy symbiosis of The Legend of Truth soon gives way to
the primarily philosophical or predominantly literary works of the 1930s,
without completely abolishing the reciprocal interpenetration. Nevertheless,
Sartre feels that there are certain things in his overall quest which are too
technical and therefore prescribe a purely philosophical vocabulary, and
he promises to double up, so to speak, every novel with an essay.92 This is
still a rather nave diagnosis of the problem, characteristic of the avid learner
of the new philosophical vocabulary of German phenomenology and existentialism. Once he has behind him this period of learning and succeeds in
elaborating his own vocabulary, he soon discovers not only that there can be
no doubling up between philosophy and novels, except for a short transitory period, but also that the real affinity for him is between philosophy and
theatre, not between philosophy and fiction. Furthermore, in the course of
articulating his original philosophical concepts in Being and Nothingness he
realizes that they need not indeed cannot be kept in separate compartments, but call for the unity of philosophy and literature in the service of his
monumental quest for man. Already Being and Nothingness is unthinkable
without his conscious appeal to the idea of such a unity.
4.
T H E SP E C IF IC IT Y OF SARTRES WO RK cannot be understood without focusing
attention on the network of terms and usages he introduces in the course of
his development. They constitute a coherent set of closely interconnected
concepts, each with its own field of radiation and points of link-up with
all the others. This is obvious if we think of such examples as authenticity,
anguish, bad faith, the spirit of seriousness, contingency, nausea,
viscosity, facticity, negation, nihilation, freedom, project,
54
commitment (engagement), possibility, responsibility, adventure, flight, chance, determination, seriality, fused group,
temporalization, totalization, de-totalization, condensation, overdetermination, mediation, progression-regression, singular universal,
irreducibility, and so on. However, we are talking about an omnipresent
characteristic which comes to the fore even in the most unsuspected places
and forms. Whether it is a direct confrontation of a major philosophical issue
or of an apparently everyday matter, Sartres terms of analysis and evaluation
are always typically his own, and from any particular point of detail they link
up with the main supporting pillars of his thought structure.
Take the term invention. Talking about the intellectual, of his vain
yearning for universality, he makes his point like this:
I remember seeing a puppy after the partial removal of the cerebellum.
He moved across the room, rarely colliding with the furniture, but he had
become thoughtful. He established his itinerary carefully. He pondered
before going around an object, requiring a great deal of time and thought
to accomplish movements to which he had previously paid no attention. In
the language of the time, we said that the cortex had assumed for him certain
functions of the lower regions. He was an intellectual dog. I dont know
whether this made him very useful or harmful to his kind, but we can quite
well imagine that he had lost what Genet, another exile, has so well named,
sweet natal confusion. To sum up, he either had to die or reinvent the dog.
So we othersrats without cerebellawe are also so made that we must
either die or reinvent man. Moreover, we know perfectly well that man will
make himself without us, through working and fighting, that our models
become obsolete from one day to the next, that nothing will remain of
them in the finished product, not even a bone, but that also, without us,
the fabrication would take place in the dark, by tinkering and patching, if
we, the debrained, were not there to repeat constantly that we must work
according to principles, that it is not a matter of mending, but of measuring
and constructing, and finally, that mankind will be the concrete universal, or
that it will not be.93
To suggest that the dog reinvents the dog is, of course, most unusual,
to say the least. And yet it does not matter in the slightest whether or not
Sartres description would match an objective scientific account. For the
point is not about the dog but about man who has to be reinvented. And,
again, invention-reinvention is by no means the term that would most
55
naturally present itself in the context. But, is the idea less unusual than the
term of which Sartre avails himself to convey it? How can one reinvent
man without falling into extreme voluntarism? Obviously one cannot if the
term is taken in its literal sense, but that is not how it is intended. Nor is it
intended as a poetic image. The meaning is conceptual, not figurative. But it
is conceptual in the sense of the earlier discussed totalizing condensationoverdetermination; that is it derives its full meaning from the multiplicity
of structural-contextual interconnections. It would be relatively easy to
find some terms that could express in a more literal and univocal form the
central idea of the passage on reinvention. But at what price? It would
mean not only the loss of the writers characteristic style, but of a great deal
of the meaning as well. Sartre deliberately chooses a term which keeps the
central idea somewhat out of focus, in order to bring a multiplicity of allusions and connections into a joint focus. For the depth as well as the field
of radiation of any particular concept is determined by the totality of interconnections it can summon up whenever it appears on its own. The difference between a profound thinker and a shallow one is that the former always
operates with a whole network of organically interpenetrating concepts,
whereas the latter contents himself with isolated terms and one-sided definitions. Thus the first establishes connections even when he has to single
out specific contexts and draw lines of demarcation, while the second loses
even the most obvious connections when he sacrifices complexity to shallow
analytical precision and to the univocal clarity of oversimplification in place
of overdetermination.
Let us consider briefly the field of Sartres concept of invention. We
have already quoted one of the contexts in which he suggests that The
reader invents us: he uses our words to set his own traps for himself.94
This is not paradox for the sake of paradox. It underlines a firm belief that
inventing is not a sovereign activity, carried out from a safe distance, but
a complex relationship of being inside and outside simultaneously, like man
who makes and reinvents himself by being both at one with his own projects
and at some distance from them. (As we can see, the idea of distance is an
integral part of these considerations, both as it appears in Sartres discussion
of Giacometti and in his references to Brechts vision of the simultaneity of
inside and outside achieved through his Verfremdungseffekt.) Talking about
Genet, Sartre brings another aspect into the foreground. Genius is not a
gift but an outcome one invents in desperate situations.95 Here invention
is response to a situation in which everything seems to be lostit is like the
sudden leap and escape of the cornered animal above the head of its pursuers.
56
Similarly, authentic feelings, essential to the production of good literature, are

not just given, in advance; every one must invent them in his turn.96 Thus,
again paradoxically, the spontaneity of authentic feeling is an invented spontaneity. Nor is this an isolated instance. The Liberation of Paris in 1944 is
described as the explosion of freedom, the rupture of the established order
and the invention of an efficacious and spontaneous order.97 We are thus
presented with invention as a fusion of negativity and positivity: invented
discipline triumphs over learned discipline, and Apocalypse is defined
as a spontaneous organization of the revolutionary forces, foreshadowing
a central problem of Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason. Invention is
the key term also when, in 1947, he speaks about the need to invent the
road to a socialist Europe98 in order to secure humanitys survival. And in
1968, appealing for Power to the imagination, he recalls that in 1936 [the
working class] invented the occupation of factories because that was its only
weapon to consolidate and to exploit its electoral victory.99 In a similar vein,
he talks about the task of inventing a university whose aim is no longer the
selection of an elite but the transfer of culture to all.100
One could go on giving further examples from different fields of Sartres
thought, from his ontology to his theory of language, but there is no need.
The instances we have seen so far are amply sufficient to indicate the nature
of the conceptual interconnections earlier referred to. Linking invention
to a paradox is not a formal stylistic device but a recognition of objective
constraint, to be transcended by the act of invention which itself is the paradoxical result of such constraint. (A cunning of history against its own
determinations, if you like.) Thus freedom and order, discipline and spontaneity, negation and self-affirmation, etc., are brought into play as necessary
dimensions of invention as a human enterprise. All these dimensions must
be simultaneously recalled, by means of the condensation of a multiplicity
of interrelations into a joint focus, in order to be able to link the part to the
whole and thus to confer upon it its full significance. This is how, starting
out from Sartres invention of the dog which reinvents the dog, we arrive
at the roots of the human enterprise: man reinventing man and thus producing the concrete universal.
But we must note not only the structure of conceptual interconnections but also its sign in Sartre: not unproblematically positive attainment
but prevalent negativity. For the way in which invention articulates itself
through its linkages is dominated by distance and constraint, determination and anguish from which invention extricates itself only for an ecstatic
moment. In such moments, when freedom explodes and imagination
57
assumes power (or genius commutes a mans death sentence into his lifeimprisonment as a writer), the ecstatic fusion of human interchange manifests
itself as the doomed temporality of Apocalypse which is always defeated by
order101by the established order, that is, to which invented discipline
and spontaneous order do not seem to be able to provide a lasting answer.
This is why in the end the positive moment of invention cannot be envisaged
by Sartre except as a radical negation of the powers of alienation and negativity. Thus a passionate ought. The inventive task of making humanity
is spelled out not as the construction of a system (be it the socialist system)
but as the destruction of all systems.102
5.
I T I S N E C E S SARY TO I NTRO D UCE here another complex of problems:
Sartres conception of temporality as one of the most fundamental
constituents of his system of ideas, determining the articulation of many
of his specific concepts.
In a very early piece on LArt cinmatographique (1931),103 Sartre
contrasts the temporality of scienceits conception of irreversible order
and absolutely determining march forward, which would be unbearable as a
feeling if it went with all our actionswith the sudden movements and spontaneous manifestations of life perceived by the individual. He suggests that
the arts of movement (music, theatre, cinema) have the task of representing
this irreversible order outside us, painted in things. He talks about the
fatality of musical progression in the melody; of tragedys forced march
towards the catastrophe, and of a kind of fatality also in the cinema. He
characterizes music as abstraction and tragedy as strongly intellectual . .
. a product of reason . . . a logical deduction starting from certain principles proposed right at the beginning. While the unfolding of action in the
cinema too is described as fatal, it is contrasted with the theatre in that it
has not got the abstract and cut time of tragedy. According to Sartre, it
is the cinema which represents by nature the civilization of our epoch.
Cinema is the art form which is the closest to the real world, which captures best the inhuman necessity of the dure of our life, and teaches us
the poetry of speed and of the machines, the inhumanity and splendid
fatality of industry. What saves the cinema from the abstract and cut time of
the theatre as well as from its intellectualism is its simultaneity and overimpression (or overprinting, superimpressionthe predecessor of Sartres
58
concept of overdetermination). He refers to Abel Gances Napoleon in

which the imagery of a tempest at the Convention is intensified by the
scenes of a tempest on the Mediterranean. The two themes are cut into each
other in such a way that they accuse and enlarge themselves and in the end
they fuse with one another. Just as in Giacometti, the particular themes do
not convey their meaning individually but only if they are taken together in
a combined unity. Thanks to the formal characteristics of overimpression
the artist can develop several themes simultaneously and thus achieve a
cinematographic poliphony.
Many points of this analysis are changed in the course of Sartres subsequent development. Yet, the enrichment and concretization of his views
proceeds from the concepts first spelled out in this article. As he discovers
the theatre for himself through his own practice, he changes his views on
abstract time and intellectualism as necessarily inherent in all theatre.
That is to say, in the light of his own dramatic work he identifies the intellectual type of drama with a certain form of classical tradition which he continues to oppose. Talking about Flies he insists that he aims at creating the
tragedy of freedom in opposition to the tragedy of fatality.104 Also, he retains
his aversion to intellectualism when he criticizes Orson Welless film, Citizen
Kane, as an intellectual work, the work of an intellectual,105 which shows
that the affirmation of spontaneity is a Leitmotif of his own work, from its
earliest inception. And in terms of formal criteria, he retains and expands
the idea of simultaneity linked to overimpression (overdetermination) and
the polyphony of integrated multiplicity (condensation and joint focus), as
we have seen.
But this is as far as we can go in identifying similarities. Sartres tragedy
of freedom is inconceivable on the basis of his youthful conception of temporality and causation, since it accepts necessity and fatality as the guiding
principles of all three art forms he refers to. Consequently the characteristics
of simultaneity and polyphony can only soften the blow; they cannot transcend the fundamental determination and limits of fatality. Characteristically,
he has to ask us to admire cinemas inflexible but supple concatenation
(enchainement inflexible, mais souple)106 which is not much more than a
consolation prize in the form of a verbal-paradoxical solution. Ex pumice
acquamone cannot squeeze spontaneity and freedom out of fatality by
calling it supple.
We can witness in Sartres youthful article on the cinema a tension
between his passionate adherence to spontaneity, the surprise of life, and the
acceptance of a conception of temporality as absolute concatenation in the
59
world around us (which inevitably means that the cinema, closest to the
real world, representing real man in a real countryside, real mountains
and real sea,107 etc., is essentially trapped and only marginally free). This is
a fertile tension because it is not simply a conflict of ideas but a contradiction between a restrictive theory and an existential striving towards freedom.
In order to extricate himself from this contradiction Sartre has to get rid
of Bergsonwhose libert intrieure, with its evasion of the question
of destiny, is, as Sartre later recognizes, an illusory freedom, remaining
always merely theoretical and intellectual,108 but not real (existential)and
elaborate a conception of temporality in affinity with his own quest.
This new conception of temporality is clearly formulated in an essay
on Faulkner, written in 1939, in which Sartre analyses The Sound and
the Fury,109 concentrating on the question of time. The contrast between
affective (emotional) and intellectual order of time found in the youthful
essay is recognized in Faulkners novel as treated in favor of the affective
order, to Sartres great satisfaction. What bothers him is the absence of
the future. Nothing happens, everything has already happened . . . the
present is only . . . past future (p. 68). Proust and Faulkner have simply
decapitated time, they removed its future, that is the dimension of acts
and freedom.110 The way Quentins suicide is treated shows that he has
no human possibilities; what we are confronted with is not a human
enterprise, it is fatality.111 The whole problem hinges on the future: If
the future is real, time moves away from the past and brings nearer the
future; but if you suppress the future, time is nothing but what separates,
that which cuts off the present from itself.112 But is it true, asks Sartre, that
human time is devoid of future? The temporality of the nail, of a lump of
earth, of the atom, is perpetual present. But man, is he a thinking nail?
Faulkner, in accordance with his vision of time, represents man as a creature deprived of possibilities. He defines man as the sum of all that he
has.113 To this Sartre opposes his own definition of man as the totality of
that he does not yet have, of all that he could have.114
In History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukcs analyses possible
consciousness as the consciousness of a historically progressive class
which has a future ahead of it and therefore has the possibility of objective totalization. In our epoch, according to Lukcs, only the proletariat
has proper temporality, inseparable from the possibility of socio-historical
totalization, because the bourgeoisie has lost its futurebecause its temporality, as Sartre puts it about Proust and Faulkner, has been decapitatedin that its fundamental aims as a class are radically incompatible
60
with the objective tendencies of historical development. Given this fundamental contradiction between aim and reality, the class without future
cannot realize the unity of subject and object but must, instead, produce
a dualistic-antinomous structure of thought, centred around individualism
and subjectivity, and dominated by the conditions of reification which
it can oppose only in and through subjectivity, thus exacerbating the contradiction between subject and object. Heidegger, facing the Lukcsian
problematic, proposes a solution by transcending Lukcs towards his
youthful essay, The metaphysics of tragedy (1910) published in the
volume Soul and Form, in which nearly two decades before Heidegger
Lukcs had spelled out some of the central themes of modern existentialism.115 Heidegger offers a conception of temporality which ascribes
possibility (projection towards the future ultimately identified with death,
in the spirit of The metaphysics of tragedy) to consciousness in general.
Thus, by turning possibility into an ontological dimension of consciousness as such, Lukcss Marxian critique of bourgeois class consciousness is
theoretically liquidated, and a project of unified ontology is announced, on
the basis of the Heideggerian reconstruction of subjectivity. Significantly,
however, the project is never brought to its conclusion. And twentyfive years after publishing Being and Time originally intended as the
founding preliminary to the overall project Heidegger is forced to make
an admission: While the previous editions have borne the designation
First Half, this has now been deleted. After a quarter of a century, the
second half could no longer be added unless the first were to be presented
anew.116 This sounds very reasonable, except that no reasons are given
for the failure to complete, not just in twenty-five years but ever since, the
whole project. Clearly we are not concerned with Heideggers Nazism
which is more like a consequence than the causebut with the nature of
the project itself: the extreme subjectivism of its temporality and being.
Ex pumice acquamone cannot squeeze the foundation of being out of a
mythically inflated subjectivity by calling it Fundamental Ontology.
Sartre adopts some elements of Heideggers conception when he writes:
The nature of consciousness implies that it throws itself forward by itself
into the future . . . it determines itself in its present being by its own possibilities: this is what Heidegger calls the silent force of the possible 117 At the
same time, right from the beginning, he goes well beyond Heidegger, putting
the German philosopher to his own use. Proceeding from his own existential quest for freedom and spontaneity, he finds support in Heideggers
conception of temporality against fatality and inertia. But this is only the
61
negative side of his overall view. The positive aspect is clearly exemplified in
a beautiful concluding passage of the essay on Faulkner:
How comes it that Faulkner and so many other authors have chosen an
absurdity which is so little in character with the novel, and so little true? I
believe we have to look for reasons in the social conditions of our present
day life. It seems to me that Faulkners despair precedes his metaphysics:
for him, as for us all, the future is barred. Everything we see, everything we
live through, incites us to say: It cannot last, and meanwhile change isnt
even conceivable except in the form of a cataclysm. We live in the epoch of
impossible revolutions, and Faulkner employs his extraordinary artistry to
describe this world which is dying of old age, and our suffocation. I love his
art, and I dont believe in his metaphysics: a barred future is still a future.118
The phrase a barred future is still a future (which becomes the model
of many a Sartrean paradox, like refusal to commit oneself is a form of commitment, or failure to choose is itself a choice) does not mean much, if
anything, in and by itself. What breathes life into this abstract formal tautology is the context (or situation) into which it is inserted. The subjectivism of the Heideggerian conception of temporality helps Sartre negate
the barred future of an epoch torn by the inherent contradiction of the
necessity of change and the impossibility of revolutions. Yetand this is
what decides the issuethe whether or not of impossible revolutions is
a question of real temporality which is being decided in the actual sociohistorical arena. Thus while the abstract temporality of a barred future is
still a future negates the real temporality of social inertia (determined by the
temporal-historical conditions of alienation and reification), this subjectivist
temporality of abstract possibility is also being negated by the real possibility
of actual revolutions.
Heideggerian purists would no doubt describe the way Sartre inserts the
adopted concepts into the context seen above as eclecticism. In fact, such
eclecticism constitutes Sartres exemplary originality and philosophical
significance. He succeeds in freeing himself of the tension manifest in his
youthful conception of temporality by acquiring a much greater tension.
The latter is not only much greater it is incomparably more fertile as
well. From now on, even if he does not yet know it (perceiving change in his
own development as commitment initiated by the war) he is situated right
in the turmoil of real temporality which he cannot just contemplate from the
sideline, from the temporalit intrieure of literary withdrawal. Indeed,
62
his act of commitment during the war becomes possible within the framework of this new conception and intensified existential tension which are
suitable to provide the basis of articulating a rich lifework. For without the
changed framework he might well respond to the inhumanity of the war and
the fatality of falling bombs in terms of the same decadent aestheticism of
interiority with which he once raved about the poetry of speed, of the
machines and about the inhumanity and splendid fatality of industry.
But cataclysm arrives and is followed by upheavals and revolutions
some unfinished, others defeated, others still partially successful, or delayed,
frustrated, brutally interfered with, but all painfully real. Could it be that
they all should have no major consequences for the other side of the contradiction locked up in Sartres new existential tension? Hardly, as his subsequent development clamorously proves.
6.
T H I S I S N OT T HE P OINT TO A NTICIPATE Sartres later development, but to
lay bare the structure of his thought as the inner necessity that constitutes
a vital condition of such development. In this sense, we have to indicate
another fundamental dimension: the way in which Sartre becomes a moral
philosopher malgr lui.
The problem arises out of the characterization of the present as an inert
totality: a world dying of old age, an epoch of impossible revolutions,
spreading and intensifying the feeling of paralysis even through the consciousness of cataclysm as the only feasible form of change. How can the
abstract proposition of barred future is still a future effectively negate such
gloom and doom? Only if it is turned into a categorical absolute which necessarily transcends all given temporality, no matter how suffocatingly real.
And who is the subject of this barred future? If it is the individual, the
proposition is clearly false, because barred future for the individual is inexorably barred. On the other hand, if the subject is mankind, the proposition
is absurd, because mankind cannot possibly have a barred future except
by barring it for itself in the form of a collective suicide, in which case there
can be no future, barred or unbarred nor indeed mankind, for that matter.
Paradoxically, the existential (non-tautological) meaning of the proposition is produced by conflating the individual and the collective subject. Its
meaning is thus not what it literally suggests (a tautology or a banality at
best), but the functional meaning of a radical negation which cannot point
63
at tangible historical forces as carriers of its truth and therefore must assume
the form of a categorical imperative: the moral ought.
This dimension of Sartres structure of thought, as inextricably linked
to the question of individual and collective subject, remains a fundamental
characteristic of his work throughout his development. Not that there can
be no changes in this respect for the rest of his life, for there are many. The
point is that such changes as they arise must always affect this whole set of
relations, notably the problems of temporality and morality as articulated in
terms of subject and object, the individual and the collective subject. These
problems are discussed in Part Three; here the point is simply to stress the
necessary interconnection between Sartres conception of temporality and
the paradoxical specificity of his moral philosophy. The truth is that the latter
is not an explicit but a latent moral philosophy and it remains so no matter
how hard he tries in some unfinished (unfinishable) manuscripts to turn it
into an explicit one. To some extent it resembles his writing lyric poetry: he
cannot write it because he does write itin a diffuse formall the time. It
is inherent in all his analyses, as the positive standpoint of the future which
assumes the form of a radical negation while it is unable to identify itself with
a historical subject. In the specific works which he is forced to abandon his
attempts at rendering explicit his moral principles are necessarily frustrated
because he tries to accomplish the task while remaining within the confines
of his phenomenological-existential ontology, which renders redundant
such explicitness.
Paradoxically, in order to remain a moral philosopher Sartres moral philosophy must remain latent. In order to spell out his latent moral philosophy
in a fully developed form, as he tries to again and again, Sartre would have
to substantially modify the structure of his philosophy as a whole, including
the function of the categorical moral ought in it. But such modification
would radically displaceindeed, possibly render superfluousprecisely
the categorical moral ought in the structure of his thought. Thus he could
produce his projected Morale only by ceasing to be a moral philosopher at
all. This explains why, curiously, his conscious efforts aimed at transcending
his earlier positions result in their strongest possible reaffirmation as the
necessary precondition of the impossible enterprise he is involved in:
the deduction of a socially oriented moral philosophy from the ontological
structure of individual praxes.
No text is nearer to his original system as spelled out in Being and
Nothingness than Determination and freedom, a lecture delivered twentythree years later, in May 1966, at the Gramsci Institute in Rome, and part of
64
a substantial manuscript on his Morale. It could be inserted into the pages

of the early work, Being and Nothingness, without too much difficulty. By
the same token, if he wants to transcend some of his earlier positions, he has
to do it without really trying. That is, he has to transcend through expansion, by bringing into the picture new ontological structuresas indeed
he does, in his Critique of Dialectical Reasonwhich objectively imply a
certain supersession, even if he does not spell it out in what is intended again
as a first volume. This means that the old and the new structures must be
left side by side, without integration. For as soon as the task of integration
is attempted, in the second volume or in some related work, the inherent
difficulty of moving from latency to explicitness presents itself with renewed
intensity, and we are back to the world of Being and Nothingness through the
route of Determination and freedom.
We can see, then, how right Sartre is when he characterizes his concern
with morality as his dominant preoccupation. With one necessary qualification. This concern enters his horizon malgr lui, in a paradoxical form,
via his definition of temporality and transcendence as opposed to his earlier
conception. Up to the time of writing LArt cinmatographique, and for
a few years thereafter, there can be no room for morality in his world of
sheltered interiority which laughs off mans concern with Good and Evil
as useless ideology and aesthetically reconciles itself with the splendid
fatality of capitalist inhumanity, without realizing the enormity of such
pronouncements. Thus when Paul Nizan, his closest friend, notes while
reviewing Nausea119 that Sartres thought is entirely alien to moral problems, he is correct in characterizing an early phase in Sartres development,
although it is highly debatable whether one should include Nausea in it.
(Nizan is no doubt influenced by the memory of their college discussions.)
In any case, it is a very limited phase. By the time Nausea is published, it is
certainly over, thanks to Sartres investigation of the nature of emotion and
imagination, and thanks to his radical redefinition of temporality.
7.
SA RT R E S N ET WOR K OF CO NCEP TS constitutes an amazingly coherent whole
in which the particular elements are organically linked. The way he uses
invention, for instance, might appear at times rather subjective, perhaps
even capricious, so long as it is not related to the conceptual framework
as a whole. But as soon as we become aware of the related concepts, as we
65
have seen above, the one-sided impression of subjectivity disappears. The

Sartrean concept of invention would indeed seem extremely voluntaristic and
even utterly futile within his own youthful vision of temporality. Not so in his
later conception. Once the fatality of absolute determination and irreversible
concatenation is banished from his picture, invention and imagination
can come into their own and acquire a major importance in his system of ideas.
Conversely, too, his preoccupation with the Imagination and LImaginaire
(the latter translated into English as the Psychology of Imagination) greatly
contribute to the elaboration of his conception of temporality.
Past becomes associated with the intellectual ordera sombre
condition, without surprise, ruled by the one-sided causality of concatenationand with inertia, lifelessness, despair. In Citizen Kane the game
is over. We are not involved in a novel but in a story in the past tense. . . .
Everything is analyzed, dissected, presented in the intellectual order, in a false
disorder which is the subordination of events to the rule of cause; everything
is dead.120 The same goes for Zola with whom everything obeys the narrowest kind of determinism. Zolas books are written from the past, while my
characters have a future.121 And when he realizes that the future is locked out
from some of his own works, he does not hesitate to condemn them. Talking
about Men without shadows (Morts sans spulture: unburied dead) he
insists that It is a failed play . . . the destiny of the victims is absolutely determined in advance . . . The cards are already on the table. It is a very sombre
play, without surprise.122 Similarly with volume IV of Roads to Freedom,
which he abandons. Simone de Beauvoir echoes Sartres own strictures and
imagery of gambling when she comments: For his heroes, at the end of Drle
damiti [the chapter published from volume IV] the game is over.123 It is
the future that gets his approval, expressed with great consistency in the positive connotation of its field of associated concepts, from hope and authenticity to surprise and life, and from the affective order (the opposite
of intellectual order) to dialectical totalization which brings to life the
object of its synthesis, instead of dissecting it on the mortuary table of analysis
for the sake of analysis.
Of course, as has been stressed repeatedly, we are talking about a unique
fusion of subjectivity and objectivity. Sartre makes no claims to scientific
objectivity. His network of concepts aims as much at evoking as at situating
and explaining. Yet, his fused subjective objectivity is infinitely more objective than the pretended objectivity of academic jargon. Knowing only too
well that we are always within the parameters of mans fundamental quest,
he does not simply observe and describe; he participates and moves at
66
the same time as he demonstrates. His way has nothing in common with the
pseudo-scientific objectivity of socially insensitive academic jargon that
resembles the enzymes of the digestive system which turn everything that
comes their way invariably into the same sort of end-product.
Sartres conceptual framework is radically different. It is more like a
sensitive dual prism which collects from all directions the lightwaves of
the epoch of which he is an exemplary witness. He breaks up the received
impressions into their constituents through the dual prism of his compelling personality only to resynthesize them in his totalizing vision that powerfully re-enters the world from which it is taken. To show and move at
the same time, from the standpoint of the feasible futurethat is his aim.
This implies being simultaneously outside and inside and it explains why
he needs the combined powers of philosophy, literature and myth. Id
like that the public should see our century, this strange thing, from outside,
as a witness. And that, at the same time everyone should participate, for this
century is made by the public.124 Sartre takes his full share in making this
century, by attacking its fetishes and increasing its self-awareness. It is this
character of participating testimony, creative and revealing commitment to
a total involvement, which gives his lifework its philosophical depth and its
dramatic intensity.
3. From The Legend of Truth to

a True Legend: Phases of
Sartres Development
1.
BEI N G S IM U LTAN E OU S LY O UTSID E and inside is also the task of a biographer,
as Sartre himself clearly demonstrates on more than one occasion
(Baudelaire, Mallarm, Genet, Flaubert). Writing on someone is a specific
relationship between two distinct singular temporalizations in which
sometimes affinities, sometimes elements of contrast predominate. In the
case of Flaubert, it is primarily the contrast that attracts Sartres attention:
Flaubert represents for me the exact opposite of my own conception of
literature: a total disengagement and a certain idea of form, which is not
that which I admire . . . He began to fascinate me precisely because I saw
him in every way as the contrary of myself.125 On other occasions (for
example when writing on Mallarm and on Genet), major affinities are in
the foreground. But whether confrontations or affinities set the tone, the
job of revealing exploration cannot be properly done without combining
the viewpoints of inside and outside: the sympathetic understanding
of inner motivations, however sharp the contrast, and the forward drive of
critical transcendence, however close the affinities.
68
Writing on someone is connecting two socio-historically different temporalizations, even when Lenin writes about Marx. Such an enterprise sets
out from the premise that the first is meaningful for the second, provided
that the process of explorationwhich is at the same time also a form of
clarifying self-reflectioncan mediate to the present those features of the
original temporalization which objectively contribute to the solution of
given tasks and problems. Reflection on the past can only proceed from
the meaning the present gives itselfvery much in the spirit of the Sartrean
projection towards the future: that is, towards the solution of the existing
tasksbut the very act of reflection, in virtue of establishing determinate
relationships with the past, inevitably also determines its own orientation.
Thus reflection and critical exploration become self-reflection and critical
self-definition. The meaning of the present is used as a key to unlock the
meaning of the past leading to the present, which in its turn unlocks formerly unidentified dimensions of the present leading to the future not in the
form of rigid mechanical determinations but as anticipations of aims linked
to a set of inner motivations. Thus we are involved in a dialectic movement
which leads from the present to the past and from the past to the future. In
this movement the past is not somewhere there, in its remote finality and
closure, but right here, open and situated between the present and the
future, paradoxical as it may sound to those who think in terms of the intellectual order of mechanical chronology. For the fact is that the present can
only have one mediation between itself and the future: not the infinitesimal
empty moment that separates it from what lies ahead, but the great wealth
and intensity of a past, brought to life in the expounded time of searching
reflection and critical self-examination.
History is thus not simply unalterable but inexhaustible. This is what
gives sense to being concerned with the past and determines the need
for constant reinterpretations. Nothing is more absurd than the notion of
definitive history, and definitive treatment of this or that period, or a
definitive biography, etc., which, by implication, anticipate a stage when,
given the abundant accumulation of definitive chunks, there will be no more
need for a constant re-examination of history. In the event of such definitiveness, it would not be only the historian who puts himself out of business
but man himself who can ignore or routinize his past only at the price of
decapitating his own future.
However, there is no danger that such notions might prevail except
perhaps in some areas of institutionalized irrelevance. To be sure, the
industry of routinized popular history and biography must promise its
F R O M THE " L E G E N D OF TRUTH " TO A "TRUE LEGEND "
69
readers (who are denied the chance of making history beyond the point
of abdication through the ballot box) the thrill of authentic voyeurism,
providing them with the consolation of definitive treatments and
allegedly great secret revelations. If ones participation is confined to
looking in on history through the keyhole, the spectacle had better be seen
as definitive, so as to give one the illusion of observing history in its
finality and massive permanence. For mans relation to the past is no privileged domain of positivistically disoriented specialists but an existential
dimension inseparable from the dilemmas and challenges of the present.
Evaluation of past events and figures, in so far as it arises from the needs
of a determinate relationship, has to be as definitive as possible in terms
of the given relationship which necessarily means that the more definitive
it is as a specific articulation of linked socio-historical temporalizations,
the less definitive it can be in its universality. Or, to put it more precisely,
its universality must manifest itself through a determinate socio-historical
temporality. Only the skeleton of pure chronology can have some sort of
mute universality and neutral validityin that it extends over all periods
which is indistinguishable from sheer immediacy and flat particularity.
For the data of pure chronology must first be selected and arranged in a
structured order, from a determinate historical standpoint, before they can
acquire any meaning whatsoever.
Thus meaning, at any level and in all contexts, is not simply found in
the subject of ones enquiry (as some sociological and other scientific
myth-makers presume, condemning themselves to tottering at the level of
generality of a local telephone directory without its self-evident function),
but unfolded from it through the meaning of the searching temporality.
Saying with Sartre that the important thing is not what one is but what one
does is one side of a vital interrelationship. The other was spelled out by
Goethe when he insisted that to be able to do something one must already
be something.126 It is this being in a situation at a determinate juncture in
history, rooted in specific social forces with their interests, needs and orientation, which constitutes the necessary principle of selection. Without that
how could one simply reproduce the meaning of Sartres work, short of
reprinting his eight or nine million words, together with an account of a few
million related facts and events? Such an enterprise would amount to doing
absolutely nothing, even if it were possible. What makes Isaac Deutschers
biographies lasting works is not that they contain everything in a definitive form (how could they?), but that they offer a meaningful selection of
data, relevant to his own quest and to the orientation of his contemporaries.
70
Thus, the most important single factor in the constitution of meaning is the
underlying passion that animates the search itself.
All this does not mean, of course, that objectivity in history is negated.
On the contrary, a precise definition of its nature and limits rescues historical objectivity from the fate of extreme relativism which it suffers through
the self-contradictory aspirations of positivism and scientism. They start
from the presumed objectivity of completeness, ignoring the arbitrariness
of the choice of the enquiry itself, whereby the proper relationship between
research and researcher is completely overturned. It is not the researcher
who looks for data; on the contrary, the availability of abundant data produces the reified researcher of institutionalized routine. And, of course,
the self-justifying ideology of such procedure takes the form of ruling out
the need for justification of any research whatsoever, absolving its triviality
and irrelevance. Anything goes that can be researched, nailed to a display
board in a form through which the dead objectivity of dusty data is linked
to an impersonally objective pseudo-subject. Are we not reassured by the
originator of this practice (Ranke) that all human facts and events are equidistant from God? He spends his life fighting historical relativism, only
to end up producing the most exasperated form of it. This is supremely
ironical. For the methodology of unstructured completeness liquidates
not only historical objectivity but itself as well. It turns the equidistant
data into tokens of equally meaningful or meaningless equivalences, thus
nihilating any need for completeness: its original aim and raison dtre. And
having succeeded in nihilating its own ground, it turns the activity of producing equidistant equivalences into a form of self-consuming superfluity.
In truth, the only God relevant to human history is made in the image
of living three-dimensional man, and therefore the data of this history are
decidedly not equidistant from him. Some are more meaningful than others,
and some are more meaningful to one epoch than to another. Objectivity in
history is not that of a nail, let alone of a stone, for man is not a thinking nail,
as Sartre often reminds us. Historical objectivity is dynamic and changing,
as is life not in and by itselffor that would be still reducible to a set of more
or less simplified natural lawsbut as it evolves, on a natural basis radically
modified by work and self-reflection, in the social sphere. The objectivity
of the search itself is determined by the conditions of a given temporality
which, of course, include anticipations and assessments of future trends of
development. Nonetheless, in its dynamic objectivity, every search is subject
to criteria of evaluation both as regards its social determinants (including
their limitations) and the nature (realistic or otherwise) of its anticipations.
71
Similarly, in the past itself we are concerned with linking temporalizations, and not with some arbitrary projection backwards onto an empty
screen. For while the past is inexhaustible, it is certainly not characterless.
It cannot be just moulded, whichever way one pleases, in accordance with
arbitrary whim and caprice: the weight and inner logic of its evidence sets
objective limits to possible reinterpretations. The past is inexhaustible not
in an by itself but in virtue of the fact that it is objectively linked to the future
which is never completely made. As man makes his own history, on the basis
of temporal and structural determinationspreserving and transcending
them certain characteristics of the past come to the fore which were not
visible before. They were not visible not because people were blind or shortsighted (though, of course, there is an abundance of such instances too) but
because they did not exist in the same form before the objective articulation of determinate relationships. The ground has certain features before the
house is built on it, which in certain conditions (of which the house itself
is an integral part), are painfully evidenced as subsidence by the cracks in
the wall. The future does not invent or create the characteristics of the past
but articulates them in the course of its own self-realization. This produces
the need for constant reinterpretations, setting at the same time well defined
objective limits as to which way and how far they can go.
In the course of such reinterpretationsin so far as they correspond
to a genuine movement in the social sphere that generates them, rather
than being mechanically turned out by the routine of a reified industry of
culturethe previous ones are inevitably aufgehoben (not refuted) in the
sense that a more advanced stage can unfold a greater complexity of meaning
out of the subject of its linking search. Lukcss assessment of Goethe gives
a deeper insight into the great German writer than Hegels reflections on
him, irrespective of the comparative stature of the two philosophers. Nor
does his evaluation lay claims to definitiveness. The characteristic feature
of a Marxist line of approach is not some attempt to go beyond the sphere
of its own transcendabilitya petrified absurditybut precisely its awareness of the temporal determinations of its own quest, not only that of its
subject. By leaving the lines of research open, instead of vainly trying to
close them, and by reflecting on its own inner motivations and temporal
determinations, such an approach, no doubt, radically rejects the illusions
of definitiveness and complete finality. At the same time, by acknowledging
and exemplifying the dynamism of historical objectivity, it can not only bring
to life with greater effectiveness the subject of its search, but also prepare
the ground for further interpretations and revaluations, rooted in new
72
existential predicaments which it thus also helps to bring to the fore. No

one can realistically aim at more than this linking search which is simultaneously outside and insidea preserving transcendence of the past which
is also a form of determinate temporality and self-transcendence. This is,
precisely, what gives such search its raison dtre.
2.
concerns the alleged phenomenon

of ruptures and radical breaks in historical and intellectual development.
The dialectical interchange of life and work, epoch and writer, make
such idea as an explanatory hypothesis a definite non-starter. The writer,
according to Sartre, goes on writing even when he has lost his illusions
about the nature and impact of literature, and thus of his own work, for he
has invested everything in his occupation.127 Even if there was nothing
beside this ideological interest,128 it should be enough to caution one
against disregarding the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity. For the
writers ideological interest points to something deeper, namely to the
fact that you have a past that you cant repudiate. Even if you try, you can
never repudiate it completely because it is as much part of you as your
skeleton . . . In the long run you have not changed much, since you can never
discard the whole of your childhood.129 And the man who speaks in such
terms, in 1970, is none other than Sartre, who is supposed to have radically
repudiated his own past.
Considering the relationship of the writer and his epoch, the problem to
be explained is twofold: individuality and autonomy on the one hand, and
social determination on the other. This is how Sartre formulates the issue:
A N OT HE R M YT H T HAT N EED S D ISP ELLING
I would like the reader to feel the presence of Flaubert the whole time;
my ideal would be that the reader simultaneously feels, comprehends and
knows the personality of Flaubert, totally as an individual and yet totally as
an expression of his time.130
And in more general terms:

I believe that a man can always make something out of what is made of him.
This is the limit I would today accord to freedom: the small movement
which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does
73
not render back completely what his conditioning has given him. . . .
The individual interiorizes his social determinations: he interiorizes the
relations of production, the family of his childhood, the historical past, the
contemporary institutions, and then he re-exteriorizes these in acts and
options which necessarily refer us back to them.131
Thus the constituents of an individuals development may be summed up

as follows:
1. The formation of his personality and thought in his youth and the
interiorization of the institutions he experiences (family, class, etc.);
2. The continued determinations of his social environment, with all its
changes, and their interiorizations by the individual;
3. The self-definition of the individual in his social setting through work
(e.g. writing) and the response of his social environment to it;
4. The interiorization of his own work and of its social consequences by
the individual concerned (of his ideological interest as an intellectual,
for instance);
5. A possible re-exteriorization of a critique of the last interiorization as
a negation of the social basis of the type of work in question (e.g. the
negation of the role of the traditional intellectual, in Sartres case).
It is clear that while the first four constituents are characteristic of the
development of individuals in general, the fifth represents a form of critical self-awareness which is inseparable from a radical critique of society.
Furthermore, since that critique appeals to the perspective of a distant future
as the necessary condition of its realization, the negation may remain theoretical only (like Bergsons libert intrieure), coupled with an actual reaffirmation, even if not necessarily re-interiorization, of the mode of existence
of the criticized traditional intellectual, not as an ideal but as an insuperable reality for the individual concerned, thus reasserting the power of continuity over the expectation of a break. We can see this clearly in Sartres
answer to the question: How do you see the new mission of the intellectual?, which begins with the suggestion that He must first of all suppress
himself as an intellectual, and ends with his confession: I decided to finish
74
the book [on Flaubert], but as long as I go on working on it, I remain at the
level of the traditional intellectual.132
Evidently, in a writers development the crucial factor is how he responds
to the conflicts and changes of the social world in which he is situated. This
can be differentiated into two basic elements: his own constitution (structure of thought, character, tastes, personality), and the relative degree of
dynamism with which the social forces of his epoch confront one another,
drawing him in one way or another into their confrontations. To describe
the interchanges between a writer and his epoch in terms of ruptures is at
best extremely nave on both counts. For neither socio-historical, nor individual development is characterized by breaks alone, but by a complex
configuration of changes and continuities. In some epochs (such as the
French Revolution) discontinuities are in the foreground, and in others
(such as the period between 1871 and 1905) continuities predominate. But
there are always changes beneath the surface of continuities, and some basic
continuities persist, no matter how radical the breaks in certain regions (the
Russian Revolution and the stagnating conditions of agricultural production for decades thereafter, for instance).
A society is made of multiple layers of coexisting social instruments
and practices, each with its own specific rhythm of temporality: a fact that
carries far-reaching implications for social development as a whole. This is
a major problem which must be treated in its proper setting, namely in the
framework of a theory of social transformation and transition. What matters
in the present context is that even in the same sphere (material production,
for instance) practices going back almost as far as the Stone Age may more
or less happily coexist with activities requiring the most advanced forms of
technology. This is by no means confined to societies like India where primitive subsistence agriculture is, ironically, complemented by the technology of
nuclear arms production. We can find similar instances in our own societies
(although the relative weight of the more ancient social practices is, of course,
very different in the economic life of our society as a whole). For a Stradivarius
on the Assembly Line is a contradiction in terms. The best chisels for sculptors are made today by an old blacksmith in London who works with tools
and techniques of thousands of years ago, but nonetheless he is able to put
to shame the most advanced Japanese, German and American computerized
chisel production techniques, by tempering steel in such a way that it optimally combines the qualities of hardness and resilience which together constitute the most desirable chisel, as Henry Moore himself insisted about it.
Now if we try to think of all the social spheres combined, with their manifold
75
varieties, different degrees of complexity, phases of uneven development

(Marx), and differences in what might be called structural inertia, as well as
their reciprocal interactions, conflicts, clashes, and even antagonistic contradictions under determinate historical conditions, it is obvious that the
reduction of this breath-taking complexity to the voluntaristic (e.g. Stalinist)
simplification of instant ruptures resulting in radical break with the past,
whereafter all problems are caused by the enemy, can only produce painful
social hernias which might take ages to cure.
Mutatis mutandis, the same considerations apply to the development
of the individual. For one thing, his need for and ability to change does not
necessarily coincide with the dynamism (or, for that matter, social stagnation) of his epoch, and conflicts may be generated from both directions.
(This is what produces the individual who is out of phase with his time.)
Furthermore, certain dimensions of his complex being are structurally less
readily amenable to change than others. Thus taste, for instance. In some
cultures eating chillies constitutes supreme delight, in others a form of
torture. The problem to be explained is not only the stubborn persistence
of the acquired taste in the individual even when he is transferred into a
sharply different culture, but also the fact that the two extremes are constituted on the shared basis of the original experience of sucking the mothers
milk. Both problems are explicable only by some specific configuration of
continuity and discontinuity, with the relative predominance of one or the
other. Incomparably more so when we take into account the whole complexity of a singular individuality. The way in which the various dimensions combine into a coherent whole (and when they do not, we have the
problems of a dislocated personality), despite the structural differences and
tensions between the respective temporal rhythms (for, thankfully, a man
does not age in one piece, with uniformity, otherwise he would age with the
self-accelerating speed of a steel ball rushing down a steep incline) can only
be comprehended through the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity.
The structure of an individuals thought is constituted at a relatively
early age, and all its subsequent modifications, however great or small, can
only be explained as alterations of the original structure, even if the distance
covered is as great as from the mothers milk to chillies. But it cannot be
explained simply as the structures rupturewhich, in and by itself, is
nothing and thus explains absolutely nothing: rupture is meaningful only
as a well defined interaction of determinate forcesor as the invention of a
brand new structure, either out of nothing, or through a mechanical transference of the determinations of an age on to the mysterious tabula rasa
76
(another name for nothing) of a rupturally emptied individuality (which

is a contradiction in terms). The lifework of an intellectual exhibits many
layers of structural transformations, which are intelligible only as increasingly more complex superseding preservations (or preserving supersessions) of the original structure.
But to refer to the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity is not enough.
To say that history, both individual and collective, manifests itself through
continuities and changes would acquire the status of a truism, were it not
that determinate ideological interests turn it into a hotly debated theoretical proposition. In considering a writer like Sartre the interesting problem
is not the unity of continuity and change in his development but its specific
form of configuration. Generally speaking, we can think of this problem in
terms of a spectrum within which continuities predominate more or less
extensively and to varying degrees of intensity (compare in this respect
Modigliani and Picasso, or Kodly and Bartk, for instance). Nor should
one be deceived by changes which are precisely manifestations of a deeper
underlying continuity. For an individuals intellectual development is made
up of many aspects, some of which are far more weighty than others in determining the articulation of the overall structure. When Sartre exclaims that
on nest pas plus sauv par la politique que par la littrature (one isnt
any more saved through politics than through literature),133 he gives away
the key to understanding that the sharply contrasting forms of his praxis are
different ways of expressing the fundamental underlying continuity: his passionate quest for the absolute of a non-religious salvation.
The salient feature of Sartres development is the ultimate predominance
of continuity through a multiplicity of transformations. His life activity
assumes an extremely paradoxical form. For it is not simply dominated by
continuities but, on the contrary, appears to be punctuated by apparently
incomprehensible discontinuities, described variously as radical conversion, lapse into ultra-bolshevism, radical break with the past, and so
on. It is both the paradoxical form of the continuity and the heterogeneous
tensions which determine its relative transformations, which together define
the specificity of Sartres intellectual development.
3.
particular phases of this development, we have to

proceed with great caution. For movements in real life are much more subtle
I F W E WANT TO F OL LOW
77
than what might be captured through periodizations which, of necessity,

freeze any live movement. Changes occur not only between workslet
alone between periods or phasesbut inside particular works. Moreover,
continuities are not broken off at points of transition but persist sometimes
throughout the whole of a lifework.
Nevertheless, the relationship between a writer and his epoch cannot
be properly understood without fully taking into account the impact of historical events and social transformations even if one must make all the necessary allowances for existing overlaps on the one hand, and the constant
capillary changes which are primarily determined by the inner logic of the
chosen subject on the other.
Keeping in mind these qualifications, we may define the principal phases
of Sartres development as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The Years of Innocence: 1923 1940

The Years of Abstract Heroism: 19411945
Search for Politics in the Key of Morality: 19461950
Search for Morality in the Key of Politics: 19511956
Search for the Dialectic of History: 19571962
The Discovery of the Singular Universal: 1963 onwards
Let us have a brief look at each of these phases.
1. The Years of Innocence: 19231940

The year 1923 stands for the publication of a short story134 and of three
fragments of a lost novel,135 followed after a four-year break by the essay
on The theory of state in modern French thought referred to above.
None of these works has other than purely documentary interest, for they
are truly pen exercises, rather than original works. The first of Sartres
writings to give a hint of what is to come are his letter contributing to the
student enquiry (see above, page 39) and The Legend of Truth, both written
in1929 but the latter published only in 1931. LArt cinmatographic (see
above, pages 56-57) is in the same category in that all three exhibit traits of
originality against a background of borrowed wisdom, but are still far from
indicating a viable road ahead.
The situation changes with The Transcendence of the Ego, written in
1934 (published in 1936) and three other major essays on problems of
78
philosophical psychology: Esquisse dune thorie des motions, LImagination

(both 1935-36) and LImaginaire: Psychologie phnomnologique de
limagination, written between 1935 and 1940, when it was published.136
According to Simone de Beauvoir, the grand project on philosophical psychology (of which The Transcendence of the Ego and Sketch for a Theory of
the Emotions constitute a small part) is abandoned by Sartre because he considers it little more than an exercise.137 In truth they are a great deal more
than that. While Sartre later sharply revises some of the most extreme statements made about freedom on the basis of the philosophical psychology
expressed in these works, he retains their conceptual framework not only in
Being and Nothingness but throughout his subsequent development. (See,
for instance, Itinerary of a thought, 1969, which explains his project on
Flaubert with the categories of LImaginaire.138)
To these works we have to add not only the important essay on temporality in Faulkner (see above pages 58-61) but also his fine short stories139
and a most remarkable novel, La Nause (Nausea). The general trend is
clear. After the first years (1923-28) which produce nothing more than
exercises, out of the gropings of The Legend of Truth some philosophical
and literary works emerge which define Sartres quest as the exploration of
individual experience at the level of a great existential intensity. The social
and political dimensions are almost completely absent, or appear only on
the horizon, painted with the colors of resignation and Melancholia (the
original title of Nausea), signaling the triumph of reification and alienation.
This absence of the social and political dimensions, before the fall of commitment, give a marked unity to Sartres first phase of development as the
years of sinfully self-oriented innocence.
2. The Years of Abstract Heroism: 19411945

The war brings commitment of a certain kind.
What the drama of the war gave me [explains Sartre], as it did everyone
who participated in it, was the experience of heroism. Not my own, of course
all I did was a few errands. But the militant in the Resistance who was
caught and tortured became a myth for us. Such militants existed, of course,
but they represented a sort of personal myth as well. Would we be able to
hold out against torture too? The problem then was solely that of physical
endurance it was not the ruses of history or the paths of alienation. A man
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is tortured: what will he do? He either speaks or refuses to speak. This is

what I mean by the experience of heroism, which is a false experience. After
the war came the true experience, that of society. But I think it was necessary
for me to pass via the myth of heroism.140
This experience of heroism is abstract not only because Sartre has to

contemplate it from the sideline but also because the whole complexity of
the epochfor even a period of historical emergency has its own ruses
and paths of alienation, however different they may be from those of the
postwar worldis reduced to a moral dilemma, in accordance with the
horizon of a problematical subjectivity and very tentatively self-transcending individuality. The main philosophical work of this phase is Being and
Nothingness (1943), which announces the possibilities of such transcendence in the extremely abstract categories of phenomenological ontology,
structured around subjectivity. Sartres three early playsBariona (1941),
Flies (1943), and Huis Clos (1943)fit well into this intellectual framework,
and so does Roads to Freedom (its first two volumes written in 194144
and published in 1945), apart from the aesthetic considerations discussed
above. 1945 is also the year of writing two important programmatic essays:
propos de lexistentialisme: Mise au point141 and LExistentialisme est
un humanisme142in which the tone is more positive but the conceptual
framework remains the same, despite the new experience of society. The
work in which the problematic features of Sartres abstract heroism break to
the fore, without however resulting in an aesthetically or conceptually viable
alternative, is Morts sans spulture,143 his failed play (see page 65).
And yet, when we notice the distinguishing characteristics of this phase,
we should also be aware of some important continuities. We should notice
not only the fact that the ontological structure of individual praxes remains
the framework of orientation of Sartres later writings on morality, including
Determination and freedom (1966), but also the structural affinities with
the Critique of Dialectical Reason, where the contrast is supposed to be the
sharpest. For implicitly in Being and Nothingness, and explicitly in Huis
Clos, hell is the other. Now one of the central themes of the Critique is
what Sartre calls the practico-inert: the reign of the other and of his instruments and institutions. And we are confronted with the same gripping definition: hell is the practico-inert.
80
3. Search for Politics in the Key or Morality: 19461950

If the first phase is characterized by the predominance of self-oriented
subjectivity, and the second by the assertion of an abstract moral heroism
(freedom as inherent in the ontological structure of being), the third phase is
under the sign of the pursuit of a morally committed politics while retaining
the sovereignty of the individual. It follows naturally from the earlier phases
of which the third represents an extension towards real socio-historical
problems, without paying much, if any, attention to institutional realities
which are necessary conditions of any possible solution of these problems.
Even Les Mains sales and LEngranage (both from 1948) which directly
confront some major political issues, do this in the form of moral dilemmas
that apparently are not amenable to a solution.
Sartres reflections on commitment are articulated with great intensity
and coherence in Baudelaire (1946), Forgers of myth: the young playwrights of France (1946), The writers responsibility (1947) and, above
all, What Is Literature? (1947). His articles on politics are full of imperatives, even in their titles: Jeunes dEurope, unissez-vous! Faites vous-mme
vtre destin!; Il nous faut la paix pour refaire le monde; Il faut que nous
menions cette lutte en commun, etc. He defines the fundamental task of the
RDR (Rassemblement Dmocratique Rvolutionnaire)a shortlived political movement with which he is associated for a whileas the unification of
revolutionary demands with the idea of freedom,144 but he has nothing to
say on how to achieve it, except by unrealistically appealing directly to the
consciousness of individuals, irrespective of their political affiliations.
The RDR soon collapses, but Sartres conception of politics as a moral
imperative persists for some time. He sees the essence of the Yugoslav experience as subjectivity . . . not as a formal ideal but as an effective reality.145
And in an introduction to Roger Stphanes Portrait of the Adventurer
(1950) he sings the eulogy of Lawrence of Arabia for living to the limit an
impossible condition, an unbearable tension of antinomies and contradictions.146 And this is how he defines morality too: it is for us simultaneously inevitable and impossible.147 Should one be surprised therefore to
learn that in the same period he abandons not only volume IV of Roads to
Freedom, but his Morale as well, after 2,000 pages of struggle with its insurmountable impossibility.148
81
4. Search for Morality in the Key of Politics: 19511956

The frustration of the previous phasethe exasperations of the Cold War
period and Sartres feeling of impotence to make an impact in a positive
direction by means of his moral-political appeals to the concerned
individualbrings a major soul-searching. Its outstanding results are Saint
Genet (195052) and, above all, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu (1951, translated
as Lucifer and the Lord in English), a magnificent playperhaps his greatest
single work: a drama we might call Sartres Guernica.
The objectivity of history is discovered obliquely, under the threat of
nuclear self-annihilation: In order to prevent the world from following its
own course, they threaten with the suppression of history through the liquidation of the historical agent.149 Sartre throws himself into feverish political
activity, in order to help prevent such ultimate disaster. He becomes a prominent figure in the World Peace Movement, writing articles, and making
numerous public speeches on the subject of world peace; and on the plane
of internal politics he is a passionate advocate of a new Popular Front.150
There are still moments when he maintains the illusions on the political
power of independent individuals,151 but he is trying to establish a close
relationship with the French Communist Party. Two major publications
mark this trend: The Communists and Peace (195254), and LAffair Henri
Martin (1953), apart from the play Nekrassov (1955) and the film scenario
The Witches of Salem (1956). And in the field of literary studies his passionate interest is with those who consciously commit themselves; he makes
this clear in an interview: Mallarm and Genetthey are both conscious
of their commitment. . . . [Mallarm] is our greatest poet. A wild, impassioned man. . . . His was an all-embracing commitmentsocial as much as
poetic.152
Sartres political radicalization brings also his clamorous break with
Camus, and then, not so clamorous but with equal finality, with his much
closer friend and collaborator, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He is accused of
abdication, which is very far from the truth. In reality, he is trying to influence the Communist Party from the outside (as witnessed by an important critical article, Le reformisme et les ftiches153) while insisting that
in France the only viable force of mediation of working-class politics is the
Communist Party.
As he later realizes, after the shock of the Hungarian upheavals in
October 1956, he is trying to do the impossible. His characterizations of
the Party are often straightforward projections of his conception of morality
82
which needs tangible historical agencies for its realization. In the end his
effort to unify his moral ideals with political reality, despite his willingness
to make some concessions, flounders and a new crisis sets in. And just as
he characterized our moral predicament earlier as ruled by insurmountable impossibility and simultaneous inevitability and impossibility, he
later sums up the dilemmas and antinomies of our political predicament in
the same terms: Collaboration with the CP is both necessary and impossible.154 Thus Politics in the Key of Morality, and Morality in the Key of
Politicshowever different their emphases in determinate historical situationscome structurally to the same thing: the assertion and reassertion of
fundamental antinomies.
5. Search for the Dialectic of History: 19571963

The disappointment of his political expectations passionately denounced
in the book-length essay, Le fantome de Staline,155 raises the questions
why did it all happen? and what are the hopes for the future?, calling
for a searching investigation of the structures and determinations of history
vis--vis the possibilities of individual praxis. This means going back to the
foundations, in order
to provide a philosophical foundation for realism. This in my opinion is
possible today, and I have tried to do it all my life. In other words, how
can one give man both his autonomy and his reality among real objects,
avoiding idealism without lapsing into a mechanistic materialism. I posed
the problem in this way because I was ignorant of dialectical materialism
although I should add that this later allowed me to assign certain limits to
itto validate the historical dialectic while rejecting a dialectic of nature,
in the sense of a natural process which produces and resolves man into an
ensemble of physical laws.156
This foundation and validation is a monumental enterprise of which

Critique of Dialectical Reason, massive as it is, constitutes only a small part.
Indeed, in an interview by Madeleine Chapsal in 1959, Sartre optimistically
announces that The first volume will be published within a month, and the
second within a year.157 However, the second volume is abandoned after early
chapters, and the project is altogether displaced a few years later by a close
investigation of singular individuality through the life and work of Flaubert.
83
Naturally, Sartres contacts with politics are not broken off, but they
assume a very different form. This is the time of the Algerian war, and he
is fully involved, as an individual, in the fight against the danger of fascism,
against torture, the OAS, and so on. Similarly, the victory of the Cuban
revolution is greeted by Sartre with great enthusiasm, and he continues to
defend it against all kinds of attack. But he is a loner supporting worthy
causes rather than a member or associate of a political movement.158
Critical self-examination in the essays on Brecht, Gorzs Traitor, Nizan,
and Merleau-Ponty vivant (1961) takes the form of a severe indictment
of his whole generation, together with its sclerotic institutions. The overall
picture is rather sombre (likewise in his Critique), and Altona (1959) one
of his most powerful plays fits organically into it, with its examination of
historical determinations in relation to human responsibility. History is
questioned with a hopeful eye towards the future, but no reassurance seems
to be forthcoming at least not for the time being.
6. Discovery of the Singular Universal: 1963 onwards

The publication of Words (1963) signals a form of peace, expressed with
serenity also in the lines we have seen on salvation in literature and in
politics. It goes without saying, Sartre takes a keen interest in the world
of politics, especially in the Third World, from writing an introduction
to a collection of Lumumbas essays to presiding over the deliberations of
the Russell Tribunal. And he defends Rgis Debrayin danger of being
executed in Boliviawith the same passion with which he condemns
the Russian intervention in Prague. There is even a moment of great
positive enthusiasmMay 1968 in Pariswhen his best dreams about
imagination in power seem to come true in his own homeland. All the
same, politically he remains an isolated figure even when for reasons of
solidarity he accepts the nominal directorship of the persecuted paper,
La Cause du Peuple.
Realizing that the concrete universal is possible only in a society which
is made of the same stuff, he accepts the limitations of the intellectualin
Words, in the essays on Luniversel singulier, in A plea for intellectuals,
for examplewhile questioning the conditions of his existence. By far the
most important project in this respect is The Idiot of the Family (vols. I and
II, 1971, vol. III, 1972)an immense work of which nearly 3,000 dense
pages are already printed, though it still seems to be very far from the end.
84
Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason was supposed to be continued in

the following way:
The difference between the first and second volume is this: the first is an
abstract work where I show the possibilities of exchange, degradation, the
practico-inert, series, collectives, recurrence and so on. It is concerned only
with the theoretical possibilities of their combinations. The project of the
second volume is history itself . . . my aim will be to prove that there is a
dialectical intelligibility of the singular. For ours is a singular history. . . .
What I will seek to show is the dialectical intelligibility of that which is not
universalizable.159
It is extremely difficult to imagine how one can comprehend history

itself through these categories, since the problem of history is precisely
how to universalize the singular without suppressing its specificities. By
contrast, however, it is very easy to see the natural transition from history to
biography, namely from this Sartrean conception of history to the project on
Flaubert. For the intelligibility of the non-universalizable singular calls for
lived experience as the basis of its comprehension. And the reconstruction
of the personage through limaginaire necessarily involved in it, gives us a
True legend, at the highest level of complexity. Some of the fundamental
structures of history itself thus remain hidden away in the second volume of
the Critique that never comes, for they do not seem to fit into the framework
of Sartres quest. But, by compensation, the existential dimensions of singular universality are brought to life, with great richness and penetration.
4.
AS WE C AN S E E F R OM T HIS necessarily sketchy account, the particular phases
of Sartres development are not simply the result of external determinations,
but of a complex interaction between the internal determinations of his
structure of thought, and the social and political events of his epoch. The
fatal immobilism of pre-war years; the immense human drama and suffering
of the Second World War; the cold war inaugurated by Churchills Fulton
speech after the short interval of serene rejoicing over the shared victory
over Fascism; the menace of a nuclear devastation in the aftermath of the
establishment of NATO, soon followed by the outbreak of the Korean War;
the explosion of the inner contradictions of the Stalinist system, and the
85
new dynamism of the Third World gathering its own momentum (with
Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.)each coincides, roughly, with a phase in
Sartres development for which it provides a broad historical and political
framework. But the way in which Sartre proceeds, and the distance he is
able to travel, is determined by the innermost nature of his vision itself, as
we could clearly perceive in his transitions from self-oriented subjectivity
ultimately leading, through the intermediary forms of active (one might
even say activist) moral and political commitment, to the problematic
individuality of the singular universal.
On the surface, changes not only are in evidence, but they assume the
striking form of apparently radical breaks: every phase is abandoned in its
turn, with conscious public declarations by Sartre as to the why? of the
clamorous discontinuities. But if we look closer, we realize that the succession of striking changes unfolds a fundamental continuity. Trying to understand Sartre through his breakswhich on the whole are confined to the
political levelis like explaining the nature of the tides by the prevalent
wind currents. Just as the tide is understood through the force of the moon,
and not by the power of the wind even if hurricane strong, Sartres development is explained by the stubborn continuity of his fundamental quest. If
the breaks were the determining feature, how could one account for the
lasting validity of the works produced in the preceding phases? The fact is,
however, that Sartres advances do not invalidate his earlier results but
essentially preserve them, both in his world of literature and in his philosophical thought. He is a man who perceives the contradictions around
him in the form of dilemmas, antinomies and paradoxes. His praise of the
adventurer is not a temporary lapse but an expression of his inner tensions which remain a permanent dimension of his lifework. He is the man
who keeps together the unbearable tension of the perceived contradictions as insuperable antinomies. For the unresolved tensionthrough all its
transformationsdrives him forward and produces the lasting validity of
his major works: Nausea, LImaginaire, Being and Nothingness, Flies, Huis
Clos, Les mains Sales, Lucifer and the Lord, Saint Genet, Altona, Critique of
Dialectical Reason, and The Idiot of the Family.160
In 1945 he declares: Mathieus childhood . . . doesnt matter,161that
is, it doesnt matter in his vision of the world, which means that however
much it matters in real life ruled by Bad Faith, it ought not to matter. In
1959, through the play Altona, he shows how the past conditions the present,
commenting on the sad reality whereby the characters are all the time commanded and held back by the past, as they are by the others. It is because of
86
the pastof their own and of all the othersthat they act in a certain way.
As in real life.162 The contrast is as striking as it is misleading. For again he
appeals to the viewpoint of the future, and urges men to look at themselves
from the outside, in order to be able to notice that it ought not to be like
that at all. As he tries to demonstrate also in Determination and freedom
six years later, there is absolutely nothing in the ontological structure of
being to make them behave like that. If they do, it is because of social and
political determinations and their interiorizations by the individualsbut
they ought not to. Witness and participant, he warns us that we shall be
judged163 by the future, our future. Thus we ought to act in accordance with
the ontological structure of our being (in relation to which Mathieus or
anyone elses past really does not matter), and not the way we actually do.
The most striking continuity lies beneath the surface of an apparent break.
The moon that determines the movement of Sartres tidal waves is his
radical quest for unfolding the fundamental dimensions of being, in a world
of distracting compromises and temptations, offering lines of easy resistance
which lead towards disaster through unfounded self-reassurance and the
promise of comfort. This is not his way, and ought not to be ours, he tells us,
pursuing the task of persuasion with tireless passion.
The marvelous unity of this life is its intransigence in the quest for the
absolute, writes Sartre about his great friend, Giacometti.164 There can be
no better way of summing up the movement and the direction of his own
lifework. Such a quest for the absolute is not something mysterious and transcendental. On the contrary, it is very precise and tangible. It means a radical
definition of a mans fundamental project in a sense which necessarily
implies going to the limit, whatever the limit may appear to be to the individual in question at any particular time in the course of his development.
Sartres heroesMallarm, Genet, Nizan, Fucik, Giacometti, Hikmet,
and in fiction Julien Sorelare men who explore their predicament to the
limit. Similarly, his anti-heroesamong them Baudelaire and Flaubertare
those who refuse to do so, thus condemning themselves to the consequences
of their fundamental choice: an escape into the imaginary and the acceptance of alienation. What interests me about Flaubert is that he refused to go
to the limit,165 writes Sartre, clearly indicating the moral sense of his painfully long involvement in the subject. It is going to the limit he himself opts
for, and champions with single-minded determination and intransigence,
insisting that the question is What have you made of your life?166 Success
is measured by ones ability to establish the real connection with others,
with oneself and with death167 as opposed to the reassuring, dreary world
87
of the inauthentic168 in which men are trapped by a moiling of flabby,

many-tentacled evasions.169
Whatever one may think of Sartres achievements, no one can accuse
him of evasions. Probing the limits, irrespective of the consequences, this
is the fundamental defining characteristic of his lifework. His road, from
self-oriented subjectivity to the problematic individuality of the singular
universal, leads over territories full of explosive dilemmas which he depicts
in the most paradoxical form. There is a morality of politicsa difficult subject, and never clearly treatedand when politics must betray its
morality, to choose morality is to betray politics. Now find your way out of
that one! Particularly when the politics has taken as its goal bringing about
the reign of the human.170 Much of Sartres lifework is spent on identifying
such dilemmas and paradoxes, even if he cannot offer solutions to them. For,
again, the innermost nature of these dilemmas and paradoxes is that willingness to face the limits is the vital condition of their identification and possible solution. It is Sartres passionate search for the limits which determines
the fundamental continuity of his lifework through all its transformations.
P A R T
T W O
Search for Freedom
To come into the world as a freedom, confronting Others is to

come into the world as alienable. If to will oneself free is to choose
to be in this world confronting Others, then the one who wills
himself such must also will the passion of his freedom.
Whether in fury, hate, pride, shame, disheartened refusal or joyous
demand, it is necessary for me to choose to be what I am.
From Being and Nothingness
4. Search for the Individual:

The early Works
1.
D I S CUS S IN G T HE IN T E LLECTUA L D EVELO PMENT
of his generation, Sartre
writes in The Problem of Method:

We plunged blindly down the dangerous path of a pluralist realism
concerned with man and things in their concrete existence. Yet we
remained within the compass of dominating ideas. For a long time we
confused the total and the individual. Pluralism, which had served us so
well against M. Brunschwicgs idealism, prevented us from understanding
the dialectical totalization. It pleased us to decry essences and artificially
isolated types rather than to reconstitute the synthetic movement of a truth
that had become. 1 71
Such self-description, with which Sartres work abounds, must be taken with
a pinch of salt. We must constantly keep in mind that in Sartres declarations
we are confronted with such a fusion of subjectivity and objectivity whereby
the meaning of the statement is always self-assertion, even when its apparent
form is self-criticism. Sartres compelling subjectivity cannot admit being in
the wrong in the present tenseonly retrospectively in a somewhat remote
92
past. Furthermore, the function of his retrospective self-criticisms (which are

as a rule spelled out with the pronoun we, rather than I) is precisely to
assert the transcendence of the criticized position, in place of demonstrating
it. This is exactly what happens in the passage on the alleged early confusion
of the total and the individual and on the claimed supersession of this
position in The Problem of Method and in the Critique of Dialectical Reason.
We shall return to this particular problem in a moment. Now the point to
stress is that the identification by a thinker of a problematic aspect of his
own work does not automatically mean that he has found a solution to it.
Nor does it mean that the retrospective self-criticism is necessarily valid
and is to be accepted at face value. In both instances we are presented with
assertions in need of substantiation and evidence before we can come to a
conclusion one way or another. Ones awareness of a problem may provide
the possibility of a solution, but should not be confused with the solution
itself which has to be established on objective grounds rather than on the
sole basis of critical self-assertions, however genuinely felt they might be.
This is particularly important in assessing Sartres development. For one
of the salient features of his lifework is that he cannot allow his case to rest
simply on the evidence of the works he produces but must provide also what
he considers to be their only legitimate interpretations. This is not simply
because he is a controversial writer. Rather, being controversial is itself
a necessary consequence of the structuring and organizing principle of his
work of its compelling subjectivity. So much so that beyond a certain
point it is impossible to separate work from self-interpretation.
To be sure, Sartres personal interventions in discussions about his own
works ever since the publication of Nausea are quite unparalleled. He
gives an endless number of interviews which he completely dominates. He
answers his critics in the most outspoken fashion not only in interviews but
in other forms as well, from short articles to book-length essays and from
lectures to open letters. Furthermore, his views on his various concerns and
on the meaning of his numerous works are faithfully reproduced in Simone
de Beauvoirs five long autobiographical volumes. Such an amount of overpowering self-reflection is quite extraordinary by any standard.
But all this is very far from being the whole extent of Sartres self-interpretations. We have to complement the picture not only with his autobiographical Words and Self-Portrait (1975) but also with many of his essays,
such as those on Giacometti, Natalie Sarraute, Camus, Nizan, and MerleauPonty, in which his personal reflections predominate whatever the immediate subject matter. And we have to add to them some of his plays (e.g.
S E A R C H F OR T HE IN DIV ID UA L
93
Lucifer and the Lord) and two major biographical works (on Genet and on
Flaubert) in which self-interpretations are very much in the foreground.
Indeed the vast majority of his lifework is more or less directly concerned
with self-examination.
The nature of Sartres quest is such that probing the limits means two
things: first, an uncompromising assessment and reassessment of his own
internal limitsof the authenticity or non-authenticity of his own choices
and decisions; and second, the assertion of his subjectivity, his constantly
scrutinized self in the world around him, with the aim of highlighting the
fundamental difference between the ontological structure of being and the
historically given situation. (The problem of interiorization is concerned
with the intersection of the two.) Self-examination is thus the vehicle of
assessing the problems of an epoch, and the concern with the problems of
the age, as articulated through the categories of responsibility and authenticity, constitutes the nodal points of renewed self-examination.
This is why whatever may happen to be the subject of Sartres enquiry, he
is always completely absorbed in it. The frequent self-references of his analyses are not simply formal characteristics of presentation and style: they are
inseparable from the conception of the subject matter itself. Consequently it
is very difficult (and rather problematical) to divorce a Sartrean proposition
from its existential contextthe when? and why? of its conception
and assess its validity entirely on its own. Sartre not only agrees with his own
generalizations: he is one with them. (His self-references are often meant as
authentications172 of this existential dimension of his assertions.) In other
words, he is fully and passionately committed to the position he happens to
hold at any given time. No wonder, therefore, that Sartre cannot concede
a point except retrospectively, when the point at issue has ceased to be an
integral part of his overall theoretical framework.
It is because of such intense existential involvement in the problems at
stake that Sartre must assume a belligerent posture vis--vis his critics, and
not because of some mysterious temperament that might be considered
the underlying psychological cause of his aggressive self-assertions. (In any
event, a mans temperament is controllable, if there is a good enough reason,
and Sartre would be the first to argue this, in the spirit of his early works
on philosophical psychology.) The passionate defense of his position is as
vital to the realization of his fundamental project as its original formulation.
And since the subjective element is such an integral part of the whole enterprise, up to a point he can rightfully claim for himself a privileged status in
explaining the meaning of his own works, in that a completely objective
94
reading of works of this kind is by definition inadequate. No doubt there

is something suspicious about the recurrent formula with which he rejects
criticism from both left (be it the French CP173 or Lukcs174) and right
(e.g. Camus175) by declaring that the critics have not read his works, not
to mention his dismissal of Gurins self-explanation with the summary
statement that he doesnt understand anything of his own book,176 as we
have seen above. All the same, the partial truth in such accusations is that
Sartres own reading of the works in question is very different from the
interpretations he contests. In other words, he insists on the importance of
the angle (the subjective element) in the articulation of theories which has
a bearing on the question of validity in a much more positive sense than is
generally acknowledged.
However, having said that, we cannot ignore the problematical aspect. A
lifework that requires the authors frequent intervention on his own behalf
reveals its vulnerability in that he will not be eternally there to supply every
age with self-interpretations which are constantly reformulated so as to be in
tune with the changing socio-historical circumstances. Ultimately his work,
just as anyone elses, must rest on the evidence the work itself displays, in
relation to which self-interpretations are necessarily marginal. A compelling
personality may succeed in imposing his self-image on his contemporaries
at least on some of thembut future generations will make up their own
mind about him without such interventions.
Paradoxically, in the long-drawn-out process of historical validation the
authors assertive self-interpretations may prove to be counter-productive in
that they may give support to artificial polarizations and sidetrack the orientation of critical assessment from the whole of the lifework to some of its
partial aspects. For while it is vitally important to keep in mind the authors
passionate involvement in specific problems and concernsfrom the angle
of which he interprets himself as much as anything elsein order to be
able to understand the particular points and phases of his development,
self-interpretations are of a very limited value in assessing the totality of his
development precisely because they are always deeply rooted in specific
situations and concerns. Thus we are again confronted with the dilemma
of individualization and universalization: the same thing that is a great
asset at one level turns out to be a potentially major drawback at another.
To account for the whole of a lifework, one has to integrate the totality of
particular points and phases in a dynamic movement without suppressing
the existential vitality of the individual elements. Any attempt at directly
universalizing a particular phasewhich is always constituted out of more
95
or less conflicting elementswill only result in an ahistorical projection of

a specific part over the whole, and at the same time in the liquidation of
the dynamic tension inherent in it. For any particular phase represents ipso
facto also a specific level of attainment and point of rest which, if generalized,
inevitably freezes the movement (which led to it and will go beyond it) and
sharply distorts the overall picture.
By contrast, the only properly historical mode of proceeding is to use
the movement itself as the principle of selection applied to all specific points
and phases. Accordingly, those elements will be highlighted at any particular
point in an authors development which represent the links of the overall
movement and thus display the fundamental trend of his development. Thus
universalization will emerge as the overall structurea dynamic and not a
static structureof which the individual elements have changing relative
weights. For what dominates a specific point or phase may occupy a very subordinate position at another, and vice versa; and it is the overall patternthe
dynamic wholewhich ultimately and objectively determines the respective structural correlations, maybe assigning a much greater relative weight
to an element of embryonic strength than to the temporarily dominant but
transitory elements whose importance diminishes as the pattern of overall
development unfolds.
It is thus easy to see that the authors self-interpretations, in so far as
they are expressions of whatever may happen to be his dominant preoccupations at a particular point in time, need not (one might indeed argue,
cannot) faithfully reflect the overall movement with all its intricacies and
delicate balances. Such intricacies and balances have to be assessed from a
certain distance, but not from the distance of the newly acquired and championed position that itself must be integrated and made subject to a critical
examination in the overall framework. And since the intensity of an authors
passionate involvement in a new phase is what is in question here, we must
be particularly careful about the self-interpretations of an authorJean-Paul
Sartrewho consciously carries the principle of existential involvement and
commitment to its utmost limits. A hasty acceptance of his self-explanations
at their face value (it does not matter whether approvingly or with a negative attitude towards the claimed changes), which seems to characterize too
many writings on Sartre, tends to bog down discussion on rather peripheral
aspects of his work (e.g. the notoriety of his allegedly radical conversion),
diverting attention from its structuring principles and basic dimensions.
This is why we have to treat them with particular care.
96
2.
T H I S TAK E S U S BAC K TO O UR O RIG INA L Q UESTIO N: should we subscribe to
Sartres strictures about the alleged confusion of the total and the individual,
the failure to understand the problem of dialectical totalization in his early
work, coupled with the claim of a radical advance in this respect in his
Critique and in the works related to the Critique? We have to postpone
for a while any attempt at a more detailed answer to the second half of
the question, apart from reiterating that Sartres conception of dialectical
totalization leads to an impasse in the second part of the Critique and to
the transmutation of its quest for making historical totalization intelligible
into a form of deliberately fictional biography. Let us see now how things are
in the early works.
There can be no doubt about it, the search for the individual is the
central preoccupation of these works. This is inherent in the attempt at
laying the foundations of a phenomenological psychology, setting out from
the irreducible fact177 of consciousness. However, it would be quite wrong
to suggest that the problem of totality is ignored. On the contrary, it occupies a very important place in every one of the early works. And there are no
signs of the total being confused with the individual. If anything, the lines
of demarcation are too sharply drawn, rather than being blurred. What is
highly problematical about Sartres early analyses of totality is of an altogether different character, as we shall see in a moment.
We find already in Sartres first important philosophical study, The
Transcendence of the Ego, a theory of consciousness articulated in relation
to the problem of totality. In a critical reference to Husserls view of the
transcendental I as the condition of unity and identity of consciousness
Sartre writes:
The individuality of consciousness evidently stems from the nature of

consciousness. Consciousness (like Spinozas substance) can be limited
only by itself. Thus it constitutes a synthetic and individual totality
entirely isolated from totalities of the same type, and the I can evidently
be only an expression (rather than a condition) of this incommunicability
and inwardness of consciousness. Consequently we may reply without
hesitation: the phenomenological conception of consciousness renders the
unifying and individualizing role of the I totally useless. It is consciousness,
on the contrary, which makes possible the unity and the personality of my I.
The transcendental I, therefore, has no raison dtre.178
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This point is further developed in the section on The constitution of

the ego as the pole of actions, states, and qualities:
. . . the individuality of the ego is a constantly gulling mirage, for it
simultaneously yields everything and yields nothing. How could it be
otherwise, moreover, since the ego is not the real totality of consciousness
(such a totality would be a contradiction, like any infinite unity enacted),
but the ideal unity of all states and actions? Being ideal, naturally, this
unity can embrace an infinity of states. But one can well understand that
what is given to the concrete, full intuition is only this unity in so far as it
incorporates the present state. By virtue of this concrete nucleus a more
or less sizeable quantity of empty intentions (by right, an infinity of them)
are directed towards the past and towards the future, and aim at the states
and actions not presently given. Those who have some acquaintance with
phenomenology will understand without difficulty that the ego may be at
the same time an ideal unity of states, the majority of which are absent,
and a concrete totality wholly giving itself to intuition: this signifies merely
that the ego is a noematic rather than a noetic unity. A tree or a chair exist
no differently. Naturally the empty intentions can always be fulfilled, and
any state or action whatsoever can always reappear to consciousness as
produced or having been produced by the ego.179
Thus we are presented with a whole cluster of conceptsindividual

totality and totalities of the same type, real totality, ideal unity (or
ideal totality), and concrete totalityin terms of which the relationship
between consciousness and the world is spelled out. And Sartre is by no
means content to remain within the sphere of subjective experience. On the
contrary, his central aim is ontological. Not only in the sense that he claims
to have produced in his conception of the ego the only possible refutation
of solipsism,180 rectifying Husserls failures in this respect,181 but also in so
far as he aims at undermining what he calls metaphysical materialism182
by opening the phenomenological bracket in the spirit of a philosophical
realism.183
Sartres interest in phenomenology is, from the beginning, existentialontological. He wants to grasp the existents in their facticity, as opposed to
the various kinds of metaphysical presuppositions or prejudgements which
seem to dominate not only philosophical theories but also their applications in psychology and elsewhere, and his enthusiasm184 for the potentialities of phenomenology is the direct expression of such concerns. However,
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he must soon realize also the limitations of Husserlian phenomenology as

regards his own programme:
Phenomenological descriptions can discover, for instance, that the very
structure of the transcendental consciousness implies that this consciousness
is constitutive of a world. But it is evident that they will not teach us that
consciousness must be constitutive of such a world, that is exactly the one
where we are, with its earth, its animals, its men and the story of these
men. We are here in the presence of a primary and irreducible fact which
presents itself as a contingent and irrational specification of the noematic
essence of the world. And many phenomenologists will call metaphysics
the investigation whose aim it is to uncover this contingent existent in its
entirety.185
Thus the concern with totality is further concretized as facing the world as it
is, as it exactly happens to be in its contingency and facticity, with a view to
uncover this contingent existent in its entirety. This contingent world of the
existents is the world of things and the world of men which we can uncover
in its complex totality. Even the famous subjective responses: hatred, love,
dread, sympathy . . . are nothing but modes of uncovering the world.186
In the spirit of his own interpretation of phenomenology which already
treats Husserls bracket as opened, Sartre hails the German philosopher
as someone who restored to us the world of the artists and prophets . . .
he cleared the ground for a new treatise of the passions. . . . ; from now on
the cult of interiority (Bergson, Proust) is completely untenable: everything
is outside, everything, including ourselves: outside, in the world, together
with others. It is not in I dont know what kind of retreat that we discover
ourselves but on the highway, in the city, in the middle of the crowd: thing
among things, man among men.187
The new treatise of the passions for which Husserl is supposed to
have cleared the ground is, of course, Sartres Being and Nothingness in
which we learn that Existential psychoanalysis is going to reveal to man
the real goal of his pursuit, which is being as a synthetic fusion of the initself and the for-itself; existential psychoanalysis is going to acquaint man
with his passion.188 In truth, it is not Husserl who clears the ground for this
conceptionexcept in an indirect sense, by providing the field for Sartres
corrective reflectionsbut Sartre himself in his early works, and to a large
extent also in Being and Nothingness. As we know, volume two of the latter,
which should have carried out in detail the programme announced in the
99
last quotation, has never been written at least not in the originally intended
form. But of course many of Sartres subsequent writings not only the
abandoned Morale but also Saint Genet, as well as numerous short essays,
and above all The Idiot of the Family take up the problematic of making
man acquainted with his passion, and try to carry it nearer to a conclusion.
Thus the Sartrean quest for the absolute the elucidation of the real goal of
mans pursuit, which implies the refutation of various misconceptions has
to set out from the analysis of passion and emotion as we encounter it in
the world of contingent existents: in the goal-directed life-activity of living
individuals. The question: what makes man drive on through success and
failure, achievement and disaster, cannot be answered in abstraction, at the
generic plane of some mystifying universality (like World Spirit), but must
find its supporting evidence in the various manifestations of human passion
as ways in which living individuals take cognizance of the world in which
they are situated and try to cope with the problems and challenges of their
situation.
The early works, while clearing the ground, articulate the main tenets of
Sartres philosophy. The critique of Husserl proceeds on two lines:
1. the establishment of a genuine need for phenomenological reduction
(Husserls epoch) in terms of Sartrean existential categories, as spelled
out in The Transcendence of the Ego;
2. an examination of what Sartre considers to be inadequate in Husserls
account of the forms and modalities of consciousness, which lead
Sartre to specify an ontological framework in which solution might be
envisaged to all that remained elusive to Husserl.
On the first point, Sartres judgement is very severe. He quotes with
approval Finks study on Husserl189 which insists that the natural attitude
of mindwhich gives rise to scientific theoriesis perfectly coherent in
itself, and therefore there is no reason whatsoever for exercising a phenomenological reduction. Sartre goes on:
There [in the natural attitude] one will find none of those contradictions
which, according to Plato, lead the philosopher to effect a philosophical
conversion. Thus, the epoch appears in the phenomenology of Husserl as a
miracle. Husserl himself, in Cartesianische Meditationen [Section 1.], made
an extremely vague allusion to certain psychological motives which would
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lead to undertaking reduction. But these motives hardly seem sufficient.

Moreover, reduction seems capable of being performed only at the end of
lengthy study. It appears, then, as a knowledgeable operation, which confers
on it a sort of gratuitousness. On the other hand, if the natural attitude
appears wholly as an effort made by consciousness to escape from itself by
projecting itself into the me and becoming absorbed there, and if this effort
is never completely rewarded, and if a simple act of reflection suffices in
order for conscious spontaneity to tear itself abruptly away from the I and be
given as independent, then the epoch is no longer a miracle, an intellectual
method, an erudite procedure: it is an anxiety which is imposed on us and
which we cannot avoid: it is both a pure event of transcendental origin and
an ever possible accident of our daily life.190
Even if Sartres conclusion is rather unexpected, the trust of his argument is abundantly clear. Having successfully liberated himself from the
shackles of academic philosophy (Brunschwicg, etc.), Sartre is determined
not to get involved in some other kind of academic operation which might
turn out to be merely an intellectual method, a complicated erudite methodological procedure preserved for the few. He is looking for a method
which has an existential basis in life and is thus open to all. This conception,
which directly links the epoch to anxiety and dread, establishes through
the same link also the vital relationship with the existential categories of
freedom, thus indicating the possibility of self-liberation through purifying
reflectionof which Sartre speaks in Emotions, a closely related work191
as the tangibly relevant function of the whole philosophical enterprise he
is engaged in. Thus, in the course of the Sartrean analysis, a rather abstract
problem of phenomenological methodology is transmuted into a major
pillar of existential ontology.
The second point of criticism mentioned above concerns the forms
and modalities of consciousness as characterized by Husserl. Sartre takes
as his point of reference a Drer engraving which we can perceive at will
as a thing-object or as an image-object, and he makes the following
observation:
Such hyletic ambivalence is possible only in a small number of privileged cases (paintings, photographs, copies, etc). Even if the alternatives
were available, one would still have to explain why my consciousness intends
some matter as image rather than as perception. . . . the distinction between
mental images and perceptions cannot derive from intentionality alone. A
difference in intention is necessary but not sufficient. The matter must also
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be different. . . . [Husserls solution, though insightful, is quite incomplete.]

. . . We know now that we must start afresh, setting aside all the phenomenological literature, and attempting above all to attain an intuitive vision of
the intentional structure of the image. . . . We should also compare imageconsciousness and sign-consciousness, in order to free psychology once and
for all from the egregious error of making images into signs and signs into
images. Finally and above all the hyle peculiar to images should be examined. It might be that on the way we would have to leave the realm of eidetic
psychology and resorting to experimentation and inductive procedures. But
eidetic description is the starting point. The way is open for phenomenological psychology.192
Thus the question why? concerning the formation of an image rather
than of a perception, again leads towards the articulation of an existential ontology. For the possibility of a phenomenological psychology as
envisaged by Sartre (as being synonymous with existential psychology,
in contrast to the strictly phenomenological eidetic psychology) has for
its precondition a radical departure from all the phenomenological literature in that its programme necessarily implies the opening of the phenomenological bracket.
This we find clearly indicated, in a more generalized form, in a key
passage of LImaginaire:
We shall give the name of situations to the different immediate ways of
apprehending the real as a world. We can therefore say that the essential
prerequisite that enables consciousness to imagine is that it be situated in
the world or more briefly, that it be-in-the world. It is the situation-in-theworld, grasped as a concrete and individual reality of consciousness, which
is the motivation for the construction of any unreal object whatever and the
nature of that unreal object is circumscribed by this motivation. Thus the
situation of consciousness does not need to appear as a pure and abstract
condition of possibility for all imagination but as the concrete and exact
motivation for the appearance of a certain particular imagination. . . . Thus,
although as a result of producing the unreal, consciousness can appear
momentarily delivered from being-in-the-world, it just is this being-in-theworld which is the necessary condition for the imagination. . . . 193
We may therefore conclude that imagination is not an empirical and
superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it
realizes its freedom: . . . as consciousness is always in situation because it is
always free, it always and at each moment has the concrete possibility of
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producing the unreal. These are the various motivations which decide at each
moment whether consciousness will only be realized or whether it will imagine.
The unreal is produced outside world by a consciousness which stays in the
world and it is because he is transcendentally free that man can imagine.194
As we can see, the reality of the world is asserted through the category of
situation which assumes a central role in Sartres lifework. (Significantly,
his essays on a variety of subjects are collected in ten volumes of Situations,
and one of the most important areas of his activity, drama, is defined by
Sartre as the theatre of situations.) Indeed, the category of situation, linked
to the surpassing function of human reality, constitutes the philosophical
foundation of Sartres idea of commitment which is thus not something arbitrary, subjective and voluntaristic, but inherent in the ontological structure
of being as conceived by the existential philosopher. Of course, at this stage
situation is not spelled out yet as commitment, but remains an abstract
philosophical principle. Nevertheless, the formulation of this principle is the
necessary precondition for the articulation of Sartres vision as commitment during the war, as well as of the organic insertion of commitment
into his philosophical system as a whole.
We should also notice that the phenomenological bracket is opened by
Sartre in the only possible way accessible to him, given his vital existential
concerns. As a solution to Husserls problem of motivations, the specific
character of a determinate mode of consciousnessin this case: imagination
is explained by the specificity of the situation itself. But the whole of consciousness which finds itself in situation is, of course, the consciousness of
a living human individual. This is why the relationship is described in terms
of the concrete and exact motivations of a certain particular imagination
as opposed to the pure and abstract condition of possibility for all imagination. Thus consciousness in situation is related to the whole of the world
in which it is situated at a given temporal juncture. Its total character which
makes Sartre speak of the whole of consciousnessis therefore necessarily
that of an individual totality (isolated from totalities of the same kind, as
we have seen before) confronting the whole world.
All this does not mean that the total and the individual are confused,
since the dialectical totalization of individual totalities as situated in the real
world is a perfectly legitimate concernand indeed it remains Sartres characteristic way of proceeding up to the present time. What it certainly does
mean is that Sartre sets out from individual existential determinationsconcrete life-situations and the projects corresponding to themin his search
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for an ultimate overall synthesis. He builds his ontological structure on the

foundation of that synthetic and individual totality which is for him the
existential reality, and he asserts the primacy of individual praxes in all his
works. This is why he has to reject with undisguised hostility what he calls
in his earliest as much as in his latest worksmetaphysical materialism
which would introduce the individual totality on the historical stage at a
much later point of development than Sartres conception for which it constitutes the primary premise and the absolute point of departure.
But it is meant only as the point of departure, not as the overall synthesis
itself. In Sartres conception we are presented with a movement: one that
has the internal logic of totalization in which the parts constitute an organic
whole, or at least point to the whole:
We said, in our Introduction, that the significance of a fact of consciousness
came to this: that it always pointed to the whole human-reality which was
making itself emotional, attentive, perceptive, willing, etc. The study
of the emotions has indeed verified this principle: an emotion refers to
what it signifies. And what it signifies is indeed, in effect, the totality of
the relations of the human reality to the world. The onset of emotion is
a complete modification of the being-in-the-world according to the very
peculiar laws of magic.195
Thus the lines of demarcation are firmly drawn, and the overall framework of reference is the totality of the relations of the human reality to the
world. Sartre is, therefore, less than just towards his early works when he
summarily characterizes them as works in which the total is confused with
the individual. And he is more than generous towards the later works in
claiming the solution of the problem of totalization, while in fact on this
point his position is characterized by minor changes and fundamental continuity throughout his lifework.
3.
LET US NOW E XAM INE TH E PRO B LEMATIC ASPECTS of the young Sartres
conception of totality and see what happens to them in the course of his
later development.
The first point to note is that the methodological dualism of phenomenology is transmuted by Sartre into an ontological law:
104
That exists spontaneously which determines its own existence. In other

words, to exist spontaneously is to exist for oneself [exister pour soi et par
soi]. One reality alone deserves to be called spontaneous: consciousness. To
exist and to be conscious of existing are one and the same for consciousness.
Otherwise stated, the supreme ontological law of consciousness is as
follows: for a consciousness the only way of existing is to be conscious that
it exists. It is therefore evident that consciousness can determine itself to
exist, but that it cannot act on anything but itself. A sensory content may be
the occasion for our forming a consciousness, but we cannot act by means
of consciousness on the sensory content, dragging it from nowhere (or from
the unconscious), or sending it back. If images are consciousness, they are
pure spontaneities. Consciousness of itself, self-transparency, and existing
only to the extent that it knows itself, an image therefore cannot be a sensory
content. It is perfectly futile to represent it as rationalized, as permeated
by thought. There is no middle ground: either it is wholly thought, and one
thinks by means of the image, or it is sensory content and one would think on
the occasion of an image. In the latter case, the image will be independent of
consciousness, appearing to consciousness according to laws peculiar to an
image which is not consciousness. Such an image, which must be awaited,
deciphered, and observed, is simply a thing. Any inert and opaque content
takes its place, by the necessity inherent in its type of existence, among
objects, that is to say, in the external world. That there are only two types of
existence, as thing in the world and as consciousness, is an ontological law.196
We have the greatest sympathy for Sartres implicit aim: the critique
of reified consciousness as manifest in mechanistically determinist theories,
including the unconscious of psychoanalysis197 inasmuch as it falls into
this category. It is in the same context that Sartre elaborates his concept of
bad faith (mauvaise foi)198 as the dialectical alternative to the theories he
criticizes. There can be no doubt about it, both his critique of crude psychological determinism,199 and his concept of bad faith represent major and
lasting achievements in Sartres philosophy. At the same time, the social
dimension is missing in both respects, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of his explanations. The critique of reified consciousness remains necessarily partial so long as its terms of reference are confined to the theories
themselves, without asking the question about the social foundations of
those theories which reproduce, in however sophisticated a manner, the
objective structure of practical reification in a reified theoretical form.200 For
reification does not arise out of the structure of consciousness itself (if it did,
105
we could do nothing about it) but appears as a result of a complex totality

of social processes of which the consciousness of the individuals constitutes
an integral part. Similarly, the concept of bad faith must be integrated into
a general theory of ideology of which even in Sartres later works there are
only some fragments. In the absence of such integration, bad faith is called
upon to explain too much, with the result of getting the focus of its explanatory specificity blurred.
The efficacy of Sartres critique of reified consciousness is, moreover,
vitiated by the extreme dualism of his approach. The active character of
consciousness is established on the basis of the tautology that the existence of consciousness is one and the same thing as the consciousness of
its existencein other words, that consciousness is conscious and selfconsciousness is conscious of itselfwhich is then declared to be the
supreme ontological law of consciousness. This ontological law is in
turn used to rule out a priori the middle ground, and thus all possibility of mediation is foreclosed. As a result we are presented with the
ultimate ontological law according to which there are two types of existence: the thing in the world, and consciousness. The whole argument
is built on this dualistic assumption without which it cannot be sustained.
As it stands, its critique can only apply to some inconsistent dualism which
might wish both to retain its dualistic principles and to make use of the
notion of a middle ground as a bastard third type of existence; this is
why Sartre insists there can be only two types.
But what if we entertain as an alternative the monistic framework of
explanation? What if we seek in the dialectic of the one and the manythe
one and only type of existence and its manifold mediations and transitions
the answer to the problems at stake? Clearly, in that case the argument that
rests on the categorical assertion of extreme dualistic assumptions evaporates in thin air. Sartre, however, never makes a serious attempt at facing the
monistic alternative, for such a confrontation would compel him to justify
his own assumptions. He prefers to thunder, instead, against metaphysical
materialism and the dialectic of nature, while simply reaffirming the categorical validity of his own premises as the necessary basis of all discussion
on the subject. And thus, starting out from the positions of methodological
dualismthe programme of a phenomenological reduction of experience
to its irreducible elements within consciousnesswe end up with the
ontology of a radically fractured totality from which mediation is exiled,
with the antinomies necessarily inherent in this fracture. As we have seen
above, Sartre censured Husserl on account of the miracle of the epoch.
106
Now, as a result of his own dualistic ontological law which produces his
radically fractured totality, we are presented with a mystery in place of the
miracle: the bewildering ability of consciousness to use the sensory world
as the vague occasionfor heaven forbid to think in terms of dialectical
determinationsof its own spontaneous self-generation.
The second point to mention is the negative determination of totality.
This solution appears in the course of Sartres application of some
Heideggerian principles (with significant modifications) to the analysis of
the imaginary:
All creation of the imaginary would be completely impossible to a
consciousness whose nature it would be precisely to be in-the-midst-ofthe-world. . . . For a consciousness to be able to imagine it must be able to
escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able by its own efforts
to withdraw from the world. In a word it must be free. Thus the thesis of
unreality has yielded us the possibility of negation as its condition. Now,
the latter is possible only by the negation of the world as a whole, and this
negation has revealed itself to us as being the reverse of the very freedom of
consciousness. . . . But, reciprocally, the possibility of constructing a whole is
given as the primary structure of the act of taking perspective. It is therefore
enough to be able to posit reality as a synthetic whole in order to posit oneself
as free from it and this going-beyond is freedom itself since it could not
happen if consciousness were not free. Thus to posit the world as a world or
to negate it is one and the same thing. In this sense Heidegger can say that
nothingness is the constitutive structure of the existent.201
The imaginary thus represents at each moment the implicit meaning of
the real. . . . this specific position of the imaginary will be accompanied by
a collapsing of the world which is no more than the negated foundation of
the unreal.202
This position should not be mistaken for some advocacy of arbitrariness. Sartre makes explicit his firm opposition to such views. This is how
he clarifies his relation to Heideggers idea of surpassing which establishes
nothingness as the constitutive structure of the existent:
But this surpassing cannot be brought about by any means whatever, and
the freedom of consciousness must not be confused with the arbitrary.
For an image is not purely and simply the world-negated, it is always the
world negated from a certain point of view, namely, the one that permits the
107
positing of the absence or the non-existence of the object presented as an

image. The arbitrary position of the real as a world will not of itself cause the
appearance of the centaur as an unreal object. For the centaur to emerge as
unreal the world must be grasped as a world-where-the-centaur-is-not, and
this can only happen if consciousness is led by different motivations to grasp
the world as being exactly the sort in which the centaur has no place.203
Similarly, he makes some important qualifications on the relationship

between imagination and freedom as well as between nothingness and the
world of existence:
. . . the imagination, which has become a psychological and empirical
function, is the necessary condition for the freedom of empirical man in the
midst of the world. For, if the negating function belonging to consciousness
which Heidegger calls surpassingis what makes the act of imagination
possible, it must be added on the other hand that this function can manifest
itself only in an imaginative act. There can be no intuition of nothingness
just because nothingness is nothing and because all consciousness intuitive
or not is consciousness of something. Nothingness can present itself only
as an infra-structure of something. The experience of nothingness is not,
strictly speaking, a direct one, it is an experience which is in principle given
with and in. The analyses of Bergson are pertinent in this connection:
any attempt to directly conceive death or the nothingness of existence is by
nature bound to fail. The gliding of the world into the bosom of nothingness
and the emergence of human reality in this very nothingness can happen
only through the position of something which is nothingness in relation to
the world and in relation to which the world is nothing. By this we evidently
define the structure of the imagination. It is the appearance of the imaginary
before consciousness which permits the grasping of the process of turning
the world into nothingness as its essential condition and as its primary
structure. . . . The imaginary is in every case the something concrete
towards which the existent is surpassed.204
Thus, Sartres intention is perfectly clear. On the one hand he wants to

assert the complete freedom of consciousness and its vital negating function.
On the other hand, he is very much concerned with showing that consciousness, despite its freedomor rather because of it, since consciousness is
always in situation because it is always free, and the other way round, as we
have seen abovecannot possibly construct another world than exactly the
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one in which we happen to live. Of course, this is a most uneasy solution that
constantly oscillates between the extreme poles of total indeterminacy and
its diametrical opposite: the massive contingency, facticity, absurdity205
and absolute givenness of the things in the world, with all their iron determinations. The very moment the freedom of consciousness is affirmed in
its categorical form, it is already negated, in an equally categorical form, by
the absolute contingency of the real as it exactly happens to bethus the
feeling of absurdity. Equally, the moment the real is asserted as exactly given,
it is already negated and surpassed, for the function of consciousness is
the surpassing of the real in order to make a world of it.206 Nevertheless,
no matter how paradoxical this conception is, the existential motivation
behind it is the affirmation of great concern: the full acknowledgement of
the objectivity of the real in its exact givenness (in opposition to any attempt
at directly inflating nothingness into a pseudo-objective myth), and the
equally full and passionate rejection of its iron determinations in the name of
surpassing through the existential projects of the human world.
But to return to the negative determination of totality, constructing a
whole (or positing the world as a world) and negating it comes to one
and the same thing. This view assigns to nothingness and negation the key
role, as the constitutive structure of the existent. The consequence of such
a definition is that totality (the real as a world) is identifiable only through
its collapse, that is when the world appears as nothing more than the
negated foundation of the unreal. Thus the world is not the foundation of
the unreal (the imaginary)for that would still preserve the reality of the
real when it is elevated to the status of totalitybut only its negated foundation. This means that when the imaginary constructs the real as a whole
through its negating function, what it brings about is not totality as real but
merely a complete nihilation which assumes the form of an unarticulated
imaginary totality that necessarily loses its totality in direct proportion to
its reconstitution as the real. We are thus presented with another, even if this
time inexplicit, ontological law; one which postulates an inverse ratio in
the relationship between the total and the real. The problem is, therefore,
not the confusion of the total and the individual but the existential nihilation
of the former through the identification of totalisation and nantisation.
In such a conceptual framework there can be no room for negation
within the sphere of objective reality itself: negation must always come from
the outside. For that which is denied must be imagined. In fact, the object
of a negation cannot be real because it would be affirming what is being
denied but neither can it be a complete nothing, since it is something
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that is being denied. So the object of a negation must be posited as imaginary.207 Thus the dialectic of nature indeed any non-Sartrean kind of
realist ontologymust be a priori ruled out by this conception. In truth,
not because of the alleged logical contradiction, for Sartre is the last person
to worry about formal logical contradictions. (There is nothing wrong with
that. One of the most crucial dialectical categories: Aufhebungsuperseding
preservation and preserving supersession is precisely a fusion of positivity
and negativity. It is exactly the kind of surpassing affirmation which Sartre
strangely wants to exclude here as a violation of logic.) The real reason is the
overall ontological construct which precedes the logical argument rather than
being derived from it, notwithstanding Sartres presentation of the issues. As
a matter of fact, Sartre must disregard any possible counter-argument to his
ownfor example, the simultaneously positive-affirmative and negative-surpassing character of Aufhebungbecause such counter-arguments would
undermine his ontological assumptions.
As we have seen above, in the passage on the supreme ontological law
of consciousness, Sartre declares that consciousness can determine itself
to exist because its nature is to be free (by definition). However, the price
he has to pay for such a definitionand he does so with great consistency
is to admit that this free consciousness cannot act on anything but itself.
Consequently, in order to be able to fulfill its negating function, consciousness must first homogenize the object of its negation with itself. This can take
place only in the form of a peculiarly Sartrean double negation which, unlike
Hegel or Marx, does not reproduce reality at a higher level but constantly
reestablishes the fragmentation of reality. The first negation is universal or
generic in that it must comprehensively (or categorically) nihilate the reality
character of the real in order to be able to act upon it once the real (transmuted into the negated foundation of the unreal) is subsumed under the
sphere of nihilatingly totalizing consciousness. (As we can see, totalization is the necessary function of this nihilating homogenization.) And the
second negation is partial or specific in that something is being denied by
imagination on the ground of the previous universal negation. And since
the specificity of the second negation cannot arise without affecting universality (the imaginary totality) itself, as produced through the first negation,
we are thrown back into a real completely severed from totality: the world
of fragmentation and isolation, compartmentalization and serialization,
privatization and deadly confrontationin one word, the desolate world of
reification. No wonder, therefore, that the existential picture of this world is
painted with the most sombre colors: When the imaginary is not posited as
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a fact, the surpassing and the nullifying of the existent are swallowed up in
the existent; . . . the person is crushed in the world, run trough by the real, he
is closest to the thing.208
This takes us to the third major point which concerns the world of
objects and their utilizability. In Nausea the problem appears in a most graphic form as the main theme of the novel:
I am no longer free, I can no longer do what I want. Objects ought not to
touch, since they are not alive. You use them, you put them back in place,
you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is
unbearable. I am afraid of entering in contact with them, just as if they were
living animals.
Now I see; I remember better what I felt the other day on the seashore when I was holding that pebble. It was a sort of sweet disgust. How
unpleasant it was! And it came from the pebble, Im sure of that, it passed
from the pebble into my hands. Yes, thats it, thats exactly it: a sort of nausea
in the hands.209
From here Sartres hero goes on to say, as the theme unfolds, first, that
Nausea is not inside him but, on the contrary, he is the one who is inside
it,210 and then, that Nausea is himself.211 Such a transition, on the surface
of it, seems to correspond to the stages whereby (1) man comes into contact
with the world of objects and simply utilizes them (absence of nausea); (2)
he perceives the threatening character of objects (the pebble, the nausea in
the hand); (3) he is surrounded and engulfed by the world of objects (he is
inside nausea); and (4) he is himself reified (he is one with nausea, he is it).
However, things are rather more complicated than that in Sartres vision.
For the point of total takeoveran unexpected, strange experience of wholenesssuddenly transmutes everything by some magic into fullness and
life and into overflowing plenitude. Significantly, at this point Sartres hero
has his revelation about the nature of existence. This is how he describes it:
It took my breath away. Never, until these last few days, had I suspected
what it meant to exist. . . . usually existence hides itself. It is there, around
us, in us, it is us, you cant say a couple of words without speaking of it,
but finally you cant touch it. . . . And then, all of a sudden, there it was, as
clear as day; existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost its harmless
appearance as an abstract category: it was the very stuff of things, that root
was steeped in existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the
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sparse grass on the lawn, all that had vanished; the diversity of things, the
individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted,
leaving soft, monstrous masses, in disordernaked, with a frightening,
obscene nakedness.212
Such a wholeness from which the veneer of diversity and individuality

has been removed, cannot be grasped, according to Roquentin-Sartre, in
terms of human measures which we apply to the world of utilizable objects.
Thus the reflection about the superfluity of all existents leads to the identification of the absolute and the absurd, nausea and existence,
existence (nausea) and contingency (nausea) all explained as dimensions of the World . . . that huge absurd being:
I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this
rapturous abundance. . . . Superfluous: that was the only connexion I could
establish between those trees, those gates, those pebbles. It was in vain that I
tried to count the chestnut trees, to situate them in relation to the Velleda, to
compare their height with the height of the plane trees: each of them escaped
from the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, overflowed.
I was aware of the arbitrary nature of the relationship, which I insisted on
maintaining in order to delay the collapse of the human world of measures, of
quantities, of bearings; they no longer had any grip on things. . . .
The Word Absurdity is now born beneath my pen; . . . I had found the key
to Existence, the key to my nausea, to my own life. . . . over there, I touched
the thing. But here I should like to establish the absolute character of this
absurdity. . . . I, a little while ago, experienced the absolute; the absolute
or the absurd. Absurd; irreducible; nothing:not even profound, secret
aberration of Naturecould explain that. . . . the world of explanations and
reasons is not that of existence. . . .
Yes, I had already scrutinized, with that same anxiety, unnameable
objects, . . . I had already felt their cold, inert qualities escape, slip between
my fingers. . . . And the pebble, that wretched pebble, the origin of this
whole business: it was not . . . I couldnt remember exactly what it refused to
be. But I had not forgotten its passive resistance. . . .
The essential thing is contingency. I mean that, by definition, existence
is not necessity. To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets
itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it. There are people, I
believe, who have understood that. Only they have tried to overcome this
contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being. But no necessary being
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can explain existence: contingency is not an illusion, an appearance which

can be dissipated; it is absolute and consequently perfect gratuitousness.
Everything is gratuitous, that park, this town, and myself. When you realize
that, it turns your stomach over and everything starts floating about, . . . that
is the nausea; . . .
I was the root of the chestnut tree. Or rather I was all consciousness
of its existence. Still detached fromsince I was conscious of it and yet
lost in it, nothing but it. An uneasy consciousness and yet one which let itself
hang with all its weight over that piece of inert wood. . . . Existence is not
something which allows itself to be thought of from a distance; it has to
invade you suddenly, pounce upon you, weigh heavily on your heart like a
huge motionless animalor else there is nothing left at all. . . . That idea of
transition was another invention of man. An idea which was too clear. . . .
Admittedly a movement was something different from a tree. But it was still
an absolute. A thing. . . . everything was full, everything was active, there was
no unaccented beat, everything, even the most imperceptible movement,
was made of existence. . . . Existence everywhere, to infinity, superfluous,
always and everywhere; . . . my very flesh was throbbing and opening,
abandoning itself to the universal burgeoning, it was repulsive. . . .
There were fools who talked to you about willpower and the struggle
for life. . . . Impossible to see things that way. Weaknesses, frailties, yes. . . . 213
[The trees] did not want to exist, only they could not help it; . . . Tired and
old, they went on existing, unwillingly and ungraciously, simply because
they were too weak to die, because death could come to them only from the
outside: melodies alone can proudly carry their own death within them like
an internal necessity; only they dont exist. Every existent is born without
reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. . . .
Did I dream up that huge presence? . . . It went up as high as the sky,
it flowed away everywhere, it filled everything with gelatinous subsidence
and I could see it going deeper and deeper, far beyond the limits of the park
and the houses at Bouville. I was no longer at Bouville or anywhere, I was
floating. I was not surprised, I knew perfectly well that it was the World, the
World in all its nakedness which was suddenly revealing itself, and I choked
with fury at that huge absurd being. You couldnt even wonder where it all
came from, or how it was that a world should exist rather than nothing.214
As we can see, the depiction of Roquentins experience in the park graphically unfolds the main tenets of Sartres existential philosophy. The world
of objectsas differentiated, determinate, utilizable, countable, comparable,
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etc.turns out to be the world of appearance and veneer, and, through

anxiety, the absolute unveils itself as undifferentiated wholeness, huge and
overpowering presence, absurd and gratuitous contingency, all-pervasive
existence, the World as irreducible, naked, huge absurd being. Here we
are given the Husserlian direct intuition of essence in its existentialist
version, with the phenomenological bracket wide open. Its driving force (or
motivation) is passion and emotion which force the absolute to reveal
itself. This enterprise is characterized at the plane of experience as anguish,
nausea, powerless fury, etc. Man is driven on by passion which shows itself
as the primary structure of his existential reality.
Naturally, Nausea is trying to convey the existential message in a fictional
form, utilizing the means of graphic depiction, metaphorical suggestion, and
dramatic presentation. The evocative aim requires that the philosophical
ideas be wedded to vivid imagery and cannot simply follow a course of their
own. Thus the various conceptual elements become fused into one another
sometimes as a direct result of the imagery itself, while a strictly conceptual development of the same ideas would require a sharper definition and
a more clearly differentiated expression. Nevertheless, all the constituents
of the young Sartres general conception are present in Nausea, in a specific form, and the world of objectsin relation to the problem of utilizabilityis depicted in fundamentally the same way as in his rather more
abstract works on philosophical psychology written in the same period.
We can see this very clearly in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions,
though of course there the lines of demarcation are more firmly drawn. This
is how Sartre characterizes in this work the fundamental contrast between the
world as the totality of utensils and the world as a non-utilizable whole:
Consciousness can be-in-the-world in two different ways. The world may
appear before it as an organized complex of utilizable things, such that,
if one wants to produce a predetermined effect, one must act upon the
determinate elements of that complex. As one does so, each utensil refers
one to other utensils and to the totality of utensils; there is no absolute action,
no radical change that one can introduce immediately into this world. We
have to modify one particular utensil, and this by means of another which
refers it in its turn to yet another, and so on to infinity. But the world may
also confront us as one non-utilizable whole; that is, as only modifiable
without intermediation and by great masses. In that case, the categories of
the world act immediately upon the consciousness, they are present to it at
no distance (for example the face that frightens us through the window acts
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upon us without any means; there is no need for the window to open, for a
man to leap into the room or to walk across the floor). And conversely, the
consciousness tries to combat these dangers or to modify these objects at
no distance and without means, by some absolute, massive modification of
the world. This aspect of the world is an entirely coherent one; this is the
magical world.215
Here we are confronted with another hopeless dichotomy. The world in

which we have to act by means of utensilsthe world of countable things
and comparable objects, predetermined instruments and goal-oriented institutions, teleological targets and individual actions, determinate powers and
specific transformationsis an infinitely fragmented world which cannot be
pictured as a whole from the point of view of the individual who is trying to
act upon it because doing so would involve us in yet another logical contradiction: that of putting an end to infinity, or controlling and transforming
infinity through a particular, infinitesimal part of it. The Sartrean construction is so fatefully dichotomous that we are either confined to the infinitesimal fraction so as to resign ourselves to the idea of action as an infinite series
of small mediations of utensils by utensils by . . . to infinity, or we directly
confront totality as undifferentiated wholeness and non-utilizable whole
(the huge absurd being we have encountered in Nausea) and act upon
it at no distance and without means, producing some absolute, massive
modification through the magic of emotion. Even to envisage taking hold
of totality in order to affect it radically in a non-magical way would mean
contemplating a dreadful self-contradiction.
Obviously, one would be an extremely simple-minded neo-positivist
cheerfully to accept the predicament of fractional instrumental mediations
in the name of a social engineering: the labour of a demented Sisyphus
who disregards the odds of infinity against him and predicates a successful
outcome to his own efforts. Sartre has nothing in common with such an
attitude. His picture of the predicament of man in the world of utensils is
very far from being a cheerful one. On the contrary, for him the Universe
remains dark (1964), as we have seen above.216 And it would be vain to
expect the removal of the gloom through the other side of the dichotomy.
For the massive modification of the world occurs only in what Sartre
explicitly calls the magical world.
But, of course, this could not be otherwise, thanks to the Sartrean
characterization of the world of utilizable things. His representation of the
totality of utensils as an infinite series of strictly partial mediations is a
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self-defeating (but in relation to the acting isolated individual coherent) misrepresentation in that it is depicted as an unstructured totality. The vague
talk about the organized complex of utilizable things (as earlier about the
occasion of the self-generation of consciousness, in place of its dialectical
determination through mediated reciprocities and interactions), does not
help in the least to solve this problem. For an organized complex which
is assigned the form of an infinite series is not organized at all in any proper
sense of the term. It is more like a contradiction in termsan organized
whole which is not a totalitythan a genuine structure. Indeed, seriality as
such is not an ontological structure of being but the mere postulate of an
inherently problematical structure: the countable arrangement of unstructured things in an infinite (open) series, at the formal-conceptual level;
and a mystifying phenomenal manifestation of an underlying structure (the
structure of reification and commodity fetish) in the sphere of social reality.
On closer inspection Sartres picture of the world as unstructured totality
turns out to be the product of a double dichotomy: (1) the diametrical opposition between the thing in the world (the world of things and objects)
and consciousness, and (2) the antagonistic existential opposition between
man (consciousness) and the other. It goes without saying, radical change
through action is conceivable if the world is a structured totality in which
some constituents have a greater strategic function than others; and the strategic importance of any particular factor (utensil, institution, means)
is in direct proportion to its ability to control the structure as a whole. (As
we can see, this is not a question of mere countability, but of a qualitative
locationkey, strategically vital, etc.of the factor in question within the
overall structure.) If we try to bring about a radical change in our society by
first addressing, say, a local tea-party of fox-hunters wives, urging them to
use their good offices with their husbands, and then we move on to the next
particular utensil and to the next thereafter, and so on in the chain of the
established organized complex, we are indeed going to get lost forever in
the maze of our self-imposed infinite series.
Fortunately, however, there are other ways of producing radical changes
in the social world. The necessary preconditions of major social change are
(1) the identification and utilization of the historically given contradictions,
forces and institutions, and (2) the adequacy of the subject of the action to
the task. If, however, the subject is conceived as an isolated individual, he is
bound to remain a prisoner of the infinite series. For social reality is a structured totality only in relation to a subject who is himself a complex whole:
the social individual integrated (through his class or, in a classless society,
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in some other form) into the community to which he happens to belong. In

the eyes of the isolated individual the social totality must, of course, appear
as the mysterious aggregate of particular steps which he cannot conceivably
control beyond an extremely limited point, if that. Thus this isolated individual who is opposedin the spirit of the Sartrean double dichotomynot
only to the world of objects but also to the human beings of the social world
characterized as the other, cannot do other than admit the powerlessness
of his own actions in the world of utilizable things and embark on the
curious strategies of the magical world. This is where the Heideggerian
heritage weighs heaviest on Sartres shoulders. The undialectical conception of the world as an unstructured totality, and the closely interrelated
characterization of the subject of human action as an isolated individual, are
transmuted into ahistorical existential structures, and the social world is
subsumed under the world of magic: the world of the emotion.
. . . during an emotion, the consciousness abases itself and abruptly
transmutes the determinist world in which we live, into a magical world. But,
conversely, sometimes it is this world that reveals itself to consciousness as
magical just where we expect it to be deterministic. It must not, indeed,
be supposed that magic is an ephemeral quality that we impose upon the
world according to our humor There is an existential structure of the
world which is magical. . . . the category of magic governs the interpsychic
relations between men in society and, more precisely, our perception of
others. The magical, as Alain says, is the mind crawling among things;
that is, an irrational synthesis of spontaneity and passivity. It is an inert
activity, a consciousness rendered passive. But it is precisely in that form
that we appear to others, and this, not because of our position in relation
to them, nor in consequence of our passions, but by essential necessity.
Indeed, consciousness can only be a transcendent object by undergoing
the modification of passivity. . . . It follows that man is always a sorcerer to
man and the social world is primarily magical.217
Emotion may be called a sudden fall of consciousness into magic; or, if
you will, emotion arises when the world of the utilizable vanishes abruptly
and the world of magic appears in its place. We must not, therefore, see in
emotion a passing disorder of the organism and the mind which enters and
upsets them from outside. On the contrary, it is the return of consciousness
in the magical attitude, one of the great attitudes which are essential to it,
with the appearance of the correlative worldthe magical world. Emotion
is not an accident, it is a mode of our conscious existence, one of the ways
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in which consciousness understands (in Heideggers sense of Verstehen) its

Being-in-the-World.218
While some parts of these quotations are most illuminating about the
nature of the emotion itself, the utilization of emotion as the key to understanding the social world (as magic) is problematical in the extreme. For man
may be a sorcerer to manbut do we not all know that sorcerers are an
invention of man, in the Sartrean sense of the term? And if men behave as if
they were sorcerers, it is not because of some essential ontological necessity
issuing from a permanent existential structure that forever manifests itself as
an unavoidable irrational synthesis of spontaneity and passivity, but because
of determinateand at least in principle removablesocio-historical conditions. To embark on the task of removing these conditions by restructuring
the social world in which we happen to live, in accordance with genuine
human ends and in opposition to the self-propelling power of magically
reified institutions, is precisely what confers meaning on the human enterprise at the present stage of history. And no magic is going to help in that.
It is not necessary to go on any longer; for some additional aspects of this
complex of problems which we might wish to examine are only corollaries
of the basic tenets seen so far. As the examples quoted above have shown, in
Sartres early philosophy totality is: (1) dualistically fractured; (2) negatively
determined; and (3) unstructured both as totality of utensils projected in
an infinite series, and as social totality called the magical world. Naturally,
in Sartres later works there are some changes also in these respects and their
extent and precise nature will be discussed in some detail in the chapters
that follow. Now we must confine ourselves to indicating briefly the general
trend of Sartres later development as directly related to the present context.
On the first point we find that in some of his later works Sartre becomes
aware of the need for mediation, and at least the postulate of such mediation repeatedly appears in the Critique and elsewhere. However, the dualistic structure of his thought tends to reassert itself, no matter how hard he
tries to overcome the fracture in particular contexts. He puts forward one
side of the dualistic opposition, to function as mediation, which it cannot
conceivably do. Thus, in place of genuine structural mediations we get
declarations such as irreducible particularity is one way of living universality219 and the child becomes this or that because he lives the universal
as particular220 whereby lived and living (which belong to the particular) become the pseudo-mediations between universality and particularity.
This solution provides a blanket justification for the systematic avoidance
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of the true problem of mediation, namely: how is it possible to live the universal as particular? A question to which the answer can only be: through
specific mediations (which, of course, calls for the precise identification of
the specificities) and not through living itSartres answerwhich is
begging the question. And, of course, begging the question not as a result
of some confusion (a favorite pseudo-explanation in neo-positivist philosophy, which itself begs the question by explaining alleged confusion by
alleging confusion) but out of the internal necessity of a philosophy which
simultaneously wants to retain unchanged its dualistic presuppositions (the
structural framework of its reasoning)e.g. What we call freedom is the
irreducibility of the cultural order to the natural order221and mediate
them by declaring that irreducibility is mediation itself.
Second, negative determination remains all-pervasive in Sartres philosophy, wherever we look. Three illustrations should suffice here, concerning (1) reality in general; (2) particular individuals; and (3) a complex
social whole like the city. According to Sartre, the fundamental dimension of
human reality, possibility, articulates itself as the presence of the future as
that which is lacking, and that which, by its very absence, reveals reality.222
In the second respect we learn that Every man is defined negatively by the
sum total of possibles which are impossible for him; that is, by a future more
or less blocked off.223 And in the third context we read that a city is a material and social organization which derives its reality from the ubiquity of its
absence.224 Again, Sartre tries to introduce historical qualifications, and
again the original structure tends to reassert itself. We can see this dilemma
in the way he approaches history. He is critical of marxism for its alleged
failure to study the structures of historythe object of Sartres enquiry in
the Critiquefor themselves.225 Paradoxically, however, his ontological
analysis of these structures under the aspect of the theoretical possibilities of their combinations,226 tends to negate the historicity of history by
defining it as a fundamental existential structure: If History escapes me,
this is not because I do not make it; it is because the other is making it as
well.227 Thus, if history escapes me, this is not because the other is
whatever he is like (i.e., antagonistically opposed to me, for determinate
socio-historical reasons), but because he is the other (i.e., because of
the existential ontological structure of otherness). Consequently, either
the other ceases to make history and leaves that job to me, or history will
continue to escape me. And again, either the other ceases to be the other,
or history will remain the way we know it from the past, namely beyond
conscious human control. And since such possibilities are at best confined
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to transitory momentslike the obliteration of the antagonism between the

I and the other in the structurally unstable fused groupthe other
continues to cast its immense dark shadow on history, thanks to Sartres
negative determination of the existential ontological structures.
And finally, the problem of unstructured totality. It is in this respect that
the changes are most obvious in Sartres later philosophy. He gets involved
in an intensive study of historical temporalization as manifest through
exchange, the practico-inert, series, collectives, recurrence, etc., although
primarily from the point of view of the theoretical possibilities of their
combinations, as we have seen a moment ago. At times he even remarks
on the historical specificity of the conditions under which the infinite series
dominates, but with a tendency to take backor at least greatly to weaken
through the next step in his line of reasoning the historical specification. We
can see this very clearly in the following quotation:
It is necessary to take up the study of collectives again from the beginning
and to demonstrate that these objects, far from being characterized by the
direct unity of a consensus, represent perspectives of flight. This is because
upon the basis of given conditions, the direct relations between persons
depends upon particular relations, and these on still others, and so on in
succession, because there is an objective constraint in concrete relations. It
is not the presence of the others but their absence which establishes this
constraint; it is not their union but their separation. For us the reality of the
collective objects rests on recurrence. It demonstrates that the totalization
is never achieved and that the totality exists at best only in the form of a
detotalized totality.228
Furthermore the early double dichotomy reappears, in that history as

such is depicted as the sphere of irreconcilable antagonism in which man
is opposed to the other and existencein its particularity and irreducibilityto knowledge. (Also: we are confronted with a struggle of thought
against its social instruments229as if thought itself were not a social instrument.) And even references to magic are retained as late as 1973 (relations
between people . . . are complicated by some magic), together with the
famous sentence from the early work on Emotions: man is a sorcerer for
man230 repeated word for word. No wonder that for Sartre the resolution
of the antagonism depicted in his existential-ontological account of history
cannot be the realization of history (in Marxs words, true history that
follows mankinds antagonistic pre-history) but only the problematical
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postulate of its dissolution: History will have only one meaning, when it
will tend to be dissolved in the concrete men who will make it in common.231
Thus, since the various institutional etc. forms of our detotalized social
totality are characterized as realities, whose being is directly proportional
to the non-being of humanity,232 the ideal of human self-realization must
appear as the direct experience of universality by concrete man whose precondition is the progressive dissolution of all those differentiations and
mediations through which real history articulates itself.
4.
T H E M ET HOD OLOG IC AL PRINCIPLES of a philosophy are inseparable from
the basic propositions through which any comprehensive orientation of
thought towards reality can be defined. Naturally, for analytical purposes,
methodological rules may have to be treated separately. But they are not
intelligible in themselves, nor are they capable of providing justifications
for themselves. To try to explain methodological principles and rules by
themselves can only result in the infinite regress of meta-meta- . . . metamethodology, or in circularity, or in a combination of the two (as in some neopositivistic analytic philosophy which exhausts itself in the production of
a self-consuming methodology for the sake of methodology by obsessively
sharpening its carving knife until the blade completely disappears in the steeldust of self-perfection and the philosopher is left holding the bare handle).
The problems of method arise out of the task at hand, and the philosophical comprehension of experience prescribes its own explicit or latent
method. Any particular set of methodological rules presents itself as a specific way of sifting and selecting from among all the available data, with a view
of constructing a coherent whole. Specifying how to proceed, what to include
or exclude, how to define the relationship between philosophical knowledge
and the totality of available (including scientific and everyday) knowledge,
how to relate philosophical activity to the totality of human praxis, and so
on,all this would be meaningless if it could not be justified by the nature of
the philosophical enterprise itself as developed throughout history. (Why on
earth should one pay the slightest attention to the rules of a particular philosophical method unless one wanted to participate in the further development
of this collective human enterprise?) Furthermore, the rules of a particular
method would be arbitrary if they could not be justified by the results as
compared to those obtainable through the adoption of alternative methods.
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Phenomenological reduction, for instance, is totally pointless without

the explicit or implicit critical references to the alleged deficiencies of the
natural attitude, and thus to the whole complex of controversial issuesin
epistemology and ontologywhich gave rise to the elaboration of the phenomenological method in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The methodological rules and principles are constituted in the course
of the articulation of a given philosophy as a whole. This is why they cannot
be simply transferred from one setting to another without all the necessary
modifications which homogenize the rules of method and the thematic principles of the philosophy in question. Ontological shifts call for significant
methodological changes even in philosophies which explicitly profess to
abide by the same rules. Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty are all
phenomenologists in a sense. However, the way they all apply and modify
the rules of phenomenology varies considerably not only from one philosopher to the other but even in the development of each.233 This is not the
place to pursue these problems systematically. Limitations of space demand
that we confine ourselves to a brief discussion of the dialectical interrelationship between method and Weltanschauung (world view) as manifest in
Sartres own writings.
Already at the time of his earliest encounter with Husserl, Sartres enthusiasm for phenomenology is tempered by concerns which are eminently his
own. When Raymond Aron, in the spring of 1933, draws his attention to
Husserls philosophy, he is already looking for some method through which
he might be able to express his own views on existence and contingency in a
more coherent form. He welcomes the discovery to the extent to which it can
be subordinated to his own conception and integrated into his own quest.
This is the most telling part of Simone de Beauvoirs account of the incident.
For while leafing through Levinass book on Husserl which he picks up on
the Boulevard Saint-Michel soon after the talk with Aron, Sartres heart
missed a beat when he found references to contingency: Had someone cut
the ground from under his feet, then? As he read on he reassured himself that
this was not so. Contingency seemed not to play any very important part in
Husserls system.234 Thus, Sartre has very firm ideas right from the beginning on what he wants the phenomenological method for: the coherent formulation of his own existential-ontological concerns. His commitment to
the latter precedes by several years his encounter with phenomenology, but
they fill his mind in a rather chaotic form. Now that he has made his discovery, he is determined to use phenomenology so as to give shape, order
and discipline to his strongly felt views. From such intention it also follows
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that in so far as the new method is not suited to the task he has in mind,
it will have to be modified as required. For he sees clearly, right from the
outset, thatthrough his own problematic of contingencyhe introduces
something significantly new into Husserlian phenomenology. No wonder,
then, that Sartres very first serious reflection on this method, in 1934, takes
the form of a radical reassessment of its principal tenets, from the transcendental ego to the epoch, and from the question of motivation to the
characteristically Sartrean way of opening the phenomenological bracket.
Of course, the relationship between method and ontology should not
be conceived on the model of one-sided determinations but as a form of
dialectical reciprocity. This means that once the Sartrean version of phenomenology is constituted, on the basis of his major ontological principles,
the methodological framework tends to circumscribe the limits within
which reality is experienced and evaluated. Thus, for instance, when in The
Problem of Method Sartre expresses his total agreement with the marxist
Lefbvres method, he reads the latters words characteristically in his own
key. For these are the exact terms of Lefbvres analysis: (a) Descriptive.
Observation but with a scrutiny guided by experience and by a general
theory. (b) Analytico-regressive. Analysis of reality. Attempt to rediscover the
present, but elucidated, understood, explained.235 And this is how Sartre
interprets it:
We have nothing to add to this passage, so clear and so rich, except that
we believe that this method, with its phase of phenomenological description
and its double movement of regression followed by progress, is validwith
the modifications which its objects may impose upon itin all the domains
of anthropology. Further, it is this method which we shall apply, as we shall
see later, to significations, to individuals themselves, and to the concrete
relations among individuals. This method alone can be heuristic: it alone at
once defines the originality of the fact and makes comparisons possible.236
As we can see, Sartres primary interest is in significations (elsewhere

he calls it hierarchized specifications237), individuals, concreteness, and
originality (uniqueness) to be connected with universality through comparisons, in the service of a heuristic. In one word, his concern is to find a
method best suited to explain a particular individual (Flaubert, for example)
in a most comprehensive way. Anthropological knowledge, as Sartre sees it,
is mobilized towards this end. By contrast, Lefbvres enquiry is concerned
with a rural community and, through studying it, with the definition of the
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methods appropriate to the field of rural sociology. Accordingly, for him the
descriptive phase is just what it says, namely, taking inventory of the data
as encountered in the given rural community, within the framework of a
general theory of society. Which means that there can be no pure description, since evaluation is an integral part of the enterprise at all phases, in
virtue of the general theory brought to bear upon the data of description.
Significantly, however, Sartre translates descriptive into phenomenological
descriptionwhich is a radically different enterprise both in that it claims
to be pure description and that its aim is the identification of essences.
The second phase for Lefbvre is analytico-regressive. For he wants
to date (his italics) with precision the various historical layers that coexist
in the given structure; that is, he wants to identify the heterogeneity of the
elementswith all their contraststhat make up the structure. In other
words, this phase is concerned with the elucidation of a cross-section of the
structure, whereas the third phase concentrates on the historical-genetic
comprehension and elucidation of the dynamic whole of the present.
Characteristically, again, this complementarity of the analytico-regressive
(or structural-analytic) and the historical-genetic dimensions is translated by Sartre as the double movement of regression followed by progress, while in fact the term progress does not appear in Lefbvres classification. In any case, it is not clear why the historical-genetic phase should
be called progressive, since Lefbvres point was not meant to establish a
temporal sequence but to stress the two forms in which history and structure
are treated in the study: history as subordinate to structure (the analyticoregressive dating of the various elements of the structure), and structure as
subordinate to history (the historico-genetic comprehension of the present).
If we want to understand the reasons why Sartre decodes for himself
and translates for us Lefbvres terms the way he does, we have to go back a
long way into the past, right to the early constitution of his methodological
principles as spelled out in the Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. In this
work we find the following key passage:
The various disciplines of phenomenological psychology are regressive
although the ultimate term of their regression is, for them, purely ideal: those
of pure phenomenology, on the contrary, are progressive. It may, no doubt, be
asked why, under these conditions, one should choose to employ the two
disciplines simultaneously; pure phenomenology might seem to suffice. But,
if phenomenology can prove that emotion is realization of the essence of the
human reality in so far as the latter is affectivity, it will be impossible for it to
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show that the human-reality must necessarily manifest itself in such emotions
as it does. That there are such and such emotions and not othersthis is,
beyond all doubt, evidence of the factitious character of human existence. It
is this factitiousness that necessitates a regular recourse to the empirical; and
which, in all probability, will forever prevent the psychological regression and
the phenomenological progression from complete convergence.238
Here we have Sartres original methodological principles which continue to structure, notwithstanding some important changes, also his much
later reflections on the progressive-regressive method: psychological
regression (or recourse to the empirical), and phenomenological progression orientated towards the essence of the human reality. The reason why
Sartre must envisage a double movement is itself twofold: on the one hand,
the purity of pure phenomenology which means that the facticity (or factitiousness) of the human existence must escape it by definition; and on the
other hand, the facticity of human existence (that is to say, its such-andsuch character; its nature exactly as we experience it) calls for disciplines
to which facticity is accessible if one wants to understand and elucidate
the object of the enquiry. How to integrate the two, remains somewhat of a
mystery, given the radical dualism of Sartrean ontology and its correspondingly dualistic methodological rules. The double movement is bound to
remain a constant to-and-fro, an oscillatory movement of reciprocal reflection from one pole towards the other, and so on. Sartre himself admits this
by saying that psychological regression and phenomenological progression
are destined forever not to converge, although strangely enough he adds, in
all probabilitya qualification contradicted by the necessity inherent in his
own depiction of the irreconcilable opposition between existential facticity
and pure phenomenological essence.
This dilemma is clearly visible also in another youthful work, LImagination, in which the earlier seen opposition between facticity and essence
is complemented by that between particularity (individual fact, examples) and universality.
Phenomenology is a description of the structure of transcendental
consciousness based on intuition of the essences of these structures. This
description takes place, of course, on the level of reflection . . . which aims
at the discovery of essences. That is to say, it begins by taking its stand from
the outset on the terrain of the universal. Though proceeding in terms of
examples, little importance is attached to whether the individual fact which
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serves as underpinning for the essence is real or imaginary. Should the

exemplifying datum be pure fiction, the very fact that it was imaginable
means that it embodied the sought-for essence, for the essence is the very
condition of its possibility.239
Thus, we are confronted with the dichotomies of facticity versus essence

(the essences of the structures of transcendental consciousness), actuality
versus possibility, and existential particularity versus phenomenological
universality. We get essences, possibilities and universality at one pole, and
facticity, actuality and particularity at the other. And since mediation (the
middle ground, the third type of existence, etc.) has been a priori ruled
out, as we have seen above, integration is hardly conceivable. In its place we
find the suggestion of a somewhat mysterious dissolution of the two poles
(and of the problem at stake) through the oscillatory double movement
of reciprocal reflection (in later terminology: cross-referencing, va-etvient), just as the antagonism of history is supposed to disappear through
the dissolution of history. This is why even in its much later formulation
the existential method . . . wants to remain heuristic. It will have no other
method than a continuous cross-reference; it will progressively determine
a biography (for example) by examining the period, and the period by
studying the biography. Far from seeking immediately to integrate one into
the other, it will hold them separate until the reciprocal involvement comes to
pass of itself and puts a temporary end to the research.240
5.
A N OT HE R M AJ OR P R E O CCUPATIO N in Sartres philosophy is his attempt
to provide a foundation to marxism through his own existential
phenomenology. It would again be quite wrong to see this only in the Sartre
of The Problem of Method and its aftermath. For in point of fact the origins of
this orientation go back in his work at least as far as The Transcendence of the
Ego, although his early attitude to marxism shows greater reservations than
in the late 1950s.
We have to bear in mind two important considerations in this respect.
First, that Sartre as a student learns about a mechanical kind of marxism
both from those hostile to it (his professors) and those (like Politzer) who
champion its cause. And second, that there is a long-standing philosophical
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traditionSimmel and Max Weber are among its founderswhich concedes to marxism, after many years of Totschweigen (execution by silence)
the value of being of partial interest (as a supplier of interesting historical
hypotheses) while insisting that it is devoid of a proper philosophical and
methodological foundation. Accordingly, even the young Lukcs entertains
for a number of years the idea of producing the missing philosophicalmethodological foundation, and Heidegger moves in the same intellectual
orbit as far as the problematic of founding is concerned, although, understandably (in the years of German disintegration following the 191418
war rendered only more painful by the success of the Russian revolution)
his fundamental ontology is meant as a foundation not for marxism but
against it, transferring the problems of alienation and reification from the
socio-historical sphere (the world dominated by capital) to the plane of existential-ontological temporality as manifest through the human condition
in history as such.241
As we have seen in connection with Temporality in Faulkner, the
young Sartre is very far from simply adopting the Heideggerian approach.
His political sympathies are on the side of the working class, even if he is
unable to identify himself with it as a militant, unlike his friend Nizan. If
Sartre is apathetic, it is because he is highly sceptical about the possibility
of a successful socialist revolution, and not because he is hostile towards
the aims of such a revolution, which he himself predicates as an abstract
imperative. His quest, at this stage of his development, is orientated towards
defining the field of action of the individual, and therefore any conception of
determinationsbe it psychoanalysis or marxismwhich does not set out
from the individuals conscious (though in different ways conscious) selfdetermination, must be considered extremely problematical.
Obviously, if the value of marxism is assessed in a framework whose
centre of reference is the existentialist individual and his consciousness
(with the aim of ascribing responsibility even to unreflective consciousness242), even a dialectical conception of marxism must appear mechanical.
In this sense, it is quite secondary how subtle Politzer and other marxists of Sartres youth might or might not be. (In other words, this point is
relevant at best only as one limited factor in explaining the formation of
Sartres ideas, but not the persistence of his views on marxism.) For any
form of marxism evaluated from the standpoint of an existential-individual
ontology must appear in need of founding. In such a framework, marxism
cannot be more than a fertile (maybe even: the best) historical hypothesis whose possibility, however, must be established on the foundation of
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a phenomenological-existential methodology. That history is made under

determinate socioeconomic conditions, indicating certain laws at work, all
this may be very plausiblebut how is it possible in relation to consciousness
and its fundamental project? So long as this foundation is not defined in
terms of the individual and his existential project, the historical conditions
and laws must appear as external mechanisms that precede the individual,
and the philosophy which concentrates on them as a mechanical philosophy,
whatever its merits at the level of historical hypotheses that, by definition,
must be established on the ground of a fundamental ontology (existential anthropology) and therefore cannot found themselves. Thus, in so far
as the historical hypotheses of marxism cannot be subsumed under the
existential conception of ontology (anthropology), marxism must be validated, complemented, corrected, etc.in short it must be superseded
by the existentialist quest. This is why Sartre maintains an ambivalent attitude towards it even in works in which his explicit aim is to announce the
dissolution of existentialism within marxism, as we shall see in a moment.
But to return to the early works, this is how this problem appears in The
Transcendence of the Ego:
It has always seemed to me that a working hypothesis as fruitful as
historical materialism never needed for a foundation the absurdity which
is metaphysical materialism. In fact, it is not necessary that the object
precede the subject for spiritual pseudo-values to vanish and for ethics
to find its bases in reality. It is enough that the me be contemporaneous
with the World, and that the subject-object duality, which is purely logical,
definitely disappear from philosophical preoccupations. The World has not
created the me; the me has not created the World. These are two objects for
absolute, impersonal consciousness, and it is by virtue of this consciousness
that they are connected. This absolute consciousness, when it is purified
of the I, no longer has anything of the subject. It is no longer a collection
of representations. It is quite simply a first condition and an absolute
source of existence. And the relation of interdependence established by this
absolute consciousness between the me and the World is sufficient for the
me to appear as endangered before the World, for the me (indirectly and
through the intermediary of states) to draw the whole of its content from
the World. No more is needed in the way of philosophical foundation for an
ethics and a politics which are absolutely positive.243
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As Sartres subsequent development shows, things are a great deal more

complicated than our quotation suggests. For notwithstanding the adoption
of the proposed philosophical foundation for an absolutely positive ethics
and politics, both remain an elusive goal in his lifework. And this is by no
means a surprising development. To declare that the subject-object duality
is purely logical, in conjunction with the ultimate postulate of a subjectless
absolute, impersonal consciousness: the absolute source of existence, is
not sufficient to make the underlying problem disappear. In any case, such
consciousness is very far from humbly conforming to Sartres characterization of not having anything of the subject. Although it is contrasted with
the strictly individual consciousness, it represents in Sartres philosophy
that conflation of the individual and the collective subject which we have
seen above, in connection with his essay on Faulkner. The phenomenological concept of intentionality enables Sartre to tie the two poles together,
so that he can describe consciousness in general, despite calling it impersonal, in terms indistinguishable from the characteristics of an individual
consciousness. Consciousness is frightened by its own spontaneity because
it senses this spontaneity as beyond freedom;244 indeed, in this framework
even the ego can be described as intended by consciousness to mask from
consciousness its very spontaneity.245 In other words, consciousness is said
to produce its egological structure in order to deceive itself.
At this point we can see that the philosophical function of the Sartrean
solution is not so much theoretical as practical246in the sense that it
points to a latent moral philosophy, though of course not to an absolutely
positive one:
Everything happens, therefore, as if consciousness constituted the ego as a
false representation of itself, as if consciousness hypnotized itself before this
ego which it has constituted, absorbing itself in the ego as if to make the ego
its guardian and its law. It is thanks to the ego, indeed, that a distinction
can be made between the possibility and the real, between appearance and
being, between the willed and the undergone.
But it can happen that consciousness suddenly produces itself on the
pure reflective level. Perhaps not without the ego, yet as escaping from the
ego on all sides, as dominating the ego and maintaining the ego outside the
consciousness by a continued creation. On this level, there is no distinction
between the possible and the real, since appearance is the absolute. There are
no more barriers, no more limits, nothing to hide consciousness from itself.
The consciousness, noting what would be called the fatality of its spontaneity,
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is suddenly anguished: it is this dread, absolute and without remedy, this fear
of itself, which seems to us constitutive of pure consciousness.247
The concept of barriers is the key to understanding this whole set of

relations, as indeed also the analysis of temporality in Faulkner culminated
in the passionate exclamation: a barred future is still a future. Collision
with barriers is an indubitable fact of the human-reality. In this respect the
existential question, according to Sartre, is twofold: (1) how to account for
the barriers we meet; and (2) how to deal with them? Since any deterministic conception of the world has been a priori rejected, and consciousness
described both as the human-reality itself248 and as the absolute source of
existence, consciousness as such must be responsible for producing its own
barriers. It sets up the ego as its guardian and its law, and thus it produces
the distinction between the possible and the real, between appearance and
being, between the willed and the undergone, etc.distinctions which all
rebound against it. Thus the reality principle appears (through differentiating between the possible and the real) and takes charge of our daily life.
The result is a mode of existence that can be described only with the negative categories of Sartres latent moral philosophy. The picture of such existence is truly desolate and well deserves Sartres passionate condemnation.
All seems to be lost until, suddenly and paradoxically, the barriers themselves come to the rescue: All ways are barred and nevertheless we must act.
So then we try to change the world; that is, to live it as though the relations
between things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic
processes but by magic. But be it well understood, this is no playful matter:
we are cornered, and we fling ourselves into this new attitude with all the
force at our command.249
The new attitude appears as the effective negation of the previous mode
of existence: consciousness lives the new world it has thereby constituted
lives it directly, commits itself to it, and suffers from the qualities that the
concomitant behavior has assigned to it. This means that, all ways out being
barred, the consciousness leaps into the magical world of emotions.250
However, this negation is bound to remain a problematic solution. Not
only becausein accordance with the underlying spontaneitythe new
attitude cannot be induced but simply arises on its own whenever it does
happen to arise (it can happen . . . , suddenly . . . etc.), but also because
the new state is ruled by fatality. The fatality of its [consciousnesss] spontaneity is described as consciousness dropping asleep251 because
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consciousness is caught in its own snare. Precisely because it is living in the

new aspect of the world by believing in it, the consciousness is captured by
its own belief, exactly as it is in dreams and hysteria. The consciousness of
the emotion is captive, but by this it must not be understood to be fettered
by anything whatever outside itself. It is captive to itself . . . Thus, when
consciousness is living the magical world into which it has precipitated
itself, it tends to perpetuate that world.252
Hence Sartres fascination with the imagery of man who is simultaneously the victim and the executioner responsible for his own undoing.253
Thus the vertiginous freedom and infinite overflow of consciousness does not bring liberation and fulfillment to man. Consciousness succeeds in extricating itself from the contradictions of one of its fundamental
attitudes only to get trapped by the fatality of the other. Man seems to be
locked into a world of antinomies: a predicament which imposes on him,
as the only authentic mode of existence, the imperative of ceaseless negation. This is why the adventurer is Sartres hero who recognizes the
vanity of action and its necessity, based on the absolute existence of man
and the absolute impossibility of such existencea hero who finds fulfillment only in the infinitesimal moment that separates life from death.254
Sartres latent moral philosophy thus unfolds as the categorical negation of
this antinomous world; or, to put it another way, the categorical negativity of
his thought makes itself intelligible as a latent moral philosophy that never
comes to a point of rest. In his vision man ought to negate the conditions
of existence, and the more so the harder he is tossed between the horns of
the existential antinomies. It is the moral intensity of this negating passion
which refuses to admit any set of determinations prior to the self-determination of consciousness, so that the latter shall assume total responsibility for
the human-reality it constitutes.
Significantly enough, in this conception of philosophy the epistemological-ontological and the moral categories are inextricably intertwined. So
much so, that epistemological-ontological objections to phenomenology are
answered by moral assertions:
The theorists of the extreme Left have sometimes reproached
phenomenology for being an idealism and for drowning reality in the stream
of ideas. But if idealism is the philosophy without evil of Brunschwicg, if
it is a philosophy in which the effort of spiritual assimilation never meets
external resistance, in which suffering, hunger, and war are diluted in a
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slow process of the unification of ideas, nothing is more unjust than to call
phenomenologists idealists. On the contrary, for centuries we have not felt
in philosophy so realistic a current. The phenomenologists have plunged
man back into the world; they have given full measure to mans agonies and
sufferings, and also to his rebellion.255
We can witness here the shift from epistemology to moral philosophy

as idealism is defined in terms of a failure to face up to evil dominating our
world in the shape of suffering, hunger and war; and similarly, realism
is defined as a passionate moral concern about mans agonies and sufferings. It is secondary, whether or not the phenomenologically bracketed
and reduced hunger retains much resemblance to real hunger: in any
case, in Sartres philosophy the doors of the phenomenological bracket
are wide open. What is of paramount importance for understanding the
structure of Sartres philosophy is the fact that right from their early constitution his epistemological-ontological categories are permeated by the
intense moral passion which has its primacy in his thought as deeply as
the principle of the primacy of practical reason predominates in the
Kantian system.
This means that we are confronted with a structural integration of moral
and ontological and other categories, and not just with lateral connections
and associations. Sartre articulates his epistemological-ontological categories in order to sustain his own conception of morality. He takes notice of
what he calls metaphysical materialism only to the extent to which the presumed ethical corollaries of such a conception of philosophy clash with his
own moral concerns. He does not examine and refute the basic propositions
of this philosophy at the level at which they are formulated but simply insists
that one does not need the absurdity which is metaphysical materialism
for spiritual pseudo-values to vanish and for ethics to find its bases in reality.
And the reason why he cannot contemplate a philosophical foundation different from his own (in which consciousness is the first condition and the
absolute source of existence) is, again, not epistemological-ontological but
moral. For if the object preceded and determined the subject, it would be
impossible to ascribe to the subject that categorical, absolute, total responsibility which Sartre wants to ascribe to it.256
Naturally, in this conception, because of the inextricable structural integration and fusion of the epistemological-ontological and the moral categories, ontology must be identified with anthropology. For nothing is admissible prior to the human reality which becomes the absolute foundation
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of everything. Fundamental ontology and existential anthropology thus

become synonymous:
. . . it is precisely for the human reality that to exist is always to assume its
being; that is, to be responsible for it instead of receiving it from outside, as
a pebble does. And since the human reality is essentially its own possibility,
this existent can itself choose what it will be, achieve itselfor lose itself.
Thus the human reality which is myself assumes its own being by
understanding it. This understanding is mine. I am, then, first of all, a being
who more or less obscurely understands his reality as a man, which means
that I make myself a man by understanding myself as such. I can therefore
question myself and, on the basis of that interrogation, carry out an analysis
of the human reality which will serve as the basis for an anthropology.257
The structural integration and fusion of the categories works, of course,

both ways. Not only are the anthropological-ontological categories permeated by existential morality but also, the other way round, the categories of
Sartrean ethic are fully intelligible only in their anthropological-ontological
context. Responsibility, freedom, possibility, choice, and so on, are
not quite what they would mean in a specific ethical proposition. At times
even Sartre feels that he must put them in inverted commas, as the term
choose in the last quotation since the subject is denied by Sartre the
status of a subject (which in fact amounts to a characteristic Sartrean conflation of the individual and the collective subject, as we have seen above).
This is why Sartres moral philosophy must remain a latent one, resisting
all his efforts which aim at articulating it as a relatively autonomous system
of morality. And this is why any concept of ontology that fails to identify
itself with existential anthropology must be rejected by Sartre even when his
openly professed and genuinely believed aim is the integration (or dissolution) of existentialist ideology within marxism.
Sartres ambivalent attitude to marxism mentioned above has its roots
in the incompatibility between existentialist anthropology and marxian
ontology. Not that he himself conceptualizes the problem in that form. On
the contrary, given his political-moral solidarity with the perspective of a
socialist transformation of society, he is anxious to stress his complete agreement with Marx. All the same, the ambivalence transpires through the shift
in his arguments, as well as through his final summing up of the prospects
of integrating existentialism and marxism. He gives three different explanations for his critical attitude: (1) His criticisms are meant for Engels;258 (2) He
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is critical of contemporary mechanical marxism;259 (3) His critical qualifications are intended to assign certain limits to dialectical materialismto
validate the historical dialectic while rejecting the dialectic of nature.260
In the third explanation we are remarkably close to the original formula
which praised historical materialism as a fruitful working hypothesis (now
he wants to validate the hypothesis) and rejected the absurdity which is
metaphysical materialism (now he limits dialectical materialism by rejecting
the idea of a dialectic of nature, worried that it would reduce man261 to
a simple product of physical laws, which exactly corresponds to the early
complaint against metaphysical materialism).
As to Sartres final summing up of the prospects of integrating existentialism and marxism, we can see very clearly that those who lamented the
alleged liquidation of existentialism and talked about Sartre being swallowed up by marxism262 had no real ground for such views. For Sartres
own words speak loud for themselves, and they speak very differently:
Thus the autonomy of existential studies results necessarily from the
negative qualities of Marxists (and not from Marxism itself ). So long as the
doctrine does not recognize its enemies, so long as it founds its Knowledge
upon a dogmatic metaphysics (a dialectic of Nature) instead of seeking its
support in the comprehension of the living man, so long as it rejects as
irrational those ideologies which wish, as Marx did, to separate being from
Knowledge, and, in anthropology, to found the knowing of man on human
existence, existentialism will follow its own path of study. This means that it
will attempt to clarify the givens of Marxist Knowledge by indirect knowing
(that is, as we have seen, by words which regressively denote existential
structures), and to engender within the framework of Marxism a veritable
comprehensive knowing which will rediscover man in the social world and
which will follow him in his praxisor, if you prefer, in the project which
throws him toward the social possibles in terms of a defined situation.
Existentialism will appear therefore as a fragment of the system, which
has fallen outside of Knowledge. From the day that Marxist thought will
have taken on the human dimension (that is, the existential project) as the
foundation of anthropological Knowledge, existentialism will no longer have
any reason for being. Absorbed, surpassed and conserved by the totalizing
movement of philosophy, it will cease to be a particular inquiry and will
become the foundation of all inquiry. The comments which we have made
in the course of the present essay are directedto the modest limit of our
capabilitiestoward hastening the moment of that dissolution.263
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Thus, in place of a radical conversion leading to a liquidation of

existentialism we find a statement which firmly reasserts not only Sartres
opposition to dogmatic metaphysics but also his lifelong programme of
founding marxism on an existential anthropology. And the last word, dissolution, could not be more distant from what it suggests to careless reading.
For the message is spelled out with precision in the preceding sentence.
Existentialism will be dissolved only when it becomes the foundation of
all inquiry; that is: the universally accepted premise of all future philosophy.
In any case, even if Sartre is willing to read Marx in his own key, their views
on the relationship between ontology and anthropology are far from being
identical. For as far back as 1844 Marx emphasized that
mans feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena
. . . but truly ontological affirmations of essential being (of nature) . . .
Only through developed industry, i.e., through the medium of private
propertydoes the ontological essence of human passion come to be both
in its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a
product of mans establishment of himself by practical activity.264
Thus, for Marx, ontology and anthropology are not synonymous; the
former is the unquestionable foundation of the latter and in that sense precedes it. Consequently, the problem is not simply materiality, namely
the fact that the point of departure is man as animal organism which sets
out from needs and creates material ensembles,265 but precisely the objective ontological conditions under which such development can take place.
This is what makes Marx insist on the ontological principle inherent in
the development of modern technology which consists in resolving each
process into its constituent movements, without any regard to their possible execution by the hand of man.266 Whether or not one should apply the
term dialectic of nature (and if so, with what qualifications) to the study
of such conditions, need not worry us here. What matters is that they are
clearly not anthropological they concern natures fundamental laws of
motion and the prerequisites of human development in accordance with and
in response to such objective laws but constitute the ultimate points of
reference of ontology into which a dialectical conception of anthropology
must be integrated as a part in the whole. Since, however, the integration of
existentialism and marxism envisaged by Sartre is diametrically opposed to
this, his programme of founding marxism remains for Sartre as far from its
realization today as in 1934.
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6.
SA RT R E S E AR LY WOR K S A RE W RITTEN in a period of great contradictions
which threateningly foreshadow the possibility of a cataclysm never seen
before. For perceptive men who are willing to bear witness, the gravity of
the predicament is evident not only in the great world economic crisis of
1929-33, but also in the solutions that follow that crisis, from the rise of
fascism to the chronic depression and unemployment that characterizes the
life of all the liberal capitalist countries throughout the 1930s, alleviated
only at the tragic price of re-vitalizing the economy, at the outbreak of the
Second World War, in the service of war material production which sets
its devastating pattern for the production of prosperity also after the war.
Looking back on this period in Situation of the writer in 1947, Sartre
describes its formative power in graphic terms:
From 1930 on, the world depression, the coming of Nazism, and the events
in China opened our eyes. It seemed as if the ground were going to fall
from under us, and suddenly, for us too, the great historical juggling began.
The first years of the great world Peace suddenly had to be regarded as the
years between wars. Each sign of compromise which we had greeted had
to be seen as a threat. Each day we had lived revealed its true face; we had
abandoned ourselves to it trustingly and it was leading us to a new war with
secret rapidity, with a rigour hidden beneath its nonchalant airs. And our
life as an individual which had seemed to depend upon our efforts, our
virtues, and our faults, on our good and bad luck, on the good and bad will
of a very small number of people, seemed governed down to its minutest
details by obscure and collective forces, and its most private circumstances
seemed to reflect the state of the whole world. All at once we felt ourselves
abruptly situated. The detachment which our predecessors were so fond of
practicing had become impossible. There was a collective adventure which
was taking form in the future and which would be our adventure. . . . The
secret of our gestures and our most intimate designs lay ahead of us in the
catastrophe to which our name would be attached. History flowed in upon
us; in everything we touched, in the air we breathed, in the page we read,
in the one we wrote; in love itself we discovered, like a taste of history, so to
speak, a bitter and ambiguous mixture of the absolute and the transitory.267
The experience of history can be bewildering if it is reflected in consciousness as a form of historical relativism. Similarly, the perception of the
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collective forces which dominate a historical situation can be paralyzing if

the individual is unable to define his own margin of action in relation to
them. Sartre is extremely anxious to steer clear of both dangers. With respect
to the first, the overriding interest of his quest is to find the absolute at the
heart of relativity itself so as to be able to oppose it to moral relativism.268
And with regard to the power of the collective forces, his aim is to demonstrate the possibilitiesand the responsibilityof the individual to face
up to mans agonies and sufferings in this world of collective adventure
which he cannot really escape, no matter how hard he might try to through
the strategies of bad faith.
In his search for the integral, though not sovereign, individual Sartre wants
to demonstrate that the man of his quest is totally free (responsible) and yet
totally situated in a contingent world. How is this possible? Is such a view
compatible with the prevailing conceptions of man? Sartres answer is an
emphatic no, and he sets out to prove the validity of his own idea: this is in fact
the most central theme of all his early works. We have already seen his objections to marxism. In addition, let us briefly refer to two other principal lines
of approach from among those he criticizes: positivism and psychoanalysis.
In the positivistic cult of the facts, Sartre identifies a basic structural
defect: the absence of a proper concept of man which means that we get an
aimless, almost totally blind accumulation of facts and no real theory. Thus:
If, later on, there ought to be a definitive concept of manwhich itself is
doubtfulthis concept is to be envisaged only as the crowning concept of
a complete science, which means that it is postponed to infinity.269 The
whole is disregarded and fragments usurp its place. And since the specificity of the human (man as a synthetic totality) does not guide the enquiry
itself, hopes that it might emerge from the maze of fragmentary, mechanistic
determinations, must be considered completely gratuitous.
Sartres attitude to psychoanalysis is equally negative, althoughin contrast to his views on the varieties of positivismhe acknowledges that its
problems are novel and important and therefore must be accounted for in
his own alternative terms. The reason why he must reject the psychoanalytic theories is the same that lies behind the criticisms he voices in other
directions: the radical inadmissibility of determinations prior or external to
the self-determinations of consciousness. This is why the critique of psychoanalysis remains central with him, no matter how hard he triesin an
intellectual climate highly favorable to psychoanalytic explanationsto give
the maximum credit to Freud himself for focusing attention on an area of
great importance. He sees clearly that what he is calling into question is the
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principle itself of psychoanalytic explanation, for in psychoanalysis what

is signified is entirely cut off from the signifying.270 To this approach he
opposes his own dialectic conception of the relationship between signifying,
signified, and signification:
If, then, it [consciousness] has a signification, it must contain this within
itself as a structure of consciousness. This does not mean that the
signification must be perfectly explicit. There are many possible degrees
of condensation and of clarity. It only means that we should not interrogate
the consciousness from outside, as one would study the remains of the
fire or the encampment, but from within; that we should look onto it
for the signification. The consciousness, if the cogito is to be possible, is
itself the fact, and signification and what is signified . . . if symbolization
is constitutive it is legitimate to see an immanent bond of comprehension
between the symbolization and the symbol. Only, we must agree upon this,
that consciousness constitutes itself by symbolization. In that case there
is nothing behind it, and the relation between symbol, symbolized and
symbolization is an infrastructural bond of consciousness. But if we go on to
say that the consciousness is symbolizing under the causal compulsion of a
transcendent factwhich is the repressed desirewe are falling back upon
the theory previously indicated, which treats the relation of the signified
to the signifying as a causal relation. The profound contradiction in all
psychoanalysis is that it presents at the same time a bond of causality and a
bond of understanding between the phenomena that it studies. These two
types of relationship are incompatible.271
Significantly enough, the same line of reasoning is followed by Sartre in an

interview more than three decades later, culminating in the rejection of the
mythology of the unconscious constituting a set of rigorous mechanistic
determinations . . . a causality . . . a mechanism.272 And no wonder. For too
much would have to go if Sartre decided to significantly modify his views
on these points. The fact is that he does not just reject the psychoanalytic
principle of explanation for certain facts and problems but provides his own
rival explanation. As we learn from Simone de Beauvoirs memoirs, the main
concepts of his alternative to psychoanalysis were spelled out already in the
early 1930s when:
Sartre worked out the notion of mauvaise foi [bad faith] which, according
to him, embraced all those phenomena which other people attributed
138
to the unconscious mind. We set ourselves to expose this dishonesty in

all its manifestations: semantic quibbling, false recollections, fugues,
compensation fantasies, sublimations, and the rest. We rejoiced every time
we unearthed a new loophole, another type of deception.273
A great deal more is built on such foundations later on, and mauvaise foi
remains one of the central concepts in the whole of Sartres lifework, articulated in all its details in Being and Nothingness and used in many subsequent
works. And the function envisaged by Sartre for his own existential psychoanalysis is radically different from that of traditional psychoanalysis. Again,
it is important to bear in mind the role of morality in Sartrean philosophy
as a whole in order to be able to understand and appreciate the function
he assigns to existential psychoanalysis: the various tasks of the for-itself
can be made the object of an existential psychoanalysis, for they all aim at
producing the missing synthesis of consciousness and being in the form of
value or self-cause. Thus existential psychoanalysis is moral ascription, for
it releases to us the ethical meaning of various human projects.274 Clearly,
no variety of Freudian theory could fulfill such functions. This is why traditional psychoanalysis and existential psychoanalysis remain worlds apart,
and Sartre has to embark on the arduous task of writing a new treatise of
the passions relying entirely on his own resources, taking for his centre of
reference the factitious predicament of the existential individual.
Socially, Sartres early works are conceived between two poles of negativity: on the one hand, the passionate condemnation of his own class and of
the bourgeois order of society that goes with it, and the rejection of the idea
of identifying himself with the struggle of the working class on the other.
Simone de Beauvoirs recollections of an incident illustrates very well that
the negation of the prevailing order by Sartre is not coupled with a positive
involvement. Instead, he opts for the position of the self-oriented outsider,
however much sympathy he might feel at times for the underdogs from a
fairly remote distance. This is how Simone de Beauvoirs account goes:
The columns of the daily press were full of bankruptcies, scandals, and the
suicides of businessmen and international financiers. The world was moving
into a state of flux. Sartre often wondered whether we should not join those
who were working for this revolution. I recall one conversation in particular,
which took place on the terrasse of the big caf in Rouen, the Caf Victor,
that looked out on the quais. Even in spheres where we were ideologically
well-informed, to come up against some concrete fact still always had an
139
effect on us, and would give rise to copious subsequent discussions. This
was what happened on this particular afternoon. A docker, decently dressed
in his blue smock, sat down at a table next to ours: the manager ejected him.
The incident did not teach us anything, but it illustrated the idea of class
segregation with all the naivet of an Epinal print, and served as the point of
departure of a far-reaching discussion. We got to asking ourselves whether
it was enough for us to sympathize with the struggle being fought by the
working classes: ought we not to join in it? . . . On this particular occasion
we decided . . . that though the proletarian struggle was of concern to us, it
was even so not our struggle; all that could be asked of us was that we should
always speak out on its behalf in any argument.275
Thus, instead of a passionate identification with the struggle for a new

society, we find a paternalistic intellectualism, confined to taking part in
merely theoretical discussions and arguments. Naturally, this is not just a
biographical detail that serves simply to add color to the background of
Sartres development, but a major factor in the constitution of his philosophical system as a whole. The decision to be critical rather than constructive276 is a rather vague way of describing what is at stake here. For in
reality it means that the criticism itselfwhich is devoid of a positive (constructive) frame of referenceis condemned to be extremely abstract and
remote from the tangible social realities.
The young Sartre takes up his stand in the no-mans-land of the self-oriented outsider, which carries far-reaching consequences for the articulation
of his philosophy. Since his moral rebellion is voiced in a social vacuum, his
criticism can only be manifested in the form of an abstract moral imperative that must remain latent and wedded to the categories of an existential
ontology, as we have seen above. Similarly, since the idea of social-political
commitment is rejected by Sartrealthough the concept of moral commitment is an integral part of his philosophy right from the early 1930sthe
existential categories in which his views are spelled out in his original system
tend to be ahistorical (for-itself, in-itself, vertigo of possibility, absolute flight, monstrous spontaneity, etc.), notwithstanding the experience
of history which he describes retrospectively in 1947. And as far as the relations of domination and oppression are concerned (which, again, he condemns in the form of a moral ought), in his early works they are converted
into the abstract existential-ontological antagonism between the for-itself
and the other at one level, and into the conflicts of interpsychic (and
indeed intra-psychic) relations at another, thus depriving them of their
140
socio-historical specificity. (Also, alienation and objectification tend to be

fused with the help of variants of the category of reification, and such fusion
produces the same sort of effect.) Finally, since the standpoint of Sartres
early works is that of the negatively defined, self-oriented outsider who
emphatically rejects the orientation of his own class without being able to
adopt the perspective of its polar opposite, the subject of his philosophy
cannot be a socio-historically specific and tangible collective subject but an
existentialist fusion of particular individuality (the contingency and facticity of the existential individual) and abstract universality (consciousness
as such in its impersonal spontaneity).
Thus, Sartres search for the individual in his early works reveals in
the spirit of the Kierkegaardian opposition to Hegel the absolute as the
unsurpassable opaqueness of the lived experience,277 or in other words,
as the irreducibility and the specificity of what is lived.278 What this
quest produces is not the individualfor the real individual cannot be
truly grasped except in his socio-historical specificity and universality, as
the social individualbut individuality and particularity as such: the
absolute at the heart of relativity itself, defined as the opaque irreducibility of the lived experience. (This is particularity directly raised to the
level of the absolute, which procedure becomes the Sartrean version of
universalizing the individual while insisting on irreducibility and nonuniversalizability.) Here, again, we can see the social determinants of this
conception. For later Sartre has to admit that the unsurpassable opaqueness of lived experiencefor instance, sufferingvis--vis knowledge
holds only to the degree that knowledge remains powerless to transform
it;279 which means that the whole question of absolute irreducibility
and unsurpassable opaqueness hinges on social praxis itself, of which
knowledge and lived experience are integral dimensions and therefore
cannot be abstractly-antinomously opposed to one another on the alleged
ground of some fundamental ontology.
Many things change significantly in the course of Sartres later development. The war years shatter the self-erected walls of his social vacuum,
and the problem of commitmentnot only moral and literary-aesthetic but
also social and politicalcomes to occupy a central place in his writings in
the most varied contexts (from literary analyses to political polemics) and at
all levels (from occasional remarks to systematic philosophical treatments).
Naturally, the increasing social awareness carries with it a conscious effort
to put into relief the political and the historical dimensions of his concerns,
which calls for the modification of some fundamental early propositions and
141
categories. Inevitably, though, such an enterprisehowever passionately felt

in the circumstances of tangible social crisesmust be carried out by Sartre
in the framework of a philosophy whose structure has been constituted
under very different conditions and with rather different preoccupations in
mind. Thus he is forced to respond to the challenge of the dramatic sociohistorical developments (during the war and after) in terms of his philosophy
as originally articulated during the 1930s, while restructuring it to the extent
to which this is feasible internally. This of course is not possible without
the constant manifestations of major tensions280 between the original structure and the new demands of which he becomes a passionate champion.
That he is unable to resolve these tensions, is inherent in the antinomous
structure of his original system. That he is unwilling to resolve them simply
by discarding his antinomies is a measure of his stubborn integrity and of
the depth of his commitment. The fact that a philosophical solution to the
problems he had embraced in his original system is not forthcoming must be
considered in conjunction with the other side of the coin. For keeping alive
the unbearable tension of his antinomies is the fertile ground on which
Sartre dramatically depictsand by no means only in the medium of the
theatrethe world in which we all live, thus creating a lifework which is
manifestly representative of our time.
5. Freedom and Passion:

The World of B EING AND N OTHINGNESS
1.
F UN DAM E NTAL LY M AN IS TH E D ESIRE TO B E (565)281states a cryptic phrase
in Being and Nothingness. To understand it, we must realize that in the world
of Being and Nothingness all the principal categories hinge on being,
including the desire to do, which is reduced either to having (576) or
to being (581). Furthermore, having itself is turned into being through
possession which is said to be a magical relation: I am these objects which
I have (591), for In possession I am my own foundation in so far as I exist in
an In-itself (592). Thus when two years after writing Being and Nothingness
Sartre asserts that existentialism defines man through action,282 and that
existentialism is a morality of action and of commitment,283 we witness a
significant shift of emphasis which opens up new possibilities of tangible
social and political involvement in his postwar development.
However, during the war years things remain more abstract in Sartres
conceptual universe. Being and Nothingness is a monumental synthesis An
Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, according to its subtitle which sets
out from asserting the primacy of subjectivity and remains anchored to the
psychological categories of Sartres early work. The abstractness of Being
and Nothingness is the consequence of the compression of a great variety of
144
heterogeneous philosophical problems into the categories worked out on

the basis of Sartres early inspiration in philosophical psychology. And when
he later calls it the eidetics of bad faith, sharply contrasting its approach
with the empirical study of our fidelities, and of the inhuman forces which
pervert them,284 he provides a very apt characterization of the limits of this
great work. For the notorious difficulties of comprehension are not so much
a matter of inherent complexity as rather of the forbidding strangeness of
the subjective key in which the work is composed, presenting a comprehensive synthesis of man and the world under its subjective aspects, and
objectivity in the spirit of phenomenological realism appears massively
transmuted into the categories of Sartrean existentialist subjectivity.
Being and Nothingness is an ontology conceived from the standpoint of
this subjectivity, and the experience of society is brought into play only
to the extent to which it can provideoften splendidly graphicillustrations for the highly abstract world (not the empirical world but an ontological construct) in which human reality (subjectivity or individuality) is
situated.
All this happens as if the For-itself had a Passion to lose itself in order that
the affirmation world might come to be In-itself. . . . the world and the
instrumental-thing, space and quantity, and universal time are all pure
hypostatized nothingnesses . . . There is being because I am the negation of
being, and worldliness, spatiality, quantity, instrumentality, temporalityall
come into being only because I am the negation of being.(217)
All this may sound disturbingly subjective and remotely abstract.

Nevertheless, the underlying intent is amply clear: to provide a forcefully
coherent elucidation of everything in terms of the being of the human
reality and the passion which animates it and makes its project intelligible. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, in 1934 Sartre credited
Husserl with the great achievement of clearing the ground for a new treatise
of the passions. Now he makes it clear why in his view Husserl himself could
not embark on the realization of the project of writing the much needed new
treatise of the passions. Because Husserl has reduced being to a series of
meanings, the only connection which he has been able to establish between
my being and that of the Other is a connection of knowledge. Therefore
Husserl cannot escape solipsism any more than Kant could. (235) It goes
without saying, to envisage a new treatise of the passions in terms of even the
most sophisticated form of solipsism would be absurd.
F R EED OM AN D PAS S ION
145
Asserting the primacy of being must be the point of departure and

the necessary ground of analysis on which such a study is feasible. Sartre
therefore proposes an approach not just different from but diametrically
opposed to Husserls. Instead of reducing being to meanings (knowledge),
he explains knowledge and meanings in terms of being and its existential
project, insisting that being is the self-evident irreducible and therefore
any attempt at reducing it to something else, and thus trying to go beyond
it is self-contradictory: for obviously it is impossible to advance further
than being and we have reached the absolute limit when we have reached
the project of being. (565) All that remains then is an elucidation of the
project of beingthe same thing as to acquaint man with his passion
(626)which in no way implies going beyond being or reducing it to something else. On the contrary, the task of elucidation amounts to the project
of advancing towards being as it constitutes itself, and the understanding of
the ontological structure of being is not a theoretical enterprise but an inherently practical one (the task of Practical Reason in Kantian terminology),
involving the elaboration of thenever completedEthics and Existential
Psychoanalysis. Sartrean ontology thus culminates in the latter, providing a
foundation for them, but it is simultaneously also founded by its own Ethics
and Existential Psychoanalysis, in that it cannot conceivably envisage any
other foundation.
ONTOLOGY
(Existential
Anthorpology)
ETHICS
EXISTENTIAL
PSYCHOANALYSIS
146
This conceptual structure can be summarily illustrated by stressing

the close structural interrelationship and reciprocity between Sartrean
ONTOLOGY (equated by Sartre also with EXISTENTIAL ANTHROPOLOGY) and
ETHICS in its inseparability from EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOANALYSYS.
Such a conceptual structure may appear to be circular, and in a particular
sense certainly it is circular. However, the circularity involved is not some
conceptual confusion or defect whose removal might improve Sartres philosophy. Removing it could be conceived only at the price of liquidating the
essential characteristics of Sartrean existentialism which cannot be reduced
to a neat, formally consistent but platitudinous epistemology, nor indeed to
a Husserlian phenomenology envisaged as a rigorous science (eine strenge
Wissenschaft) as the idea of a madman genius, but a mad idea none the
less.285 For in Sartres philosophy we are directly concerned with man interrogating himself about his own project which he tries to hide from himself,
with all the ambiguities, subterfuges, strategies of bad faith and circularities
involved. This is why Sartrean phenomenological ontology must be conceived as an existential anthropology which is fused with practical moral
and psychoanalytical concerns in this new treatise of the passions, and
thus circularly it coils back into itself by founding itself precisely through
the selfsame existential dimensions which it claims to found. Consequently,
to try to eliminate existential anthropology from Sartres phenomenological
ontology, in order to render it formally consistent, would be tantamount to
the futility and absurdity of trying to square the circle.
In any event, Sartre is not in the least embarrassed by this circularity
but openly assumes it, as we shall see in numerous contexts, from Being
and Nothingness to the dialectical circularity discussed in the Critique of
Dialectical Reason. Assertions like: no dialectic for my relations with the
other but rather a circle (363) abound in Being and Nothingness, and they
constitute an essential part of its existential message. The circularity of
the overall conceptual framework and the paralyzing stalemate suggestively
conveyed through remarks like the one just quoted are inseparable from
one another. The fundamental propositions of Sartrean existentialism are
determined by this overall conceptual structure, and, conversely, the latter
must assume the form it actually does as a result of the innermost nature of
the fundamental existentialist propositions. Indeed Sartre would argue that
given the absolute character of the existential circle the necessary assumption of contingency and facticity, which means that we can never get
outside the circle (363) the existentialist circle is its only adequate philosophical equivalent or approximation.
147
We shall have to return to these problems on more than one occasion.

Now the point to stress is that Being and Nothingness is truly intelligible
only as a monumental sketch of the strikingly original outlines of the new
treatise of the passions, structured around the apparently circular proposition that freedom is passion and passion is freedom. Thus in this work we
get not simply a reconciliation of freedom and passion, after centuries of
philosophical debate which insisted on the primacy of one or the other, at
the expense of one or the other, but the passionate assertion of the essential
identity of the two. Thus freedom is no longer conceived as purely transcendental, leaving the world of appearance and necessity locked into itself
while claiming to supersede it transcendentally by postulating a separate
world of essences and freedom (the world of the Ding an sichthing initself of Kant and his followers)it is the most fundamental dimension
of human existence passionately striving to realize itself. And Sartre violates
traditional philosophy not only as regards the formal characteristics of his
work but even in the mode of development and style of presentation. Instead
of providing a detached, objective description, followed by rigorously
sustained proof (the ideal even of that madman genius, poor Husserl), he
passionately asserts and reasserts his basic proposition concerning freedom
and passion in so many different forms, and the existential proof emerges
through the plausibility of its authenticity: another concept which refers
back to freedom in an apparent circularity, by reasserting in its own way the
basic identity of freedom and passion.
If the fundamental project, the person, the free realization of human
truth is everywhere in all desires (567), and if it is our freedom itself which
constitutes the limits which it will subsequently encounter (482), as Sartre
asserts, then all varieties of psychological determinism are a priori ruled
out as being structurally incapable of even perceiving the problem, not to
mention providing a viable solution for its difficulties. Exact and objective psychology must be dismissed as a solipsism (229) which treats the
other as an object, denying its subject character in much the same way as
we find in Sartres famous description of one of the fundamental strategies
of bad faith. The same considerations apply to knowledge in general. The
point of view of pure knowledge is contradictory; there is only the point of
view of engaged knowledge. . . . an engaged upsurge in a determined point
of view which one is. (308) Thus, knowledge is a dimension of being, and
mistakes or misconceptions of knowledge must be made intelligible
on the ground of the fundamental ontological structures, instead of being
dissolved through conceptual manipulation: a solipsistic circularity
148
which assumes the separate existence and absolute legislative power of its
owndetached, objective, exact, rigorous, unambiguous, etc.
thought. As against all such approaches, Sartre insists on the necessary practical embeddedness of theoretical viewpoints. In his advocacy of an existential psychoanalysis he does not proceed from a theoretical refutation of
psychological determinism (traditional psychoanalysis being only one of the
manifold varieties of the latter) but from identifying the practical determinants which are uncritically projected in the theoretical image:
In each moment of reflection anguish is born as a structure of the reflective
consciousness in so far as the latter considers consciousness as an object
of reflection; but it still remains possible for me to maintain various types
of conduct with respect to my own anguishin particular patterns of
flight. Everything takes place as if our essential and immediate behavior
with respect to anguish is flight. Psychological determinism, before being
a theoretical conception, is first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the
basis of all attitudes of excuse. It is a reflective conduct with respect to
anguish; it asserts that there are within us antagonistic forces whose type
of existence is comparable to that of things, . . . endowing them with an
inertia and externality is eminently reassuring because they constitute a
permanent game of excuses. . . . But this determinism, a reflective defense
against anguish, is not given as a reflective intuition. It avails nothing against
the evidence of freedom; hence it is given as a faith to take refuge in, as the
ideal end towards which we can flee to escape anguish. . . . Thus we flee from
anguish by attempting to apprehend ourselves from without as an Other or
as a thing. (4043)
As we can see, the reified images of psychological determinism are

explained in terms of determinate practical attitudes emanating from the
ontological structure of being which constitutes Sartres basic concern
in this eidetics of bad faith. Such theoretical reifications of the human
reality are both necessary, in so far as they arise out of the anguishing ontological structure, and not out of theory as such, and freely assumed, in
that they can be practically opposed by alternative types of attitude and
conduct and by their appropriate conceptualizations. And the necessary
failure of these deterministic theories of psychological reifiction, which
represent a capitulation to flight and excuses, calls for a radically new treatise of the passions which insists simultaneously on the inescapability of
freedom (man is condemned to be free) and on the necessary situation
149
of this freedom in the contingency of human existence motivated by its

ontological passion. (Empirical passion is said to be the symbolic expression of the fundamental ontological passion.) For all human existence is
a passion, the famous self-interest being only one way freely chosen among
others to realize this passion. (626)
2.
I N A D IS C ORU S E IN WH ICH A MB IG UITY 286
is consciously assumed and

cultivated, rather than being considered a residue of conceptual imperfection
which must be removed by means of appropriate analytical procedures, the
use of metaphors is not meant simply to enliven the style of presentation. In
Being and Nothingness metaphors appear with great frequency, and they
are inextricably entangled with the philosophical message which cannot be
conveyed in any other form. Many years later in an interview Sartre criticizes
his own use of metaphors in Being and Nothingness, giving as an example
the much quoted phrase: Man is a useless passion, which received hostile
comments not really on account of its literary qualities, but because of its
atheistic message according to which the passion of man is the reverse of
that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born.
But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a
useless passion. (615) This is how Sartre argues his case in 1965:
If I forget myself for a moment and use a literary turn of phrase in a
philosophical work I always feel slightly that I am pulling a fast one on
my reader; it is a breach of trust. I once wrote the sentenceremembered
because of its literary aspectlhomme est une passion inutile (Man is a
useless passion). A case of breach of trust. I ought to have put that in strictly
philosophical terms. In my Critique of Dialectical Reason I do not think I
was guilty of breach of trust at all.287
To be sure, it is far from being the case that Sartre avoids in his later
works the literary practices which he now condemns as a breach of trust,
even if their extent is more limited in the Critique of Dialectical Reason than
in Being and Nothingness. However, this is not at issue at this point where
our concern is to show the role they play in articulating and authenticating
the suggestive philosophical message of Sartres eidetics of bad faith.
In any case, it is hard to accept not only that the example given by Sartre
is a breach of trust, but also that the phrase in question could be translated
150
into strictly philosophical terms. For if the literary mode of expression

is an essential condition of conveying the philosophical message (not to
mention also subjectively authenticating it, which is very much the case
with Being and Nothingness), then obviously it cannot be considered a
breach of trust. One may then still legitimately challenge the problematical
character of a particular philosophical discourse which needs the extensive use of metaphors for its articulation. In that case the whole discourse
would be called into question, and not just some isolated phrases which
could be translated into a less evocative form. But how could one put in
strictly philosophical terms the undoubtedly striking phrase: Man is a
useless passion? As we have seen already, so much hinges on references
to passion as a fundamental ontological characteristic in this new treatise of the passions that any attempt at removing passion from the definition of the human reality would empty it of its central core around which
everything else is structured.
Each human reality is at the same time a direct project to metamorphose its
own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself and a project of the appropriation
of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental
quality. Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so
as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which
escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which
religion calls God. (615)
Take away passion from this discourse and it loses both its suggestive
power and its existential meaning. On the other hand, if Sartres strictures
apply to the adjective useless only, and not to passionwhich is hard to
know, since he gives no indication of how to render the criticized phrase in
strictly philosophical termsthen the self-criticism amounts to very little
indeed, if anything at all, in that the message of a necessary failure (the literal
meaning of ontologically frustrated useless passion) is in fact very effectively conveyed by the adjective he uses, without involving any breach of
trust at all. Paradoxically, therefore, Sartres sweeping condemnation of the
particular example in rather harsh terms is the expression of his reluctance
to be critical of the philosophical discourse of Being and Nothingness as a
whole, since the continuities of this discourse with his later thought, despite
some significant differences, are far too weighty to enable him to embark on a
far-reaching critical examination of this work. Self-criticism again appears
as a retrospective should have been coupled with a positive self-assertion
151
claiming an exemplary solution of the problem in the Critique of Dialectical

Reason, while in fact not only is the greater part of the categorial framework
of Being and Nothingness retained (though, of course, complemented by a
range of new categories) but even some particular arguments and examples
from the early work reappear in new contexts in the later Critique, requiring
a reference to the original context (not provided by Sartre himself) in order
to acquire their full significance.288
The overpowering use of metaphors in Being and Nothingness is not
simply a literary way of rendering with greater evocative power an abstract
philosophical proposition. If it had been meant as such, it would have been
a failure; for the characteristic of abstractness remains despite the graphic
imagery, as we have mentioned before. Nor is it the consequence of an
unavoidable dialectical complexity in terms of which Sartre emphatically
defends the long involved sentences of his Critique of Dialectical Reason.
The numerous metaphors of Being and Nothingness are not isolated examples of literary presentation: they constitute a coherent whole, and as such
they are inextricably linked to the ambiguities of the conceptual framework
itself. To understand and appreciate the nature and importance of these
metaphors we must first focus attention on the underlying ambiguities in
light of which the particular images of Sartres eidetics of bad faith reveal
their necessity in the constitution of a coherent, powerful and highly specific
philosophical discourse. A few examples should suffice to illustrate the connections we are concerned with.
After asserting that my freedom eats away my freedom (480), Sartre
goes on to discuss the relationship between the particular and the global:
. . . it is necessary to consult each mans history in order to get from it a
particular idea with regard to each individual for-itself. Our particular
projects, aimed at the realization in the world of a particular end, are
united in the global project which we are. But precisely because we are
wholly choice and act, these partial projects are not determined by the
global project. They must themselves be choices; and a certain margin
of contingency, of unpredictability, and of the absurd is allowed to each
of them, although each project as it is projected is the specification of the
global project on the occasion of particular elements in the situation and so
is always understood in relation to the totality of my being-in-the-world. . .
. freedom is the freedom of choosing but not the freedom of not choosing.
Not to choose is, in fact, to choose not to choose. (48081)
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The elements of this reasoning are most intricate, and they are made
even more complicated by the fact that they are not always rendered conceptually explicit. Instead, metaphors are brought forward at some key points,
and they are fully integrated into the development of the argument so that
they can carry part of and thus support the whole of the existential message.
It is the need to keep together a number of antinomous factorsresisting
the temptation of an easy solution by paying just lip service to one side
of the antinomy while dogmatically asserting the validity of the other; say
freedom, at the expense of contingencywhich makes the task of putting
everything in strictly philosophical terms not merely difficult but well-nigh
impossible. If I am wholly choice (wholly freedom), then the particular
elements of a situation cannot possibly amount to a determinationwhich
would sharply contradict my absolute freedom and the corresponding
absolute responsibilitybut only to an occasion on which my freedom
must freely determine itself. (Must, in that even if it does not, it actually
does, in the mode of choosing not to choose.) Consequently, that strange
hybrid of a conceptual metaphor (or metaphorical concept): the Sartrean
occasion289 is born which keeps perilously balanced on a razors edge the
antinomous requirements of freedom and contingency-facticity, without
suppressing either side in favor of the other. Furthermore, since the
free project is fundamental, for it is my being (479), it must have some
significant characteristics which, however, cannot possibly amount to a
definite character, nature, or determining determination, since that would,
again, undermine my freedom. Similarly, every one of my choices must be
freely chosen from an infinite range of possible choices, and at the same time
they must be totally unjustifiable in that justifiability would impose itself
as a kind of moral determination which preempts and destroys my freedom
and thus reveals itself as existentially repugnant, no matter how moral.
If, therefore, the concept of my original, initial, fundamental and
global290 project is to be meaningful at all, the global project must have some
significant effect on my particular choices without, however, determining
them in the slightest. Thus another strange concept is brought into play:
the specification of the global project in the form of the particular projects
on the occasion of the particular elements of my situation, which in no
circumstances should be interpreted as a determination of my choices either
by my global project (my being) or by the (social, political, psychological, and
other) forces at work in my situation. Situation, too, should not be thought
of as a set of objective conditions which determine my project, but rather
as the concrete embodiment of my project, and thus as something created
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by me on the occasion and through the unification of certain elements

which I happen to encounter in my contingency and facticity. As in Kants
philosophy, the determinations of the empirical world cannot condition or
contradict my freedom which retains, despite all evidence to the contrary, its
absolute power. (Man cannot be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is
wholly and forever free or he is not free at all (441)as Sartre puts it.) But
in contrast to Kants philosophy, freedom can be contradicted by itself, and
not even just a little, but wholly and absolutely, and still without invalidating
in the least the categorical absoluteness of freedom. If this sounds absurd, it
does not really matter in a strictly philosophical sense. Sartre takes up the
gauntlet and defiantly calls it absurd, with the proviso that this is not because
a philosophical thought fails to master its formal rules, but as a matter of the
ontological conditions of the human reality:
Since freedom is a being-without-support and without-a-springboard, the
project to be must be constantly renewed. I choose myself perpetually and
can never be merely by virtue of having-been-chosen; otherwise I should
fall into the pure and simple existence of the in-itself. The necessity of
perpetually choosing myself is one with the pursued-pursuits which I am.
But precisely because here we are dealing with a choice, this choice as it
is made indicates in general other choices as possibles. The possibility of
these other choices is neither made explicit nor posited, but it is lived in the
feeling of unjustifiability; and it is this which is expressed by the fact of the
absurdity of my choice and consequently of my being. Thus my freedom eats
away my freedom. (480)
As we can see, freedom is not limited by something external to it, and

yet it is totally nihilated. The absolute validity of freedom is categorically
asserted, and yet, the conditions of its realization (negation) in conformity
with my contingency and facticity are fully respected, without prejudging
in the least whether the particular manifestations of my freedom as unified
under my unique global project will be marked by authenticity or by bad
faith. The Kantian problematic which insists on the absoluteness of freedom
is fully retained, and yet it is totally transformed in that it is no longer confined to a transcendental world. The antinomous elements of the Sartrean
conception are held together, even if in a most uneasy way, and the existential concept of freedom ceases to be a sublime transcendental principle. It
assumes a tangible shape, indeed a body, and appears voraciously engaged
in a very un-Socratic function which should scandalize any self-respecting
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utilitarian liberal. We catch a glimpse of it: eating. And, horror of horrors,

my freedom eats away my freedom, for which I can only blame myself. The
metaphor just like the others mentioned before is neither a literary device
for rendering things more vivid, nor is it translatable. It is an essential part
of the specific philosophical structure which displays a number of very different levels, including the unsaid and the figuratively implied as well
as the metaphorically condensed, in addition to the strict philosophical
terms of an explicit conceptual progression. To be sure, one may very well
question the fundamental ambiguity of Sartres conception of freedom in
Being and Nothingness, with its antinomous structure of categorical assertion and simultaneous negation. What must, however, be beyond dispute is
that given theno matter how problematicalelements of this conception,
my freedom eats away my freedom represents an essential constituent as
well as a most fitting summing up of it.
The same ambiguity is in evidence in Sartres depiction of the relationship between the For-itself and the In-itself as a double play of unilateral
oppositions devoid of reciprocity, insisting on the affinity of the For-itself
with the ambiguous realities of Kierkegaard (94), so as to be able to assert
that Value is everywhere and nowhere; at the heart of the nihilating reflection-reflecting, it is present and out of reach, and it is simply lived as the
concrete meaning of that lack which makes my present being. (95) Given
the antinomous conception of the relationship between the For-itself and
the In-itself as unilateral (rigid, non-dialectical) oppositions, one needs the
metaphor of double play to bring them together at all. And since we are
confronted with a relationship totally devoid of reciprocity, the envisaged
synthesis of In-itself-For-itself or value can only be conceived as an unrealizable totality (94). Thus the fundamental ambiguity is unavoidable in
view of the antinomous structure. The impossible synthesis of unilateral
oppositions can only exist as an unrealizable totality, and as such it must
reside everywhere and nowhere: it must be simultaneously at hand,
immediately present, and totally out of reach. The sense we encounter here
is a strictly subjective sense. It amounts to saying that even though Value (the
In-itself-For-itself ) is an unrealizable totality, the fundamental project of
the human reality (my own being, with all its absurdity) is intelligible as
a passionate striving for the realization of the unrealizable, impossible synthesis. The sets of metaphorical concepts employed by Sartre do not change
the antinomous relations; nor are they meant to. They cannot create the
movement of reciprocity leading to synthesis on a ground for which a priori
antagonism is predicated forever. All they can do and are meant to do is
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to provide a subjective authentication for the striving of my human reality

toward the impossible synthesis of an unrealizable totality. In the absence of
such an authentication the discourse about authenticity would become
totally vacuous and Sartres eidetics of bad faith would undermine and
destroy itself. Thus the metaphors are both necessary and untranslatable.
For given the elements of this conception, only a subjective authentication
is feasible,291 which, however, cannot be produced in strictly philosophical
terms. At the same time the double play of unilateral oppositionsarguably a contradiction in terms in strict philosophical termseffectively and
legitimately provides just the kind of movement which keeps the antinomies
together and holds them apart while subjectively authenticating the possibilities of individual choice against all odds: very much in the spirit of
Sartres existential discourse as articulated in Being and Nothingness.
Similarly, the relationship between the For-itself and being is described
as an extreme paradox: the For-itself is immediate presence to being, and yet
at the same time it slips in as an infinite distance between itself and being
(218). The coincidence of immediate presence and infinite distance cannot
be conceptualized in strictly philosophical terms. It must be established
through the vivid imagery of the For-itself turned into infinite distance
slipping in between itself and being. This particular conceptual edifice is
extremely fragile: it would collapse even under the most delicate touch of a
strict philosophical examination. The perilously unstable conceptual elements (the For-itself which is one with immediate presence but at the same
time it slips in between itself and being as an infinite distance) are supported
by the imagery which does not reconcile the antinomous constituents conceptually (that would be impossible) but glues them together figuratively. In
other words, the discourse functions by inventing a graphic imagery whose
purpose is the subjectively authenticated unification of the elements of
another impossible unification: that is, the figurative-evocative synthesis
of the antinomous terms which at the discursive level are deliberately kept
apart. The paradoxical unification-separation and the fundamental ambiguity corresponding to it again assert themselves as inherently necessary to
the existentialist message.
Having designated value as an unrealizable totality in virtue of its being
the impossible unification of the In-itself-For-itselfan unrealizable totality
which we nevertheless must strive for, as we have seenthe being of value
which we must encounter (and indeed we must encounter it, otherwise it
would be totally devoid of existential plausibility and subjective authentication) can only be a phantom-being which surrounds and penetrates the
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For-itself through and through (203). (Note even the way in which the
expression through and through is superadded in order to intensify the
evocative power of the surrounding and penetrating phantom-being.) In an
axiological framework like this the realization of the aims we set ourselves is,
yet again, depicted as an impossible unification by definition, and it is compared to the predicament of an ass trying to reach a carrot tied, hopelessly
beyond its reach, to the shaft of the cart he is pulling:
Thus we run after a possible which our very running causes to appear,
which is nothing but our running itself, and which thereby is by definition
out of reach. We run toward ourselves and we aredue to this very fact
the being which cannot be reunited with itself. In one sense the running is
void of meaning since the goal is never given but invented and projected
proportionately as we run toward it. In another sense we cannot refuse to
it that meaning which it rejects since in spite of everything possibility is
the meaning of the For-itself. Thus there is and there is not a meaning in
the flight. (2023)
The imagery is very suggestive and its function is the same as before:
the simultaneous assertion of immediate vicinity and unreachable distance
sustains the impossible unification of the human reality with its being. In the
spirit of existentialism, just as my being must be constantly recreated through
the perpetual renewal of the project which it is, the goal of my pursuitsince
I am pursued-pursuitscan never be given in that its givenness would act
as a determinism and undermine my freedom. From this negative determination of the existentialist position vis--vis determinism arises the strange
imagery of running toward ourselves, pursuing the goal of the impossible unification of ourselves with our being, which is by definition out of
reach. What else could such a pursuit be if not meaningless meaning and
meaningful meaninglessness? And since the goal must forever remain out
of reach, authenticity must reside in the running itself which proportionately invents and projects its goal without ever making it. (This is why
all human activities are equivalent . . . and all are doomed to failure. Thus
it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of
nations. (627) What counts is the running itselftowards ourselveswhich
we invent proportionately as we run toward it, namely toward ourselves.)
Again, the discourse would be thoroughly incoherent in strictly philosophical terms. For how does one run toward oneself, strictly speaking?
(The image of the ass and the carrot is a very bad example. It does not
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convey at all Sartres meaning as it emerges from the lines that immediately
follow it. For in the asss case the goal is in fact given in the carrot, and the
ass would not be an ass enough to go on forever as a pursued-pursuitpursuing an unreachable carrot.) In the spirit of Sartres existentialism, the
antinomous elements must be firmly kept apart at the discursive level. And
yet, this must be accomplished without allowing them to be represented as
antagonistic forces within us whose type of existence is comparable to that
of things. (40) The possibility of an existential mastery over them must be
demonstrated, if the existentialist conception of freedom is to mean anything
at all. But given the role of contingency and facticity in the same conception,
the power of freedom in reaching its unreachable goal of the impossible unification can only be demonstrated in the form of a subjective authentication,
which is suggestively accomplished by complementing the discursive level
with a metaphorical level in such a way that the two levels are not developed
side by sidethat would amount to no more than the introduction of conceptually superfluous literary embellishmentsbut become fully integrated.
The remarkable mass-appeal of Sartres existentialism (to the point of
becoming a cult which dominated the cafs of the Quartier Latin in Paris
in the immediate postwar years), despite the forbidding abstractness and
intense ambiguity of its conceptual framework as a whole, is inseparable
from this characteristic of total integration (fusion) of the metaphorical and
discursive levels in Being and Nothingness.
The last example which we can afford to quote in this limited space concerns the concepts of causality, motion and time. In a conceptual framework in which freedom and choice, project and goal, situation and being are
defined in the form we have seen, the concepts of causality, motion and
time must equally be defined in such a way that the existentialist discourse
is not disrupted but, on the contrary, intensified. The language of determinism
is emphatically rejected, and we get a definition of causality as
the apprehension of the appeared, as being already there in its own
nothingness so as to prepare its apparition. (208)
Similarly,
Motion has no more of being; it is the least-being of a being which can
neither arrive nor be abolished nor wholly be. Motion is the upsurge of
the exteriority of indifference at the very heart of the In-itself. This pure
vacillation of being is a contingent venture of being. (213)
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And from this point it is only one step to say that

universal time is revealed as present vacillation; already in the past it is no
longer anything but an evanescent line, like the wake of a ship which fades
away; in the future it is not at all, for it is unable to be its own project. It is
like the steady progression of a lizard on the wall. Moreover its being has the
inapprehensible ambiguity of the instant, for one could not say either that it
is or that it is not. (213)
The fundamental ambiguity of is and is not, of everywhere and

nowhere, of immediate presence and infinite distance, of meaning and
meaninglessness, and so on, is central to the existential message. This
ambiguity, in all its particular manifestations, is the existential ambiguity
of freedom and contingency: of the absoluteness of freedom and the iron
necessity of its embodiment in the concrete situation of the human reality.
Keeping the anguishing authenticity of the existentialist discourse diametrically opposed to determinism and its bad faith while acknowledging the
full weight of contingency and facticity, means an immensely difficult balancing act on a high wire, with the constant danger of precipitating, split
into two, on the side of mechanical determinism with one half, and of pure
indeterminacy with the other. To rescue causality, temporality, and
motion from the reified objectivity of mechanical determinism without
allowing them to disintegrate in the vacuous discourse of indeterminacy
Sartre needs not only the strange imagery of a something-nothing which
preparesnot determinesits apparition, but also a whole range of
metaphors and imagesfrom pure vacillation and present vacillation
to the evanescent line of a ship which fades away and to the steady progression of a lizard on the wallso that the arduous balancing act can be
maintained. The pressures of sustaining the existentialist discourse through
this balancing act, which uses the metaphorical level to join together in a
most unstable union elements of strict determination and absolute indeterminacy, produce a manipulation of concepts which may appear sheer sophistry if read in a purely discursive sense, separated from the total context.
We have seen the telling description of the various manifestations of the
global project as its specification, so as to guard against the possibility of a
deterministic reading. Similarly, in our quotation of a moment ago, nothingness is already there before it appears in order to prepare292 its apparition,
leaving the meaning of the term prepare vaguely undefined in function of
the balancing requirements. But perhaps the most striking example is to be
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found in the context of a definition of the relationship between past and

facticity. These two terms, insists Sartre, indicate one and the same thing:
The Past, in fact, like Facticity, is the invulnerable contingency of the Initself which I have to be without any possibility of not being it. It is the
inevitability of the necessity of fact, not by virtue of necessity but by virtue
of fact. It is the being of fact, which cannot determine the content of my
motivations but which paralyses them with its contingency because they can
neither suppress it nor change it. (118)
It is a sour consolation that the inevitability which permeates our being

in the mode of necessity of fact does so not by virtue of necessity but by
virtue of fact, and this kind of differentiation, considered in strictly philosophical terms, appears to be nothing but hair-splitting sophistry. The
same goes for the assertion that this curious necessity of fact which imposes
itself as inevitability does not ipso facto also determine our motivations but
only paralyses them. And yet things appear in different light if we insert
these propositions into Sartres discourse as a whole, instead of examining
them in isolation. For Sartre draws a firm line of demarcation between
motivation and determination, which in turn carries with it the necessity
of a radical redefinition of all the interrelated concepts in the same spirit,
including causality, temporality, motion, and indeed necessity and
inevitability inasmuch as they are admissible into the framework of the
existentialist discourse. But since the innermost structure of this discourse
is starkly antinomous, there remains in it an immense tension through
and through which tends to split it apart, despite all efforts of conceptual
manipulation and metaphorical unification. It is this tension which bursts
out into the open as an apparent sophistry in those contexts in which the
naked discursiveness still predominates: before, that is, Sartre succeeds in
complementing the discursive level of his discourse with the metaphorical
level, thus producing the only feasible existentialist unification of the antinomous elements in the form of a subjective authentication.
This is what we can witness in the example just quoted. The existentialist antinomy sternly asserts itself immediately after the somewhat baffling talk about the necessity of fact and the non-determining paralysis
of motivations, making them intelligible in strictly discursive terms when
Sartre admits that Between past and present there is an absolute heterogeneity. (119) But things cannot be left at that, nor are they intended to be,
as evidenced by the strange conceptual manipulation of inevitability and
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free motivation which anticipatesor, rather, postulatessome sort of a

synthesis, even if it cannot accomplish its aim. And, of course, a conceptual unification of absolute heterogeneity in strictly philosophical terms
would be a monstrous contradiction in terms. Yet it must be accomplished
somehow for the sake of the existentialist message. Thus we find on the
other side of the brutally open conceptual dividethe explicit admission of
an absolute heterogeneitya most remarkable homogenization of this heterogeneity, accomplished through the use of a graphic imagery. We witness
a presentification of the past (that is, its transformation into some sort of
a lived present)which could not conceivably work on a strictly discursive
leveland the assertion of its evanescent value, with an appeal to memory
as a framework of subjective authentication. We are presented with a beautiful description which successfully buries the existentialist antinomy deep
below the surface (where it remains until it is bound to erupt again in some
other context) and we are left with the impression of a unification:
. . . memory presents to us the being which we were, accompanied by a
plenitude of being which confers on it a sort of poetry. That grief which we
hadalthough fixed in the pastdoes not cease to present the meaning of a
For-itself, and yet it exists in itself with the silent fixity of the grief of another,
the grief of a statue. (119)
There is no attempt to pretend that the antinomy of absolute heterogeneity no longer exists. All that happens is that it is made existentially bearable through the poetic power of memory which turns the past into some
sort of a present and confers upon it a plenitude of being while also retaining
its past character in the silent fixity of a statue. The act of balancing is successfully accomplished without distorting or falsifying its own terms of reference, thanks to the fact that the impossible unification of absolute heterogeneity is confined to the subjective plane. There it produces an existentialist authentication of its categorical rejection of the past as a determinism
with an appeal to the experience of lived memory: a procedure which, again,
leaves the question entirely open whether we constitute the plenitude of
being of our past authentically or in bad faith. Sartres existentialism
needs no more than an indication (proof would be far too strong a term)
of the possibility of authenticity vis--vis the absolute contingency of the
past, and this is preciselyno less, no morewhat it succeeds in producing
through the full integration of the discursive and metaphorical levels. For
given the inherently antinomous structure of Sartres discourse, (a) the only
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way it can produce the indication of a possible authenticity is the massive

use of metaphorical imagery; and (b) even through the most extensive use
of such imagery it can only produce the indication of a mere possibility, followed by frequent assertions of doom and necessary failure, as we have seen
above. Thus the occasional footnotes about the possibility of an ethics of
deliverance which should follow a somewhat mysterious radical conversion (412) must be taken with a mountain-size pinch of salt. To squeeze a
coherent ethics of deliverance and salvation out of the category of mere
possibility forebodingly resembles the Sartrean imperative of an impossible
unification. If later the author of the Critique of Dialectical Reason is less
dependent on metaphorical imagery than in Being and Nothingness, this is
partly because he is less orientated toward abstract possibility than before
(in that he gives a more positive hearing to the categories of need, necessity
and determination) and partly because he tries to introduce the category
of mediation into the discourse of antinomous oppositions. However, the
examination of the precise character of such changes and of the extent to
which they may be considered successful must be left to Part Three.293
In Being and Nothingness the antinomous conceptual structure remains
in evidence from beginning to end, determining the constant recurrence of
ambiguities and metaphors. These three characteristicsantinomies, ambiguities and metaphorsare thus inextricably linked together as structural
characteristics of Sartres existentialist discourse on freedom and contingency. Since the unstable balance that characterizes the existentialist message
must be invented and constantly recreated in the form of a coherent set of
concepts, and since the metaphorical level plays an essential part in the production of the unique coherence which emerges through the radical transformation of the deterministic language of everydayness in each and every
particular context, we encounter the ubiquitousness of the metaphorical
imagery as an ongoing process. The suggestiveness of this imagery cannot
be properly appreciated simply in terms of the graphic qualities of the particular imageslike the play-acting waiter in the caf, quoted everywhere
taken in isolation,294 but goes much deeper. Its intensity is cumulative and
arises partly from the ongoing articulation of a coherent system of interlinked
images, constituted not entirely unlike a set of musical variations on some
fundamental existentialist themes whereby the particular item is always
incomparably richer in conjunction with the set as a whole than by itself.
But the intensity goes even beyond the remarkable structural coherence of
the metaphorical level as a whole. It is also due to the vitally important function which the metaphorical imagery fulfills, through the intermediary of its
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particular images and concept-metaphors, in the constitution of Sartres

existentialist discourse. In other words, the almost hypnotic intensity of
this imagery is just as much conceptual as it is representational. Thus, when
Sartre asserts that he should have written Being and Nothingness in a way
which would have avoided what he now calls a breach of trust, he does not
realize295 that he could not have done so. And all the better for that. For had
he succeeded in conforming to his retrospective ideal, we would have been
deprived of one of the most original and representative philosophical works
of the twentieth century.
3.
T H E WAY IN W HIC H T HE VA RIO US existentialist themes are developed in
Being and Nothingness might be termed kaleidoscopic, in the sense that a
conceptual framework made of remarkably few elements is articulated in detail
through a virtually endless number of particular examples and descriptive
specifications. The conceptual framework itself might seem very simple at first
sight, in view of the extremely limited number of basic categories. However, a
closer look reveals some forbidding complications at all levels.
For a start, the constantly recurring categories are arranged as antinomous pairs (Being/Nothingness, In-itself/For-itself, Self/Other,
Freedom/Contingency, Possibility/Necessity, Authenticity/Bad Faith,
and the like), and their interrelationship is conceived in the form of the unilateral oppositions of absolute heterogeneity, as we have seen. A further
complication is that the contrast of such unilateral oppositions does not
constitute a movement: rather, it represents the picture of a paralyzing stalemate and therefore any movement we encounter must be introduced from
outside, as it were. But, of course, there can be nothing outside the fundamental structural outlines of a synthesizing philosophical conception. If
a particular philosophical totalization conceives the world as a paralyzing
stalemate, the movement that can be accommodated within the framework
of such a totalization must be a rather problematical one. And, indeed, the
kaleidoscopic development of themes, as we shall see in a moment, has
the function of creating this peculiar movement in Being and Nothingness.
We are presented with an endless succession of ingenious transformations
and permutations, both conceptual and metaphorical, whereby illustrative
instances taken from everyday life unfold Sartres conception of the basic
ontological structures.
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The pattern of this development is most revealing. For the various

instances of everyday life, and the corresponding common-sense use of language, are described, moulded, and manipulated by Sartresometimes to the
point that he himself has to admit that they are forced296until the full correspondence of the empirical instances to the fundamental ontological structures can be asserted. Thus the movement of kaleidoscopic particularization
and exemplification cannot introduce any dynamism into the underlying static
structures but invariably culminates in the stark reassertion of an all-pervasive paralysis. The conceptual framework of unilateral oppositions sharply
delineates the character of the superadded movement which must disappear
abruptly the very moment it helps to bring into relief the essential identity of
the particular existents with the underlying ontological structures. The movement of particularization is strictly in the service of, and indeed subordinated
to, asserting and reiterating the primary message of the overall conception. It is
therefore a total misconception of the nature of Being and Nothingness to speak
in terms of high praise about Sartres descriptive talent while making dismissive remarks about his theoretical conception and philosophical rigour. These
two dimensions not only stand or fall together but the overall philosophical
conception unquestionably constitutes the bergreifendes Moment297 in
relation to descriptive detail and graphic particularization. Undoubtedly,
Sartres description of Pierres absence from the caf is a most impressive piece
of writing; but only in terms of the total set of relations as specified by Sartre.
Indeed, it is completely pointless, and perhaps even meaningless, without the
overall ontological conception in which nothingness and lack assume
a determinate, multi-faceted, and most unusual meaning in terms of which
Pierres tangible absence can and must be read.
Sartres great preference for writing philosophy, which is by no means
surprising in view of the incomparable ease with which he produces monumental works of philosophy, is understandable precisely in relation to a
talent which embarks on the laborious process of drafting the work from the
premises of a most firmly laid down (some might say: rigidly preconceived)
overall conception as the dominant feature of the whole enterprise. The synthesis is there right from the beginning in the original intuition of the overall
conceptual framework, and the process of writing consists in the detailed
articulation of the basic intuition under extremely close control at every
stage. The great ease of writing arises from the fact that the overall direction of development is unhesitatingly anticipated from the first moment, and
thus the new treatise of the passions writes itself, so to speak, much as it is
described by Sartre in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions:
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The words that I am writing . . . are exigent. It is the precise manner in

which I grasp them in the course of my creative activity that makes them
what they are: they are potentialities that have to be realized. . . . I simply feel
the traction they exert; I feel their exigence objectively. I see them realizing
themselves and, at the same time, demanding further realization. . . . the
exigence of the words that I am tracing is directly present, weighty and felt.
They impel and direct my hand. But not as though little demons, alive and
active, were driving and guiding it in fact: this is a passive exigence.298
The curious concept of a passive exigence becomes meaningful in fact

with reference to the overall design. Sartre knows the words in advance as
they are about to realize themselves because the overall design firmly guides
his hand with its passive exigence. For even if the minute details and particular images obviously cannot be known in advance, the precise direction of
the development and the specific character or type of the admissible imagery
is peremptorily anticipated in the original intuition of the basic outlines and
of the categorial framework of an enterprise which consciously undertakes
the elaboration of a new treatise of the passions on a premise asserting the
fundamental identity of freedom and passion. This is very different indeed
from the situation when Sartre rightly castigates his own failed play,
Morts sans spulture (Unburied Dead), as a play without surprise,299 in
that the destiny of the characters is absolutely defined in advance. Such a
procedure may be totally inadmissible in the medium of the drama, but the
absence of surprises does not constitute a drawback in the development of
a philosophical conception in which the relationship between the parts and
the whole is justifiably ruled by necessity, even in Sartres existentialism.300
And inasmuch as the whole enterprise is conducted in the spirit that even
the apparently most insignificant gestures are meaningful manifestations of
the human reality in its entiretyhence the definition of the task of philosophy as the hermeneutic of existence301 already in the Sketch for a Theory
of the Emotionsthe interpretative approach in relation to the analysis or
description of any particular situation is automatically given and unceremoniously imposed on whatever detail or illustrative example Sartre happens
to mention, from food to mountain-climbing or ice-skating, leaving no room
whatsoever for surprises as to the ontological meaning which the particular instances will be allowed to disclose.302
There is something quasi-mechanical in this pattern of closely controlled interpretative development which never tires of reiterating the underlying elementary ontological structures on the occasion of each and every
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particular instance. The extreme unevenness of Being and Nothingness a

characterization applicable, mutatis mutandis, also to Sartres other philosophical ventures of equally or even more massive proportions, from Saint
Genet to the Critique of Dialectical Reason and to the unfinished trilogy on
Flaubert is a necessary consequence of this kaleidoscopic pattern of
development. For the immensely ingenious overall structurethe invention
of the kaleidoscope itself which in turn produces an inexhaustible variety of
complex images through the interplay of a few simple elementsmay just
as easily yield some splendidly impressive and suggestive pictures as some
tediously repetitive permutations. The following example gives a good idea
of what is involved in the latter:
The Present could not pass except by becoming the before for a For-itself
which constitutes itself as the after of that Present. There is the only one
phenomenon: the upsurge of a new Present which is making-past the Present
which it was, and the Making-Past of a Present involving the appearance of a
For-itself for which this Present is going to become Past. The phenomenon
of temporal becoming is a global modification since a Past which would be
the Past of nothing would no longer be a Past and since a present must be
necessarily the Present of this Past. This metamorphosis, moreover, affects
not only the pure Present; the former Past and Future are equally affected.
The Past of the Present which has undergone the modification of Pastness,
becomes the Past of a Pastor a Pluperfect. So far as the Pluperfect is
concerned, the heterogeneity of the Present and the Past is now suddenly
suppressed since what made the Present distinct as such from the Past has
now become Past. In the course of the metamorphosis the Present remains
the Present of this Past, but it becomes the past Present of this Past. That
means first that this present is homogeneous with the series of the Past
which extends from it all the way back to its birth, second that this present
is no longer its Past in the form of having to be it but in the mode of having
had to be it. The connection between Past and Pluperfect is a connection
which is in the mode of the In-itself, and it appears on the foundation of the
present For-itself. It is this which holds the series of the past and pluperfect
welded into a single block. . . . Future and past Present are solidified in the
In-itself on the foundation of my Present. Thus the Future in the course of
the temporal process, passes to the In-itself without ever losing its character
as Future. In so far as it is not achieved by the Present, it becomes simply a
given Future. When it is achieved, it is affected with the quality of ideality;
but this ideality is ideality in-itself, for it presents itself as a given lack of
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a given past and not as the lacking which a present For-itself has to be in
the mode of not being. When the future is surpassed, it remains forever on
the margin of the series of Pasts as a former futurea former Future of a
particular Past becomes Pluperfect, an ideal given Future as co-present to a
Present become past. (1445)
And so it goes on, and on, with bewildering tortuosity and repetitiveness. If there can be in philosophy a real breach of trust in Sartres sense
of pulling a fast one on the reader, certainly this is it. We might even think
that he is here only pulling the readers leg, if we did not actually know that
Sartre is always very serious about everything he writes.
The trouble with passages like this is that they bring into play the mechanism of verbal transformations and content themselves with going round
and round in circles. If we ask ourselves at the end of the verbal transformations how far we advanced with the problem, the sobering answer is: not at
all. This is so strongly the case here that a mere four lines after our heavy
quotation Sartre is led to declare that it would almost be correct to reverse
our terms in order to find the truth. And why not? We would still be going
round in circles, even if in the other direction. This is in fact what we are
compelled to do by Sartre for two more pages, at which point he admits that
We find ourselves once more, it seems, at our point of departure. (147)
And since in this particular context Sartre has now exhausted the possibilities of abstract conceptual permutations, backwards and forwards, we
are presented with another twist as the solution in the sentence that immediately follows: But the truth is that there is no problem. Perhaps so. But if
so, what was all the fuss about? And here is the answer: If we believe that
we have met one [problem], this is because in spite of our efforts to think of
the For-itself as really For-itself, we have not been able to prevent ourselves
from fixing it in the In-itself. (147) It is good to know that while we were
being taken for a ride Sartre was our sincere companion and shared our
predicament. This knowledge, however, does not change the disconcerting
fact itself, namely that after our long and tortuous journey of verbal selfindulgence we managed to get exactly nowhere.
And yet in a sense it is fortunate that Sartre did not edit out these
passages of inconclusive verbosity. For they help to identify the tension
involved and the reasons why even Sartres incomparable dexterity of
conceptual manipulation and linguistic transformation cannot succeed in
advancing the problem. If we re-read carefully our quotationand we must
do so several times in order to be able to acquire some perspective over
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its captivating mazewe find that it takes us nowhere because it merely

reasserts in their naked abstractness the basic conceptual imperatives of
Sartres categorial framework as a whole in the context of temporality,
without any attempt at a necessary mediation. We know right from the
beginning that the fundamental relationship between the For-itself and the
In-itself is conceived in such terms that it has inescapable implications for
the various dimensions of temporality, just as much as for everything else.
(For instance, the absolute heterogeneity between past and present is the
necessary concomitant of this fundamental relationship.) However, such
implications must be substantiated through particularization and specification, in accordance with the precise character of the existential context
in question, otherwise the philosophical enterprise which aims at demonstrating the essential identity of the empirical manifestations of existence
with the underlying ontological structures fails to reach its object, and thus
fails to indicate the possibility of an authentic existentialist choice in the
spirit of the programmatic hermeneutic of existence.
In our quotation, regrettably, we witness the unfolding of such a failure.
The original implications are spelled out as abstract imperatives and are
reiterated again and again as such. We catch a glimpse of the necessary heterogeneity of past and present, followed by a sudden hint of homogeneity.
The latter though, in sharp contrast to our earlier quote which tackled the
same problem, is not demonstrated through particularization and subjective
authentication. It is merely asserted as an abstract structural requirement
(the heterogeneity of the Present and the Past is now suddenly suppressed)
and since there is nothing to sustain it, it must be immediately taken back
(the connection between Past and Pluperfect is a connection which is in the
mode of the In-itself ). Furthermore, since we witness the manifestation of
contradictory imperativesthe preservation of heterogeneity just as much
as its suppressionthe two are abstractly brought together in yet another
unsustained declaration according to which the connection between Past
and Pluperfect which is in the mode of the In-itself appears on the foundation of the present For-itself. And the failure is significantly in evidence
also at the metaphorical level. For the metaphor of welded into a single
block is not integrated into the discourse butagain, in sharp contrast to
our earlier quotesit is merely appended to the tail-end of it as a decorative
image which wildly overstates what it asserts, thus revealing just as much the
authors strongly felt need for the reconciliation of the antinomous tensions
as his inability to bring them together in other than abstractly imperatival
form. The same considerations apply to the rest of our long quotation, and
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therefore they need not detain us any longer. What it all adds up to in the end
is that in the example we have just seen we are presented not with an existential demonstration of a significant correspondence between the temporal
dimension of existence and some fundamental ontological structures but
with the singularly uninstructive restatement of what we knew from the very
beginning, namely that the For-itself is radically different from the In-itself,
and therefore one should not try to fix the For-itself in the In-itself.
The contrast could not be greater with our next example, which displays at its best Sartres legendary power to bring to life as a tangible existential reality even the most abstract philosophical connections. Here Sartres
analysis sets out from defining play as an activity of which man is the first
origin, for which man sets the rules, and which has no consequences except
according to the rules posited. (580) Play is considered a manifestation of
freedom through which man escapes his natural nature (581) in virtue of
the fact that he is in complete control over the act, its value and the rules.
The empirical instances of play are described by Sartre in terms of their
deepest existential meaning:
. . . the desire to do is here reduced to a certain desire to be. The act is not
its own goal for itself; neither does its explicit end represent its goal and its
profound meaning; but the function of the act is to make manifest and to
present to itself the absolute freedom which is the very being of the person.
This particular type of project, which has freedom for its foundation and its
goal, deserves a special study. It is radically different from all others in that it
aims at a radically different type of being. It would be necessary to explain in
full detail its relations with the project of being God, which has appeared to
us as the deep-seated structure of human reality. But such a study cannot be
made here; it belongs rather to an Ethics. . . . Nevertheless the fact remains
that the desire to play is fundamentally the desire to be. (581)
Thus the ontological concern with the experience of play is pushed

in one direction to the point where the ultimate structure of the human
realitythe project of being Godbrings into the picture Ethics as the necessary complementary to the ontological analysis. And as Sartres graphic
particularization and specification of the ontological structures progresses
in the other direction, again it reaches a point where it necessarily calls for
being complemented by the third constituent of his discourse, Existential
Psychoanalysis (586), as we shall see in a moment. The intensity and richness of these pages would not arise simply from the particular imagery.
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Rather, they are inseparable from the fact that the empirical instances are
referred to the totality of their dimensions in that all three regions of the
existentialist discourseOntology, Ethics and Existential Psychoanalysis as
reciprocally founding one anotherare brought into play around the focus
of tangible experiences, which in turn clearly display the structural coherence of a complex philosophical conception as a whole. Sartre takes as his
principal example the experience of skiing:
That pure In-itself [the field of snow], comparable to the absolute,
intelligible plenum of Cartesian extension, fascinates me as the pure
appearance of the not-me; what I wish precisely is that this In-itself might
be a sort of emanation of myself while still remaining in itself. This is the
meaning even of the snowmen and snowballs which children make; . . . To
ski means not only to enable me to make rapid movements and to acquire a
technical skill, nor is it merely to play by increasing according to my whim
the speed or the difficulties of the course; it is also to enable me to possess
this field of snow. . . . The upsurge of the snow is the matter of my act in
the same way that the upswing of the hammer is the pure fulfillment of the
hammering. At the same time I have chosen a certain point of view in order
to apprehend this snowy slope: this point of view is a determined speed,
which emanates from me, which I can increase or diminish as I like; through
it the field traversed is constituted as a definite object, entirely distinct from
what it would be at another speed. . . . It is myself then who give form to the
field of snow by the free speed which I give myself. But at the same time I
am acting upon my matter. The speed is not limited to imposing a form on
the matter given from the outside; it creates its matter. The snow, which
sank under my weight when I walked, which melted into water when I tried
to pick it up, solidifies suddenly under the action of my speed; it supports
me. . . . This is because I hold a special relation of appropriation with the
snow: sliding. . . . I realize a synthesis which has depth. I realize that the
bed of snow organizes itself in its lowest depths in order to hold me up;
the sliding is action at a distance; it assures my mastery over the material
without my needing to plunge into that material and engulf myself in it in
order to overcome it. To slide is the opposite of taking root. The root is
already half assimilated into the earth; it can utilize the earth only by making
itself earth;303. . . Sliding, on the contrary, realizes a material unity in depth
without penetrating farther than the surface; it is like the dreaded master
who does not need to insist nor to raise his voice in order to be obeyed.
An admirable picture of power. From this comes the famous advice: Slide,
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mortals, dont bear down!304 This does not mean Stay on the surface,
dont go deeply into things, but on the contrary Realize syntheses in depth
without compromising yourself. . . . Thus the sliding appears as identical
with a continuous creation. The speed is comparable to consciousness and
here symbolizes consciousness. (5824)
Thus the eidetic description of the particular example of skiing culminates in the revelation of a symbolic relationship which universalizes its
significance. Now we can really understand and appreciate why the particular example has been brought into the existentialist discourse. Equally,
in relation to this example, we can understand the fundamental difference
between pure phenomenology and Sartrean phenomenological description
which is undertaken in the service of the hermeneutic of existence. For the
essence which a Husserlian description of skiing would disclose could
not have anything to do with the existential-ontological region of being: that
would be ruled out by the necessary bracketing out which is an a priori
methodological prerequisite of its approach. Husserlian disclosure of the
essence of skiing could only refer to itself for its meaning, and in no circumstance to some fundamental ontological passion which it might existentially
symbolize. By contrast. Sartre makes intelligible the project of skiing as
a project of realizing syntheses in depth, embracing the totality of relations of the human reality in their full intensity. Thanks to this approach, the
everyday experience of skiing recedes from our horizon by billions of light
years: the conception of a symbolic meaning makes the commonplace experience simply incommensurable with its existentialist counterpart. Now the
hermeneutic of existence puts in front of us something totally different:
the snow as impenetrable and out of reach, representing the synthesis of
self and not-self (585) in a specific mode of possessive appropriation. Even
the resistance the snow seems to exert over us is made intelligible in the
same terms of ontological appropriation:
I have realized this resistance through my fatigue, and I have been able to
measure at each instant the progress of my victory. Here the snow is identical
with the Other, and the common expression to overcome, to conquer, to
master, etc. indicate sufficiently that it is a matter of establishing between me
and the snow the relation of master to slave. This aspect of appropriation
which we find in the ascent, exists also in swimming, in an obstacle
course, etc. The peak on which a flag is planted is a peak which has been
appropriated. (585)
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Thus everything is set in the same light, and the ontological significance
of the particular examples can be brought out in a generalized form:
. . . a principal aspect of sportand in particular of open air sportis the
conquest of these enormous masses of water, of earth, and of air, which seem
a priori indomitable and unutilizable; and in each case it is a question of
possessing not the element for itself, but the type of existence in-itself which is
expressed by means of this element; it is the homogeneity of substance which we
wish to possess in the form of snow; it is the impenetrability of the in-itself and
its non-temporal permanence which we wish to appropriate in the form of the
earth or of the rock, etc. Art, science, play are activities of appropriation, either
wholly or in part, and what they want to appropriate beyond the concrete
object of their quest is being itself, the absolute being of the In-itself. (585)
And this is the point where the overall design becomes wholly visible,
asserting the unity of the particular and the general in the synthesis of existentialist ontology with existential psychoanalysis:
Thus ontology teaches us that desire is originally a desire of being and that
it is characterized as the free lack of being. But it teaches us also that desire
is a relation with a concrete existent in the midst of the world and that this
existent is conceived as a type of In-itself; it teaches us that the relation of
the For-itself to this desired In-itself is appropriation. We are, then, in the
presence of a double determination of desire: on the one hand, desire is
determined as a desire to be a certain being, which is the In-itself-For-itself
and whose existence is ideal; on the other hand, desire is determined in the
vast majority of cases as a relation with a contingent and concrete In-itself
which has the project of appropriating. Does one of these determinations
dominate the other? Are the two characteristics compatible? Existential
psychoanalysis can be assured of its principles only if ontology has given
a preliminary definition of the relation of these two beings the concrete
and contingent In-itself or object of the desire, and the In-itself-For-itself or
ideal of the desire and if it has made explicit the relation which unites
appropriation as a type of relation to the In-itself, to being, as a type of
relation to the In-itself-For-itself. (5856)
These few pages present to us in a microcosm, as it were, the totality of

Sartres existentialist conception. We can witness the development of the
particular themes on the ground of the fundamental existentialist categories.
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Inevitably, the closer we get in the process of eidetic description to the ontological core, the more the antinomies of its structure are pushed into the
foreground, profoundly affecting the character of the particular instances. It
is because of the underlying structural antinomies that appropriation must
be conceivedin sharpest possible contrast to our empirical notion of it
as nothing but a symbolic relation to an ideality, and in its ideality, corresponding to the ultimate ontological structure, it must be envisaged simultaneously as something given at one stroke . . . and as requiring an infinite
time to be realized. (592) In other words, we are again confronted with an
impossible realization, in the truest spirit of the existentialist message:
. . . it is impossible to realize the relation symbolized by appropriation. In
itself appropriation contains nothing concrete. It is not a real activity (such
as eating, drinking, sleeping) which could serve in addition as a symbol
for a particular desire. It exists on the contrary, only as a symbol; it is its
symbolism which gives it its meaning, its coherence, its existence. There can
be found in it no positive enjoyment outside its symbolic value; it is only the
indication of a supreme enjoyment of possession (that of the being which
could be its own foundation), which is always beyond all the appropriative
conduct meant to realize it. (593)
It is not an idiosyncratic inclination for paradoxical transformations

which produces such antinomous contrasts but, on the contrary, the conceptual framework of structural antinomies tends to articulate itself often
through extreme, and sometimes even shockingly extreme, paradoxical
formulations, like: Destruction realizes appropriation perhaps more
keenly than creation does, for the object destroyed is no longer there to
show itself impenetrable, . . . to destroy is to recreate by assuming oneself
as solely responsible for the being of what existed for all. (593) True
enough, no matter how shockingly paradoxical. But of course true only in
terms of the fundamental definitions of the overall conceptual framework
which must precede it. The particular paradoxes are only instantiations of
the conceptual framework of unilateral oppositions: they can be derived
from the latter with the ease of the kaleidoscopic transformations which
throw at one moment the light on one side of the antinomy, and the next
moment the contrasting light of its opposite, on the particular point at
issue, and in the most extreme cases they can even combine the two lights
into a single beam, so as to display with authenticity the uneasy balance
of the existentialist conception.
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Contrary to interpretations which arbitrarily isolate the particular

descriptions from the philosophical conception and oppose them to the
latter, we can clearly identify the determination of even the most minute
details by the overall conception. Taken in isolation, assertions like the
In-itself is transformed into nothingness (582)that is, when I pick up
some snow and my fingers melt itor the snow solidifies suddenly under
the action of my speed; it supports me (583) are unsustainable absurdities.
Melted snow is by no means nothingness, and in any case things might turn
out the other way roundnamely my frozen fingers departing into nothingness from my hand rather than the snow melting awaydepending on
the outside temperature. Nor is it true that the snow solidifies and supports
me under the action of my speed. For speed or no speed, what I need,
above all, is the supporting platform of my skis, or some similar devices, and
they do the supporting, not my speed which itself must be supported:
that is, made possible by the underlying support. But obviously such factual
trivia cannot be allowed to stand in the way of Sartres eidetic sweep. All
the less so, since admitting that it is the clumsy materiality of my skis which
supports me and not the free determination of my elegantly speeding nothingness would undermine the existentialist opposition of sliding to taking
root, in that one may be compelled to say that skiing is a moving concretion of snow by analogy with root described as a living concretion of the
earth. (584) For obviously we are talking about the same process of material inertia mastering material inertia: in one case it can utilize the earth
only by making itself earth, (584) and in the other it can utilize for sliding
compressed snow only by making itself a kind of compressed snow. (The
liberty involved in calling the ski compressed snow is not one whit greater
than in calling the root earth.)
The selectivity of the particular imagery, with its telling omissions, is
dictated by the necessary requirements of the existentialist conception as
a whole. The outlines of the particular imagery are speedily sketched in the
self-generative process of kaleidoscopic transformations as mediated projections of the basic categorial framework (ultimately identified as symbolic
equivalents of the latter) and nothing can be allowed to disturb the picture. If
a contrary example crops up in the course of the self-generative transformationsfor instance in that as soon as the particular case of skiing is generalized as sliding (and it must be generalized in the process of becoming a
symbolic equivalent), it inevitably brings forth to our attention also other
forms of slidingit is categorically dismissed the moment it appears.
Sliding on ice, which scratches the ice and finds a matter already organized,
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is very inferior [to skiing], and if people continue to do it despite all this, it
is for other reasons. (584) Whatever those other reasons might be, we
are never told. The kaleidoscopic mode of progression enables Sartre to get
out of the difficulty by simply declaring the characteristic that has emerged
(scratching the surface of the ice) to be inferior. This, however, brings
another problem with it, namely the realization (as an afterthought) that in
a sense skiing also scratches the snow. But not to worry; another eidetic
assertion will help to extricate Sartre also from this difficulty by nullifying
the counter-effect of the disconcerting characteristic and thus by taking back
in some form what he was forced to admit by the logic of his own example.
He does this by referring to a slight disappointment which always seizes us
when we see behind us the imprints which our skis have left on the snow.
How much better it would be if the snow re-formed itself as we passed over
it! Besides, when we let ourselves slide down the slope, we are accustomed
to the illusion of not making any mark; we ask the snow to behave like that
water which secretly it is. (584)
And this is where Sartres dominating subjectivity turns out to be the
necessary sustaining power of the whole enterprise. For if some people might
question the liberties he takes with his own terms of analysis and description, he will not hesitate for a moment to dismiss his critics just as categorically as he sweeps aside examples and instances perceptibly contrary to his
own interpretative direction, saying that his critics have not read his work,
or if they did they have not understood it, or that they are a priori incapable
of understanding it, or even that they are incapable of understanding their
own works. This could not be otherwise in a conception in which we set out
from a description of skiing and end up with a legislative assertion of how
the ideal snow ought to behave in the symbolic act of appropriation.
No philosophical conception can be divorced from its authors specific
subjectivity which sustains it in its articulation. This is just as true of Sartre
as of Spinoza and Descartes, Hegel and Marx, Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
Sartres overpowering subjectivity is a necessary complement to a conception which must impose on the reader, through whatever liberties its eidetic
descriptions might require, the conviction that things are in the ontological
depth (of which the empirical manifestations and modes of behavior are
only the symbol) as they ought to be according to the existentialist hermeneutic of existence.
It is the total context which confers the proper meaning on the particular examples and instantiations. It is the articulation of the overall conception which sustains the particular points, no matter how much they
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may be forced. All selectivity is necessarily tendentious and therefore

it needs a broader frame of reference for its justification than the accuracy of details. Indeed, the selection of accurate particulars is no less in
need of justification than taking liberties. In both cases the criterion of
justification can only be the coherence of a significant discourse, and the
accuracy of details is no guarantee whatsoever that we are on the right
road to the latter, as all depressingly pedestrian varieties of positivism and
neo-positivism testify.
Equally, the fact that a writers terms of description or analysis strongly
depart from our everyday experience is no evidence by itself against the
meaningful coherence of his discourse. Sartres inaccuracies and forced
descriptions are not just inaccuracies and forced descriptions. As we have
seen also in the case of taking root as diametrically opposed to sliding,
they are highly tendentious constituents of the intended meaning. Reading
the great majority of his analyses and descriptions we realize their significant
departure from our own perception of the same relation, and yet we do not
mind this precisely because of the powerful suggestive coherence of his discourse. We do not mind the liberties he takes precisely because we realize,
in relation to the overall conception, what he is driving at as his vision
unfolds in front of us in its existentialist coherence and originality.
No one can deny the profound originality of Sartres discourse in Being
and Nothingness. But simply to refer to this originality is not enough for
identifying its specificity. For there is a fundamental difference between the
originality of, say, Marxs Capital and Sartres work. Our concern here is not
the question of relative greatness but the determination of a writers attitude
toward his own work as an essential condition of the particular character of
that work.
In Sartres case, as a direct manifestation of his dominating subjectivity,
originality is not only the type of solution given to some significant problems: it is also a constantly pursued conscious aim of the intellectual undertaking. The quest for originality appears to him at a crucial time in his development as an imperative to emancipate himself entirely from the influence of
others so as to be able to follow his own unique road. It is in this spirit that
he writes in a letter to Simone de Beauvoir in 1940:
Since I have broken my inferiority complex vis--vis the extreme left, I
feel a freedom of thought which I never had before. Also vis--vis the
phenomenologists. It seems to me that I am well on the way of finding myself.305
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This attitude is strongly reinforced through its elevation to a theoretical

status in Sartres conception of existentialist authenticity as the pursuit of
ones unique project; and from that moment on this cardinal tenet of the
hermeneutic of existence is inseparable from the radical self-assertion of
his dominating subjectivity. Indeed, to be more precise, the Sartrean pursuit
of originality as a conscious aim is very much part of his original project
from a very early age, as we can see through Words and other autobiographic
material at our disposal. The change that we can witness around 1940
which happens to coincide with his traumatic experience with the left and
consequently with the definition of his own pursuit as a strictly individual
ventureis that his attitude as a writer toward his own work is now crystallized around a specific version of the authenticity of individual existence,
defined in a diametrical opposition to bad faith seen above all as the spirit
of seriousness which dares to presume that the pursuit of social objectives
is more commendable than getting drunk alone.
Thus we see a unique fusion of personal determinations with a particular theoretical posture, and this fusion becomes the organizing core of the
synthesis of Being and Nothingness. As such it determines in the last analysis
not only Sartres attitude to other thinkers, relegating the matter of scholarly
considerations to a status of no real importance,306 but also his relation to
the treatment of experience as interpretative evidence. It is Sartres overpowering subjectivity as embodied in the structural framework of his conception which sharply determines what sort of evidence is admissible at all
for consideration and what kind of use is to be made of the admitted data.
(Indeed, the term data is rather inadequate. For by the time the empirical
particulars are brought into the focus of theoretical generalization by Sartre
they are fundamentally transformed through eidetic description and kaleidoscopic specification.)
Marx may spend the greater part of his life, buried in the British
Museum Library, engaged in unearthing evidence which not merely sustains his theoretical conception but expands, modifies and intensifies it as
well, displaying thus an inherently dialectical relationship between theory
and research. Nothing could be more alien to Sartres way of proceeding.
(Not surprisingly, therefore, he must break off the project of investigating
history precisely at the point where the more or less self-generative permutations of the formal structures of history are sketched out and the need for
evidence in the form of a sustained historical research inescapably asserts
itself.) Sartre maintains the same sort of attitude toward his particulars as
the Absolute Monarch toward his subjects: he treats them as he pleases; and
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quite legitimately so in that, being the categorically self-asserting foundation

of legality itself, he constitutes them in such a way that they owe their very
existence as subjects to the constitutive framework of the overall conception in which they are allowed to arise. And just as the conscious pursuit of
originality has been existentialistically theorized and authenticated as the
unique project of strictly individual venture, now the sovereign attitude
toward empirical experience is elevated to a theoretical status in the spirit
of the hermeneutic of existence that declares its interest only in their symbolic meaning which it itself generates, creates, and invents.
What we see then is a unique integration of subjective and objective
determinations in a specific type of synthesis which constantly maintains the
sovereignty of the overall conception over the particulars of its articulation.
The kaleidoscopic mode of development is a most adequate form of manifestation of such a synthesis. For it is simultaneously open and closed. It is
breathtakingly open with respect to the possibilities of self-generative partial
transformations, and it is rigidly closed as regards the fundamental structure
and categorial framework of the whole. It is for this reason that every new
phase in Sartres development must bring with it a new presentation of detail,
coupled with the claim that it amounts to a radically new synthesis.
The novelty is both true and wildly overstated. True in the sense that the
new phase, inasmuch as it represents a richer experience (e.g. the challenge
of politics and the experience of society in the postwar years), requires the
reformulation of Sartres fundamental concerns in relation to the elements of
the new experience. And since the specific synthesis of Being and Nothingness
is complete precisely in its incompleteness and unfinishability, the new experience of politics and society cannot be simply inserted into its categorial framework, which articulated itself as a new treatise of the passions conceived under
its individualistic-subjective aspects as the eidetics of bad faith.
At the same time, the claim of radical novelty characteristically brushes
aside two basic continuities. First, the most important earlier categories are
always transferred into the later syntheses (as indeed is the case also in the
relationship between Being and Nothingness and the earlier studies in philosophical psychology as well as Nausea), even if complemented by new ones,
establishing thus a most remarkable continuity in the categorial framework
of Sartres philosophy as a whole, notwithstanding its numerous partial
transformations. And second, the structural relationship between any given
set of categoriesin LImaginaire, in Being and Nothingness, in the Critique
of Dialectical Reason, or, for that matter, in The idiot of the Familyand the
empirical particularizations in terms of which they are spelled out, remains
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essentially the same, whatever field of experience happens to supply the

instances of interpretative specification. In other words, we always set out
from the sharply defined outlines of the overall conception as the overpowering bergreifendes Moment of the given enterprise, which leaves no
room for a genuine dialectic between theory and research.
Thus Sartres approach remains the same whether he writes about
the experience of anger and skiing, or about negritude, or indeed when
he invents with sovereign mastery the deeply significant experiences that
Flaubert ought to have had. It is the representative value of this unique mode
of synthesis, of which Being and Nothingness is a supreme example, which
working through, and not in spite of, his overpowering subjectivity makes
Sartre an outstanding figure.
4.
for his failure to concern himself with

sexuality, the result of which is that his Dasein appears to us as asexual.
(383) In contrast to this Sartre insists that the For-itself is sexual in its very
upsurge in the face of the Other and that through it sexuality comes into the
world. (406)
The problem at stake is therefore not a matter of secondary importance
(though this is the impression one would get by reading some books on Sartres
ontology307) but, on the contrary, quite fundamental to the hermeneutic of
existence which is concerned with the meaning of the human reality in all
its manifestations. For if the For-itself is sexual in its very upsurge in the face
of the Other, then sexuality can only be elucidated in terms of the deepest
ontological structures. Here, as everywhere else, when we reach the ultimate
connections, we are invited to grasp the problem not as doing but as the
project of being. To-be-in-the-world is to form the project of possessing the
world (597), and sexuality is an integral part of the realization of this project,
and as such it occupies a vital place in the existentialist treatise of the passions.
One cannot stress enough that the meaning of these relations is far from
being immediate: it is symbolic. Sartre adopts as the point of departure of
his own hermeneutic Pascals insight that in an activity [hunting, or playing
tennis, for instance] which would be absurd if reduced to itself, there was a
meaning which transcended it; that is, an indication which referred to the
reality of man in general and to his condition. (562) Sartre generalizes this
approach and reads the various manifestations of psychic life as symbols
SA RT R E C R IT IC IZ E S HEID EGGER
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maintaining symbolic relations to the fundamental, total structures which

constitute the individual person. (569) Thus whatever experience may be
under scrutinybe it fatigue on a mountain climbing expedition, or sexual
desire, or play, or nausea, or preference for certain types of food, and so on
our search for meaning must be guided by the same principle: it is a matter
of rediscovering under the partial and incomplete aspects of the subject the
veritable completeness which can be only the totality of his impulse toward
being, his original relation to himself, to the world, and to the Other, in the
unity of internal relations and of a fundamental project. (563)
In this sense, sexuality is understood as a fundamental existential project
which aims simultaneously (a) at the Other and (b) at being in general. In the
first respect: in desire I make myself flesh in the presence of the Other in
order to appropriate the Others flesh. (563)
Desire is an attitude aiming at enchantment. Since I can grasp the Other
only in his objective facticity, the problem is to ensnare his freedom within
this facticity. . . . and by touching this body I should finally touch the Others
free subjectivity. This is the true meaning of the word possession. (394)
And in the second respect:

To plug up a hole means originally to make sacrifice of my body in order that
the plenitude of being may exist; that is, to subject the passion of the For-itself
so as to shape, to perfect, and to preserve the totality of the In-itself. . . . A
good part of our life is passed in plugging up holes, in filling empty places,
in realizing and symbolically establishing a plenitude. (613)
But, of course, here as everywhere else the ideal involved turns out to be
an impossible ideal: desire itself is doomed to failure (396) in that pleasure is the death and the failure of desire, (397) and the fullness of being is
equally unrealizable, which ultimately makes man a useless passion.
As we can see, human reality under its aspect of sexuality corresponds to
the same ontological determinations of freedom and passion which we have
encountered in other contexts, in the spirit of a truly totalizing vision. Thus
Sartres involvement in psychological research already in his student days,
which is further intensified in his literary projects (Nausea and the short
stories of the 1930s) as well as in his theoretical writings on Emotion and
Imagination, reveals itself as incomparably more than a contingent beginning. Indeed, there is a sense of necessity about it: an organic development
180
with a growing achievement in the 1940s. In Being and Nothingness the

early psychological insights are integrated with the ontological categories of
a unique brand of existentialist hermeneutic, and the new treatise of the passions is articulated as an eidetic of bad faith aimed at unveiling the paradoxical realities of the ontological structure, thus not only making intelligible
the bewildering ploys and manifestations of bad faith which escape even the
most ingenious psychoanalytic approaches, but also offering the possibility
of an existential solution to the problems involved.
In the structure of Being and Nothingness we can identify two essentially
different, though of course interlinked, lines of reasoning. First, the often
explicit polemic thrust in Sartres definition of the basic categories and relations. In this respect the most obvious target is constituted by the various
psychological theories (especially psychoanalysis and positivist-behaviorist
psychology), but all related conceptions, from Descartes theory of the passions of the soul308 to Marx as the paradigm of the standpoint of seriousness309 and to Prousts idea of a passional mechanism310 are critically dissected by Sartre in accordance with his concept of bad faith.
The second discernible dimension of analysis is in fact the more fundamental. It consists in Sartres attempt at defining the basic ontological
structures themselves in terms of which the meaning of human reality can
be identified. What is the meaning of the being which includes within
itself two radically separated regions of being? (XLIII), asks Sartre, and
he undertakes an elucidation of this meaning strictly in terms of the ontological relationship between the two indicated regions of being: For-itself
and In-itself, categorically excluding the possibility of a religious explanation. And he combines the polemical and substantive dimensions of his
analysis under the hypothesis that the various theoretical misconceptions
arise as strategies of flight in the face of the anguishing existentialist choices
which man is compelled to confront. The remarkable structural cohesion
of Being and Nothingness311our impression that the whole massive work
is made of the same piece or written in the same breath, in that whatever particular problem is at stake, we are always confronting the one central
idea: mans quest for the unrealizable totalityis closely connected with
this treatment of the theoretical alternatives as subordinate moments of the
overall conception of the meaning of human reality.
The conscious rejection of the religious framework of explanation carries
with it the claim that the existentialist meaning of the human reality must be
constituted by the being who is at the centre of the hermeneutic of existence.
The nature of the human enterprise is identified as the self-constitution of
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meaning and value at all levels, from the everyday projects of alarm clocks,
sign boards, tax forms, policemen, so many guard rails against anguish
(39) to the ultimate desire to be God. (566) If there is a meaning to the
human enterpriseand according to Sartre most emphatically there is,
although some sectarian religious critics312 accuse him of nihilismit must
be inherent in all facets of experience. Accordingly, Sartre pursues his quest
by systematically scrutinizing the most varied forms of life-activity: work,
sexuality, play, art, science, and the production and consumption of food.
He finds that although the forms and modalities of these activities significantly differ among themselves, so that we can grasp certain specificities
of, say, play in comparison to eating, the ultimate existential meaning of all
of them is fundamentally the same. It is given in the project of possessing
the world, which is conceivable only as a possessive appropriation of the
world, whether we think of sexualityas the project to possess the Others
transcendence as pure transcendence and at the same time as body (394)
or of the existential significance of food described as the appropriative
choice of being. (615) We can understand now in this light why for Sartre
desire cannot be a desire of doing. All activities, in Pascals sense, refer to
the reality of man in general and to his condition, and thus they represent
merely the form in which a fundamental ontological characteristic of the
human realitylack asserting itself through desire (87)manifests itself
as the desire of a transcendent object, (385) that is as a desire of being.
In the constitution of meaning through activity, a privileged position is
assigned to the constitution of value, in that all everyday values derive their
meaning from an original projection of myself which stands as my choice of
myself in the world (39) and as such it becomes the source of further action.
Naturally, the constitution of value is not a separate activity. Rather, it is inherent
in all activities as a supportive structure which links the symbolic manifestations of being to their ontological ground. Strategies of bad faith originate in
the course of the constitution of these values and, by contrast, in good faith we
try to extricate ourselves from the self-imposed trap of bad faith.
Characteristically, Sartre not only declares that it is indifferent313
whether one is in good faith or in bad faith, (70) but he goes as far as
asserting the primacy of bad faith over against good faith. Good faith
seeks to flee the inner disintegration of my being in the direction of the
In-itself which it should be and is not. Bad faith seeks to flee the In-itself
by means of the disintegration of my being. (70) Thus the talk about
authenticity is bound to remain somewhat vacuous, since the apparent
positivity of good faith is nothing but the double negativity of a flight
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of a flight of disintegration to which it is impossible to assign other than

a purely imperatival regulative meaning. As such it has an ontological
status radically different from that of bad faith. The latter constitutes an
immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being, and this
permanent threat or risk originates in the fact that the nature of consciousness simultaneously is to be what it is not and not to be what it is. (70)
Bad faith, therefore, arises from the innermost structure of consciousness
itself, whereas good faith is parasitic on the persistent negativity of the disintegrating flight which it tries to flee. Good faith is, in fact, doubly problematical. First because in contrast to bad faithwhich emanates from the
ontological structure of consciousness itself and thus needs no additional
supportgood faith has no such obvious ontological underpinning and
must be sustained through some well-founded existential motivation which
Sartre fails to specify. (Significantly, he evades the problem, which is for
him structurally insoluble, by rather gratuitously suggesting in a footnote a
radical escape from bad faith through self-recovery or authenticity the
description of which has no place here, (70) nor for that matter anywhere
else in Being and Nothingness.) And the second problematical feature of
good faith is that even if a motivation has been found, given good faiths
parasitic character or structural dependency on bad faith, it is bound to
remain an unrealizable ideal and a permanently frustrated one.
But whatever ones reservations about Sartres approach to these problems, no one should fail to see that in the framework of his existential hermeneutic the most varied aspects of experience are synthesized in a powerfully
coherent form. All kinds of activity as well as all forms of psychic life are made
intelligible in terms of particular existential projects structured around ones
fundamental project, which is said to be identical with the original choice of
ones being. The concept of passion occupies a strategic position in this
hermeneutic of existence; and indeed no other concept could take its place.
For Sartre must explain first of all what makes human reality persist in its
quest for being, and he must be able to do that without introducing a determinism into the picture. Consciousness, on its own, could not accomplish
anything. Nor could the abstract principle of the freedom of the will help,
since it could not supply the motivation for its own deliberations. And this is
where passion proves its vital importance for Sartres vision.
We shall see in a moment the fundamental ontological meaning of his
concept of passion. But first we have to glance at the other sense in which
passion is referred to in Being and Nothingness. This second sense is
much the same as that used in everyday language, or by philosophers and
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psychologists, and Sartre sets out to extricate it from what he considers to be

a network of deterministic misrepresentations:
There is a fairly common tendency to seek to identify free acts with voluntary
acts and to restrict the deterministic explanation to the world of the passions.
. . . In this case it would be necessary to conceive of man as simultaneously
free and determined, and the essential problem would be that of the relation
between this unconditioned freedom and the determined processes of the
psychic life: how will it master the passions, how will it utilize them for its
own benefit? A wisdom which comes from ancient timesthe wisdom of the
Stoicswill teach us to come to terms with these passions so as to master
them; in short it will counsel us how to conduct ourselves with regard to
affectivity as man does with respect to nature in general when he obeys it in
order better to control it. Human reality therefore appears as a free power
besieged by an ensemble of determined processes. One will distinguish
wholly free acts, determined processes over which the free will has power, and
processes which on principle escape the human will. (441)
Sartre emphatically rejects this view and opposes to it his own

conception:
Here as everywhere we assert that the state of consciousness is a pure idol
of a positive psychology. If the will is to be freedom, then it is of necessity
negativity and the power of nihilation. But then we no longer can see why
autonomy should be preserved for the will. (442)
But this is not all: the will, far from being the unique or at least the
privileged manifestation of freedom, actuallylike every event of the Foritselfmust presuppose the foundation of an original freedom in order to
be able to constitute itself as will. The will in fact is posited as a reflective
decision in relation to certain ends. . . . Passion can posit the same ends. For
example, if I am threatened, I can run away at top speed because of my fear
of dying. This passional fact nevertheless posits implicitly as a supreme end
the value of life. (443)
Thus since freedom is identical with my existence, it is the foundation of
ends which I shall attempt to attain either by the will or by passionate efforts.
Therefore it cannot be limited to voluntary acts. Volitions, on the contrary,
like passions are certain subjective attitudes by which we attempt to attain
the ends posited by original freedom. (444)
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Thus passions (in the plural), as subjective attitudes, are on a par with
volitions in that they are both manifestations of original freedom. The passional act is that which has a specific passion for its motive, (445) but it is
free none the less. It is the ensemble of the desires, emotions, and passions
which urge me to accomplish a certain act, (446) but they all arise on the
ground of an original freedom.
However, Sartre does not stop at this point but turns the table completely on the will which appeared to have a privileged position in relation to
freedom at our point of departure. Now we learn that assigning a privileged
position to the will could not be more illusory. For a voluntary deliberation
is always a deception (450)
When I deliberate, the chips are down. And if I am brought to the point
of deliberating, this is simply because it is a part of my original project to
realize motives by means of deliberation rather than by some other form of
discovery (by passion, for example, or simply by action, which reveals to me
the organized ensemble of causes and of ends as my language informs me of
my thought). . . . When the will intervenes, the decision is taken, and it has
no other value than that of making the announcement. (451)
And this takes us to the fundamental meaning of passion, which is not

a subjective attitude but the basis on which all attitudes arise. This is in the
last analysis identical to original freedom itself which posits the ends we
attempt to attain. It constitutes our very existence as the original choice
[an impulse toward being] which originally creates all causes and all motives
which can guide us to partial actions. (465) If I want to understand the
existential-ontological meaning of the fact that I freely abandon myself to
fatigue (as opposed to some deterministic physiological or psychological
hypothesis), I must refer this action to my original choice of being, since this
passion of the body coincides for the For-itself with the project of making the
In-itself exist. (456) To put it in a generalized form:
The For-itself by its self-negation becomes the affirmation of the In-itself. . . . in
the quasi-totality of Being, affirmation happens to the In-itself; it is the adventure
of the In-itself to be affirmed. This affirmation which could not be effected as the
affirmation of self by the In-itself without destroying its being-in-itself, happens to
the In-itself as the affirmation is realized by the For-itself. The affirmation is like
a passive ecstasis of the In-itself which leaves the In-itself unchanged yet which is
achieved in the In-itself and from the standpoint of the In-itself. All this happens
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as if the For-itself had a Passion to lose itself in order that the affirmation world
might come to the In-itself. (217)
As we can see, the introduction of passion into the primary set of relations
radically modifies everything. It is in virtue of this passion that the human
enterprise can take place at all, and assume a character, a direction, and a
meaning without it we would be stuck to consciousness and freedom
conceived as an icy abstraction totally devoid of any possibility of development. Through passion, freedom and consciousness acquire a bodyand
indeed not just in a figurative senseso much so that it becomes possible
to talk about the passion of the body for carrying out the original project
of freedom to make the In-itself exist: a description which stands in diametrical opposition to the customary view of the body as the depository
of physical and psychological determinations. It is thanks to the primary
identity of freedom with passion that freedom can be situated: that is conceived in such a way that it can be nothing but situated (though, of course,
with all the ambiguities314 necessarily involved).
It is through this fusion of freedom with passion that freedom becomes
a meaningful existential category. And passion, likewise, through its fusion
with freedom acquires a unique character. It is not just any old passion, but
the fundamental ontological passion of the human reality which aims at
making the existential venture happen through the facticity of freedom315
tied to an absolute contingency and yet remaining absolutely free.
Fundamental ontological passion is thus defined as self-negation and
self-sacrifice: a passion to lose oneself so that the world might come
to the In-itself, as we have just seen, or that the plenitude of being may
exist, (613) or again so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency, (615) and so on, and so forth.
Fundamental choice is the original choice of our being and as such it must
of necessity be a conscious choice, (461) although, Sartre hastens to add
a few lines later, not a deliberate choice. Rather: it is the foundation of all
deliberation in that a deliberation requires an interpretation in terms of an
original choice. (4712)
Consciousness in this Sartrean sensewhich makes the firm distinction between conscious choice and (deliberate) conscious choice, so
as to be able to dismiss the idea of the unconsciousis non-positional
consciousness.316 Corresponding to non-deliberate conscious choice, nonpositional consciousness is
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. . . we-as-consciousness since it is not distinct from our being. And as our

being is precisely our original choice, the consciousness (of) the choice is
identical with the self-consciousness which we have. One must be conscious
in order to choose, and one must choose in order to be conscious. Choice
and consciousness are one and the same thing. . . . to be conscious of ourselves
and to choose ourselves are one and the same. (462)
Sartre insists that there can be no such thing as an unconscious psychic

phenomenon, (44) and later he adds that the proponents of the psychoanalytic theory have hypostatized and reified bad faith, they have not escaped
it. (54) It goes without saying, the problematic of the unconscious is far
too complex to be dissolved by any particular formula, since an adequate
treatment requires the development of a coherent theory of ideology, spelled
out not simply in general terms but in great concreteness and specificity
directly applicable to particular individuals. And whatever one may discover
in Sartres philosophy, given its individualistic framework of categories, it
certainly cannot be an adequate theory of ideology.
But this need not concern us here. For the point at issue in this particular
context is that his existentialist equation of choice and being, choice and
consciousness, choice of ourselves and consciousness of ourselves in the
non-positional mode, enables Sartre to suggest a non-deterministic solution
to the psychoanalytic problem of the unconscious. For a start, the unconscious is ruled out by definition as a priori impossible, since we set out from
the original identity of fundamental passionchoice of being (freedom)
non-positional consciousness, and all the specific structures of consciousness, whether affective (like desires, emotions and passions), or volitional,
reflective, and therefore fully share the burden of absolute responsibility as
specific modes of manifestation of the original synthesis.
The phenomenon of the unconscious is accounted for as bad faith
which pretends to itself (in the non-positional mode of fundamental unreflective consciousness (473) as contrasted to the consciousness reflected
on) to be unconscious in order to be able to flee anguish (namely the
burden of inescapable freedom). The possibility of such a strategy is not
proved but obliquely assumed by analogy with Gestalt psychology which
couples the primacy of the total form with the variability of the secondary317
structures. Accordingly, Sartre asserts that it is possible for me to impose
upon myself reflectivelythat is, on the voluntary planeprojects which
contradict my original project without, however, fundamentally modifying
the initial project. (471) Thus it is possible to talk even about the bad
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faith of the will, (473) in the sharpest possible contrast to any theory of
the unconscious.
To be sure, Sartre must consider the psychoanalytic hypothesis an
absolute outrage, in that it diametrically contradicts his own conception of
our absolute freedom and absolute responsibility which insists that we are
totally responsible not only for the wars from which we suffer but even for
our birth, race, nationality, place of living and past.318 All this would sound a
thousand times more absurd than the fateful laments of a demented prophet
of doom if Sartre could not sustain at least in the form of a subjective authentication his shocking assertions.
We have seen briefly in an earlier section the reasons why, given his individualistic conception of human reality as a strictly individual venture, he
must content himself with a subjective authentication and construct a phenomenological ontology in the mould of an existential anthropology, and
the concluding section of this chapter will be dedicated to a close investigation of this crucial problem. At this point the issue is not the determination
of the existentialist limits of Sartres conceptual framework as a wholethat
is, the question why it must articulate itself the way it actually doesbut
the identification of the structural links and conceptual interconnections. In
other words, the question of how it all works and what makes possible the
manifold kaleidoscopic transformations which we have already witnessed.
As we have seen, the most fundamental ontological relations are defined
by Sartre in terms of the identity of freedom and passion in the self-constitution of human reality which also corresponds to the primary identity
of being, choice, and self-consciousness. This ultimate ontological equation proves to be extremely fruitful because its terms are defined in such
a way that they become interchangeable right from the beginning, thus
establishing the possibility of virtually endless variations and self-generative
transformations. The primary concepts can be combined in the first place
among themselves, and all additional conceptual derivations can be fused
with the preceding ones, resulting in an ever-enlarging circle319 of relations
and sets of definitions.
We may be taken aback when we read the apparently arbitrary suggestion that being is the same as being free. If, however, we grasp the meaning
of Sartres assertionthere is no difference between the being of man and
his being free (21)in the context of the original equation of freedom and
passion as its fundamental ontological ground, it ceases to be shocking and
appears as a quasi-analytic specification of the original terms of reference, in
that the being of man as being free is merely another way of asserting the
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inextricable unity of freedom and situation according to the rules of an

existentialist hermeneutic.
The same procedure is followed in asserting the identity of freedom and
obligation, (35) being and choice, (440) choice and consciousness, (462)
choice and action, (484) consciousness and desire, (391) situation and motivation, (487) contingency and facticity, (486) and a great many other combinations (such as intention and action, consciousness and consciousness of
freedom, facticity of freedom and contingency of freedom, etc.), including at
times even the most unexpected ones, like play and anguish. (581)
On the ground of Sartres fundamental ontological equation some rather
unorthodox logical procedures become thoroughly legitimate: such as, for
instance, the establishment of lack as the fundamental ontological characteristic of the human reality with reference to the existence of desire. (87) While
strictly speaking it is taking liberties with logic to say that since desire is a
lack therefore man is a lack, nevertheless it is perfectly tenable on the ground
on which this equation arises, namely the fundamental definition of human
reality as an ontologically meaningful passion to lose itself so that the original
lack should be remedied through the establishment of the plenitude of being.
In a discourse which is structured in this way, there can be nothing wrong
with saying that consciousness chooses itself as desire, (391) or indeed much
more shockingly that my body is a conscious structure of my consciousness.
(329) The Sartrean discourse is structured the way it is in order to be able to
impose on us its own framework and terms of reference, and consequently to
make acceptable the shocking assertions of the existentialist hermeneutic.
And the close integration of metaphors into the discourse as a whole, as well
as the use of the method of kaleidoscopic transformations which we have seen
in the preceding sections, serve precisely the same purpose.
Seen in this light, the insistence on absolute freedom and absolute
responsibility is far from being as absurd as even Sartre suggests sometimes
in his relatively recent interviews.320 His extreme statements on the absoluteness of freedom are integral parts of a highly complex discourse which
must be read within its own terms of reference, whether one agrees with the
principal tenets of this philosophy or not. Partly this is a question of remembering the direct or indirect qualifications which one can find elsewhere in
the work and which constitute the necessary complement to the extreme formulations. And partly it is a matter of appreciating the moralist-exhortative
function which claims on the strength of an ontological description mans
absolute freedom so as to be able to address to him the obligation of an
absolute responsibility.
189
But more than anything else, the legitimacy of reading Sartre within his
own terms of reference concerns the fundamental coherence of a representative philosophical discourse which obeys its inner determinations. Once
the core of a significant conception is constitutedas a result of an original
choice or fundamental project, or whatever other name we care to give to
those existential-social determinations which ultimately structure a coherent
world vieweverything else follows with an iron necessity even if one is
the champion of absolute freedom. (Departure from this inner necessity is
either some kind of inconsistency, whatever its reasons, or a step toward
a meaningful transformation and restructuring of the original conception.
In this sense the idea of a radical conversion is certainly feasible, but an
adequate treatment of its conditions would require some very precise definitions in the framework of a totalizing theory.)
In this sense, given certain propositions and fundamental definitions,
one must insist not only that motivation is not causation, (27) but also
that the structure of motives as ineffective is the condition of my freedom.
. . . there is never a motive in consciousness; motives are only for consciousness since consciousness has the task of conferring on the motive
its meaning and its importance. (34) We should also notice here the
imperatival structure of this element of Sartres discourse: the definition of
consciousness in terms of its task. Just as in an earlier mentioned passage
freedom-anguish is said to be characterized by a constantly renewed obligation to remake the self which designates the free being, (35) the fundamental ontological passion of human reality, losing itself, is sustained
through an as if clause.
Sartre explicitly turns away from Kantian morality, which is orientated
toward doing (action), in the name of an existentialist ontology whose
ultimate point of reference is being, (431) and near the end of Being and
Nothingness he declares that we cannot possibly derive imperatives from
ontologys indicatives. (625) The problem is, though, that the alleged
indicatives of phenomenological ontology (existential anthropology) are
deeply impregnated with imperatives at all levels, from the most fundamental
sets of relations to the secondary structures and partial descriptions, and
the being in question is a choice of being which ought to be constantly
renewed: that is, a doing, in the Kantian sense of the term. Also, when
Sartre claims that the existentialist hermeneutic succeeds in eliminating the
distinction between the intention and the act, the actual state of affairs is
far more problematical than the claim suggests. For the act in question is
choosing, which is said to be by definition identical to doing, (484) and
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the freedom of our action is made subjectively plausible merely in terms of

the possibility of an authentic choice the choice of our being. Kantian philosophy haunts Being and Nothingness from beginning to end (and not
just Being and Nothingness, of course), even if the Kantian constituents are
fully integrated into Sartres unique mould of discourse.
The ontological indicatives of absolute freedom and responsibility
arise in Sartres philosophy under the sign of the strictest ought, and they
operate in the context of the most severe contingency. And of course all this is
articulated in characteristically Sartrean terms. The absoluteness of freedom
is established through its definitional identity with the unavoidability of
choice even in the circumstances of a deliberate refusal to choose, and the
categories of contingency and facticity are brought into the foreground
in order to remind us that we should not have any voluntaristic illusions as
to the possible impact of our actions. Sartre goes as far as he possibly can in
acknowledging the force of circumstance, in talking about the necessity
of fact and the inherent ambiguity of freedom in situation, as we have
seen. To concede more than that would not just qualify his conception of
freedom but undermine and ultimately destroy his philosophical framework
as a whole. He must go on insisting that we are absolutely free and absolutely
responsible, adding at the same time that it is the contingency of freedom
and the contingency of the In-itself which are expressed in situation by the
unpredictability and the adversity of the environment, (509) meaning that
the adversity of my environment imposes on me the absolute obligation of
carrying the full burden of responsibility also for my situation which I therefore must be, rather than just being in it.
And so it goes to and fro, emphasizing now one side and then the other.
Sartre is fully aware of the extremely uneasy balance which threatens to precipitate the whole structure in one moment on one side and the next moment
on the other: that is why he must be constantly engaged in re-balancing and
re-qualifying, so as to maintain the integrity of the fundamental conception. I am responsible for everything, in fact, except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. (555) Quite so. But then
ultimately I am not responsible for anything at all! It shows Sartres great
honesty as a thinker that he makes no attempt at hiding this unpalatable
dilemma. Obviously, however, he cannot allow it to remain the final word on
the subject. And since there is no other way out, the Kantian as if comes
again to the rescue. Just as the fundamental passion of the human reality for
losing itself for the plenitude of being could only be established in terms of
as if, here, in the sentence that immediately follows the one just quoted, we
191
are confronted with the ultimate qualification: Therefore everything takes

place as if I were compelled to be responsible.
The imperatival underpinnings of the whole structure reveal themselves
in an unmistakeable fashion. I am absolutely free in virtue of being compelled to choose (condemned to be free), and because everything happens
as if the human reality through the free exercise of its fundamental passion
decided to lose itself so that the plenitude of being might exist. And likewise,
I am absolutely responsible because in my absolutely free being I am identical with my situation, no matter how devastating the coefficient of adversity321 might be, and therefore everything happens as if I were compelled
to be absolutely responsible, whether I assume the awesome burden of this
responsibility or try to run away from it through the ruses of bad faith.
On which side is Sartres heart in this balancing of freedom and responsibility against contingency and adversity? The answer is revealed by an
astonishing inconsistency: surely an existentialist version of the Freudian
slip for a man of Sartres stature. It occurs in the context of Sartres discussion of death and suicide. He rightly takes Heidegger to task for the latters
treatment of death, insisting that in view of the fact that death is a radical
contingency, it cannot belong to the ontological structure of the For-itself,
and consequently it must be ruled out of all ontological conjectures. (545)
Death cannot be my possible, since it is the nihilation of all my possibles,
which is outside my possibilities. (537) Similarly, suicide is an absurdity which causes my life to be submerged in the absurd, and of course it
carries with it the nihilation of all my possibilities. And yet, when it comes
to dealing with a situation of extreme gravity in which the possibilities of
an authentic choice are suffocated by adversity, Sartre does not hesitate for
a moment to elevate ones death by suicide to the dignity of an authentic
ontological possibility.
Thus we are told that there are no accidents in a life; . . . If I am mobilized in a war, this is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. I deserve it
first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion; these
ultimate possibles are those which must always be present for us when there
is a question of envisaging a situation. For lack of getting out of it, I have
chosen it. (554)
Desertion, yes, but suicide? Such a view is no less grotesque than Lockes
theory of a tacit consent, and the ideological interest is equally visible in
it. The only difference is that we are much more favorably disposed toward
the ideology of assuming ones responsibility in a fight for freedom than
toward the Lockean liberal legitimation of institutionalized wage-slavery.
192
However, we can entertain Sartres view only as a moral ought which

requires, of course, an appropriate justificationone which suicide cannot
be given even in his own terms of referenceand definitely not as an indicative of ontology. The assertion: suicide is one mode among others of
being-in-the-world, (556) far from being one of ontologys indicatives,
is a mere rationalization of extreme voluntarism, no matter how much we
might sympathize with the underlying intent.
Yet, the need to assert the existentialist message in Being and
Nothingness at the price of such inconsistency is extremely rare. As a matter
of course the delicate balancing enterprise is successfully accomplished
through those legitimate and powerful original methods of articulation
which we have seen above. Inevitably, the discourse on absolute freedom
and absolute responsibility deeply marks Being and Nothingness, in its allpervasive negativity, with a character of abstract heroism. According to this
passionate eidetic of bad faith, it is in the innermost nature of our ontological conditions, which transcend temporality and hold for feudalism
just as much as for our present-day predicament, that we have infinite
possibilities of choice, (522) and therefore we should not resign ourselves
to the choice of disintegrating flight in an attempt at escaping from the
responsibility of freedom. And no degree of adversity or failure is allowed
to invalidate the abstract heroism of this imperative of authenticity which
remains undefined as a generic choice of being, necessarily devoid of any
indication of what might constitute a tangibly authentic form of action.
For the imperative is coupled with a revealing qualification that blends
perfectly with both the abstract heroism and the subjective authenticity of
Sartres existentialist hermeneutic: There can be a free For-itself only as
engaged in a resisting world. . . . Success is not important to freedom. (483)
We are presented with the abstract imperative of engagement generically confronting a resisting world, and the enterprise remains a strictly
individual venture, struggling against the Other or capitulating to the
illusion of collective solidarity in the spirit of seriousness on the barren
road of disintegrating flight.
If this is the relation of forces, if this is how the lines of demarcation
are drawn in the eidetic of bad faith, obviously success must not be important to freedom. What counts is the authenticity of the undertaking itself: a
principle which is compatible not only with the assertion of the ontological
equivalence of all kinds of endeavor,322 but even with the gloomy forecast
of the ultimately necessary failure of all projects of the human reality: a forecast which is not really a forecast but the acknowledgement of an absolute
193
certainty, inherent in the fundamental ontological structure of being which

defines man as a useless passion. We are bound to fail in our attempt at
dominating others just as much as in the project of love which holds in its
being-for-others the seed of its own destruction. (377)
And yet, if to will oneself free is to choose to be in the world confronting
Others, then the one who wills himself such must will also the passion of
his freedom. (526) This is why whether in fury, hate, pride, shame, disheartened refusal or joyous demand, it is necessary for me to choose to be
what I am. (529) Which sums it all up again, in a characteristically Sartrean
fashion. And in the ultimate re-balancing effort we are also given a glimmer
of hope, though only as the promise of the possibility of a radical conversion.323 Again we are really presented with the imperatival conditions of
possibility of this radical conversion, although it appears as an indicative
of ontology. And again it is authenticated in strictly individual terms, on the
strength of the subjective integrity of a particular example, taking its inspiration from the world of the imaginary (limaginaire), especially the world
of Dostoevskys and Gides heroes. The concept which is meant to convey
the glimmer of hope in a Delphic form, anticipating Sartres postwar cult of
the adventurer, is the instant as a beginning which is given as the end of a
prior project, and we are told that it is precisely this which is produced in
the case of a radical modification of a fundamental project. (466)
In truth, the condition of possibility of a radical conversion is the suspension of the temporal determinations specified by my earlier choice,
and this may be envisaged in the framework of the Sartrean hermeneutic of
existence only as the infinitesimal instant which interposes itself between
two radically different fundamental projects. But it must be presented as an
indicative of ontology: we are told that it is produced in the case of a radical
modification of a fundamental project. In other words, the condition of possibility of a radical conversion is the radical modification of the fundamental
project through the instant. The change is envisaged as a liberating instant
in which I am suddenly exorcized and become radically other, accomplishing a total metamorphosis of my original project. (475) And if Sartre
paradoxically also maintains that we must conceive of the original choice
as unfolding time, (465) that only brings to the fore the often forbidding
complexities of an antinomous structure of thought, without invalidating the
primary importance of the liberating instant which puts the chips down in
an exhilarating moment and allows unfolding time merely to make the more
or less prosaic announcements:
194
These extraordinary and marvelous instants when the prior project

collapses into the past in the light of a new project which rises on its ruins
and which as yet exists only in outline, in which humiliation, anguish, joy,
hope are delicately blended, in which we let go in order to grasp and grasp
in order to let gothese have often appeared to furnish the clearest and
most moving image of our freedom. (476)
A moving poetical description indeed of the existentialist unity of

freedom and passion. As to what it is which we grasp when we let go in
order to grasp and grasp in order to let go, or where it will all take us on the
necessary premise of our useless passion, or again what the value is of this
radical conversion while the Other remains the ontologically established
permanent threat and perverter of even the most authentic project, all such
questions are permanently banished from the horizon of a hermeneutic of
existence conceived as an inescapably individual venture.
5.
T H E STAN DP OINT F R O M W H ICH SA RTRE articulates his hermeneutic of
existence is that of an anarchistic individualism,324 and its ultimate point of
reference is the ontological solitude of the For-itself. (456) In this spirit
he insists that what he calls the impulse toward being can be only purely
individual and unique. (563) Understandably, therefore, Sartres ontology
of solitude assumes the dimension of an eidetic of bad faith which can be
coherently formulated from the standpoint of isolated individuality. And
in keeping with this character of the work, the proofs we are presented
with in Being and Nothingness are either analytic-deductive325 or appear
as subjectively authentic and plausible representations of an existential
predicament.
Sartres individualistic ontological posture asserts itself by ascribing to
the Other a radically different ontological status from the For-itself s, with
far-reaching consequences for all aspects of this conception. According to
Sartre, the Other is an a priori hypothesis with no justification save the
unity which it permits to operate in our experience. (227)
Human reality remains alone because the Others existence has the nature
of a contingent and irreducible fact. We encounter the Other; we do not
constitute him. And if this fact still appears to us in the form of a necessity,
195
yet it does not belong with those conditions of the possibility of our
experience orif you preferwith ontological necessity. (250)
Like Marx, Sartre owes a great deal to Hegels characterization of the

Master-Slave relationship in The Phenomenology of Mind. However, they
develop Hegels original insights in diametrically opposite directions. Marxs
criticism of Hegels approach aims at intensifying the historical dynamism
inherent in this relationship, rectifying the ideologically determined violations of the inner logic of his own conception by Hegel himself.326 Sartre,
by contrast, radically eliminates the historical dimension from the relationship and transforms it into a timeless existential structure. And by denying
to the Other a proper ontological status, he renders the whole relationship
extremely problematical, determining in a peculiar way not only the character of the Other but also the nature of self-consciousness, especially in its
collective form (the We-subject), as we shall see in a moment.
To be sure, the assertion of the fundamental ontological solitude of the
For-itself cannot be sustained in isolation. Consequently, the whole range
of categories to which the For-itself is closely connected must be defined
in structurally identical terms. In other words, the categories are arranged
as ontologically primary or fundamental on one side, and as derivative or
parasitic on the other. This is how the most important relations are depicted
in Being and Nothingness:
O N TO LOG IC AL LY P R IM ARY
Consciousness
Individual point of view
Negation
For-itself
Ontological solitude
Self
Individual totality
Conflict
Incomparable uniqueness
Bad faith
Lack
Possibility
Freedom and passion
Contingency and facticity
D ERIVATIVE O R PAR AS I TI C
The World
Global point of view
Affirmation
In-itself
Togetherness
The Other
Humanity
Solidarity
We-subject and Us-object
Good faith
Realization
Probability
Causality and necessity
Ens causa sui
196
Detotalized totality
Missing God
The Imperative (to realize
the unrealizable)
Imperfection and fragmentation
Totalized totality
Ideal or value
Societys demands
The Imaginary Synthesis
(Beauty)
Inevitably, if this is the ontological structure of being, then the deepest

ontological meaning of human reality cannot be other than suffering, and
the consciousness of this human reality must be defined as an ontologically
unhappy consciousness: an approach which, again, radically liquidates all
historical connotations of Hegels concept of unhappy consciousness:
. . . human reality arises as such in the presence of its own totality or self as a
lack of that totality. . . . it combines in itself the incompatible characteristics
of the In-itself and the For-itself. . . . The being of human reality is suffering
because it rises in being as perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without
being able to be it, precisely because it could not attain the In-itself without
losing itself as For-itself. Human reality therefore is by nature an unhappy
consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state. (90)
Sartre constructs an ontological framework from a set of antinomously

structured relations, and consequently, situating himself on one side, he can
argue that the unification of one side with the other is impossible because they
are structurally incompatible. Thus, what may very well be an antinomous
relationship in virtue of some identifiable relative historical determinations is
transformed into an absolute. In the spirit of his ontological commitment to
an individualistic standpoint, coupled with an a priori exclusion of the possibility to take a global point of view, (359) Sartre insists, as if it were a matter of
absolute self-evidence, that the self is individual; it is the individual completion of the self which haunts he For-itself. (91) It is not difficult to agree that
so long as the ontological project is conceived as the individual completion of
the self, such a completion can only haunt the For-itself. Equally, if I adopt
as my absolute point of departure the ontological solitude of the For-itself,
I can only ascribe a derivative or hypothetical ontological status to the Other.
But, of course, this whole procedure is extremely problematical. For it is only
analytically (tautologically) true that the self is individual, in so far as the
individual self is certainly individual. But such individual self is nothing
more than a one-sided philosophical construct.
197
The real human self, by contrast, is the dialectical unity of individual and
social determinations, hence both individual and non-individual, and therefore it cannot conceivably have a merely individual completion. Since,
however, I started out from a purely individualistic ontological conception
of the self, the idea of a completion must and can only arise as the abstract
imperative of an unrealizable totality. Furthermore, since the Other could
only be given a totally inadequate ontological status as a mere hypothesis,
all possible combinations of the self with the Other must suffer the consequences of the Others problematical ontological determination. As a result,
the self s social dimension appears as an ontological afterthought which
arises on the derivative ground of the hypothesis of the Other, transforming
the For-itself into a degraded, petrified and reified being: The For-itself
when alone transcends the world; it is the nothing by which there are things.
The Other by rising up confers on the For-itself a being-in-itself-in-themidst-of-the-world as a thing among things. This petrification in In-itself
by the Others look is the profound meaning of the myth of Medusa. (430)
We should notice a significant change of emphasis in comparison to
Sartres early essay on Husserls idea of intentionality which ends with some
enthusiastic words, in the spirit of an epistemological and ontological optimism: we discover ourselves on the highway, in the city, in the middle of the
crowd, thing among things, man among men.327 Now the last three words
are revealingly eliminated, and the suffocating atmosphere of reification is
all-pervasive. Besides, the epistemological and ontological optimism which
characterized not only the essay on Husserl but also The Transcendence of
the Ego328 now becomes an existentialist target to fire at, condemning Hegel
in the name of a fundamental conception of the human predicament ruled
by irreconcilable conflict:
In the first place Hegel appears to us to be guilty of an epistemological
optimism. It seems to him that the truth of self-consciousness can
appear; that is, that an objective agreement can be realized between
consciousnessesby authority of the Others recognition of me and my
recognition of the Other. (240) . . . But there is in Hegel another and
more fundamental form of optimism. This may be called an ontological
optimism. For Hegel indeed truth is truth of the Whole. And he places
himself at the vantage point of truthi.e., of the Wholeto consider the
problem of the Other. . . . individual consciousnesses are moments in the
whole, moments which by themselves are unselbstndig (dependent), and the
whole is a mediator between consciousnesses. Hence is derived an ontological
198
optimism parallel to the epistemological optimism: plurality can and must be

surpassed toward the totality. (243) . . . [By contrast] . . . the sole point of
departure is the interiority of the cogito. . . . No logical or epistemological
optimism can cover the scandal of the plurality of consciousnesses. If Hegel
believed that it could, this is because he never grasped the nature of that
particular dimension of being which is self-consciousness. . . . [For] even if we
could succeed in making the Others existence share in the apodictic certainty
of the cogitoi.e., of my own existencewe should not thereby surpass the
Other toward any inter-monad totality. So long as consciousnesses exist, the
separation and conflict of consciousnesses will remain. (244)
Thus, the plurality of consciousnesses is a scandal and conflict is a

primary and insurmountable ontological condition. Conflict is the original
meaning of being-for-others, (364) and unity with the Other is radically
impossible. (365) The relationship is conceived in the formal structure of
reciprocity, understood as symmetry, obliterating the dimension of an actual
social-historical genesis. I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to
enslave me. (364) The plain and bitterly unpalatable truth of the matter
is, though, that in actual history only one side of the allegedly symmetrical
conflict is successful in enslaving the other, and even then not in virtue of
some abstract formally structured ontological reciprocity, but becauseas a
matter of brute existencehe historically gains control of the conditions
of work and thus destroys even the semblance of formal reciprocity, instituting the structure of domination not as an ontological imperative but as
a historically persistent, and therefore at least in principle also historically
surmountable, set of actual social relations.
Sartres formal reciprocity, however, which is constituted on the ontological premise of antagonistically opposed individual thisesmuch like
Hobbess bellum omnium contra omnescan only be depicted as a fateful
existential-ontological circle: the circle of relations with the Other. (408)
My project of recovering myself is fundamentally a project of absorbing
the Other, (364) but the formal structure of reciprocity makes sure that the
project fails and perpetually reproduces itself as unrealizable, thus a priori
denying all possibility of escape from the ontologically dignified circle. The
idea of a dialectical relationship with the Other is categorically rejected in
favor of the existential circularity, stipulating that we can never get outside
the circle, (363) as we have already seen. And even the most fundamental
strategies of escape, sadism and masochism, are condemned to futility. Nor
does hate fare any better:
199
Hate does not enable us to get out of the circle. It simply represents the final
attempt of despair. After the failure of this attempt nothing remains for the
For-itself except to re-enter the circle and allow itself to be indefinitely tossed
from one to the other of the two fundamental attitudes. (412)
If the fundamental ontological conditions and determinations are

depicted in this way, how could the idea of an ethic of deliverance and
salvation, achieved after a radical conversion which we cannot discuss
here, (412) be more than a gratuitous postulate encapsulated in a three
line footnote? For how could my radical conversion329 fundamentally
change the ontological structure of being which is defined as a priori
incompatible with the idea of a change, in the sharpest possible contrast to
the psychological experience of an historic man? (429) And what about
the Other? In this respect either I must envisage the simultaneous radical
conversion of allwhich is a priori rejected eleven pages after the three
line footnote as an abstract, unrealizable project of the For-itself toward an
absolute totalization of itself and of all others (423)or I must take refuge
in the mythical idea of the instant, coupled with the enthusiasm for the
equally mythical Apocalypse, an idea that appears in Sartres work immediately after the war.
As things stand in Being and Nothingness, the existential-ontological
circle defines the character and limits of the human enterprise:
We work to live and we live to work. The question of the meaning of the
totality life-workWhy do I work, I who am living? Why live if it is in
order to work?this can be posited only on the reflective level since it
implies a self-discovery on the part of the For-itself. (201)
This passage follows Sartres description of the roof repairers workclothes as an example of how the being-for-others refers us to the infinite
regress of instrumental complexes, pictured as a chain of which the for
whom is merely a link incapable of breaking the chain itself. Understandably,
therefore, the ontological determination of the structures of reification confines the search for meaning to the reflective level of a discovery of ones own
incomparable uniqueness. And this is where the limitations of the individualistic stance become painfully visible. For obviously the chain of capitalistic reification must be broken if I want to constitute a meaning which is
refused to me within the circle, while, to be sure, it is impossible to envisage
the realization of this task through a purely individual action.
200
Sartre is, of course, far too great a thinker to settle for such an absurdly
individualistic solution, which would elevate Don Quixote to the stature of
all positive heroes of world literature rolled into one, from Hercules and El
Cid to Figaro and to Stendhals Julien Sorel. Sartres sense of realism not only
specifies the necessary inseparability of Don Quixote (absolute freedom)
from Sancho Panza (absolute contingency and facticity), but also produces
a complete fusion of the two in the stipulated identity of authentic choice
with radical action: a full-blooded Don Quixote who carries in him, and
not just with him, his Sancho Panza. (No danger, therefore, of a head-on
collision with the windmill of society. Our fused hero is not interested in the
success of freedominsisting that success is not important to freedom
but in the abstract possibility of action. And he can always succeed in acting.
For whatever he does or does not do is always necessarily an action, even
when it all amounts to no more than the choice of refusing to choose.)
But even so, the enterprise remains problematical. For ones individual
self-discovery, no matter how authentic the choice, cannot significantly
affect the massive structures of domination, with all their antagonisms
and instrumental complexes. This is why the search for meaning cannot
be made intelligible purely on the reflective level: the terrain of isolated
individuality. We work to live and we live to work is not just a circle, but
the most vicious of all conceivable vicious circles in the circumstances of
alienated labour, precisely because as the circularity of a brute existent it
constitutes the material foundation of all domination, and hence is radically
incompatible with a meaningful life. Thus the search for meaning is identical with breaking the vicious circle of alienated self-objectification, which
implies not a self-discovery on the part of the For-itself but the practical breaking up and radical restructuring of the whole immense chain of
instrumental complexes in relation to which the isolated individual in all
his incomparable uniqueness is nothing but a helpless victim. And given
the sheer size of the undertaking, not to mention its inherent character,
this means that the realization of the task involved can only be envisaged as
a radical intervention at the level of social praxis, with the aim of bringing
under conscious social control the crucial material, human, institutional
and instrumental determinations: a task which implies a viable social consciousness in charge of the situation, in contrast to the purely individual
self-consciousness concerned with its own authentic self-discovery on the
reflective-contemplative level.
However, the world of Being and Nothingness is radically incompatible
with this social consciousness. Setting out from the ontological solitude of
201
the For-itself, the existence of the Other is established at the price of identifying objectivity with alienation and stipulating the absolute insurmountability of this alienation:
My original fall is the existence of the Other. . . . I grasp the Others look
at the very center of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own
possibilities. (263) . . . my possibility becomes probability which is outside
me. (265) Thus being-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a
freedom which is not my freedom. . . . this slavery is not a historical result
capable of being surmounted. (267) My being for-others is a fall through
absolute emptiness toward objectivity. (2745) Shame is the feeling of an
original fall, . . . I have fallen into the world in the midst of things and I need
the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am. (289) . . . by the fact of
the Others existence, I exist in a situation which has an outside and which
due to this very fact has a dimension of alienation which I can in no way
remove from the situation any more than I can act directly upon it. This limit
to my freedom is, as we see, posited by the Others pure and simple existence.
(510) Thus the very meaning of our free choice is to cause a situation to
arise which expresses this choice, a situation the essential characteristic of
which is to be alienated; that is, to exist as a form in itself for the Other. We
cannot escape this alienation since it would be absurd to think of existing
otherwise than in situation. (526)
How could one get out of the circle through solidarity arising on the
foundation of a shared predicament if the pure and simple existence of
the Other turns objectivity into permanent slavery by defining the essence
of all situation as alienation? How could one even conceptualize the possibility of a social struggle against reified objectivity if reification is given
the ontological dignity of solidification and petrification as contained
in the profound meaning of the myth of Medusa?330 And how could one
envisage an end to the helplessness of isolated individuality through a dialectical reciprocity and mediation with others if the dialectic of reciprocity is
turned into a self-defeating circularity, and mediation is a priori condemned
as the Other in my very being, after I have mythically fallen through absolute emptiness into the objectivity-alienation-petrification of my situation?
By adopting the standpoint of anarchistic individualism, Sartre imposes on
himself the characteristic limitations of this framework as a range of possible
conceptualizations to the exclusion of others: an approach the salient
feature of which is the a priori rejection of the possibility of a historical
202
suppression of alienation through a conscious social disentanglement of

objectivity from reification, in a radical reversal of the original historical
process of entanglement corresponding to the unconscious condition
of human development hitherto. Sartres individualistic stance, however,
deprives him of the conceptual tools required for envisaging a solution to
such problems. In the conceptual framework of Being and Nothingness the
possibility of a genuine collective consciousness is an a priori non-starter,
since self-consciousness is by definition purely individual, and the idea of
an unconscious is categorically rejected already at the level of individual
consciousness. Thus we can see again that Sartre goes in a direction
diametrically opposed to Marxs way of developing the problems. While
he adopts the Hegelian identification of alienation and objectivity, which
is inherently ahistorical, he goes a great deal further, liquidating even the
remnants of historicity from these relations by declaring the emptiness of
the concept of a historically developing humanity. Anticipating Althussers
laments by more than two decades Sartre writes:
But if God is characterized as radical absence, the effort to realize humanity
as ours is forever renewed and forever results in failure. Thus the humanistic
Usthe Us-objectis proposed to each individual consciousness as an
ideal impossible to attain although everyone keeps the illusion of being
able to succeed in it by progressively enlarging the circle of communities
to which he does belong. This humanistic Us remains an empty concept,
a pure indication of a possible extension of the ordinary usage of the Us.
Each time that we use the Us in this sense (to designate suffering humanity,
sinful humanity, to determine an objective historical meaning by considering
man as an object which is developing its potentialities) we limit ourselves to
indicating a certain concrete experience to be undergone in the presence of
the absolute Third; that is, of God. Thus the limiting concept of humanity
(as the totality of the Us-object) and the limiting concept of God imply one
another and are correlative. (423)
The fact is, though, that humanity as ours does very much exist in alienated form and practically asserts itself as world history through the world
market and the division of labour on a world scale.331 Furthermore, the concept
of man developing his potentialities does not imply in the least the formulation of an impossible ideal, viewed from the illusory standpoint of the absolute
Third, God, but requires grasping the disconcerting reality of the structures of
domination in the dynamic process of their objective unfolding and potential
203
dissolution, from the standpoint of a self-developing collective subject.332 In

the absence of such social consciousness the structures of alienation remain
in dominance over against the isolated individual who is lost in the jungle of
an unstructured totality and the infinite regress of instrumental complexes.
And history, deprived of its fundamental dimension of continuity in change
and change in continuity through the categorical negation of the possibility
of an actual collective subject, ceases to exist in a meaningful sense of the term
and becomes an ontologically insignificant dimension of individual existence,
affecting only the thinnest layer of the psychological surface. The multiplicity
of individual ventures cannot be united even at a given point in time: how could
it be united then through history? Human agency is conceived as purely individual, and the direction of a series of actions is defined through the structural
coherence of the primary and secondary structures of the fundamental project.
As to change, or indeed radical change, we are presented with the mysterious
moment or instant which is put forward to provide its own explanation
in virtue of its simple occurrence, without any possibility of prior determinations. The definition of the human enterprise as a strictly individual venture
and the radical negation of the possibility of a meaningful social consciousness arising on the real ground of history leaves us with the ultimate Fourth:
the contemplative philosopher whonegating the position of the absolute
Third and its necessary correlative, the humanistic Usannounces the
deepest ontological meaning of the human reality: man is a useless passion.
And he does that by directly identifying isolated individuality with the universality of ontological manin sharp contrast to the alienated objectivity
of historical man representing the degraded mediation of the For-itself with
the Otherby stipulating a fundamental symbolic relationship of equivalence
between the two.
In the context of Sartres individualistic presuppositions, the ontological
solitude of the For-itself and the essentially degraded character of the Others
mediatory function, there can be no other way than that. There can be no
genuine social consciousness, not only at the level of humanity as ours but
equally in the domain of class relations. We are either confronted with the
direct symbolic manifestations of allegedly profound ontological relationships, or with the psychological experience of historic man. Accordingly,
the idea of class consciousness is relegated to the position of a derivative
and strictly psychological experience which cannot significantly affect the
fundamental ontological relations:
204
Class consciousness is evidently the assuming of a particular Us on the

occasion of a collective situation more plainly structured than usual. . . . the
situation of the oppressing classes presents the oppressed classes with the
image of a perpetual Third who considers them and transcends them by
his freedom. (420) The primary fact is that the member of the oppressed
collectivity, who as a simple person is engaged in fundamental conflicts
with other members of this collectivity (love, hate, rivalry of interests, etc.)
apprehends his condition and that of other members of this collectivity as
looked-at, and thought-about by a consciousness which escapes him. . . . I
discover the Us in which I am integrated or the class outside, in the look of
the Third, and it is this collective alienation which I assume when saying Us.
(421) The oppressed class can, in fact, affirm itself as a We-subject only in
relation to the oppressing class. (422) But the experience of the We remains
on the ground of individual psychology and remains a simple symbol of the
longed-for unity of transcendences. . . . the subjectivities remain out of reach
and radically separated. (425) . . . the experience of the We-subject has no
value as a metaphysical revelation; it depends strictly on the various forms of
the for-others and is only an empirical enrichment of certain of these forms.
It is to this fact evidently that we should attribute the extreme instability of
this experience. It comes and disappears capriciously, leaving us in the face
of others-as-objects or else of a They who look at us. . . . We should hope
in vain for a human we in which the intersubjective totality would obtain
consciousness of itself as a unified subjectivity. Such an ideal could be only
a dream produced by a passage to the limit and the absolute on the basis of
fragmentary, strictly psychological experiences. Furthermore this ideal itself
implies the recognition of the conflict of transcendences as the original state
of being-for-others. (428) . . . the We-subject is a psychological experience
realized by an historic man immersed in a working universe and in a society of
a definite economic type. It reveals nothing particular; it is a purely subjective
Erlebnis (experience). . . . the We-subject is a psychological experience which
supposes one way or another that the Others existence as such has been
already revealed to us. It is therefore useless for humanity to seek to get out
of this dilemma: one must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be
transcended by him. The essence of the relations between consciousnesses is
not the Mitsein (being-with); it is conflict. (429)
Here we have a succession of extremely problematical principles which

spell out the hermeneutic of existence on the social plane as a system of
total immobility. In this system the collective situation is not a primary
ontological condition but merely an occasion in relation to which the
205
consciousness of a particular Us may be assumed if the situation is more

plainly structured than usual. (What makes it become more plainly structured we are never told.) This derivative situation is contrasted with the
primary fact of fundamental conflicts (love, hate, rivalry of interests,
etc.) in which all individuals are involved (bellum omnium contra omnes)
as a matter of ontological determination, and therefore any conceivable
solidarity of the members of the oppressed class, who are among themselves necessarily torn by ontologically fundamental conflicts, must remain
secondary, hopelessly unstable, and ultimately illusory. Furthermore, collective situation is not an objective determination but merely an assumed
one which I bring upon myself when I say Us under the gaze of the
perpetual Third.333 Consequently, the We-subject, in its capricious
instability must necessarily posit the permanence of the oppressing class
on which it structurally depends in this upside-down-ontology of Being
and Nothingness, in sharp contrast even to Hegels insights on this point
in his account of the Master-Slave relationship, not to mention Marx.
This means that we are forever locked into the structures of the class-initself 334 which derives its identity and consciousness from its mere negation of the opposing class, and the constitution of the class-for-itself 335
through which an end to class antagonism and class existence may be
envisaged is declared to be a priori impossible. The experience of collective solidarity is confined to individual psychology, and the inherent
contradiction is explained away by gratuitously suggesting a symbolic relationship of identity between this paradoxical manifestation of individual
psychology and longing for the impossible unity of radically separate
transcendences. The strictly psychological character of these relations
is reiterated again and again, and it is sharply contrasted with the original
state of being-for-others defined as insoluble conflict to be perpetually
acted out within the confines of the existential-ontological circle. Thus the
psychological experiences of historic man, trapped in a working universe
of (by definition) alienated objectivity, yield the inescapability of impotence as a degraded mirror-image of the ultimate ontological uselessness
of human passion.
But again we should ask the question: how could all this be different
on the assumed premise of the ontological solitude of the For-itself which
stipulates the a priori impossibility of a unity of the self with others through
meaningful social mediation? So long as totality is defined as an internal
ontological relation of thises which can be revealed only in and through the
individual thises, (180) and so long as the human reality is conceived as
206
a detotalized totality which temporalizes itself in a perpetual incompleteness, (180) just as long all possible combinations for the For-itself with
others must remain secondary and problematical. The a priori rejection
of interpersonal-social mediation as objectivity-alienation condemns the
possibility of combinations to the futility of mere exteriority (while in fact
one would need a precise definition of the criteria which can separate the
meaningful combinations from their reified counterparts) and dismisses the
idea of constituting ontologically significant relationships on their basis:
Being a group of three is not a concrete property of the group. Neither is it
a property of its members. . . . The relation of quantity is therefore a relation
of In-itself but a purely negative and external relation. . . . it is isolated and
detached from the surface of the world as a reflection (reflet) of nothingness
cast on being. (191)
But since the relation of quantity is a necessary prerequisite of the constitution of a viable social mediation and collective consciousness, the step
from the self-oriented one to the self-conscious many surely amounts not to
a purely negative and external relation but to the challenging positivity of
a different kind of internal relation: one made possible by the dialectic of
quantity and quality inherent in an effective social mediation. Consequently,
it cannot be subsumed under the model of a detotalized totalization of the
individual thises aimed at preserving in the unrealizable totality of an
impossible unification the incomparable uniqueness of the ontologically
solitary For-itself. By contrast, in the framework of Sartres individualistic
ontological presuppositions the step from the I to the We that appears
in our freedom itself creates the obstacles from which we suffer (495) represents an arbitrary conflation of the individual and collective subjects into
an entity of extreme ambiguity: a quasi-collective subject336 which becomes
intelligible only as an inherently historical being, and yet he transcends all
history in the abstract-ontological discourse on absolute freedom and absolute responsibility. And the procedure which produces this ahistorical and
curiously plural subject is all the more suspect since Sartre dismisses the
We-subject of actual social-historical action as a strictly psychological
experience totally devoid of a proper ontological status.
If, as Sartre admits, his proposed method for an existential psychoanalysis leaves much to be desired, this is not simply, as he suggests, because
everything remains to be done in this field, (457) but because the problematical character of the methodological principles themselves inherent in
207
its ontological standpoint. The assertions that in each inclination, in each

tendency the person expresses himself completely (363) in that each drive
or tendency is the entire person (364) may well agree with the principle
according to which the being of the For-itself is an individual venture and
the choice of the For-itself is always the choice of a concrete situation in
an incomparable uniqueness, (598) but they produce a method of analysis
which tends to disintegrate in the interminable particularization337 of a bad
infinity (Hegel).
The definition of the original project as the center of reference for an
infinity of polyvalent meanings (570) is coupled with the idea that the
For-itself in its freedom invents not only primary and secondary ends; by
the same stroke it invents the whole system of interpretations which allows
their interconnections. . . . the subject must furnish his touchstone and his
personal criteria. (471) Accordingly, the analyst will have to rediscover
at each step a symbol functioning in the particular case which he is considering. (573) For the choice is living and consequently can be revoked by
the subject who is being studied. [Revoked through] abrupt changes in orientation. . . . Our concern here is to understand what is individual and often
even instantaneous. The method which has served for one subject will not
necessarily be suitable for another subject or for the same subject at a later
period. (573) Needless to say, it is the rejection of a dialectical social mediation which brings with it the dispersive particularization of this method.
And the latter, far from following the way in which the subject itself is supposed to invent the appropriate system of interpretations and provide his
personal touchstone and his personal criteria, ends up, on the contrary,
inventing for the subject a quasi-fictional framework of interpretation, as
Sartre himself is later forced to admit338 with respect to the actual realization
of his long-standing project on Flaubert.339 The methodologically explicit
rejection of generalization produces both the dispersive particularization of
the underlying ontological generalities of the claimed fundamental choice
of being,340 as well as the quasi-fictional framework of interpretation, which
in Sartres own words invents even the subject, in a desperate attempt at
encapsulating the bad infinity of dispersive particularization in a world of its
own invention. Thus even in this respect the adoption of an extreme individualistic standpoint makes Sartre pay very dearly for maintaining the absolute
ontological primacy of solitude over against the merely psychological experience of historic man and his social mediations.
208
PA R A DOXIC AL LY, HOWEVER, SO ME O F TH E GREATEST IN S I G H TS of Sartres

philosophy arise on the same ground in Being and Nothingness as its
problematical features. And while it is certainly true that the historical and
social dimension would greatly enhance their significance, it is equally
arguable that Sartres conscious distancing of himself from the prevailing
social and historical theories was an essential condition of the production
of these insights.
In this respect the profoundly imaginative depiction of the complex manifestations of individual existence in Sartres eidetic of bad faith which we
have looked at need not detain us here any further, save just to mention that
his almost fanatical insistence on the freedom of the For-itself was an essential condition of undertaking at all such an enquiry in the circumstances of
apparently uncontrollable collective forces. We must now look, even if only
briefly, at some less obvious instances, in which Sartres insights are produced in virtue of the vantage point of his ontological presuppositions, and
not in spite of them. Furthermore it must be stressed that these acquisitions
of Sartrean philosophy do not simply provide a welcome corrective to the
prevailing varieties of mechanical vulgar Marxism but represent a potential enrichment even to the most subtle dialectical approach. The fact that
there is no evidence of a serious acquaintance with Marxs thought in Being
and Nothingness, indeed that the available evidence shows rather the opposite,341 need not concern us here. For it makes even more remarkable Sartres
achievements, arising almost in isolation in the process of single-mindedly
carrying to the utmost conclusions the far-reaching implications of his own
ontological principles.
The first point concerns the definition of the human reality in relation to the whole network of instrumental complexesfrom the most
primitive tools to the monstrous materiality of the crowd-instrument
without which human existence is simply inconceivable. While the necessary social-historical embeddedness of all instrumentality cannot be
stressed enough, there is also a dimension of instrumentality as such
which transcends all particular phases of history, in a transhistorical (but
by no means suprahistorical) sense.
Understandably, the historical conditions under which Marxist theory
was originally constituted pushed this transhistorical dimension into the
background. However, the original historical contingency cannot change the
fact that an adequate treatment of this dimension is a vital part of elaborating
a coherent theory of instrumentality without which even the most dedicated
social enterprise is bound to remain under the threat of utter failure. To be
209
sure, Sartre tends to emphasize only this dimension, or rather, he tends to

transform all aspects of instrumentality into an ahistorically defined ontological dimension. None the less, through his overpowering stand against the
almost universally prevailing tide, he achieves in this respect single-handed
more than anyone else in the twentieth century.
The same goes for the problematic of the instant. We have seen the
dubious uses to which Sartre puts this concept in Being and Nothingness in
order to fill the immense lacunae produced by the missing social dimension
of his ontology. Nevertheless, his recurrent amplification of the ontological
importance of the instant pushes to the forefront of our attention a major factor
without which the structure of historical change itself remains unintelligible.
Naturally, the category has important individual and social applications
whose manifold specificities cannot be subsumed under a single model.
And, of course, an adequate solution presupposes its treatment in the dialectic of continuity and change for which one would look in vain in Being
and Nothingness. But again, what we actually do find there is both illuminating and challenging enough to provide a major inspiration to some long
overdue research. For it is not enough to insist on the necessary social conditions of a radical historical change. Stalinism simply assumed the radical
novelty of its own reality, while its opponents, like Lukcs, tended to overemphasize the element of continuity in historical change. Sartres great insight,
which insists both on the being of the instant as a structure sui generis and
on its structuring function as the center of reference of the new fundamental
project, offers a great deal for a better understanding of social causation and
social consciousness.
The assessment of the nature of structural dependency is closely connected with the previous point. We have seen Sartres problematical
approach to interpersonal and social relations and its consequences for
the articulation of his philosophy as a whole. And yet, in his analysis of the
way in which the Other determines me, he suddenly confronts us with a
tremendous insight: Our relation is not a frontal opposition but rather an
oblique interdependence. (246)
We must appreciate the importance of this insight in contrast to many
theories which picture social conflict on the model of a frontal opposition and heavily contribute to the generation of necessarily disappointed
expectations. But surely, the concept of a historically irreconcilable structural antagonism should not be confused with that of a frontal opposition. Oblique interdependence is not only thoroughly compatible with
the persistence of an objective structural antagonism but may very well
210
constitute its fundamental modality, as Sartre tells us. Indeed, the real
explanatory value of the instant is precisely this, that it suggest a radical
restructuring of the normally prevailing modality of oblique interdependence into the transient modality of frontal opposition: a restructuring both
on the plane of the key material and instrumental complexes and at the
level of social consciousness.
An adequate social strategy, arising on the basis of a correct historical
understanding, requires the precise definition of the moment of a major
historic change together with its before and after, in terms of the complex
modalities of the prevailing structural relations and their dialectical transformations. History has its structures just as much as anything else: if this were
not the case, it would hopelessly escape us. Thus whatever we may think of
the defects of Sartres conception of history, insights like the one just quoted
on no frontal opposition but oblique interdependencewhich paradoxically arise out of an individualistic project of defining his own position in the
form of an equidistance from the major social forces, ontologically fixing
their relations in the ahistorical immobility of the existential circlerepresent a major contribution to a deepening historical understanding.
The final point in this survey concerns the problem of appropriation. And this is where we can see perhaps most clearly the way in which
the individualistic stance produces the paradoxical unity of the depth of
Sartres insights and the limitations which determine the various conceptual combinations, including the symbolic claims of his existential heuristic.
Reflecting on the problem of appropriation from the standpoint of a radical
individualism, Sartre perceives an elemental contradiction between ownership and utilization: an insight which would be obviously denied to all those
who situate themselves at the standpoint of a utilitarian liberalism. Since,
however, Sartre cannot transcend his ontological presuppositions, he produces a characteristic solution of this contradiction:
ownership appears to the owner simultaneously as something given at one stroke
in the eternal and as requiring an infinite time to be realized. No particular act
of utilization really realizes the enjoyment of full possession. . . . handing over
a banknote is enough to make the bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is
needed to realize this possession. In acquiring the object, I perceive that
possession is an enterprise which death always renders still unachieved.
Now we can understand why; it is because it is impossible to realize the
relations symbolized by appropriation.
211
In itself appropriation contains nothing concrete. It is not a real activity

(such as eating, drinking, sleeping) which could serve in addition as a
symbol for a particular desire. It exists, on the contrary, only as a symbol;
it is its symbolism which gives it its meaning, its coherence, its existence.
There can be found in it no positive enjoyment outside its symbolic value;
it is only the indication of a supreme enjoyment of possession (that of the
being which would be its own foundation), which is always beyond all the
appropriative conducts meant to realize it. (5923)
Thus the symbolic solution of the insoluble contradiction between the

eternality of the act of ownership and the disintegrating limitedness of
appropriation in the particular acts of utilization becomes the paradigm of
Sartres explanatory framework. The ultimate meaning of the human reality
is, as we have seen above, the appropriation of being in the form of the world.
Since, however, appropriation cannot be other than symbolic, my appropriative relation to being must be also symbolic in every significant respect.
Thus we are given a heuristic framework in the form of symbolic relations which both pinpoint (even denounce) and at the same time preserve
the inherent contradictions. The ultimate meaning of the human reality is
tantamount to revealing the insoluble character of contradictions (hence
all the categories of unrealizable totality, impossible unification,
impossible ideal, insoluble dilemma of radically separated transcendences, the circle of relations with the Other, and the like): which is
both profoundly true and thoroughly problematical. For it is true only with
a vital social-historical qualification which, however, appears to Sartre as
ontologically insignificant in the form of historic man immersed in a
working universe of a definite economic type. And the missing element
of the theory speak equally loud. For, in truth, the world which we must
appropriate must also be produced, in the dialectic mode of a productive appropriation and appropriative production. And while it is still
plausible to envisage the act of appropriation as a symbolic act of isolated
individuality, the production of the world as a totality of appropriative relations and corresponding objects cannot conceivably be envisaged from
the standpoint of an isolated individuality. Thus work appears in Sartres
writings only marginally, if at all (tellingly, its instances are confined to
some highly selective individualistic manifestations, from the waiter to the
roof-repairer, both productive only in the sense of being producers of
surplus value in the economically tertiary sphere of services) and the
working universe occupies an ontologically insignificant status, in the
212
sharpest possible contrast to the fundamental ontological significance of

symbolic appropriation.
There is an alternative solution, namely an approach according to which
the act of appropriation need not be conceived as a symbolic act if we remove
the contradiction between ownership and utilization through the abolition of
exclusive ownership and the simultaneous accessibility of utilization to all,
together with the harmonization of the totality of actual appropriative relations with the totality of productive relations in the self-realization of the transindividual and transhistorical subject. But such a solution is radically incompatible with the ontological horizons of Being and Nothingness, no matter how
intensely it is animated in its search for freedom by an authentic passion.
AS W E C AN S E E , T HEN, SA RTRES UND ERTA KING produces as many
illuminating insights as major question marks, in a synthesis full of tensions.
No one is supposed to feel comfortable in the presence of his conclusions,
least of all the author himself. The restlessness of the determination to move
forward appears to be an integral part of his fundamental project.
How far can Sartre go in his postwar development in resolving the tensions we have encountered in his ontological framework, and to what extent
is it possible for him to modify his original ontological conception through
the experience of society and the challenge of history? The investigation
of these questions will be the task of Part Three.
A Note on B EING
AND
N OTHINGNESS
Here is a representative selection of metaphorical imagery in the order in

which the particular metaphorical concepts appear in Being and Nothingness.
They were originally printed as endnote 294 in the first edition of this book.
Consciousness is a plenum of existence. (XXXI)
the preceding reflections have permitted us to distinguish two absolutely
separate regions of being; . . . two regions without communication. (XXXIX)
being is opaque to itself precisely because it is filled with itself. (XLI)
The necessary condition for our saying not is that non-being be a perpetual
presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunt being. (11)
Negation cannot touch the nucleus of Being, which is absolute plenitude
and entire positivity. By contrast Non-being is a negation which aims at this
nucleus of absolute density. Non-being is denied at the heart of being. (15)
Non-being exists only on the surface of being. (16)
Nothingness carries being in its heart. (18)
214
If I emerge in nothingness beyond the world, how can this extra-mundane

nothingness furnish a foundation for those little pools of non-being which we
encounter each instant in the depth of being? (19)
There is an infinite number of realities which are not only objects of
judgement, but which in their inner structure are inhabited by negation, as
by a necessary condition of their existence. (21)
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of beinglike a worm. (21)
The questioner nihilates himself in relation to the thing questioned by
wrenching himself from being in order to be able to bring out of himself the
possibility of non-being. (23)
Human freedom precedes essence in man and makes it possible; the essence
of the human being is suspended in his freedom. (25)
Every psychic process of nihilation implies then a cleavage between
the immediate psychic past and the present. This cleavage is precisely
nothingness. (27)
Freedom is the human being putting his past out of play by secreting his
own nothingness. (28)
Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode
of not-being. (32)
The immediate is the world with its urgency and in this world where I
engage myself, my acts cause values to spring up like partridges. (38)
Bad Faith provides us with a permanent game of excuses. (40)
If I am anguish in order to flee it, that presupposes that I can decenter myself
in relation to what I am, that I can be anguish in the form of not-being it,
that I can dispose of a nihilating power at the heart of anguish itself. (44)
a perpetually disintegrating synthesis and a perpetual game of escape
from the For-itself to the For-others and from the For-others to the Foritself. (58)
One puts oneself in bad faith as one goes to sleep and one is in bad faith as
one dreams. Once this mode of being has been realized, it is as difficult to
get out of it as to wake oneself up. (68)
A N OT E ON B E ING AND N OTH INGNESS
This perpetual act by which the In-itself degenerates into presence to itself
we shall call an ontological act. (79)
as a perpetually evanescent totality, being-in-itself must be given as the
evanescent contingency of my situation. (83)
the contingency which paralyzes these motivations to the same degree as
they totally found themselves is the facticity of the For-itself. (83-4)
Facticity resides in the For-itself as a memory of being, as its unjustifiable
presence in the world. (84)
Value is everywhere and nowhere; at the heart of the nihilating relation
reflection-reflecting, it is present and out of reach, and it is simply lived as
the concrete meaning of that lack which makes my present being. (95)
We shall use the expression Circuit of Selfness for the relation of the Foritself with the possible which it is, and world for the totality of being in so
far as it is traversed by the Circuit of Selfness. (102)
The world is mine because it is haunted by possibles. (104)
memory presents to us the being which we were, accompanied by a
plenitude of being which confers on it a sort of poetry. That grief which we
hadalthough fixed in the pastdoes not cease to present the meaning of a
For-itself, and yet it exists in itself with the silent fixity of the grief of another,
the grief of a statue. (119)
The For-itself is present to being in the form of flight; the Present is a
perpetual flight in the face of being. (123)
The Future is the ideal point where the sudden infinite compression of
facticity (Past), of the For-itself (Present), and of the possible (a particular
future) will at last cause the Self to arise as the existence in-itself of the Foritself. (128)
To be free is to be condemned to be free. (129)
The mode of being of the For-itself is diasporatic. (136)
the For-itself, dispersed in the perpetual game of reflected-reflecting, escapes
itself in the unity of one and the same flight. Here being is everywhere and
nowhere: wherever one tries to seize it, it is there before one, it has escaped.
215
216
It is this game of musical chairs at the heart of the For-itself which is presence
to being. (142)
Thus the time of consciousness is human reality which temporalizes
itself as the totality which is to itself its own incompletion; it is nothingness
slipping into a totality as a detotalizing ferment. This totality which runs
after itself and refuses itself at the same time, . . . can under no circumstances
exist within the limits of an instant. (149)
Impure reflection is an abortive effort on the part of the For-itself to be
another while remaining itself. (161)
We use the term psyche for the organized totality of these virtual and
transcendental existents which form a permanent cortege for impure
reflection (163)
The psyche object appears as an unachieved and probable totality there
where the For-itself makes itself exist in the diasporatic unity of a detotalized
totality. (165)
It is precisely because it [quantity] does not belong to either things or to
totalities that it is isolated and detached from the surface of the world as a
reflection of nothingness cast on being. (191)
The ideal fusion of the lacking with the one which lacks what is lacking is
an unrealizable totality which haunts the For-itself and constitutes its very
being as a nothingness of being. (194)
Thus the world is revealed as haunted by absences to be realized, and each
this appears with a cortege of absences which point to it and determine
it. . . . Since each absence is being-beyond-beingi.e. an absent-initselfeach this points toward another state of its being or toward other
beings. But of course this organization of indicative complexes is fixed
and petrified in In-itself; hence all these mute and petrified indications,
which fall back into the indifference of isolation at the same time that they
arise, resemble the fixed, stony smile in the empty eyes of a statue. (199)
This connection in isolation, this inert relation within the dynamic is what
we call the relation of means to end. It is a being-for which is degraded,
laminated by exteriority. (200)
the For-itself apprehends temporality on being, as a pure reflection which
plays on the surface of being without any possibility of modifying being. (206)
This exteriority-to-self . . . appears as a pure disorder of being. (212)

Motion is the upsurge of the exteriority of indifference at the very heart of the
In-itself. This pure vacillation of being is a contingent venture of being. (213)
universal time is revealed as present vacillation; already in the past it is no
longer anything but an evanescent line, like the wake of a ship which fades
away; in the future it is not at all, for it is unable to be its own project. It is
like the steady progression of a lizard on the wall. (213)
time appears as a finite, organized form in the heart of an indefinite
dispersion. The lapse of time is the result of a compression of time at the
heart of an absolute decompression and it is the project of ourselves toward
our possibilities which realizes the compression. (215)
Thus time appears through trajectories. But just as spacial trajectories
decompose and collapse into pure static spaciality, so the temporal trajectory
collapses as soon as it is not simply lived as that which objectively implies our
expectation of ourselves . . . time is revealed as the shimmer of nothingness on
the surface of a strictly a-temporal being. (216)
To the extent that the Other is an absence he escapes nature. (228)
Consciousnesses are directly supported by one another in a reciprocal
imbrication of their being. (236)
The Other is the test of my being inasmuch as he throws me outside of
myself toward structures which at once both escape me and define me. (245)
The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a
fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which
undermines the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting. (255)
it appears that the world has a kind of drain hole in the middle of its being
and that it is perpetually flowing off through this hole. (256)
My original fall is the existence of the Other. (263)
My being for others is a fall through absolute emptiness toward objectivity.
. . . Thus myself-as-object is neither knowledge nor a unity of knowledge
but an uneasiness, a lived wrenching away from the ecstatic unity of the Foritself, a limit which I cannot reach and which yet I am. (275)
217
218
When objectivized the prenumerical reality of the Other is decomposed and

pluralized. (282)
Shame is the feeling of an original fall, not because of the fact that I may
have committed this or that particular fault but simply that I have fallen
into the world in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of the
Other in order to be what I am. (289)
Modesty and in particular the fear of being surprised in a state of nakedness
are only a symbolic specification of original shame. (289)
It is precisely through its results that we apprehend fear, for it is given to
us as a new type of internal haemorrhage in the worldthe passage from the
world to a type of magical existence. (295
Thus the Other-as-object is an explosive instrument which I handle with
care because I foresee around him the permanent possibility that they are
going to make it explode and that with this explosion I shall suddenly
experience the flight of the world away from me and the alienation of my
being. (297)
The relation which I establish between the Others body and the external
object are really existing relations, but they have for their being the being
of the for-others; they suppose a center of intra-mundane flow in which
knowledge is a magic property of space, action at a distance. (305)
knowledge can be only an engaged upsurge in a determined point of view
which one is. (308)
the world as the correlate of the possibilities which I am appears from the
moment of my upsurge as the enormous skeletal outline of all my possible
actions. . . . The world is revealed as an always future hollow, for we are
always future to ourselves. (322)
A dull and inescapable nausea perpetually reveals my body to my
consciousness. . . . We must not take the term nausea as a metaphor derived
from our physiological disgust. On the contrary, we must realize that it is
on the foundation of this nausea that all concrete and empirical nauseas
(nausea caused by spoiled meat, fresh blood, excrement, etc.) are produced
and make us vomit. (338-9)
The flesh is the pure contingency of presence. (343)
motion is a disorder of being. (348)

this instrument which I am is made-present to me as an instrument
submerged in an infinite instrumental series, although I can in no way view
this series by surveying it. (352)
But precisely because I exist by means of the Others freedom, I have no
security; I am in danger in this freedom. It moulds my being and makes me
be, it confers values upon me and removes them from me; and my being
receives from it a perpetual passive escape from self. (366)
In love it is not a determinism of the passions which we desire in the
Other nor a freedom beyond reach; it is a freedom which plays the role of
a determinism of the passions and which is caught in its own role. (367)
in desire there is an attempt at the incarnation of consciousness (this is what
we called earlier the clogging of consciousness, a troubled consciousness, etc.)
in order to realize the incarnation of the Other. (391)
The world is made ensnaring; consciousness is engulfed in a body which is
engulfed in the world. (392)
Desire is an attitude aiming at enchantment. Since I can grasp the Other
only in his objective facticity, the problem is to ensnare his freedom with this
facticity. It is necessary that he be caught in it as the cream is caught up by
a person skimming milk. So the Others For-itself must come to play on the
surface of his body, and be extended all through his body; and by touching
this body I should finally touch the Others free subjectivity. (394)
Thus the other meaning of my incarnationthat is, of my troubled
disturbanceis that it is a magical language. (396)
sadism and masochism are the two reefs on which desire may founder. . . . It is
because of this inconsistency on the part of desire and its perpetual oscillation
between these two perils that normal sexuality is commonly designated as
sadistic-masochistic. (404)
this explosion of the Others look in the world of the sadist causes the
meaning and goal of sadism collapse. (406)
The person who say Us then reassumes in the heart of the crowd the original
project of love, but it is no longer on his own account; he asks a Third to
save the whole collectivity in its very object-state so that he may sacrifice his
219
220
freedom to it. Here as above disappointed love leads to masochism. . . . The

monstrous materiality of the crowd and its profound reality (although only
experienced) are fascinating for each of its members; each one demands to
be submerged in the crowd-instrument by the look of the leader. (422)
When I deliberate the chips are down. . . . When the will intervenes,
the decision is taken, and it has no other value than that of making the
announcement. (451)
By the sole fact that our choice is absolute, it is fragile. (465)
If the given cannot explain the intention, it is necessary that the intention by
its very upsurge realize a rupture with the given, whatever this may be. (478)
my freedom eats away my freedom. (480)
The For-itself discovers itself as engaged in being hemmed in by being,
threatened by being. (487)
the upsurge of freedom is the crystallization of an end across a given and the
revelation of a given in the light of an end. (508)
death is a boundary and every boundary (whether it be final or initial) is a
Janus bifrons. (531)
freedom enchains itself in the world as a free project toward ends. (551)
man condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his
shoulders. (553)
In knowing, consciousness attracts the object to itself and incorporates it
in itself. Knowledge is assimilation . . . to know is to devour it yet without
consuming it. We see here how the sexual and alimentary currents mingle
and interpenetrate in order to constitute the Actaeon complex and the Jonah
complex; we can see the digestive and sensual roots which are reunited to
give birth to the desire of knowing. (579)
all serious thought is thickened by the world; it coagulates; it is a dismissal of
human reality in favor of the world. (580)
sliding appears as identical with a continuous creation. The speed is
comparable to consciousness and here symbolizes consciousness. (584)
But creation is an evanescent concept which can exist only through its
movement. If we stop it, it disappears. (591)
No particular act of utilization really realizes the enjoyment of full
possession, but it refers to other appropriative acts, each one of which has
the value of an incantation. (592)
my freedom is a choice of being God and all my acts, all my projects translate
this choice and reflect it in a thousand and one ways. (599)
A psychoanalysis of things and of their matter ought above all to be
concerned with establishing the way in which each thing is the objective
symbol of being and of the relation of human reality to this being. (603)
What is the metaphysical purport of yellow, of red, of polished, of wrinkled?
And after these elementary questions, what is the metaphysical coefficiency of
lemon, of water, of oil, etc.? (604)
slimy . . . represents in itself a dawning triumph of the solid over the
liquidthat is, a tendency of the indifferent In-itself, which is represented
by the pure solid, to fix the liquidity, to absorb the For-itself which ought to
dissolve it. Slime is the agony of water. (607)
Here we can see the symbol which abruptly discloses itself: there exists
a poisonous possession; there is a possibility that the In-itself might absorb
the For-itself, that is, that a being might be constituted in a manner just the
reverse of the In-itself . . . Slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sickly-sweet,
feminine revenge which will be symbolized on another level by the quality
sugary. (609)
Thus in the project of appropriating the slimy, the sliminess is revealed
suddenly as a symbol of antivalue: it is a type of being not realized but
threatening which will perpetually haunt consciousness as the constant
danger which it is fleeing, and hence will suddenly transform the project of
appropriation into a project of flight. (611)
Man is a useless passion. (615)
The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself;
it is like a hole of being at the heart of being. . . . The For-itself is like a tiny
nihilation which has its origin at the heart of Being; and this nihilation is
sufficient to cause a total upheaval to happen to the In-itself. This upheaval
is the world. (6178)
221
222
The real is an abortive effort to attain to the dignity of the self-cause.

Everything happens as if the world, man, and man-in-the-world succeeded
in realizing only a missing God. Everything happens as if the In-itself and the
For-itself were presented in a state of disintegration in relation to an ideal
synthesis. (623)
Man pursues being blindly by hiding from himself the free project which
is this pursuit. He makes himself such that he is waited for by all the tasks
placed along his way. (626)
P A R T
T H R E E
The Challenge of History
Introduction
A F T E R T HE S E C ON D WO RLD WA R Jean-Paul Sartres direct participation in
politics changed beyond recognition. As he modestly wrote about his role in
the resistance movement during the war: all I did was a few errands.1 After
the war the role assumed by him in politics could only be described as ever
more prominently active.
Indeed, for some time Sartre even maintained the idea of exercising a
seminal influence in the establishment of a fully independent political movement which was supposed to assemble under a large electoral umbrella
the individuals who would openly distance themselves from the political
partiesin a movement naively misnamed as the R.D.R.2which could
only fail, as we have seen above.
Nevertheless, Sartres personal impact on political events and developments, not only in France but also internationally, could only increase
in a most remarkable way almost until the last two or three years of his life.
Indeed his influence continued to grow much more than that of any other
intellectual in Europe, and in other parts of the world. This became possible partly through the great periodical which he founded and for many
years actively edited, Les Temps Modernes, and even more so through his
powerful writings conceived in the spirit of a passionate advocacy of the
most radical emancipatory causes sustained by Sartre, not only in philosophical and political theory but also in the world of the theatre and the
medium of the film.
226
Inevitably, controversyeven of the sharpest and bitterly condemnatory kindbecame an integral part of Sartres direct involvement in political
matters very soon in the aftermath of the war, carrying with it equally ferocious attacks voiced against him from opposite directions. As we have seen
earlier, Sartre was denounced not only as the manufacturer of war machine
against marxism3 and the Hyena of the pen,4 by one side, but also as a
systematic blasphemist and a patented corruptor of youthand even as
the grave-digger of the West5by the other. Naturally, in order to successfully assert the causes he went on advocating, it was very far from sufficient to
defiantly rejectwhich Sartre in a most outspoken manner always didthe
often prejudiced and blind condemnations leveled against him. In political
terms, if he wanted to prevail, many things had to be radically reconsidered
and clearly redefined by Sartre himself.
A critical reexamination of his earlier political stance became unavoidable for Sartre once the illusions attached by him to the wishfully projected
role of stillborn political formations like the R.D.R. had to be abandoned
as a result of the increasing polarization experienced all over the world in
the postwar years. For those years had precipitously brought with them
the military establishment of the Atlantic Alliance of NATO and the corresponding domination of world politics by the United States of America.
Thus the question arose of constituting a political force organizationally
suited to counter the dangerously advancing trend toward yet another
world-wide conflagrationswitching from the cold war openly pursued
ever since Churchills belligerent Fulton Speech in August 1946to what
ultimately could not turn out to be other than a truly catastrophic war in the
age of the fully operative atomic Weapons of Mass Destruction, possessed at
that time only by the United States, as proved by Hiroshima and Nagasaki.6
In Sartres view, subsequent to his rejection of the R.D.R. perspective, the
only organized political movement in France capable of effectively facing up
to this issue, provided that it succeeded in overcoming its past failures and
contradictions deplored by Sartre already before the Second World War, was
the Communist Party. And Sartre certainly hoped to greatly contribute to the
positive solution of the identified contradictions through his own political
and ideological influence as a militant theoretician and creative writer.
Although Sartre never joined the French Communist Party as a cardcarrying member, his relationship with it greatly improved after the immediate postwar years, which were characterized by bitter controversy not
only in France but also in the international communist movement. Parallel
to the improvement of his relationship with the party in France in the early
227
1950s, in the same period his stature as an outstanding intellectual of the left
became clearly acknowledged in the whole of Eastern Europe as well as in
the Soviet Union itself.
But even under the best of circumstances the rapport between Sartre
and the French CP remained a rather uneasy one. Indeed, in October 1956,
as a result of the French CPs totally subservient approval of the Soviet military repression of the Hungarian uprising, it resulted in a sharp condemnation of the party by Sartre, even if he tried to leave the door open to a more
positive future.
However, the conflicts during the Algerian war, with no significant
improvement in subsequent years, were leading toward a complete break,
brought about at the time of the French explosion of May 1968. Thus
Sartres earlier quoted paradoxical formulation of the reasons for critically
distancing himself from the party in Franceaccording to which co-operation with the Communist Party is both necessary and impossible7had
to be irretrievably abandoned in the end. He considered such break absolutely necessary notwithstanding the fact that he could not indicate any real
alternative to what in his own view would be required by an organizationally sustainable force fit to counter the new historical danger, as he openly
admitted a year later.8
TO BE S U R E , SART R E S S EVERE critique of the strategic orientation pursued
by the French Communist Party, which pointed in the direction of their
ultimate break, was not initiated at the time of the military repression of the
Hungarian uprising in 1956. As a matter of fact Sartre prophetically warned
the CPnot after the role it played in the Hungarian October and thereafter,
but way back in February 1956 9 against the far-reaching consequences
of its failure to adopt the right strategic perspective and the corresponding
course of action, without which it would be impossible for the party to avoid
the fateful impact of the false choices following from projecting a revolution
emptied of its content10 and a reformism which will end up destroying the
substance of the Party.11
Ironically, the French CPwhich among the major Communist
Parties of the Third International was by far the most heavily tainted
with dogmatic Stalinism in its practice of emptying the revolution of
its contentin due course (as if it wanted to prove Sartre unreservedly
right) also ended up destroying the substance of the Party by capitulating to self-delusory reformism which had put an end even to its once
noteworthy electoral effectiveness.
228
The year 1956 constituted a major line of demarcation in postwar history,

due to the fundamental contradiction between officially announcing
through Nikita Khrushchev, the General Secretary of the Soviet Party, at the
Twentieth Party Congressthe much needed program of destalinization,
followed by its dramatic failure to turn it into reality as painfully demonstrated by the Soviet military response to the popular uprising in Hungary.
Nevertheless we were still very far from the time when the major Communist
Parties in the West, including not only the French but also the Italian CP,
would transform themselves into neoliberal political entities, just as traditional social democracy had done.
Understandably, therefore, even after the traumatic year of 1956, Sartre
was still hoping for a change for the better, trying to exercise his influence on
the French Party in favor of the destalinization promised first in the USSR
and then in the world communist movement in general. This is how he
expressed his still remaining hope in the book-length critical essay entitled
Le Fantme de Stalin, in the triple issue of Les Temps Modernes dedicated
to the Hungarian uprising:
Notre programme est clair: travers cent contradictions, des luttes intestines,
des massacres, la dstalinisation est en cours; cest la seule politique effective
qui serve, dans le moment prsent, le socialisme, la paix, le rapprochement
des partis ouvriers: avec nos resources dintellectuels, lus par des intellectuels,
nous essaierons daider la dstalinisation du Parti franais.12
More or less at the same time, in theoretically more important terms,

Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason was conceived in the same spirit of
attempting to bring more closely together those intellectuals who would be
positively disposed toward socialism. In other words, Sartre was trying to formulate his new approach to philosophical method and history in his Critique
of Dialectical Reason in order to offer a theoretical framework also politically
more acceptable to the left in general. In this sense he advocated a new philosophical and historical orientation in which the once firmly asserted rejection
of marxism by Sartrean existentialism could be remedied by the notion of existentialism itself becoming an ideological enclave within marxism.
Accordingly, in his Problem of Method, published in September and
October 1957 in Les Temps Modernes,13 he praised most generously the
writing of Henri Lefbvreone of the most prominent intellectuals of
the French Communist Partyfor his approach to philosophical methodology and anthropology, as we have seen above.14 The same Henri
229
Lefbvre who once crudely dismissed Sartre himself as the manufacturer

of war machine against marxism.15 This could only underline the double
generosity of the Sartrean praise conferred on Lefbvre in The Problem
of Method. Sartres by no means simply tactical/political but in a genuine
theoretical way intended redefinition of existentialism as an ideological
enclave within marxism, must be the subject of a much closer scrutiny in
the remaining chapters of this book.
T H E C ONTAT / RYBAL K A CH RO NO LO G IE B IB LIO G RA PH IE C OM M E N T E of
Les crits de Sartre indicates that the text of Questions de mthode was
incorporated in the Gallimard edition of the Critique of Dialectical Reason
without major changes.16 This is true, with one significant qualification.
The necessary qualification concerns the removal by Sartre himself of a
few lines in which the politically infuriated author of Questions de mthode
sharply insulted Lukcs on the basis of an accusation leveled against the
Hungarian philosopher without the slightest justification.
The reason for Sartres fury was a characteristic but total misinformation communicated to him by some Hungarian emigrs who lived in
Paris. According to that misinformation Lukcs, after being released from
Rumanian deportation, returned to Budapest and actively supported Jnos
Kdrs government set up by the Soviets in Hungary after the military
repression of the uprising.
As I wrote in a letter to Lukcs, posted to him from Paris in November
1957, I made Sartres acquaintance at a conference and he invited me to his
home, where yesterday we had a two hours long conversation. His apartment,
in rue Bonaparte near Boulevard Saint Germain, was the same one which he
had to abandon later, because it was bombed by the French extreme right
on the 19th of July 1961. There I told Sartre that the accusation of Lukcss
capitulation after his return to Budapest was totally absurd. For, in truth, at
the time Lukcs lived under house arrest, receiving the sharpest orchestrated
attacks in the Hungarian press, and refused to make even a minimal concession. On the contrary, when he was threatened, he defiantly reminded Jnos
Kdr in a letter addressed to him, that in Imre Nagys shortlived government (of which they both were members) Kdr himself curiously voted in
favor of abandoning the East European military alliance called the Warsaw
Pactwhich gave the Soviets the legalistic pretext for their military intervention on the 4th of Novemberwhereas Lukcs firmly argued and voted at
the crucial ministerial meeting against taking such a fateful step. And indeed
it was Lukcs who had been proved to be right.
230
Moreover, the Hungarian philosopher behaved with the greatest moral

integrity and personal courage even under the most dangerous circumstances, including the inquisition which he had to suffer, together with other
members of Imre Nagys Government deported to Rumania. When he was
placed there under duress and pressed to make a confession against Imre
Nagy, with whom Lukcs had honorable comradely differences in approach
to some political matters for many years, he forcefully retorted to his inquisitors in these words: when Imre Nagy and I are free to walk the streets of
Budapest, I am willing to express with full openness my political disagreements with him; but I make no confession against my fellow-prisoner.17
In this spirit, when his close friend Zoltn Sznt yielded to inquisitorial
pressure in the same setting in Rumania, and spoke out against Imre Nagy,
Lukcs in the presence of other people demonstratively broke off at once his
lifelong friendship with the man who inexcusably made his confession an
accusation against their fellow-prisoner.18
Naturally, Sartres furious insulting words against Lukcs, already published in the first French version of Questions de mthode in Les Temps
Modernes, could not be undone. But in our conversation, as I reported it to
Lukcs, Sartre expressed his great regret, saying that he has been badly
misled, and he promised me that he would cut out the offensive words when
the book itself is published, which he actually did. The final version of the
text was scheduled to appear in the Gallimard edition of Sartres Critique of
Dialectical Reason, using Questions de mthode as its long introduction.
And that was the versionwithout the groundlessly insulting words against
Lukcswhich came to be used in the English as well as in the other foreign
language translations of Sartres widely read Questions de mthode.
There was also another major reason why I went to see Sartre on the
28th of November 1957. In fact I tried to do so more than two years earlier,
in September 1955. Unfortunately, however, right at that time in 1955 Sartre
was traveling with Simone de Beauvoir in China, and I could only discuss the
matter with Francis Jeanson, then Managing Editor of Les Temps Modernes,
since soon after seeing Jeanson I had to return to Hungary.
The important reason at issue already in 1955 was my attempt to establish a working contact and ongoing cooperation between Sartre and Lukcs.
I knew from Lukcs himself that he was most positively disposed toward
an exchange, possibly even a very intensive exchange, of views and cooperation with Sartre. The need and the occasion for establishing it was even
greater in 1957 than in 1955. For both Sartre and Lukcs were working in
that period on very similar problems. Sartre was deeply immersed then in
231
the monumental work of the Critique of Dialectical Reason,19 of which the

first volume was to appear in January 1960, with its continuation in a second
volume planned for a year or two later, while Lukcs was working on his
equally monumental systematic Aesthetic andwhat could only have been of
especial interest to Sartreon his Ontology of Social Being. We had a positive conversation about this matter with Sartre, who was welcoming the idea
of an ongoing working relationship with the Hungarian philosopher, highly
respected by him,20 and he promised me that he would presently write a
letter to Lukcs to establish their cooperation.
A day after visiting Sartre I described this encounter in my letter sent
to Lukcs, which he did receive.21 I mentioned in it also the fact that
Sartre expressed his most sincere disposition to resume a positive intellectual exchange of views, expressing also his desire to publish in Les Temps
Modernes a part of [Lukcss] Die Gegenwartsbedeutung des kritischen
Realismus22 and through Gallimard the whole book. I was stressing at the
same time in this letter to Lukcs my own conviction that we need today
such an exchange of intellectual dialogue more than ever,23 adding that I
imagine that by now you have received Sartres letter.
Sadly, however, the potentially most fruitful cooperation between these
two outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century did not materialize.
Three months later Lukcs himself wrote to me from Budapest24 that he
never received the promised letter from Sartre. Naturally, this does not
mean that Sartre never sent the letter in question. For precisely the years
1957-1960 constituted the period when Lukcs was under very heavy state
control, and Sartres letter, which undoubtedly would have strengthened
Lukcss embattled position, could have very easily disappeared in some
secret archive, as numerous other documents directly related to Lukcss
political and intellectual activity, going back all the way to the 1920s, did
indeed actually disappear for some considerable period. If actually sent by
Sartre, as promised, also this letter might one day re-emerge, like some other
documents did from time to time, including the lengthy study written by
Lukcs in 1925 or 1926 in defense of History and Class Consciousness25 and
also the text of his famous Blum Theses.
Today, after having read and re-read Sartres Critique of Dialectical
Reason and Lukcss Ontology of Social Being, I am more than ever convinced that such an ongoing cooperation between their authors would have
been positive to both of the major synthesizing projects which they had been
working on during those critical years.
232
after his conflicts with the French

Communist Party over the Soviet military response to the Hungarian
popular uprising was followed by an even more traumatic period in the
midst of the Algerian war.
He always took a most courageous stand against the atrocities committed by the French military, exposing himself not only to repressive state
measures but also to direct threats to his life. Francis Jeansonwho was
truly devoted to Sartre ever since the publication of his own book on Le
Problme moral et la pense de Sartre, in 194726abandoned his position
in 1957 as Managing Editor of Les Temps Modernes because of his strong
disagreement with Sartre over the most outspoken critique of the French
CP expressed by the author of Le Fantme de Stalin concerning Hungary.
During the Algerian war, however, Jeanson published with his group of militant intellectuals a clandestine monthly journal to which Sartre gave a defiant
interview in June 1959 openly under his name. In this powerful interview
Sartre called for the most active solidarity of the French working class with
the persecuted Algerian combatants, exposing himself thereby to the danger
of a trial by a military tribunal. This is how Sartre and Jeanson reconstituted
their close friendship, through a deeply shared cause and the corresponding
imperative of their common struggle.
In the same period, Sartre forcefully sided with Henri Alleg, a most courageous militant who was fighting in clandestinity against the Algerian war
and published in 1958under the title: La Question27his moving account
and compelling denunciation of being tortured by the French parachutists
in Algeria. Allegs work had been immediately impounded and destroyed
on the order of the French Government. Indeed, the seriousness of the
situation was clearly underlined by the fact that the order imposed by the
Government against Henri Allegs La Question was the first such repressive
measure against an intellectual work in France since the Eighteenth Century.
Sartres rejoinder on the subject, entitled Une Victoire, was equally
powerful. It was published in the weekly journal LExpress, on the 6th of
March 1958, generating great indignation on the right and in government
circles. As a result not only the March 6, 1958 issue of LExpress was immediately confiscated and destroyed but also the other publications which
reprinted Sartres expression of solidarity with Alleg, in a continued defiance of the French government order, suffered the same fate.
In this critical period the danger of a military coup, actively promoted
by the colonizers in Algeria and in other parts of the still existing French
empire, was not very far from the darkening political horizon of France, and
T H E DI F F IC U LT YE AR F O R SA RTRE
233
Sartre was in the forefront of all those who warned and did everything they
could against it. This danger did not disappear even after General de Gaulle
assumed again the Presidency of the French Republic. On the contrary, the
atrocities and outrages committed by the military supporters of the colonizers in Algeria and in Indo-China continued for years, as demonstrated
also by the bombing of Sartres apartment on more than one occasion, as
earlier mentioned.
This picture became even more complicated, and darker with regard
to its personal dangers for Sartre and for his deeply committed intellectual
comrades, by the worsening international situation, and especially by the
far-reaching impact of the war of the United States against Vietnam. As is
well known, also under such circumstances Sartre did everything possible
to expose in public the fateful implications and the potentially most devastating consequences of that war, maintaining with great determination his
longstanding anti-war stand.
We should recall in this connection that already way back in 1951-1952
Sartre intervened on behalf of Henri Martin, who as a young soldier had
to take part in the French colonial war against the people fighting for their
independence in Vietnam, despite his clearly expressedbut by the military
authorities rejectedconscientious objection to it. After returning to France,
still a soldier in Toulon, Henri Martin wrote and distributed leaflets of protest
against the French imperialist war. As a result he was sentenced to five years
imprisonment by a military tribunal in Toulon. Sartres intervention in his
interest was in connection with that sentence, intended by the military authorities to serve as a general deterrent. In January 1952 Sartre was stressing in
his conversation with Vincent Auriol, President of the French Republic at
that time, the absurd severity of the military tribunals judgement against
Henri Martin. Moreover, following his encounter with Vincent Auriol, in an
interview given to the journal Action Sartre underlined the moral justice of
the young generations rebellion under the circumstances,28 and he played a
prominent role also in publishing the collective volume on the whole issue.29
As history repeated itself a decade later, replacing the military oppression of French colonialism in Indo-China with the new form of global
hegemonic imperialism embodied in the United States of America and its
escalating war against Vietnam, Sartre condemned in the strongest possible
terms the continuing colonial military aggression against the Vietnamese
people. He raised his voice in every way he could, forcefully presiding over
the Bertrand Russell Tribunal which pilloried the principal political figures
who supported the imperialist military adventures as war criminals.
234
Sartres tireless advocacy of the fundamental progressive social and

political causes were pursued with absolute consistency and growing intensity throughout the postwar period. Understandably, his passionate militancy generated the vituperative fury of the conservative and reactionary
forces in France. But nothing could deter him from taking the side, in the
clearest possible terms, of the persecuted and the oppressed whenever
people asked for his support, as they continued to do. Not even when his
personal safety was quite obviously at stake. At the height of the conflict
arising from the Algerian war and of its sharply divisive aftermath, the most
reactionary representatives of the French state authorities wanted to induce
General de Gaulle to order Sartres imprisonment. It is a measure of de
Gaulles stature that he brushed them aside in no uncertain way by saying:
one doesnt arrest Voltaire!
SA RT R E S NE E D TO R E C O NSID ER H IS CO NCEPTIO N O F H I STORY in terms
of its painfully tangible reality, with its explosive conflicts and social
determinations, was closely connected with his witnessing how the cold
war was being transformed into hot war in different parts of the world,
foreshadowing the obvious danger of humanitys total destruction as the
ultimate implication of the unfolding developments.
In France the political polarization in the early 1950s assumed the form
of imprisoning major political figures of the left, like Alain Le Lap, the
General Secretary of the oldest and most influential trade union movement,
the C.G.T., and even the arrest of some high-ranking communist politicians
with parliamentary immunity, like Jacques Duclos, who took an active part
in organizing the demonstration against General Ridgway in Paris on May
28, 1952. As for the unforgivable crime of the imprisoned C.G.T. General
Secretary, it was decreed to be his demoralization of the nation, on the
ground that he was opposed to the French colonial war in Vietnam.30
This was the period when the relationship between Sartre and the
Communist Party greatly improved. The reason why Sartre sought the
improvement was inseparable from his concern for finding an organizationally effective ground for countering the dangerous trend toward another
global conflagration and thereby the annihilation of humanity. This stand
by Sartre represented, since 1949, a critical and also deeply self-critical
position, acknowledging the irreversible failure of the R.D.R. as a feasible
independent political force, and explicitly distancing himself at the same
time also from the illusory promotion of the American Gary Daviss movement calling itself the Citizens of the World. That movement was naively
235
favored and even actively promoted in France by Albert Camus, a great

writer and the editor of the journal Combat, but judged with utmost scepticism by Sartre himself.31
In protest against the growing military rearmament, the Atlantic Pact,
the ongoing wars in the Far East, and the threat of another global war,
Sartre joined the World Peace Movement and wrote a series of very long
critical articles entitled Les Communistes et la Paix, published originally
in several issues of Les Temps Modernes and made available much later in
English by Hamish Hamilton in the volume: The Communists and Peace:
With an Answer to Claude Lefort.32 In this series of combative articles Sartre
was castigating with extreme sarcasm not only the accommodatory position
of the traditional social democratic forces but also the contradictory and
utterly unreal attentism of the sectarian left which failed to take seriously
the great danger of humanitys potential destruction.
This is how Sartre summed up his position at the end of the second
article of Les Communistes et la Paix,33 published in Les Temps Modernes
in October-November 1952:
Already it is whispered, Are you mad! To want an independent left linked
with the Party! Do you want the Party to recover its influence over the
masses? If not, let well alone, quietly; leave the disintegration to go on; one
day the Party will fall to pieces. Fortunately things have not yet reached
that point: but when they are at their worst and if you are the irreconcilable
enemy of the Party, I cannot prevent myself from finding despicable those
who wait for Communist collapse through the workers despair. I am told
that the worker will pull himself together. . . . If you are to be believed, there
is no occasion for anxiety. In twenty, fifty years, we shall see arise a new
reborn proletariat. In short, patience is the thing: after all, life is not so bad,
and anti-Communism pays.
Good. Let us wait then. Twenty years, if you like. Unless, in six months,
the Third World War breaks out. In which event it may well be that there will
be no one at the meeting place: neither you nor I, nor a liberated proletariat,
nor France.34
Inevitably, this series of sharply ironical articles resulted in Sartres irrevocable break not only with Albert Camus (who initiated the break) but also
with his once much closer friend, Merleau-Ponty, who subsequently attacked
Sartre for his alleged ultra-Bolshevism35 in the Adventures of the Dialectic:
a book celebrated by the political and academic establishment in France not
236
for theoretical but for well identifiable ideological reasons, in grateful recognition for Merleau-Pontys adhesion to the League of Abandoned Hope,36
which he himself once labelled and sharply condemned in such terms.
T H E F U NDAM E N TAL R EASO N W H Y Sartre adopted his positive stance
toward the CP in The Communists and Peace was his conviction that the
agglomeration of isolated individuals, making up also the popular masses
of the workers,37 was incapable of meeting the historical challenge of
humanitys potential destruction on the horizon. Only the workers as a
classin the Marxian sense of the class for itself could do that in Sartres
view, repeatedly expressing in these articles his full agreement on the subject
with Marx.
At the same time Sartre stressed that the Communist Party constituted
the necessary mediation without which combining and unifying the masses
of workers into the class required for the purpose of the radical transformation of the dangerously developing social order was unthinkable. Moreover,
even after his sharp conflicts with the French CP Sartre maintained the
validity of the main tenets expressed in The Communists and Peace,
although a decade later he added the qualification that in the course of its
development the party itself has become serialized and therefore lost its
ability to fulfill the necessary role of mediator which he was defending in
the much debated articles. The concepts of seriality and serialization
were developed by Sartre in his Critique of Dialectical Reason in which he
tried to elaborate the general theoretical framework of his conception of the
intelligibility of our history, including not only the categories of what he
called the formal structures of history but also a sustainable account of
real history.
In the period of the early 1950s Sartres principal concern was the fateful
eventuality of an all-destructive war. That was also a seminally important
consideration for redefining his original conception of the relationship
between man and history. In his Notebooks for an Ethicsabandoned in
1948 949this problem was approached in a most abstract way, in terms
of the structural relationship between the For-itself and the In-itself,
with the assertion of ontologically necessary failure very much in line with
his Being and Nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology. In this
sense he wrote in his Notebooks for an Ethics:
Every attempt of the For-itself to be In-itself is by definition doomed to fail.

From this we can account for the existence of Hell . . . Even though this
237
failure may be indefinitely covered over, made up for, by itself it tends to

reveal the world as a world of failure and it can push the For-itself to ask
itself the pre-judicial question of the meaning of its acts and the reason of its
failure. Then the problem gets posed as follows: Why is the human world
inevitably a world of failure, what is there in the essence of human effort such
that it seems doomed in principle to failure?38
However, when the question of failure is not postulated in terms of

the ontologically necessary failureby definitionof the abstract Foritself trying to be In-itself, but confronted as the real failure of human
beings to save themselves from nuclear annihilation, then also the figurative Hell becomes the real hell of absurdly self-imposed but preventable
human action, with identifiable human historical agencies that can and
must be stopped. For that kind of catastrophic failure cannot be indefinitely covered over, due to the unalterable absence of anybody who might
be able to do any covering over.
This is how the challenge of history assumes a concrete form, confronting
the individuals in every walk of life with real questions and real alternatives
which no one can simply ignore. Indeed, this is why history itself and the
historical agent must be reconsidered in its painful objective reality also by
the existentialist, in terms of the actual and threatening unfolding of history
under the existing conditions, which in their worsening destructiveness
are still very much part of our own predicament today. And Sartre unhesitatingly engages in facing up to such vital issue by pointing his accusing
finger at those whoblinded by determinate class interests which cannot
be effectively countered by any agglomeration of isolated individualsare
complicitously choosing the destructive alternative course of action, with
devastating overall implications, and thereby, knowingly or not, siding with
the potential termination of history. Accordingly, nothing could be clearer in
terms of Sartres explicit answer to the tangible challenge of real history than
these warning words: In order to prevent the world from following its own
course, they threaten with the suppression of history through the liquidation
of the historical agent.39
In March 1980, two weeks before dyingafter many years of dedication to the cause of positively meeting the challenge of history, punctuated
by major personal successes and grave disappointmentsSartre gave what
turned out to be his last interview. The general tone of this interview was
rather pessimistic, in tune with the pessimism which characterized the last
decade of his life, after the failure of his expectations attached to May 1968
238
and its political and organizational aftermath. In the concluding minutes of

this interview, anticipating that he might live ten or perhaps only five more
years, Sartre was referring to the invasion of Afghanistan and he reiterated
his deep concern about a third world war, saying that With this third world
war, which could break out one day, and with this miserable ensemble which
is our planet, despair comes to tempt me. . . . In any case, the world seems
to be ugly, bad, without hope. This is the quiet despair of an old man who
will die in it. However, I resist and I say that I shall die in hope, but this hope
must be founded. One must try to explain why this world of today, which is
horrible, is only a moment in the long historical development; that hope has
always been one of the dominant forces of the revolutions and insurrections;
that how much I continue to feel hope as my conception of the future.40
Sadly, two weeks later Sartre was already dead. Thus he could not elaborate as his final contribution the promised foundation of hope for his conception of the future of which only hope in despair remained to him in the
final years of his life.
6. Material and Formal Structures

of History: Critique of Sartres
Conception of Dialectical
Reason and Historical
Totalization
of The Dialectic of Structure and History,
it was one of Jean-Paul Sartres great merits as a thinker and exemplary
militant to address the fundamental question of historical totalization in the
post-Second World War period. His famous Critique of Dialectical Reason
was dedicated to the subject, announcing in its already massive first volume
the soon to be followed completion41 of this project.
It is important to bear in mind that Sartres Critiqueas published
by Gallimard in Paris in 1960, with the subtitle of Theory of Practical
Ensembleswas never intended to offer the complete picture on its own. On
the contrary, it explicitly promised the proper elaboration of the categorial
framework of real history, as the necessary complementary and indeed
the theoretical climax to Sartres project. This is how he had put it in his
Introduction to the published work:
AS M EN T IONE D IN C HA PTER 2
240
Volume I of the Critique of Dialectical Reason stops as soon as we reach

the locus of history; it is solely concerned with finding the intelligible
foundations for a structural anthropologyto the extent, of course, that
these synthetic structures are the condition of a directed, developing
totalization. Volume II, which will follow shortly, will retrace the stages of
the critical progression; it will attempt to establish that there is one human
history, with one truth and one intelligibility . . . by demonstrating that a
practical multiplicity, whatever it may be, must unceasingly totalise itself
through interiorising its multiplicity at all levels. . . . Then we shall be able to
glimpse what these two volumes together will try to prove: that necessity, as
the apodictic structure of dialectical investigation, resides neither in the free
development of interiority nor in the inert dispersal of exteriority; it asserts
itself, as an inevitable and irreducible moment, in the interiorisation of the
exterior and in the exteriorisation of the interior.42
However, there were some very good reasons why this project could
never be brought anywhere near its promised completion. The intended
analysis of real historyin contrast to the philosophical problematic outlined in the first volume of the Sartrean Critique only in terms of the formal
structures of historyrefused to materialize in the interminably growing
pages of the posthumous second volume; a manuscript amounting to a
volume of almost five hundred pages which in the end was not considered
suitable for publication by its author. For whereas Sartre had no difficulties
in illustrating the categories adopted in the published first volume with most
imaginatively used historical material, categories also accurately defined by
him as the strictly formal structures of history, the attempted evaluation
of particular conflictual situations and major historical developments discussed in the second volume remained firmly anchored, despite his intentions, to the same formal categorial framework. Thus in the end not much
choice remained to Sartre himself than to abandon his originally promised
comprehensive account of real history as the integral part and terminus ad
quem of his vision of historical totalization.
Yet, it would be quite wrong to see in this outcome the corrigible personal failure of a particular thinker. In the case of one of the outstanding
intellectual figures of the twentieth century, as Jean-Paul Sartre undeniably
happened to be, the non-realizability of an important theoretical enterpriseattempted, to be sure, from a determinate social and historical standpointhas its deep-seated objective ground and corresponding representative significance. On this particular occasion this is the case all the more
M AT E R IAL AN D F OR M AL STRUCTURES O F H ISTO RY
241
because Sartre intended to put forward his conception, in the midst of the
turmoil of some far-reaching historical events,43 as an integral part of a quest
pursued with great passion throughout his life in the service of the cause of
human emancipation.44
In this sense Sartre rejected in the strongest possible terms any idea of
a mysterious totalizer which we have seen advocated even by the greatest
thinkers of the bourgeoisie in the ascending phase of the capital systems
historical unfolding. He insisted that in any viable historical conception
people must be wholly defined by their society and by the historical movement which carries them along; if we do not wish the dialectic to become a
divine law again, a metaphysical fate, it must proceed from individuals and
not from some kind of supra-individual ensemble. the dialectic is the law
of totalization which creates several collectivities, several societies, and one
historyrealities which impose themselves on individuals; but at the same
time it must be woven out of millions of individual actions.45
Another major achievement of the Critique of Dialectical Reason is Sartres
elaboration of the categorial framework of what he calls the formal structures
of history, as we find them outlined in the work published by Gallimard in
1960, with powerfully depicted historical material, ranging from some key
episodes of the French Revolution of 1789 to twentieth century developments. These formal categoriesfrom the constitution of seriality and the
fused group to disintegrative institutionalizationas elaborated in the
first volume of the Sartrean Critique, by no means could be said to constitute
the formal structures of history in general. They are on the whole applicable
to a determinate phase of human history only, in that they encapsulate some
characteristic determinations of social interchange under the bourgeois order.
In that way, though, their potential for illuminating some important
aspects of modern historical transformations is truly remarkable. Indeed
precisely thanks to their formal structuring orientation they are well in tune
with some of the fundamental material imperatives of capitals productive order which must subsume under its fetishistically quantifying formal
equalizations and abstract homogenizing determinations the most disparate
qualities of societal metabolic interchange in which exchange value must
absolutely dominate use value, as we have seen these problems discussed
in Chapter 4 as well as in Section 6.2 of The Dialectic of Structure and
History. Thus the fact that Sartre was unable to complete his original project
of integrating the propounded formal structures of history with his intended
account of real history cannot take away anything from their explanatory
value in their own setting.
242
TO UN D E R STAND T HE INSUP ERA B LE IMPED IMENTS at the roots of Sartres

project for elucidating the problem of totalization in real history it is worth
quoting a passage from an important interview he gave in 1969 to New Left
Review. As it clearly transpires from this interview, even as late as 1969
Sartre was still promising to complete the second volume of the Critique of
Dialectical Reason, although he had already put aside its nearly five hundred
pages way back in 1958. These were his words in the 1969 interview:
The difference between the first and the second volume is this: the first is
an abstract work where I show the possibilities of exchange, degradation,
the practico-inert, series, collectives, recurrence and so on. It is concerned
only with the theoretical possibilities of their combinations. The project of
the second volume is history itself . . . my aim will be to prove that there is
a dialectical intelligibility of the singular. For ours is a singular history. . . .
What I will seek to show is the dialectical intelligibility of that which is not
universalizable.46
However, as the case turned out to be, the drafting of the second volume,
which was actually interrupted for Sartres compelling internal reasons
before the end of 1958, was never taken up again. Its abandoned manuscript
was posthumously published in French five years after Sartres death, in
1985, and in English six years later, in 1991.
Nevertheless, the destiny of this major Sartrean project was by no means
surprising. My own comment, when Sartre was still alive and fully active, on
the just quoted passage and on the anticipated unfinishability of his theory
of historical totalizationas clearly demonstrated to me by volume one of
the Critique of Dialectical Reason as well as by the 1969 interview itself
was as follows: It is extremely difficult to imagine how one can comprehend
history itself through these categories, since the problem of history is precisely how to universalize the singular without suppressing its specificity. By
contrast, however, it is very easy to see the natural transition from history to
biography, namely from this Sartrean conception of history to the project
on Flaubert. For the intelligibility of the non-universalizable singular calls
for lived experience as the basis of its comprehension. And the reconstruction of the personage through limaginaire necessarily involved in it,47 gives
us a True Legend, at the highest level of complexity. Some of the fundamental structures of history remain hidden away in the second volume of
the Critique that never comes, for they do not seem to fit into the framework
of Sartres quest.48
243
The insurmountable problem for Sartre was, and always remained, that
the way to universalize the singular without suppressing its specificity is
feasible only through the appropriate mediations which link thesocially
definedmultiplicity of particular individuals to their groups and classes
at any given time, and to the unfolding societal development across the
whole of history. Sartres answers to the question of mediation were always
extremely problematical in his conception of historical totalization. And,
again, the missing social/historical mediations from his thought were not a
corrigible absence.
To be sure, Sartre rightly stressed that history is woven out of millions
of individual actions, as we have seen his firm insistence on this issue elsewhere. However, despite a claim made explicit in the period of writing and
publishing the first volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reasonaccording
to which existentialism has been left behind by him in his later development
as no more than an ideology49some of the crucial categories developed
in his early work, prior to and during the Second World War, and indeed
most strikingly in Being and Nothingness, remained always dominant in his
philosophy. He even took back in 1975 the 1958 assertion about existentialism being merely an ideological enclave within Marxism,50 accepting
instead, and in a curious way,51 the existentialist label again.
The point of seminal importance in this respect was that by his de
factoeven if under the given political circumstances not programmatically
expressed yet persistentattempt to give an existential ontological foundation
to his own categorial framework also in the Critique of Dialectical Reason,52
Sartre barred his own road to making dialectically intelligible the process of
historical totalization in real history. Namely, he made it prohibitively difficult to envisage how it could be possible at all for the millions of individual
actionsin truth always deeply embedded in historically most specific and
dynamically interrelated social structuresto add up to a network of lawlike determinations in the proper sense of historical necessity, conceived as
progressively changing and in its modality of asserting itself in due course
vanishing necessity. The missing historical mediations played a crucial role
in derailing Sartres intended overall account of real history.
In his problematical attempt to give an ontological foundation to his own
existentialist enclave within Marxism, Sartre had to turn the eminently
historical and socially transcendable category of scarcity into a paralyzing
ahistorical and anti-historical absolute, arbitrarily proclaimed to be the insuperable permanence and the overall determination and horizon of our real
history. He did this by postulating that to say that our History is a history
244
of men is equivalent to saying that it is born and developed within the permanent framework of a field of tension produced by scarcity.53
At the same time, he repeatedly contradicted his earlier categorical assertion according to which there is no such thing as man; there are people.54
However, for the sake of the existentialistically absolutized declaration of
a perverse reciprocity between each particular individual and the mythical
Other who inhabits every individual, a direct line of identity was decreed
by Sartre to be fatefully prevailing between the ethically both rebellious
and at the same time also viciously inhuman individual and the mythical/
demonic man under the rule of permanent scarcity. It is important in this
respect to quote in some detail Sartres words from the first volume of the
Critique of Dialectical Reason:
In pure reciprocity, that which is Other than me is also the same. But in
reciprocity as modified by scarcity, the same appears to us as anti-human
in so far as this same man appears as radically Otherthat is to say,
as threatening us with death. Or, to put it another way, we have a rough
understanding of his ends (for they are the same as ours), and his means (we
have the same ones) as well as of the dialectical structures of his acts; but we
understand them as if they belonged to another species, our demonic double.
Nothingnot even wild beasts or microbescould be more terrifying for
man than a species which is intelligent, carnivorous and cruel, and which
can understand and outwit human intelligence, and whose aim is precisely
the destruction of man. This, however, is obviously our own species as
perceived in others by each of its members in the context of scarcity. . . . it
makes everyone objectively dangerous for the Other and makes the concrete
existence of each individual endanger that of the Other. Thus man is
objectively constituted as non-human, and this non-humanity is expressed in
praxis by the perception of evil as the structure of the Other.55
This ahistorical Sartrean discourse on evil as the structure of the

Otherand indeed the Other as each and every particular individualin
the Critique was articulated in such a way that with relative ease it could be
incorporated into the existentialist ontological design of his first great synthesizing philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. In this way we were told by
the marxisant56 Jean-Paul Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason that
I may try to kill, to torture, to enslave, or simply to mystify, but in any case
my aim will be to eliminate alien freedom as a hostile force, a force which
245
can expel me from the practical field and make me into a surplus man
condemned to death. In other words, it is undeniable that what I attack is
man as man, that is, as the free praxis of an organic being. It is man, and
nothing else, that I hate in the enemy, that is, in myself as Other; and it is
myself that I try to destroy in him, so as to prevent him destroying me in my
own body.57
Naturally, the passionately committed militant intellectual Sartres motivation for constructing this vision of inescapable conflict, characterized as
necessarily arising from and ruled by permanent scarcity, inseparable from
its existentialist ontological underpinning, was not the submissive defense
but the radical negation of the existent societal order. He needed the heightened ontological emphasis for his proclaimed existentialist enclave in
order to put into dramatic relief the enormity of the struggle that must be
pursued against the enemy Other, paradoxically defined as myself and
every individual self. However, by doing so without bringing into the picture
the appropriate social and historical mediationsindeed by obliterating the
vital distinction between historically insuperable first order and capitals to
be transcended antagonistic second order mediations58he ended up with
absolutizing the historically relative against his own critical intentions.
UN D E R T HE S P E C IF IC C O ND ITIO NS O F REA L H ISTO RY asserting themselves in
our time, as we are forced to live them under the structurally determined rule
of capital, the antagonistic second order mediations must always prevail.
They represent a historically in the long run absolutely untenable imposition
and domination of the established societal reproduction process, with their
ultimately destructive and self-destructive implications. The historical
supersession of such antagonistic second order mediations, no matter how
prohibitive the obstacles to their overcoming might appear under the present
conditions, is the key to the solution of the thorny issuethe veritable
vicious circle in the capital systems real historyof scarcity inseparably
combined with recklessly produced waste on the one hand and the often
oversimplified wishful counter-image of abundance on the other. The idea
of the pseudo-ontological permanence of capitals oppressive second order
mediations, postulated on the premise of historically already long before
capitals appearance imposed class domination, as the necessary structural
framework of self-imposing scarcity, is a falsely stipulated distortion. For the
relative continuity which we can find between the qualitatively different
antecedents of capitals antagonistic second order mediations and its own
246
distinctive modality of class-exploitative societal reproductive domination

by means of the economically enforced extraction of surplus labor as surplus
value, is trans-historicaland in that sense superablebut emphatically not
supra-historical.
Once, however, the existentialist ontological underpinning of Sartres
categorial framework asserts itself, offering a vision of some kind of human
condition inseparable from destructive conflict under the rule of permanent
scarcity, the original intellectual motivation of critical negation of this great
militant thinker is inevitably pushed into the background. Thus the corollary of absolutizing the relativei.e., absolutizing the historical category of
scarcity by turning it into ontologically interiorized permanencemarks its
far-reaching negative impact. This corollary of absolutizing the relative in
Sartres existentialist ontological enclave paradoxically assumes the form
of relativizing the absolute conditions of human existence by suppressing
its unique character as a historical absolute. The actually existing and, this
cannot be stressed enough, by no means ahistorical absolute constituent
of humanitys dialectical determinationnamely the forever inescapable,
and in that sense, but not in its particular modality, absolutenatural substratum of human existence is the issue here. Its unique determination as
a historical absolute remains in force none the less. For no matter to what
degree this natural substratum might (indeed must) be modified by ongoing
human productive development, in the course of the historical creation of
new needs and the corresponding extension of the conditions of their satisfaction, ultimately it always remains firmly circumscribed by nature itself.
And that circumstance also means that in as much as it is violatedwhich
continues to happen in our time to an increasingly dangerous degree in
humankinds relationship to natureit must be also unceremoniously, and
even punitively, imposed upon society by the objective requirements of
human existence itself.
Naturally, this makes absolutely imperative for humanity the positive
articulation of a viable and historically sustainable interchange of the social
individuals with nature and among themselves, as the changing but necessary social ground of their relationship to nature, if they want to avoid
self-destruction. But to do so is possible only by observing the unique and
inherently historical character of the relationship in question. Only on that
basis is it feasible to redefine in a proper way, especially under the conditions of the intensifying structural crisis of their mode of social metabolic
reproduction, the vital relationship of humanity to nature in the necessarily
open-ended historical framework of development.
247
Accordingly, it would be self-defeating to characterize in any attempted

account of real history the objective character of the natural substratum
of human existencewhich must be in the course of human development
subject to appropriate historical transformations,59 in view of the intervention of, by human beings instituted and changing, historical necessity in the
order of naturewith the timeless existentialist ontological materiality of
scarcity, postulated on the arbitrarily assumed ground that man is objectively constituted as non-human, and this non-humanity is expressed in
praxis by the perception of evil as the structure of the Other.60
To presume and repeatedly proclaim that man is objectively constituted as non-human is an existentialistically misrepresented prejudgement
of the issue, devised for the purpose of switching immediately, in the same
sentence, from the apparently neutral/objective meaning of non-human to
the fateful characterization of the non-humanity of human praxis as necessarily carrying with it the perception of evil as the structure of the Other.
The so-called objective constitution of man, called in this way by
Sartre, with regard to its primary/primitive objectivity, does not and cannot
refer at all to man, nor to an existentialistically projected demonic/mythical non-human, but only to the animal world. In relation to the being
that emerges later in historyby constituting itselfas human, it can be
legitimately called, from a human perspective, pre-human, but decidedly not in a tendentious sense, proclaimed to fit the somber spectrum
of existentialist ontology, as non-human. For prior to the open ended
historical self-constitution of the human beingof which the creation of
a new need is the first historical act, as we have seen it discussed in
The Dialectic of Structure and Historythere is no such being properly so
called as non-human in the Sartrean sense. It must be revealingly called
by Sartre in that way so that later the being in question should be easily
presentable in the spirit of existentialist ontological gloom as evil, with
its structural determination assigned to the Other embedded in every
individual self, including myself.
In actuality the natural substratum of human existence itself is not a
massive materiality but a changing social structural relationshipan
always historically specific mediationof human beings in general with
nature and among themselves. Thus this inescapable mediation is necessarily constituted and reconstituted through socially specific and historically changing human intervention in the absolutely inescapable order of
nature. In other words, it is constituted and reconstituted in the form of
the dual causality of natures own lawfulness, on the one hand (which can
248
be dynamically adapted but not violated), and the progressively modified/

displaced (and in its particular modality in due course vanishing/superseded) historical necessity, on the other.
In the same sense, the category of scarcity is from its inception an
inherently historical category, acquiring its meaning from the relationship
of its temporary (no matter how long) domination over the human beings
that under determinatethat is, historically specific and alterableconditions must suffer its power. This is far from being a self-sustaining power.
It must be simultaneously also defined as subject to becoming historically
superseded, at least in principle. Or not, as the case might be. But it is not
superseded only if the projected necessary failure of the human species is
absolutized as the all-embracing ultimate catastrophe, amounting to the termination of human history itself.
Scarcity makes no sense at all in itself and for itself as an absolute. It is
always scarcity in relation to something or someone. Moreover, even in its
objective determination as a weighty contingency it makes senseone way
or anotheronly in relation to human beings who may suffer or overcome
it, thanks to their own inherently historical determination and self-determination. Unlike humans, animals do not live in a world of scarcity. They
just liveand dieas the species-determinations of their genus-individuality permit and destine them to do.
Scarcity must therefore be understood in its appropriate historical
context, as parasitic on human history, and not as the postulated ground and
pessimistically hypostatized causal foundation of history. To say with Sartre
that history is born and developed within the permanent framework of a
field of tension produced by scarcity61 can only absolutize the relative and
relativize the absolute. For, in the latter sense, the just quoted Sartrean assertion subordinates to the hopeless vicissitudes of demonically magnified and
likewise interiorized scarcity62 the absolute imperative of instituting a viable
alternative to the established mode of social metabolic reproduction at the
present critical juncture of history. By contrast, in the framework adopted
by Sartre, the gloom of insuperably absolutized anti-historical scarcity as
the ground of historical intelligibility, wedded to the earlier quoted perverse
reciprocity between myself and the Other in me, is overwhelming.
The fact that the imperative facing human society today for adopting a
radically different mode of historically sustainable social metabolic reproduction is absolute, in direct opposition to capitals destructive pursuit of
unlimitablehence by definition always scarcecapital-expansion,
does not and cannot obliterate the inherently historical character and
249
corresponding urgency of such absolute. For all conceivable absolutes in the

human context are necessarily historical at the same time, including those
concerning the ineliminable natural substratum of human existence itself.
However, by submerging the historically determinate practical imperative
for elaborating a viable societal reproductive alternative into the generic
pseudo-absolute existentialist ontological projection of the permanent
framework of scarcity can only generate desolate pessimism63 and the noble
but impotent ought to be as its envisaged counter-image.64 There can be
no room therefore in the structurally prejudged existentialist ontological
enclave, dominated by permanent scarcity, for exploring the conditions of
feasibility of the required and historically sustainable positive alternative.
The strange result of all this is the diminishing of responsibility for the
capital system itself, notwithstanding its historically overwhelming range
of destructive second order mediations. Such responsibility is diminished
in Sartres proclaimed existentialist ideological enclave within Marxism
on account of the mythically magnified role ascribed by him to the antihistorically extended generic interiorized scarcity made by myself as the
Other. And that Other in me is hypostatized by Sartre in a form overburdened with the most unreal projection of responsibility by being characterized in an earlier quoted passage from the Critique of Dialectical Reason as
the demonic double of not only the human species in generalcalled in
that quote, as we have seen it earlier, a species which is intelligent, carnivorous and cruel, and which can understand and outwit human intelligence,
and whose aim is precisely the destruction of man65but at the same time
of every single individual member of society in their personal capacity.
This is a most peculiar way of exempting the capital system of its quite
obvious responsibility for being actually bent in our time on the very real
destruction of man rightly deplored by Sartre himself. Moreover, what
makes the kind of existentialist ontological underpinning which we have
seen in the categorial framework of the Critique of Dialectical Reason rather
paradoxical is, of course, the circumstance that Sartre would be the last
person to offer such exemption as a matter of conscious deliberation to the
inhuman power of capital. No one raises more often in a dramatic way than
Sartre himself the question of responsibility in general and the grave responsibility of the intellectuals in particular. His moral indignation and radical
negation remain always very intense. But the only historical subject he can
appeal to and try to enlist for the fights he is engaged in is the isolated particular individual.
250
T H E P O L IT IC AL D IM E N S IO N O F SA RTRES A P P ROACH to history is expressed

in a brilliant occasional piece from 1973: Elections: A Trap for Fools,66
published in Les Temps Modernes in January 1973, and as we learn with
precision from the article itself, written on the 5th of January 1973, shortly
before the French General Election under Pompidous Presidency.
Elections: A Trap for Fools is a very significant article as the political
actualization of the Sartrean formal structures of history, developed in great
detail in the first volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. For in the
Sartrean vision the categories of the Critique are perfectly applicable to
the electoral situation itself, considered by him a strictly and reprehensibly
formal structure of history.
In this respect it is directly relevant that Sartres Critique of Dialectical
Reason, as regards its inspiration, can only be understood in the context of
the dual crisis of (1) French colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria, and (2)
the deepening crisis of the Soviet type system, including the East German
(1953), the Polish (1955/56) and the Hungarian upheavals. Indeed, the
Hungarian popular explosion of October 1956 has a greater impact on
Sartres thought than any other contemporary historical event, as evidenced
by his major essay: The Phantom of Stalin as well as by the Critique of
Dialectical Reason itself.67
The formal categories elaborated by Sartre in the first volume of his
Critique of Dialectical Reason, arising to a considerable degree from his passionate assessment of this dual crisis, remain to the end the orienting principles of his interpretation of the unfolding political events and of the role to
be assigned to the individuals participating in them. This is so irrespective
of the fact that he is unable to theorize the problem of totalization in real
history either in the repeatedly promised but unfinishable second volume
of the Critique or anywhere else.68
The process of fateful serialization, corresponding to one of his most
important formal structures of history, in conjunction with the practicoinert field, is described by Sartre in Election: A Trap for Fools in most
vivid terms. Talking about the serialized individual he insists that a soldier
takes the bus, buys the newspaper, votes. All this presumes that he will make
use of collectives along with the Others. But the collectives address him as a
member of a series (the series of newspaper buyers, television watchers, etc.).
He becomes in essence identical with all the other members, differing from
them only by his serial number. We say that he has been serialized. One finds
serialization in the practico-inert field, where matter mediates between men
to the extent that men mediate between material objects. . . . serial thinking
251
is born in me, thinking which is not my own thinking but that of the Other,
which I am and also that of all the Others. It must be called the thinking of
powerlessness, because I produce it to the degree that I am Other, an enemy of
myself and of the Others, and to the degree that I carry the Other everywhere
with me.69
At the same time, the grave consequences of such serialization are graphically put into relief by saying that Now, these citizens, identical as they are
and fabricated by the law, disarmed and separated by distrust of one another,
deceived but aware of their impotence, can never, as long as they remain
serialized, form that sovereign group from which, we are told, all power emanatesthe People.70
Sartres accusing finger, as we can see, is not pointed at society in general
but to every individual. For, according to him, I as the serializedand indeed
actively self-serializingindividual am the guilty one who produces the
thinking of powerlessness, and in that way I become an enemy of myself
and of the Others. He thereby clearly ascribes responsibility not only to the
ruling societal order but directly to each one of us, looking at the same time
also for the required remedy in the form of a direct appeal to our individual
consciousness. Not surprisingly, therefore, the article of Elections: A Trap
for Fools ends with an ought to be presented as a must, by saying that
We must try, each according to his own resources, to organize the vast antihierarchic movement which fights institutions everywhere.71
The question of how the now actually serialized individuals could
prevail against the hierarchic institutions everywhere, as he invites them
to do, cannot be addressed by Sartre. Some of his centrally important categoriesindicting the power of serialization as such and the necessity of
the fused groups institutionally foreshadowed disintegration, as well as
the fateful relapse of the particular members of the group into self-imposed
serialityspeak eloquently against his own proclaimed imperative. This
is the reason why the ought to be of the unspecified mode of organization of the individuals is strongly contradicted by Sartres explicit judgement against the feasible success of organization itself. This is expressed
with great sincerity in an interview given by Sartre in 1969 to the important
Italian political movement, the Manifesto group, in these words: While I
recognize the need of an organization, I must confess that I dont see how
the problems which confront any stabilized structure could be resolved.72
in Elections: A Trap for Fools which
illuminates the political and theoretical roots of Sartres militant strategic
T H E M OST S IG NIF IC AN T PASSAGE
252
orientation, is his emphatic condemnation of the act of voting itself, in the

name of his passionate advocacy of sovereignty celebrated also in one of his
most important categories, the sovereign group.
This seminal passage of Sartres 1973 article on elections reads as
follows: When I vote, I abdicate my powerthat is, the possibility everyone
has of joining others to form a sovereign group which would have no need of
representatives.73
The importance of Sartres concern with the imperative of sovereignty
cannot be stressed strongly enough. The same idea is emphasizedindeed
idealizedby him in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the dramatic
May 1968 upheavals in France. In fact Sartre singles out the embryonic
appearance of sovereignty as the great novelty of the 1968 historical events
in general. For he insists in his sharp condemnation of the critics of the
student movement that What I reproach all those with, who insulted the
students, is that they failed to see that the students expressed a new demand:
the need for sovereignty.74
Of course, the sovereignty here referred to, wholeheartedly supported
by Sartre, is nothing less than the unique social formation which in his
view should beor, in more accurate terms, ought to bespontaneously constituted by all those who reject serialization, in opposition to the
stabilized structures whose politically favored organizational establishment is turned down by him even in one of his most succinctly articulated
political reflections on the subject, presented in the interview given to the
Manifesto group of the Italian radical left. And the mode of constituting
such sovereignty, according to Sartre, is either through some revolutionary
explosion, like May 1968 in France, or by means of the admittedly problematical organizational form brought into being by the direct appeal of
the militant intellectuals to the consciousness of the potentially anti-hierarchical individuals in general, who are said to be favorably disposed in
that way by their need for liberty.
The idea that such direct appeal might be able to produce the required
outcome is often expressed by Sartre with a confession of self-critical scepticism, even pessimism, as we have seen it earlier.75 It persists, nevertheless.
For the roots of advocating politically commended solutions in the form of
such direct appeals to individual consciousness reach back a long way in
Sartres political development. Indeed, as far as the individualistic addressee
of political enlightenment is concerned, such views reach back even more
soin fact much more sonot only into the rather remote past of French
political and intellectual history but in the philosophical tradition of the
253
European bourgeoisie in general, in terms of its earlier discussed orientation

to aggregates of individuality76 in neglect of class reality.
In terms of the political organizational form based on the idea of some
direct appeal to individual consciousness shared by Sartre, we have to
remember the Rassemblement Dmocratique Rvolutionnaire (R.D.R.)77
with which Sartre was formally associated in 1948 and 1949. He insisted
in an interview given to the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune
that such movement was addressing itself strictly to the individuals, and not
to constituted groups.78 Accordingly, the programmatic pieces written by
Sartre and his associates about thisfar from really influentialmovement
explicitly stressed the desire to be very different from the established political organizations and parties of the left. It was explicitly stated by Sartre
that they are meant to orient their individual supporters, instead, toward
the defense of some important long-standing political ideals. In this sense
he argued:
The question is not to abandon liberty; not even to abandon the abstract
liberties of the bourgeoisie, but to fill them with content . . . The first
objective of the Revolutionary Democratic Assembly is to combine the
revolutionary demands with the idea of Liberty.79
In this way, under the political circumstances of 1948, the direct appeal
to the progressive individuals remained rather vague and generic. But the
same form of direct appeal was put later into relief by Sartre in his much
more radical interpretation of May 1968, in sharp contrast to the traditional
organizational forms and parties. His stress on sovereignty, in his praise of
the students, is most relevant in that respect.
However, the most important defining characteristic of the Sartrean
position concerning the required historical alternative is precisely his categorical rejection of the act of voting itself in the passage quoted from the
1973 article. A rejection made on the ground which we have seen a little
while ago, namely that When I vote, I abdicate my powerthat is, the possibility everyone has of joining others to form a sovereign group which would
have no need of representatives.
In the form of this direct appeal to individual consciousness of the
would-be voters, dismissing the traditional state institutions and the constituted political parties, the Sartrean rejection is formulated in the spirit
of the best bourgeois tradition of the Enlightenment. We can see its close
affinity with Rousseaus radical dismissal of voting and his condemnation
254
of the parliamentary representative political system. This is how Rousseau

argues his case:
The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives;
they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every
law the people has not ratified in person is null and voidis, in fact, not a
law. The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken;
it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they
are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes of the
short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them.80
In the same way as Rousseaus self-deluding Englishmen who foolishly

renounce their power in favor of parliamentary representatives and quickly
lose their momentary liberty, which they are said to deserve, Sartres selfserializing fools, who likewise consent to abdicate their power by voting,
instead of joining others to form a sovereign group which would have no
need of representatives, they also fully deserve their fate according to the
great French marxisant existentialist intellectual.
But even so, Sartres militant adhesion in the twentieth century to the
heroic Enlightenment perspective championed by Rousseau in support
of direct democracy in the eighteenth century is paradoxical. For Sartre
formulates the most radical critique of the bourgeoisie while remaining
within the bourgeois class horizon. He often even consciously and explicitly states that his sharp critical position is that of an insider. Sartre does
that so as to be able to denounce as strongly as feasible, from the critical insiders position, the mortal danger posed by the historically given
socioeconomic and political reality in which all individuals are, according
to him, deeply implicated.
Thus Sartre defines his own position as a bourgeois with an acute critical conscience who assumes a position of open revolt against the increasing
destructiveness of the established order, without the ability to detach
himself from the bourgeois integument.81 The passionate direct appeal to
individual consciousness is in this Sartrean vision the necessary corollary
to his explicit or implicit advocacy of instituting some kind of direct democracy whose distant ancestry was supposed to be in tune with the Rights of
Man. His earlier quoted desire to fill with content the abstract liberties
of the bourgeoisie speaks volumes for itself in that respect. But it also
shows the difficulties and limitations of attempting to produce totalization
in real history within the categorial framework of the formal structures
255
of history compatible with a radically intended but in its origin necessarily abstract and formalistic horizon. One conceived in its time within the
boundaries of the never realizedand for that matter never realizable
bourgeois Rights of Man.
Accordingly, it would take the labor of Sisyphus to fill with content the
abstract liberties of the bourgeoisie, and of course to no avail. For the distance from the formal liberties of the bourgeois order to their socialist counterparts which are inconceivable without all-embracing real contentas for
instance the question of substantive equalityis literally astronomical. The
actual constitution of a radically different social metabolic order, structurally
defined in a qualitatively different way from capitals mode of societal reproductionfrom its elementary material productive practices to the highest
levels of cultural interchanges, together with the corresponding decision
making practices of its substantively equal social individuals emancipated
from capitals antagonistic second order mediations82is required for the
realization of such relationships to which the bourgeoisie could not significantly contribute even in the abstract heroic period of its historical past
prior to the French revolution. And that would need infinitely more than to
fill with content the abstract liberties of the bourgeoisie. For the sobering
truth of the matter is that those abstract libertiesdevised in accordance
with the requirements of a structurally iniquitous social order, and therefore
within their own terms of reference appropriately confined to the formal/
legal spherecannot be filled with socialist content. They are incompatible
with substantive socialist determinations, notwithstanding the slogan about
filling them with content adopted from time to time in well meaning but
greatly constrained political discourse.
Paradoxically, therefore, Sartres reformulation of the idea of some kind
of unspecified and organizationally undefinable direct democracy is put
under heavily accented question marks in relation to any feasible future by
his own rather pessimistic account of the constitution and fateful disintegration of the fused group. Yet, it is retained as an ought to be. But even
as a noble ought to berevealingly enough coupled with his repeated
exhortations addressed to individual consciousness to join a sovereign
group which would need no representativesthe Sartrean idea tuns out to
be an openly admitted formal structure only. A most problematical formal
structure which would have to be (but, as it happens, cannot be) filled with
content in his elusive second volume of the Critique, envisaged for making
intelligible his apodictic project about the dialectic of real history.
256
SA RT R E C R IT IC IZ E S HU SSERL in the first volume of the Critique of Dialectical

Reason for his conception of apodictic certainty. This is how he puts it:
Husserl could speak of apodictic certainty without much difficulty, but

this was because he remained on the level of pure, formal consciousness
apprehending itself in its formality; but, for us, it is necessary to find our
apodictic experience in the concrete world of history.83
To be sure, the way Sartre intends to pursue his own project of demonstrating apodicticity in real history cannot be satisfied with the internal
resources of pure, formal consciousness apprehending itself in its formality, within the confines of self-proclaimed Husserlian immanence.
However, despite the intended major differences Sartre continues to share
important aspects of his own orientation toward apodicticity with the
bourgeois ancestry in view of the fact that he never submits the material
foundations of capitals social order to a sustained critical analysis. For he
addresses his critical observations to the political and ideological/psychological dimensions only.
Thus it is by no means accidental that Sartres categorial framework
in the Critiqueincluding its unfinishable second volumecan only be
spelled out in terms of the formal structures of history, which undoubtedly
happen to be highly relevant to the evaluation of some important aspects of
the societal interchanges of capitalist aggregative individuality, but they
are most problematical in relation to overall historical development as real
history. For in the society of generalized commodity production, operated
on the basis of formally reductive homogenization and abstract value-equation of all substantive/qualitative incommensurability, capitals perverse
formal apodicticity can, to be sure, prevail. But in the open-ended development of real history it can do so only as long as the antagonistic second
order mediations of the material reproductive system itself can impose the
ultimately self-destructive imperative of endless capital-expansion on the
producers through the substantively most iniquitousbut formally/legally
equalized and in that way securedorder of hierarchical structural domination and subordination.
In this sense the perverse but for a long historical stage preponderantly
successful formal apodicticity of the capital systems law of value, with its
rationally unlimitable self-expansionary imperative as the dynamic material determinant of its apodictic certainty sui generis, can appear to be insuperable. It can proclaim with categorical absoluteness its ownin reality
257
in historical terms most specific84 and in substantive terms most limited

insuperability in view of the total absence of identifiable self-limiting targets
of productive pursuit admissible from the standpoint of capitals mode of
social metabolic reproduction. This is an incorrigible and dangerously missing, but absolutely necessary, self-limitation. It is due to the fact thatto be
a meaningful self-limitation at allit would have to be defined in substantive
terms necessarily excluded by capital.
Such structural impediment to the vitally important self-limitation is
imposed on capital as a historically specific reproductive system in view
of its innermost and unalterable material determination which must assert
itself in generalized commodity production. For that kind of production
cannot operate without formally reductive universal value-equation. And
that is because such a system must formally equate under its most discriminatory exchange relations the qualitatively/substantively incommensurable
use values corresponding to human need. Moreover, this incorrigible determination is further aggravated on account of the utterly fallaciousyet
as a rule apologetically asserted and perpetuatedfalse identification of
commendable productive development, idealized as unquestionably desirable growth in general, with the fetishistic absolute of increasingly more
destructive capital-expansion.
Nevertheless, even if there can be no rationally conceived and instituted limits admitted to capitals self-expansion in its own terms of reference, there are some absolutely vital systemic limits. They are twofold. On
the one hand, the limits in question arise from the irrepressible antagonistic second order mediations of the capital system in general, and on the
other from the increasing destructivenessforeshadowing at the same time
also potential systemic self-destructionof capitals mode of social metabolic reproduction in relation to nature. Indeed, the grave transgression of
capitals systemic limits is coupled with devastating military adventurism
exercised in the interest of imposing the globalized system of destructive
production (while preaching the self-mythology of productive destruction) by the imperialistically dominant powers in our ever more precarious planetary household.
Sartres pessimism is boundless when he calls out in despair: It is
impossible to find a rational basis for revolutionary optimism, since what
is is the present reality.85 In this way the destructive dominance of the
rationally unlimitable self-expansionary imperative of the capital system is
unhappily interiorized also by Sartre as the apparently undefeatable rationality of actuality.
258
However, capitals formally equalizing rationality is in reality substantive irrationality that must be imposed with ruthless apodictic necessity in
the production sphere as much as in all fields of the political domainfrom
the most comprehensive state practices involved in safeguarding the internal
and international class relations and interests of the established mode of
material production to the ideological/political regulation and value-determination of the nuclear familyno matter how destructive the consequences in the descending phase of the systems development. No wonder,
therefore, that we are presented with bleak pessimism concerning the future
in Sartrean discourse after the bitter disappointment that follows the shortlived enthusiasm of 1968.
This is understandably so because, similarly to Marcuse, also in Sartres
approach too much of the apparent stability of capitals material reproductive order and of its allegedly integrated social subject of potential change
rejected by Sartre as unable to overcome the inertia of constituted groups
and stabilized structuresis granted at face value to organized capitalism.
As a result, the wishfully postulated but in actuality extremely fragile
social subject of the ought to be radical transformationthe allegedly
sovereignty-embodying French student movement of 1968 for Sartre,
and Marcuses minoritarian groups of the intelligentsia86 (sharply
opposed by him to the working class)offer no more solid ground for
envisaging the required changes in the unfolding future than the abstract
declaration of needs which are said by Sartre to be the needs of every
man, irrespective of their social class belonging and corresponding material and ideological determinations.
We can clearly see that Sartre, like Marcuse (who in this respect to a large
extent inspires Sartre), adopts the dubious notion of organized capitalism,
contrasting it with competitive capitalism. Sartre puts into relief the politically challenging novelty of organized capitalism in order to call for an
anti-authoritarian way of approaching the task ahead on the model of the
aspirations of French Maoist students, in contrast to the traditional political
parties of the left which are in his view anchored to the nineteenth century.
These are Sartres words:
The classical leftist parties have remained in the nineteenth century, in the
time of competitive capitalism. But though the Maoist movement is still in
its first stages, these militants, with their anti-authoritarian praxis, appear to
be the only revolutionary force capable of adapting to new forms of the class
struggle in a period of organized capitalism.87
259
Marcuses concern is very similar both in calling for a new social subject
of transformation, indicating the militant youth as the embodiment of antiauthoritarian politics, and in claiming that the now established societal
reproductive order must be characterized as indefinitely stable organized
capitalism, in contrast to the past.
In both cases the claimed novelty and corresponding power of organized capitalism is paradoxically overstated. It is overstated to such an
extent that when the somewhat euphoric period of 1968 passes away,
together with the idealized expectations attached to its claimed antiauthoritarian political praxis, the pessimistic readjustment of the former
strategic perspective can only offer in favor of its own support the noble but
abstract postulate of the internal need of the individuals in the case of both
Sartre and Marcuse, coupled with constant references to Kantian imperatives in the writings of the German militant intellectual from the 1960s to
his final years.88
T H E KA N T IAN L E GACY W EIGH S D OW N as heavily on Sartre as on Marcuse. And
that is a major part of the problem. For in order to give a substantive rational
foundation to a positive and historically sustainable alternative to the capital
system, it is necessary to extricate ourselves from the established orders
merely formal rationality and corresponding formal apodicticity of gravely
iniquitous but pretendedly unobjectionable universal value-equation. Yet
in terms of the pretended equitable value-determinations even the absolute
human outrage of decreeing capital and labor to be formally/rationally equal
in the exchange relation as individually sovereign buyers and sellers can
be totally misrepresented, turning into a travesty the real character of the
relationship involved. For the pretended equality of contractually related
individuals, who are supposed to regulate voluntarily and freely their
interchanges in accordance with the Rights of Man, is in fact brutally
forced upon the class of living labor by the actual power relations embodied
in the alienation and expropriation of the means of production from the
producers, originally instituted by great violence,89 and ever after protected
by the state.
Accordingly, with the passing of historical time the idealized and statelegitimated formal rationalitywhich in actuality (i.e. in the Hegelian
rational actuality of real history) always amounts to substantive irrationalitybecomes in capitals descending phase of development ultimately
self-destructive in view of the historically untenable but rationally unlimitable imperative of capital expansion.
260
The formally idealized Rights of Mancuriously invoked even by

Sartre when he appeals to the idea of the individuals joining that sovereign
group from which, we are told, all power emanates, the People.90cannot
be exempted from the requirement of giving a substantive rational foundation to a historically sustainable positive alternative to capitals formally
legitimated and in the name of its pretended formal and instrumental
rationality91 peremptorily enforced mode of social metabolic reproduction. Otherwise we must remain trapped by Sartresand Marcuses
utter pessimism.
However, in Sartres lifework it is impossible to supersede the established orders formal rationality and corresponding formal apodicticity
without abandoning the idea that the categorial framework of his marxisant existentialist conception, as spelled out in his Critique of Dialectical
Reason, encapsulates the formal structures of history in general, and as
such applicable also to a strategic view of the necessary historical alternative
to capitals social metabolic order. The unfinishable second volume of the
Critique does not stand alone in Sartres lifework. The same fate affected his
project announced at the very end of Being and Nothingness, concerning the
problems of situated freedom to be pursued on the ethical plane,92 and
the work on structural anthropology whose early publication was also
repeatedly promised by Sartre in interviews many years before his death, but
never materialized.
The reasons for the revealing unfinishability of these major Sartrean
projects are very similar. But this is in no way meant to be a negative judgement on Sartres lifework. Paradoxically, the major projects in question are
in fact complete in their incompleteness and truly representative as integral
parts of his great militant intellectual achievement precisely in their unfinishability. For they embody a tirelesseven heroicstruggle on his part to
radically negate the established order from within its own class parameters.
Sartre himself voices the insuperable dilemmas involved by using the
same expression about the nature of the enterprise which he tries to pursue
as necessary but at the same time impossible. He says that in different
but interrelated contexts. Thus, talking about the most powerful organized
political force of the left in France he asserts that Collaboration with the
Communist Party is both necessary and impossible.93 That sums up very
well Sartres position on the issue, indicating the painful double-sided
acknowledgement that, on the one hand, without a major organizational force
the advocated objectives cannot be accomplished, yet on the other hand, the
force in question is very far from actually promoting the necessary change.94
261
The same dilemma is put by Sartre in more generalized terms when he insists
that Ethics is for us inevitable and at the same time impossible. 95
All these paradoxical and self-torturing insights are by no means publicity-seeking occasional remarks of which he is accused by his capital-apologetic detractors.96 They are consistently coupled with the most dedicated
theoretical work in composing thousands of pages97 of his major unfinishable
projects, formulated from within the horizon of his own class whose conscience Sartre tries to challenge and indeed shake. The unfinishable manuscripts express with great personal authenticity the impossibility to realize
the chosen historical task by the reactivation of even the best Enlightenment
tradition, together with the once sincerely believed (but never instituted)
Rights of Man characteristic of its horizon. Sartres inability to go beyond
the formal apodicticity of the shared class horizon, confining his own categorial explanatory framework to the formal structures of history, despite his
explicit promise and conscious efforts aimed at elucidating real history
both in the political domain and in the world of morality, is inseparable from
this connection.
Sartres writings on ethics, which were not lost, show a repeated attempt
to overcome the forbidding practical impediments of the given historical situation in terms of his appeal to the moral imperative, formulated frequently
in the Kantian spirit. In a major lecture, written not in his youth but nearly
at the age of sixty, he quotes Kants famous dictumyou ought to, therefore
you canand insists on the primacy and centrality of individual praxes in
contrast to collective and institutional structures.98 However, this attachment
to the Kantian legacy and its corollaries is not without serious problems. For
the German philosopher, to whom Sartre is deeply indebted throughout
his intellectual life, does not hesitate to reconcile the fundamental contradiction between the formal requirements of Enlightenment rationality (and
corresponding equality) and the most blatant perpetuation of substantive
inequality even in the domain of the law. He argues in this way:
The general equality of men as subjects in a state coexists quite readily
with the greatest inequality in degrees of the possessions men have, whether
the possessions consist of corporeal or spiritual superiority or in material
possession besides. Hence the general equality of men also coexists with great
inequality of specific rights of which there may be many. . . . Nevertheless, all
subjects are equal to each other before the law which, as a pronouncement of
the general will, can only be one. This law concerns the form and not the
matter of the object regarding which I may possess a right.99
262
As we can see the greatest moral philosopher of the bourgeoisie in the

ascendant, Immanuel Kant, who models the universality and validity of the
moral judgement as such on the form of the natural law, can find absolutely nothing wrong with the total denial of substantive equality to the overwhelming majority of the people. Even his reference to the idea of Rousseaus
general will cannot make any difference in that respect. The insoluble contradiction between the actually existing system of formalized law and the
legitimately enforced substantive inequality in society and in the state is
supposed to be overcome by Kants peremptory decree according to which
the law as such can be concerned only with the form and not with the matter
of the object in question. Consequently the law can be most iniquitously
discriminatory even in terms of the specific rights which it may or may not
grant to whoever it pleases, and yet qualifying at the same time as fully adequate to the rational requirement of the general equality of men as subjects
in a state, justified with reference to its claimed harmony with the general
will. Although in this way we find in Kantwho was, like Sartre, greatly
inspired by Rousseaua characteristic interpretation of the general will,
corresponding to the Sovereignty of the People, the Kantian advocacy of the
materially discriminatory idea of equality, in tune with the established order
of private property, is not in conflict with some of Rousseaus most important tenets. For the great French philosopher of the Enlightenment insists
with unmistakable firmness that the right of property is the most sacred of
all the rights of citizenship, and even more important in some respect that
liberty itself; property is the true foundation of civil society, and the real
guarantee of the undertakings of citizens100 . . . the general administration
[embodied in the state] is established only to secure individual property,
which is antecedent to it.101
Naturally, Sartre advocates the real equality of all individuals in society,
and he can only scorn the great inequality of specific rights (in favor of those
who can pay for it) imposed by the hypocritical practices of actually existing
law. However, he cannot extricate himself from the formal apodicticity of the
system oriented toward asserting the primacy and historical viability of the
individual praxes, in the spirit of the aggregates of individuality idealized by
the best philosophical tradition of capitals ascending phase of development,
including the conceptions of Rousseau, Kant, Adam Smith and Hegel.
Sartres ever renewed direct appeals to individual consciousness are
obvious manifestations of that. That kind of orientation carries with it idealizations of its own kind in relation to the present, as we find it clearly demonstrated in Sartres greatly overrated characterization of the French Maoist
263
students directly supported by him,102 who later in fact ceased to have anything to do with an even vaguely progressive, let alone genuine revolutionary,
perspective. And, of course, the problems go much deeper than that as far as
the question of the necessary historical alternative to the established order is
concerned. For the obverse side of the same coin of expecting the required
solution from the direct appeal to individual consciousness had to be that
far too much was granted by Sartre, exactly the same way as by Marcuse,
to the continued historical viability of so-called advanced capitalism and
organized capitalism.
SA RT R E S HISTOR IC AL CO NCEP TIO N IS H AUNTED to the very end by his
dismissal of the idea of the We-subject in Being and Nothingness. As we
have seen in Section 7.3 of The Social Determination of Method, according
to the Sartrean existentialist ontology
The oppressed class can, in fact, affirm itself as a We-subject only in relation
to the oppressing class. . . . But the experience of the We remains on the
ground of individual psychology and remains a simple symbol of the longedfor unity of transcendences. . . . The subjectivities remain out of reach
and radically separated. . . . We should hope in vain for a human we in
which the intersubjective totality would obtain consciousness of itself as a
unified subjectivity. Such an ideal could be only a dream produced by a
passage to the limit and to the absolute on the basis of fragmentary, strictly
psychological experiences. . . . It is therefore useless for humanity to seek
to get out of this dilemma; one must either transcend the Other or allow
oneself to be transcended by him. The essence of the relation between
consciousnesses is not the Mitsein [being with]; it is conflict.103
This view of the nature of the We-subject as a mere projection of

individual psychology is linked by Sartre in the same work to the assertion
according to which the conception of humanity is totally illusory, derived
from the notion of God as a radical absence, and thus it is forever renewed
and forever results in failure. Accordingly Each time that we use the Us in
this sense (to designate suffering humanity, sinful humanity, to determine an
objective historical meaning by considering man as an object which is developing its potentialities) we limit ourselves to indicating a certain concrete
experience to be undergone in the presence of the absolute Third; that is, of
God. Thus the limiting concept of humanity (as the totality of the Us-object)
and the limiting concept of God imply one another and are correlative.104
264
By the time we reach the Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre is willing

to give some tangible meaning to the concept of humanity by saying that
Our critical investigation must also show how the practical multiplicity
(which may be called man or Humanity according to taste) realizes, in
its very dispersal, its interiorization.105 However, also in this work the existentialist ontological underpinning of the relationship between myself
and the Otherdepicted as the interchange in reciprocity between the
Other as myself and myself as the Other, in the domain of history developed within the permanent framework of a field of tension produced by
scarcity106makes conflictuality and struggle insuperable. Also, defining
Humanity by the term practical multiplicityor, rather, agreeing
politely to call Sartres really operative term of practical multiplicity also
by the name of Humanity according to tasteleaves the door wide open
to an insuperably individualistic account of some vital historical processes.
This outcome cannot be helped by Sartre in view of the absence of theorizing in his philosophy the required complex mediations (not confined
to the circularly deterministic field of materiality107) through which the
objective and subjective factors can be brought together, not least by indicating the sustainable constitution of the we-subject as the transformatory agent of historical development, in contrast to the fateful necessity of its
relapse into self-induced seriality.
We have to consider here a most difficult and somewhat convoluted
passage from the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Its great complexity is due
to Sartres internal difficulties of trying to find solutions in this important
work to the addressed problems within the categorial framework adopted
by him. For his categorial framework itself stubbornly resists his attempts
at finding the desired solutions. Nevertheless, it is necessary to quote this
passage in its integrality because it sums up better than anything else Sartres
general approach to history. This is how it reads:
In its attempted transcendence of this concrete objectivity (which only
succeeds in so far as it is not prevented by the Other), the praxis of struggle
awakens, actualises, comprehends and transcends the constitutive praxis
of the Other in so far as he is himself a practical subject; and in its action
against the Other, on the completion of this very transcendence and through
the mediation of the field of materiality, it reveals and produces the Other
as an object. From this point of view, the anti-dialectical negation appears
as a moment in a more complex dialectic. At first, in fact, this negation
is precisely what is transcended: the praxis is constituted for both as the
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negation of negation: not only through everyones transcendence of his

object-being, but practically through everyones attempts to liquidate the
practical subject in the Other outside and from the outside and to recover
his objectivity through this transcendent destruction. Thus the antagonistic
negation is grasped by everyone as a scandal which has to be transcended.
But at the level of scarcity its origin does not lie in this revelation of scandal:
it is a struggle for life; thus the scandal is not only grasped in its appearance
as scandal, but also profoundly comprehended as the impossibility that the
two should co-exist. Consequently the scandal is not, as Hegel supposed,
the mere existence of the Other, which would take us back to a statute
of unintelligibility. It lies in suffered (or threatened) violence, that is in
interiorised scarcity. In this respect, although the original fact is logically
and formally contingent (scarcity is only a materially given), its contingency
is far from impairing the intelligibility of violence. What is important for
the dialectical comprehension of the Other, is the rationality of his praxis.
Now this rationality appears in violence itself, in so far as this is not the
contingent ferocity of man, but everyones intelligible reinteriorisation of
the contingent fact of scarcity: human violence is meaningful. And as this
violence is a negation of the Other in everyone, negation, in its reciprocity,
becomes meaningful in and through everyone, as scarcity turned practical
agent, or in other words as human-scarcity. Thus practical negation is
constituted as a negation of scandal-negation both in so far as the latter is the
Other in everyone and in so far as this Other is interiorised scarcity. From
this point of view, what is indissolubly negated by praxis is negation as the
condition of man (that is to say, as a conditioning readopted in violence by
the conditioned) and as the freedom of an Other. And in fact the scandal of
the presence in me (as a mark of my object-being) of the Others freedom as
the freedom-negation of my freedom, is itself a determination in rationality
in so far as this negative freedom actualizes in practice the impossibility of
our co-existing in the field of scarcity.108
Thus the dialectical intelligibility of history in this Sartrean vision is

primarily concerned with the comprehension of the scandalous dialectical rationality of the Others praxis, in its threatening freedom that must
be negated and transcended (indeed possibly liquidated as practical
subject) in the unavoidable struggle for life. The question of violence
is explained as dialectical intelligibility and rationality in terms of the full
reciprocity at work whereby the objective determinations of conditioning
are readopted in violence by the conditioned. In this way we are always
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offered by Sartre a definition of the Other as the Other in everyone: a definition inseparable at the same time from the comprehension of violence as
meaningful human violence. And precisely because interiorised scarcity
as meaningful violence involves (and implicates) everyone, the antagonistic
relationship affecting all human beings must be considered ipso facto dialectically intelligible and comprehensible.
This conception of meaningful historical interchange also carries with it
a most problematical definition of the historical agent. In one sense, applying
to all individuals, it is the freein as much as consciously and actively
threateningOther in everyone, including of course myself as the Other
to the Other. But since this Other in everyonein its necessary constitution in and through full reciprocityis interiorised scarcity, through this
marxisant existentialist ontological underpinning of the Sartrean vision
of scarcity as such assumes a quasi-mythical status as the effective agent of
history. This strange determination of the historical agent is paradoxically
by directly linking the abstract universal to the abstract individual, in an
attempt to demonstrate the dialectical intelligibility of that which is not universalizable, as mentioned before109due to the irreducible (repeatedly
commended in that way by Sartre himself) individualistic conception of his
philosophy. For due to the fact that the claimed dialectically intelligible violence in history is said to be a negation of the Other in everyone, negation
itself, in its reciprocity, becomes meaningful in and through everyone, as
scarcity turned practical agent.
In this spirit we are subsequently presented by Sartre with the firmest
possible assertion concerning the nature of comprehension, positive and
negative reciprocity and intelligibility itself, modeled also at this point in
his analysis, in terms of its simultaneously individualistic orientation and
abstract universality, on the existentialist life or death struggle of myself
with the Other. These concluding remarks lead again to the frequently
repeated promise about elucidating in the forthcoming second volume of
the Critique, on the basis of the formal structures discussed in its first, the
dialectical intelligibility of historical totalization in real history. The lines in
question read like this:
To comprehend in struggle is to grasp the praxis of the Other in
immanence, through its own objectivity and in a practical transcendence.
I now comprehend the enemy through myself and myself through the
enemy. . . . Comprehension is an immediate fact of reciprocity. But as
long as this reciprocity remains positive, comprehension remains abstract
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and external. Struggle, in the field of scarcity, as negative reciprocity,

engenders the Other as Other than man, or as anti-human; but at the same
time I comprehend him, in the very springs of my praxis, as a negation
of which I am a concrete practical negation, and as mortal danger. For
each of the adversaries, this struggle is intelligible; or rather, at this level,
it is intelligibility itself. Otherwise, reciprocal praxis would in itself have
no meaning or goal. But what concerns us is the general problem of
intelligibility, particularly at the concrete level. . . . These questions bring
us at last to the real problem of History. If History is to be the totalization of
all practical multiplicities and of all their struggles, the complex products
of the conflicts and collaborations of these very diverse multiplicities must
themselves be intelligible in their synthetic reality, that is to say, they must
be comprehensible as the synthetic products of a totalitarian praxis. This
means that History is intelligible if the different practices which can be
found and located at a given moment of the historical temporalisation
finally appear as partially totalising and as connected and merged in their
very oppositions and diversities by an intelligible totalisation from which
there is no appeal.110
However, the insuperable difficulty is that the Sartrean formal structures

of historyvalidly applicable in terms of their illuminating political determinations, if coupled with their complementary socioeconomic qualifications, to capitals highly specific and historically transient stage of developmentcannot yield the dialectical intelligibility of real history in general. On
the one hand they are made problematical by their existentialist ontological
underpinning which structurally opposes itself to the We-subject even in
Sartres marxisant phase of development, and on the other, by the Sartrean
conception of advanced capitalism and organized capitalism, and its
militantly with great integrity postulated but socially undefined counterforce. This is what we must consider on the remaining pages of this chapter.
is the concept of reciprocity
postulated by Sartre. He puts forward that idea as part of the existentialist
ontological underpinning which he intends to give to his own categorial
framework.
The envisaged Sartrean conceptual framework is meant to account
thanks to his marxisant existentialist idea of reciprocityas fully for the
relationship between the particular individuals as for those social formations which should be described in his view as practical multiplicities,
T H E F I R ST ID E A T HAT N EED S REASSESSMENT
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including humanity according to taste. For Sartre claims that such a categorial framework is the only way to provide the dialectical foundations
of a structural anthropology, formulated first in synchronic terms as the
elementary formal structures.111 This is according to Sartre the necessary
conceptual foundation on the basis of which it becomes possible for him
to consider the diachronic depth of practical temporalization112 in the
promised second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, thereby
accounting for the dialectical intelligibility of real history.
Sartre needs the claimed marxisant existentialist concept of full reciprocity (and circularity) because in his view the symmetrical relationship
between the Other and the individual subjectin that the subject must be
reduced by the Other, in accordance with the requirement of Sartrean reciprocity, to the status of an object and threatened to be destroyed in that way
in the course of the insuperable struggle for life in the historical domain
asserted by Sartre to be born and developed within the permanent field of
tension produced by scarcity113enables him to postulate at the same time
the negative but again appropriate and full reciprocity as the necessary condition of dialectical intelligibility. For this way of conceiving the relationship
in question makes it possible for him to posit also on the opposite side of
the equation the same negative and circular reciprocity through which the
Other in myself likewise transforms the free praxis of the Other outside
into the enemy objectso as to liquidate it as the rival subject that must be
prevented from realizing its own design as free praxis and mortal danger
for mein the process of my self-assertion as the only acceptable free praxis
prevailing against the Other in interiorized scarcity. This is how I comprehend the enemy through myself and myself through the enemy as a
result of which dialectical comprehension itself becomes an immediate fact
of reciprocity.114
This is perfectly coherent in its ownSartrean marxisant existentialistterms of reference. The problem is, however, that all individuals
in our historically created, and up to the present thus maintained societies,
are constitutive parts of determinate class formations. Inevitably, therefore,
in the actual class reality of real history, as we have to confront it until
it is historically superseded by actual societal developmentin obvious
contrast to the abstractly postulated individualistic account of the permanent enmity between myself and the Other in the Sartrean categorial
framework of circularly reciprocal determination and negationthere is
definitely not, and there cannot possibly be, any symmetrically conceptualizable relationship of circular reciprocity. On the contrary, we find not
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only in the present order but also in the class societies constituted across
history some system of very far from symmetrical structural domination
and subordination which changes only in its historical specificityfrom
slavery through serfdom to the wage slavery of the capitalist orderbut
not in its fundamental modality of hierarchical structural domination that
lacks any resemblance to Sartrean reciprocity.
Accordingly, the challenge for the class of labor (and of its particular
members), in their capacity oriented toward constituting the necessary and
only feasible historical alternative to capitals societal reproductive order,
concerns the establishment of a non-hierarchical structural framework of
social metabolic reproduction, to be accomplished on a substantive equitable and thereby historically sustainable material and political basis. And
that involves, to be sure, the task of overcoming within such qualitatively
different new societal reproductive horizon the historically to our own days
prevailing, and through its unique vicious circle wastefully perpetuated,
but at least in principle superable, objective conditions of socially specific
capital-accumulating scarcity.
Indeed, the now fetishistically enduring vicious circle of scarcity is quite
unique precisely in its immense but deliberately promoted wastefulness.
Moreover, as such it is supposed to remain operative in its totally untenable
cultivated wastefulness and globalizing destructiveness for the unsustainable prosaic cause of endless capital-accumulation, in contrast to the somber
vision of our struggle for life over the existentialistically postulated mortal
danger embodied in the Other in everyone, defined as ontologically insuperable interiorized scarcity.
After 1968 Sartre confessed that I have always remained an anarchist.
When Michel Contat reminded him of that admission, in the interview published under the title of Self-Portrait at Seventy, this was Sartres answer:
That is very true. . . . I have changed in the sense that I was an anarchist
without knowing it when I wrote Nausea. I did not realize that what I
was writing could have an anarchist interpretation; I saw only the relation
with the metaphysical idea of nausea, the metaphysical idea of existence.
Then, by way of philosophy, I discovered the anarchist in me. But when
I discovered it I did not call it that, because today anarchy no longer has
anything to do with the anarchy of 1890.
CONTAT : Actually, you never identified yourself with the so-called anarchist
movement.
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SARTRE : Never. On the contrary, I was very far away from it. But I never
allowed anyone to hold power over me, and I have always thought that
anarchywhich is to say, a society without powersmust be brought about.115
Revealingly enough, the question of advocating the establishment of

a society without powersirrespective of the name conferred upon the
political creed associated with it, from nineteenth century anarchism to the
presentgoes to the heart of the matter. Naturally, it is not enough for a
prominent and throughout his life socially most privileged individual to say:
I never allowed anyone to hold power over me.
The really difficult problems are: whether, to what extent, and in which
sustainable form, the rejection of power exercised over oneself is generalizable in its applicability to the present and to the future. For, obviously
and Sartre would have to be the first to admit itin the case of the overwhelming majority of the people in our actually existing societies today,
even simply raising that question, not to mention the major impediments
encountered for successfully translating it into their practically sustainable
circumstances by the far from privileged individuals, in their capacity as
more or less isolated individuals, cannot arise. Wage slavery is not very
reassuring in that respect, even if the old historical forms of slavery and
serfdom have been as a rule successfully consigned to the past, even if by
no means everywhere.
Naturally, the fact itself that the issue can be raised at all in our time, and
indeed that it could be raised in some form already in the nineteenth century,
shows some significant advancement in terms of the objective dialectic of
historical development, and not only in terms of its comprehensibility and
intelligibility. For in the remote past the slaves could be simply categorized
as talking tools even by a giant of philosophy, like Aristotle, as mentioned
before. In this sense Sartres ideal of anarchy that must be brought about,
called by him a society without powers, can only mean a society in which
there is no separate body exercising power over the individuals against their
aspirations and will.
The issue is then: what are the conditions for the realization of such a
society? And that is the point where the question of how to deal with the
established social orderdescribed by Sartre and others as advanced capitalism and organized capitalismmust be confronted. In other words,
the fundamental question is: what are the actually required and feasible
leverages through which capitals social order can be radically transformed
in the desired direction?
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Nineteenth century anarchism was dismissed by Marx in no uncertain

way. He wrote about Bakunins book: Statehood and Anarchy, that its
author has only translated Proudhons and Stirners anarchy into the
barbaric idiom of the Tartars.116 And Marx argued that A radical social
revolution is bound up with definite historical conditions of economic
development; these are its premises. . . . Bakunin understands absolutely
nothing of social revolution, only its political rhetoric; its economic conditions simply do not exist for him. . . . Willpower, not economic conditions,
is the basis of his social revolution.117
But even if we ignore the weighty historical baggage of the nineteenth
century varieties of anarchism, for the sake of an idealized anarchist society
without powers advocated by Sartre, some fundamental objective determinations and difficulties cannot be disregarded. Especially if at the same time
the supposedly inexorable power of advanced capitalism and organized
capitalism is reasserted, so as to be opposed by a direct political appeal to
individual consciousness invited to join a new sovereign group118illustrated with the example of the French Maoist studentsand contrasted with
organized Parties (and other stable organized structures) that are said to
have remained in the nineteenth century. Yet capitalisminseparable from
those historical conditions of economic development which were put so
powerfully into relief by Marx in all of his seminal workscannot be overcome at the political level only,119 no matter how genuine might be the willpower of the individuals who wish to oppose it in that way.
T H E KEY P R OB L E M IN T HIS RESP ECT is the objectively grounded centrifugality
of the capital system itself in its innermost constitution as a mode of social
metabolic reproduction.
As the interested reader can see it discussed in my book on The Dialectic
of Structure and History,120 the modern state emerged and expanded in relation to that insuperable centrifugality, not least for the purpose of bringing
under a feasible degree of control its potentially most disruptive aspects. This
epochal historical process was accomplishedon the ground of the underlying material determinationsin the interest of the dynamic expansion of
the capital system as a whole, in its inseparability from the increasingly more
powerful modern state. That is indeed where we can see a real reciprocity. But,
of course, this kind of reciprocity is, again, very far from being symmetrical.
It is defined by a determinate type of social and historical interrelationship in
which the dialectical primacy121not to be confused with a mechanical onesidednessbelongs to the fundamental material determinations.
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Naturally, this type of reciprocally secured development between politics and the economy, on the material reproductive ground of capitals necessary centrifugality, also means that negating the political dimension on its
own, in the spirit of even the most idealized conception of anarchism, could
only absolutize or exasperate the systemic centrifugality of the established
mode of social metabolic reproduction, resulting in total uncontrollability.
This is why anarchism had to prove to be a non-starter in all of its varieties
in the past.
The historically constituted and structurally entrenched reciprocity of
capitals fundamental dimensions can only be overcome by radically altering
the material reproductive as well as the political dimensions together, and
doing that on the appropriate systemic scale. The partial material co-operative ventures known to uswhich attempted to change the system through
the work of the productive and distributive co-operativesrepresented the
obverse side of the anarchist political coin. Significantly, however, despite
the good will invested in such co-operatives by their adherents, they could
not make a practicable inroad into the structural determinations of capitals social order on other than a minute scale. Not even when the political
anarchist and the material co-operative sides of the coin have been brought
together, as in Spain, in the anarcho-co-operative enterprises.
Here it is well worth reminding ourselves of the fact that Marx never
hesitated theoretically stressing the idea, and also passionately advocating
it in his pioneering organizational involvement in the international socialist
movement of his time, that the economic emancipation of the working class
is the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate
as a means.122
The same idea, underlining the dialectical primacy of the material basis
of capitals social order, was reiterated by one of the greatest intellectual
and political figures of the socialist movement, Rosa Luxemburg, when she
wrote:
What distinguishes bourgeois society from other class societiesfrom
ancient society and from the social order of the Middle Ages . . . is precisely
the fact that class domination does not rest on acquired rights but on real
economic relations; the fact that wage labour is not a juridical relation but
purely an economic relation.123
In the same sense, it would be a great mistake to imagine that imperialism can be overcome at the political/military level, as many people after the
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second world war naively started to celebrate the arrival of the age of postimperialism. Also in this regard Rosa Luxemburgs words, which highlighted the inescapable and historically evolved economic foundations of
imperialist political/military strategies, remain valid to our own days, despite
the fact that they were written almost a century ago. This is how they read:
Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the
product of a particular state of ripeness in the world development of capital,
an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable
only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will.
Capitalism is incompatible with economic and political divisions. . . . It needs
for its development large, united territories . . . and [to] lift the demands and
needs of society to a plane corresponding to the prevailing stage of capitalist
production and to the mechanism of modern capitalist class rule.124
Accordingly, the devastating political/military dangers of imperialisma

system of most iniquitous internal determinations and corresponding interstate relations which can change its historical specificity but not its structurally entrenched substancecannot be consigned to the past without radically overcoming the material reproductive dimension of the capital system
as an integrated whole.
The incurable centrifugality of the capital system can only intensify its
contradictions and heighten the dangers necessarily associated with them
in an age of globally conflicting vested interests asserted by the dominant
monopolistic forces, corresponding to the now prevailing stage of articulation of capitals mode of social metabolic reproduction. Direct political
appeals to individual consciousness, even in the most idealized spirit of
anarchism, cannot counter the power of the vital material reproductive
determinations whose analysis is missing from Sartres work not only before
the Critique of Dialectical Reason but also later.
The formal structures of history offered by Sartre in the two volumes
of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and reiterated in different ways in
his subsequent writings, always remained well within the framework of
the posited formal determinations, oriented toward an increasingly more
elusive political advocacy after the great disappointments he suffered
following the moments of hope in 1968 and in its immediate aftermath.
Sinking into a deeply pessimistic mood in his final years was therefore
sadly but perfectly understandable in the case of a combative intellectual,
like Sartre, who after the defeat of 1968 could not envision any leverage
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by which he could from within even slightly alter, let alone dislodge
from its hinges, as he once hoped, the political consciousness of the class
against which he passionately rebelled.
The pessimistic idea that advanced capitalism and organized capitalism might be able to offer some long-term sustainable remedy to capitals antagonistic second order mediations could not be of any help in this
respect. The necessary point of departure for an alternative approach cannot
be other than an attempt to put firmly into relief the material structures of
history. Not as given once and for all, in an abstractly posited generality,
with unsustainable claims to formally universalizable validity extended to
all possible phases of history, but in its actually unfolding and changing
specificity. And that framework would have to be identified in our time in
accordance with the never in the past experienced historical determinationswith their deeply antagonistic and therefore in the last analysis unrealizable tendency toward global integrationwhich correspond to the ever
more destructive monopolistic material and political/military stage of capitals imperialist articulation as a societal reproductive system, directly threatening even humanitys relationship to nature.
To be sure, this point of departure, in its unavoidable historical specificity and orientation, could offer no a priori apodicticity of any kind for
understanding the dialectical intelligibility of historical development once
and for all. Any attempt to do so would be in relation to actually unfolding
history a crass contradiction in terms. The idea of postulating a set of eternally valid material structures of history in the spirit of some kind of aprioristic apodicticity could only assume the shape of a strait-jacket, or a bed of
Procrustes, to which necessarily open-ended real history would have to be
arbitrarily tied or imaginarily chained.
In truth there can be no categorically generalizable material structures for
all conceivable phases of real history, nor indeed any universally extended
formal structures. For the real history of human societal existence could
not qualify for being history at all by closing its gates to alternative forms
of development with the help of some hypostatized permanent structures,
even if they be at a determinate time in history clearly identifiable material
structures. Nothing illustrates this proposition better than Marxs explicitly
stated insistence that the category of historical necessity makes no sense at
all unless it is understood as historically changing and vanishing necessity.
Moreover, once the objective and subjective conditions for the establishment of a rational planning process are consolidated in the course of
the historically pursued and sustained socialist transformation, the power
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of earlier overwhelming economic determinations is bound to be greatly

diminished. It is put into its place as an integral but subordinate part of a
conscious socialist accountancy. That form of accountancy becomes practicable only in the absence of the predetermined and self-perpetuating
vested interests of capitals willing personifications who expropriate to
themselves the power of managing the societal metabolism even if they
cannot control it, irrationally steering society instead in the direction of
systemic annihilation. For only the socialist accountancy can confer their
properand not fetishistically absolutizedweight upon the objectively
limiting factors, within the adopted framework of humanly rewarding and
positively interiorized objectives.
That is so because the real meaning of the words quoted about the economic emancipation of the working class is the emancipation of humanity
from the blindly prevailing power of economic determinism under which no
human being can ever be in genuine control of the social metabolism, not
even the most willing personifications of capital. Only through the qualitative transformation of laborfrom being the alienated and structurally subordinate but necessarily recalcitrant social class of the reproduction process
into the universal regulative principle of humanitys interchange with nature
and among its individual members, freely embraced as their meaningful lifeactivity by all members of societyonly through such transformation can
real human emancipation be accomplished in the course of open-ended historical development.
That is the reason why Marx was contrasting to what he called prehistory not some kind of Messianic end of historyalthough he is often
crudely accused of doing thatbut the dynamic process of actually
unfolding and consciously controlled real history. That is: history no
longer ruled by antagonistic economic determinations but lived in accordance with their chosen aims and objectives by the social individuals as
freely associated producers.
In fact the categories called by Sartre the formal structures of history
are most illuminating for a limited phase of capitalistic developments, on
account of their affinity with some important material and human characteristics of the formally equalized articulation of generalized commodity
production. But they could not be extended to the whole of history, from
the most remote past to the indefinite future. That kind of universal extensionand corresponding closureis inadmissible not only for the material structures of history, which must be grasped always in their historical
specificity, irrespective of how long the underlying determinations can assert
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themselves in the changing societal domain, but also for what may be legitimately called formal structures in an appropriately defined social setting.
Sartre could be no exception to that. Indeed Sartre himself supplied
his own proof for the impossibility of modifying and extending his own
formal structures in the postulated way by his inability to complete the
original project125 repeatedly announced for the elaboration of the conceptual framework of real history in the second volume of his Critique of
Dialectical Reason.
that advanced capitalism
and organized capitalism represent a significantly different and
historically more sustainable phase of the capital systems development
than its nineteenth century variety, to which the political Parties of the left
have allegedly remain anchored, is quite unfounded. The opposite is much
nearer to the by no means pessimistic truth.
The deciding issue concerns the rational restrainability and controllability of any societal reproductive order in relation to the historical actuality
and availability of its necessary conditions of reproduction. And the most
uncomfortable truth of the matter in this respect is that a socioeconomic
reproductive order, the now established societal order, whose viability
depends on endless capital expansion, must constantly generate not only (to
a large extent manipulable or even repressible) subjective but also irrepressible objective expectationsboth for others and for itselfwhich it cannot
possibly fulfill.
In this sense, in contrast to capitals existing order, only a qualitatively
different way of managing the social metabolism, from the elementary material processes to the highest levels of artistic production and enjoyment
could make a real difference in this respect. And that would imply a radically
different orientation of the social individuals toward consciously pursued
communal coherence of their activities, in place of the now prevailing and
potentially disintegrative centrifugality of their conditions of existence. This
is so because for as long as the antagonistic second order mediations of the
capital system remain dominant, they are bound to call for some kind of
political super-imposition, instead of militating against it in the spirit of the
anarchistic desideratum of society without powers.
There can be no such thing as a society without powers. Especially
not in an age of globally unfolding production and societal reproduction.
The now established reproductive order is inseparable from its antagonistic
second order mediations for the simple reason that they are required for
T H E P E S S I M I ST I C I D E A S H A R E D A LS O BY SART R E
277
the irrational pursuit of endless capital-expansion irrespective of the consequences. However, this system is bound to produce recalcitrance (in the
producing individuals), the superimposition of extraneous control (in order
to defeat recalcitrance, if necessary by violence), and at the same time also
institutionalized irresponsibility (because of the absence of rationally feasible and acceptable control).
It is not too difficult to see how problematical it must be to regulate
advanced capitalist society on the basis of such practices and corresponding
results even on a limited national scale, not to mention the necessity to keep
the intensifying contradictions under the lid in their unavoidably unfolding
global setting. Understandably, therefore, the only way to sustain a globally
coordinated reproductive order on our horizon is by envisaging co-operatively
shared material and political power, determined and administered on the
basis of not simply formal but substantive equality (an absolute must as the
condition of feasibility of a viable future societal order) and the corresponding
rational planning of their life activities by the freely associated producers.
Naturally, this is inconceivable without the appropriate form of mediation of the social individuals among themselves and in their combined relationship, as real humanity (though not according to taste), to nature.
However, there is nothing mysterious or prohibitively difficult about advocating a qualitatively different system of societal reproductive mediation.
The conditions of its establishment can be spelled out in a tangible way,
involving a determined and historically sustained effort to break the stranglehold of exchange value over humanly adopted and gratifying use value,
corresponding not to formally equalizable and substantively incommensurable as well as callously ignored human needs, but to the individuals as freely
associated individuals asserting directly meaningful human need.
The basic organizing principle of the kind of societal reproductive
activity which is oriented toward such a qualitatively different social metabolic order was described by Marx in very simple terms, with reference to
the communal interchange of the life-activity of the individuals, when he
wrote that
The communal character of production would make the product into a
communal, general product from the outset. The exchange which originally
takes place in productionwhich would not be an exchange of exchange
values but of activities,determined by communal needs and communal
purposeswould from the outset include the participation of the individuals
in the communal world of products.126
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Obviously, regulating and freely coordinating their life-activities by the

individuals implies ongoing positive adjustments. The required genuine positive adjustments in a socialist order become feasible thanks to the removal
of the structurally entrenched vested interests of the alienating class existence of the past, with its institutionalized irresponsibility under the capital
system. Accordingly, the productive and distributive activity of the individuals can be promoted and maintained not by postulating a society without
powers but by the fully shared powers of the members of society, inseparable from the adoption of their fully shared responsibility. That is the only
viable and historically sustainable alternative to the growing destructiveness
of advanced capitalism and organized capitalism.
7. Lvi-Strauss against Sartre

C L AUD E L V I- ST R AU S S eulogized by one of his devotees as structuralism
personified127admitted in an interview which he gave in 1971 to the
prominent French weekly journal, LExpress, that since 1968 structuralism
went out of fashion.128 In fact what was remarkable in this respect was not
the fact that in the 1970s structuralism started to fade away, being pushed
out of the limelight by post-structuralism and other similarly oriented
post-denominations, like post-modernity.129 Rather, the somewhat
astonishing circumstance was that after the second world war the ideology
of structuralism had actually acquired an extremely dominant position, and
maintained it for well over a decadefrom the middle of the 1950s to the
end of the 1960sin European and American intellectual circles.130
Of course, this postwar period coincided with the pretenses of the
end of ideology131 both in America and in Europe. Structuralism, with its
claims to represent the ultimate of scientific rigour in the field of the
human sciences,132 fitted very well into the prevailing intellectual and
political climate. Even more strangely for Lvi-Strauss himself, the nonideological aspirations of his celebrated orientation were combined with
explicitly claiming to be simultaneously a marxisant intellectual, like
Jean-Paul Sartre. As late as the 1971 interview published in LExpress
Lvi-Strauss was still asserting that he was a marxisant thinker. In this
regard the postwar intellectual prominence of the Communist Party in
France, professing its (Stalinistically updated) devotion to Marx, made
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that ideological alignment perfectly understandable. At least to the extent

of paying lip-service to Marx in the case of some important intellectuals
like Lvi-Strauss. And even a figure openly hostile to any idea of socialism,
Raymond Aron, who championed the American atlanticist perspective
and Europes subservience to U.S. dominated NATO, could not avoid a
negative dependency on the French C. P.s intellectual prominence. All
this had changed considerably around the end of the 1960s. In fact the
serious decline in the popularity of structuralism, dated by Lvi-Strauss
himself to the years immediately following May 1968 in France, and the
simultaneous appearance of various post-structuralist ideological approaches, coincided with the new phase in the development of the capital
system marked by its deepening structural crisis.
However, even Lvi-Strauss erstwhile claim that he was a follower of
Marx, in any sense at all, should be taken with a mountain size pinch of salt.
Not only with regard to hisextremely pessimisticposition recorded in
his major interview in 1971,133 but also in relation to the rest of his work
before that date or after. For as regards the theory of the superstructure
in which he suggested that he had elaborated his own unique version of
the Marxian conceptasserting at the same time without any justification
that the superstructural domain was left virtually untouched by Marx, who
was supposed to have assigned to it only an unfilled spacethe characteristic approach to the field offered by Lvi-Strauss was incorrigibly ahistorical. And nothing could be more alien to Marxs lifework as a whole as
well as to any particular aspect of it.134 In this spirit Lvi-Strauss was not
only completely ignoring Marxs fundamental answers to the problems of
the superstructure and ideology, conceived by him as dialectically linked to,
and in that way inseparable from, the changing material basis of societyas
we could see them in considerable detail for ourselves in my book on The
Dialectic of Structure and Historybut offered a diametrically contradictory line of approach to the problems elaborated by Marx always in a profoundly historical sense.
It is also important to underline here that the various post-structuralist and post-modernist ideological trends could not be considered
significantly different in this respect. The extremely skeptical and problematical attitude to history was by no means confined to Lvi-Strauss himself.
Indeed, the incorrigibly ahistorical approach to their object of enquiry constituted the common denominator of all kinds of postwar structuralism and
post-structuralism, including the general line of structural functionalism
advocatedwith Weberian allegiancesby Talcott Parsons, and heavily
LV I -STR AU S S AGAIN ST SA RTRE
281
promoted for capital-apologetic ideological purposes in the United States

of America.
The major conservative Swiss historian of the nineteenth century,
Leopold von Ranke, coined the famous orienting principle for fellow historians according to which every age was equidistant from God. That line
of thought amounted to categorically asserting that whatever might indicate
the signs of historical development, in terms of Rankes views belonged to
the world of illusion and false appearance. The claimed marxisant contribution by Lvi-Strauss to elucidating the nature of the superstructure
from the elementary structures of kinship135 to the logics of myth136 and
to the characterization of the relationship between history and La pense
sauvage137had much the same equidistancing orientation in LviStrauss structural anthropology, devoted to the defense of the conceptual universe of the North and South American indian peoples vis--vis the
thought produced in modern times anywhere. In other words, according
to Lvi-Strauss the idea of historical advancement as such had to be considered extremely dubious, to put it mildly. Accordingly, it was not in the least
surprising that when Lvi-Strauss was asked the question in 1971 by the
interviewer of LExpress: So you think that history is devoid of any sense?,
his gloomy answer could only be: If it has a sense, it is not a good one.138 In
this way Lvi-Strauss position was even more retrograde than the historical
skepticism of the prominent British conservative Sir Lewis Namier, discussed in Chapter 5. of The Social Determination of Method, who asserted
that if there is sense in human history it escapes our perception.139
The idea of historical advancement is rejected by Lvi-Strauss in the
most romantic fashion by postulating that in the vision of the world produced by the savage mind the whole of nature could speak to man.140 His
imaginary solution to the gloomily described troubles of our contemporary
world was said by him to be: the management of technological progress in a
rather stationary way and strict population control. However, Lvi-Strauss
pessimistically rejected his own solution as unrealizable immediately after
mentioning it, coupled with an endorsing reference to the utopian views
once advocated by the nineteenth century reactionary and indeed racist
French writer Gobineau,141 who also turned away from his own projected
utopia by ruefully saying that it was unrealizable. But Lvi-Strauss never
bothered to spell out the necessary social qualifications concerning even
the elementary conditions of feasibility of his proposed solutions whichin
terms of their concern with technology and population controlcould fit
in perfectly well with the wishful common places of ubiquitously promoted
282
capital apologetics.142 The pessimistic formulation of his comments was

voiced on account of the nostalgically deplored unrealizability of the
should-be (but alas cannot-be) solutions. (Mytho)-logically, therefore,
Lvi-Strauss could only end his 1971 interview with the earlier mentioned
doom-laden tirades against humanity in general,143 exempting at the same
time from all blame the regimes, parties, groups and classes144 whose role
is clearly recognizable in our actually unfolding history.
T H E I N C OR R IG IB LY AHISTO RICA L and
in many ways even anti-historical

character of Lvi-Strauss work is by no means the only sense in which his
approach is diametrically contradictory to Marx. An equally serious aspect is
his rejection of the Marxian unity of theory and practice. In fact Lvi-Strauss
presents his opposition to socially committed practice as a commendable
virtue when he contrasts his own stance to Sartrean existentialism by saying
that structuralism, unlike existentialism favored by the young in and after
1968, is devoid of practical implications.145
What is very difficult to understand in this respect is this: why should
one try to elucidate the complexboth substantive and methodological
problems of the superstructure and ideology if not for putting to appropriate
practical use the knowledge acquired through such investigation? That was
indeed the vital concern expressed by Marx in his insistence about the cardinal importance of practice in orienting the intellectual enterprise. After all,
as we have seen in the Introduction to The Social Determination of Method,
already Descartes forcefully stressed the inherently practical nature and justification of his own engagement with the theoretical challenge of untying
the deceptive skeptical knots produced by scholasticism in the field.146
Short of such practical orientation, what is the point at all of Lvi-Strauss
romantic tirades against humanity, condemning it as its own worst enemy,
ifallegedlynothing can be done about it, because the technological and
population control utopia advocated by him (against population explosion as the postulated source of all evil) is said to be unrealizable? If
really nothing can be done in order to remedy the identified problems, then
also the act of voicing the gloomy romantic laments must be utterly pointless, and in a curious way even self-contradictory.
We can see the self-contradiction in Lvi-Strauss approach to these
issues by recalling a typical passage from The Savage Mind on the nature of
history. It reads like this:
283
History is a discontinuous set composed of domains of history, each of

which is defined by a characteristic frequency and by a differential coding of
before and after. . . .the discontinuous and classificatory nature of historical
knowledge emerges clearly. . . . In a system of this type, alleged historical
continuity is secured only by dint of fraudulent outlines. We need only
recognize that history is a method with no distinct object corresponding to
it to reject the equivalence between the notion of history and the notion of
humanity which some have tried to foist on us with the unavowed aim of
making historicity the last refuge of a transcendental humanism: as if men
could regain the illusion of liberty on the plane of the we merely by giving
up the Is that are too obviously wanting in consistency. In fact history is tied
neither to man nor to any particular object. It consists wholly in its method,
which experience proves to be indispensable for cataloguing the elements of
any structure whatever, human or non-human, in their entirety.147
Thus, when it suits the requirements of Lvi-Strauss positivistic characterization of history, humanity is ruled out of court with the typical exorcizing label of transcendental humanism. This curtly dismissive treatment
of humanity is even reminiscent of Sartres earlier seen prewar condemnation of the We-subject in Being and Nothingness, also re-echoed by
some strange structuralist Marxist authors. At the same time, in complete
contrast to his earlier position, when adopting the tone of the romantic
Jeremiads seems to be a more convenient form of discourse, humanity is
resuscitated again as thealas hopelessly deaf or unwilling to listen
addressee of Lvi-Strauss utterly gloomy but in ruling ideological circles
curiously welcome and prominently diffused sermon. Not even the faintest
memory remains of the once categorically dismissed refuge of a transcendental humanism and historicity in this updated reference to humanity,
well in tune with the newly emerging and appropriately promoted globalized utopian and respectably classless ideological and political climate.
Lvi-Strauss also claims to be a dialectical thinker. In reality, with the
repetitive dualisms and dichotomies of his timeless and rigid structuralist
approach he is not only undialectical but also anti-dialectical. Opposing
continuity and discontinuity in the way in which we have seen it done by
him in the last quotation, defining history as a discontinuous set, is a graphic example of that. Again, nothing could be more alien to the Marxian
approach to history in which the dialectical relationship between continuity
and discontinuity is always stressed as strongly in relation to the material
basis as to the superstructure of society.
284
We can clearly see this dialectic also in the following quotation from the
Grundrisse, where Marx discusses the fundamental issue of the categories,
underlining that Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most
complex historic organization of production. The categories which express
its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insights
into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still
unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have
developed explicit significance within it, etc.148 In this way the meaning of
structure is illuminated, thanks to the profoundly dialectical conception of
continuity and discontinuity in actual historical development from the vanished social formations to the most complex organization and relations of
production in bourgeois society. By contrast, Lvi-Straussian structuralism
turns into a reified fetish the concept of structure precisely because of its
arbitrary dichotomous treatment of history, counterposing even the mystificatorily frozen idea of space to that of historically unfolding time.
We have seen that Marx had put into relief in the strongest possible terms
that We know only one science, the science of history.149 Lvi-Strauss rejects
that approach, to be sure, not by naming Marx (after all, he is supposed to be
also a marxisant intellectual in the field of the superstructure) but by sharply
criticizing sinfully radical Sartre.150 He writes that Sartre is certainly not the
only contemporary philosopher to have valued history above the other human
sciences and formed an almost mystical conception of it. The anthropologist
respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as
a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human
societies in time, the other in space.151 It is a very strange complementarity
indeed which operates on the premise of the dichotomous separation and
opposition of space and time. We have seen in the last chapter in considerable detail Sartres approach to history developed in his Critique of Dialectical
Reason. It does not resemble in the slightest Lvi-Strauss strictures against
this major attempt at elucidating the dialectical character of historical totalization, irrespective of how far Sartre succeeds in completing to his own satisfaction the chosen very real philosophical task.
To say that Sartre has an almost mystical conception of history is
nothing more than a gratuitous insult voiced by an anti-historical and antidialectical thinker. Sartre, who was in fact most generous in the Critique of
Dialectical Reason to Lvi-Strauss, was well justified when in his answer
to such insult retorted: anyone who can write down the dialectic of this
dichotomy shows he knows absolutely nothing about dialectic. And we
285
find in the same quotation from pages 26162 of The Savage Mind the adoption of another anti-dialectical dichotomyfor dichotomies are ubiquitous
in Lvi-Strauss workalso when he crudely counterposes the concept of
method to that of the object (on top of space and time, as well as continuity
and discontinuity) in his characterization of history, reducing it to the task
of cataloguing the elements of any structure, and thereby confining to a
strictly subsidiary position the historians enterprise; which means in fact
demoting it even from its (politely/evasively granted) complementary role.
is not simply Sartre
but the Left in general, although he is supposed to be, of course, also an
intellectual figure of the Left. But in actuality the leading French structuralist
celebrated by the conservative weekly LExpress is no more a man of the
Left than he is a follower of Marx or a dialectical thinker. He claims that
superstructures are faulty acts [his emphases] which have made it socially.
Hence it is vain to go to historical consciousness for the truest meaning. . . . in
Sartres system history plays exactly the part of a myth. Indeed, the problem
raised by the Critique de la raison dialectique is reducible to the question:
under what conditions is the myth of the French Revolution possible?152
Thus, after he himself conveniently reduces everything in his conception of myth to the proverbial darkness in which all cows are black,
Lvi-Strausswell armed again with his own claim of being a man of
science who stands outside the merely contextual field of history153can
proceed to aim his fire at his principal political target by saying that The
so-called men of the Left still cling to a period of contemporary history
which bestowed the blessing of a congruence between practical imperatives and schemes of interpretation. Perhaps this golden age of historical
consciousness has already passed.154
Thus, in view of the prominent figure of French structuralism the only
proper thing to do is to abandon any concern with practical imperatives
unlike socially committed Sartrean existentialism deplorably favored by the
youth in 1968 and after 1968, and disparagingly described by Lvi-Strauss
as an old thing (une vieille chose)so as to offer in its stead the detached
rigor (devoid of practical implications) of the structural anthropologist
man of science. Lvi-Strauss is not disturbed even by directly contradicting himself in the same paragraph by first claiming that he is engaged
in doing scientific work and immediately adding another one of his bizarre
romantic laments by saying that But I cannot help thinking that science
would be more lovable if it did not have to serve to anything.155
NAT UR A L LY, L V I- ST R AU SS REA L TA RGET O F CENSURE
286
And yet Lvi-Strauss does not hesitate to appoint himself to the lofty
status of standing outside the mere contextuality of temporally limited
contemporary history and above the faulty acts of the superstructure which
have made it socially. But can it be done? And in any case, what does it
really mean, if anything?
In truth the textual record shows thatin contrast to the groundless accusation according to which the main tenets of Sartres Critique
of Dialectical Reason amount to no more than a myth about the French
Revolution still fashionable on the Leftnothing could be more mythically inflated than Lvi-Strauss universal panacea of exchange. It is
propounded by him fully in harmony with the well established conservative treatment of that categorycorresponding to a totally ahistorical and
wild extension of its meaningin twentieth century ideology, including
the characteristic role to which it is put in the aggressively anti-socialist
crusade by Friedrich von Hayek.156
The full structural anthropologist arsenal of kinship is used by LviStrauss for that purpose, even if much of it is considered rather questionable in terms of the evidence peremptorily claimed by him, according to
the critical view of those fellow anthropologists who are not wedded to the
structuralist ideology of standing above ideology in virtue of having scientifically deciphered its code through the universalist Mytho-logics of
the Lvi-Straussian superstructure. As the English anthropologist Edmund
Leach underlined it, many would argue that Lvi-Strauss, like Frazer, is
insufficiently critical of his source material. He always seems to be able to
find just what he is looking for. Any evidence, however dubious, is acceptable so long as it fits with logically calculable expectations; but wherever the
data runs counter to the theory Lvi-Strauss will either by-pass the evidence
or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the heresy
thrown out of court!157
In this respect, too, we find in the writings of Lvi-Strauss a most disturbing anti-historical conception, motivated by conservative, and indeed
reactionary, ideological interests. So much so in fact that at a certain point
in the extensive March 1971 interview even the conservative magazine
LExpress finds the gloomy romanticism too much to take on board and
respectfully asks the question: Isnt it what you say very reactionary, in
inverted commas?158
It is to this question that we are offered by Lvi-Strauss the final answer
of his interview, which is utterly reactionary without any inverted commas,
condemning humanity altogether as its own worst enemy and, alas, at the
287
same time also the worst enemy of the rest of the creation.159 That is the
blind alley into which the reader is led by Lvi-Strauss mythologics.
The insuperable problem for Lvi-Straussian structuralism is that the
concept of exchange is inherently historical. Indeed, precisely in view of the
comprehensive nature of exchange relations which actually change in the
dialectical sense of continuity in discontinuity, and discontinuity in continuity, the most diverse reality corresponding to the term exchange is a
historical category (a Daseinsform, i.e. a form of being) par excellence. If it
is treated in any other way, by obliterating the qualitatively different determinations of its modes of being, this important category becomes fetishistically
blurred in a most revealing way.
The socially telling fetishization in question by Lvi-Strauss and others
takes the form of conflating some clearly identifiable aspects of the claimed
exchange relations and corresponding values (to be discussed in a moment)
into a fallaciously posited one. This is done in more or less conscious conformityand of course in the descending phase of the capital systems
development in much more rather than in less conscious conformityto the
interests of the established socioeconomic and political order.
It is by no means surprising or coincidental, therefore, that in LviStrauss mythologizing procedure the anti-historical and generic extension
of the concept of exchange is associated with crying over the loss of the
sense and secret of equilibrium160the mythical postulate of capital-apologetic modern scientific (even mathematically rigorous) economists
and market idolators161and over the disintegration of civilization.162 For
heaven forbid to point the finger to the crisis of capitalism, let alone to its
grave and deepening structural crisis of which the explosion of May 1968
was an obvious early manifestation.
In Lvi-Strauss books, by contrast, the dramatic events of 1968 and their
non-conformist aftermaths are interpreted as an additional sign of the disintegration of a civilization which fails to secure the integration of the new generations that could be so well accomplished by the societies without writing.163
He attributes to Marx the absurd idea that social consciousness always
lies to itself.164 For if it was really true that social consciousness always
lied to itself, in that case the destruction of humanityin the form of LviStrauss cataclysmwould be an absolute certainty, and not a socially
produced and socially preventable danger. No scheme of interpretation,
let alone the vacuously claimed structuralist deciphering of the code of what
is supposed to be hiding behind the necessary lies of social consciousness,
could show a way out of the very real associated dangers. Objective historical
288
antagonisms and their contradictory incorporation in social consciousness

can be consigned to the past only by the radical intervention of the human
historical subject in the domain of objective social metabolic reproduction
and not at the level of mythologicsin response to the prevailing, but by the
structuralist man of science dismissed, practical imperatives.
Significantly and most disconcertingly, however, with regard to the
human subject and historical agent165 whose development in actually
unfolding history is envisaged by Marx in the form of actively overcoming
the false consciousness that must arise from the objective determinations of
historically specific class antagonism, Lvi-Strauss sets up not just one of his
many dichotomies but a hopelessly self-paralyzing irreducible antinomy166
between the most comprehensive historical and dialectical categories of
subject and object.
Every criticized phenomenon is presented in Lvi-Strauss work in an
utterly vague and generic form, so as to avoid the embarrassing requirement to name the grave social specificity of capitals antagonistic reproductive order. In the same way as he was vacuously lamenting over civilization in general, he complains that society is becoming enormous, that it
minimizes difference and spreads similarity, and that it fails to escape
abrupt and hard determinism, etc.
At the same time Lvi-Strauss refuses even to mention, let alone to seriously analyze, the tangible character of ruthless capitalist determinism at the
roots of the deplored phenomena. Instead, he denounces progress in the
most grotesque way, by saying that it brings only 10% good while 90% of the
efforts dedicated to it must be spent on remedying the inconveniences.167
Also, in his wide-ranging 1971 interview, given to LExpress in the period
when in the aftermath of the events of 1968 the organized reactionary forces
in Parisactively promoted by the Gaullist regimeopenly display their
aggressive determination in favor of the most repressive measures, marching
on the Champs dlise in the center of the French capital shouting kill
Sartre, civil war-machine, and even bomb his nearby apartment,168 LviStrauss has the nerve to say in the concluding paragraph of his interview,
in response to the delicately raised suggestion that his views might sound
somewhat reactionary to the readers, that The terms reactionary and
revolutionary have no meaning except in relation to the conflicts of groups
which oppose one another. But today the greater peril for humanity does not
come from the activities of a regime, a party, a group, or a class.169
This is what we are asked to believe by the structuralist man of science.
After all, we have been also invited by him to accept, as we have seen above,
289
thatcontrary to the foolish beliefs of the so-called men of the Left, la

Sartre and his socially non-integrated followers among the dissenting
youththe golden age which bestowed the blessing of a congruence between
practical imperatives and schemes of interpretation has already passed.
T H E CO NT R AD ICTORY TREATMENT O F TH E TH O RNY ISSU E S of the exchange
relationship, closely connected with the questions concerning use value and
exchange value, go back a long way in the various theoretical conceptions
formulated from the standpoint of capital. Not surprisingly, therefore, neglecting and even obliterating the historical dimension of the major issues, so
as to be able to eternalize capitals societal reproductive order, is a general
tendency in this field. Moreover, this tendency is clearly visible not only in
twentieth century capital apologetics but also in the writings of the classical
political economists.
In this way the capitalist exchange relations are ahistorically universalized
(and of course at the same time also legitimated) through their confusion with
a completely dehistoricized conception of utility. Thus in the case of Ricardo,
for instance, we find the baffling conflation of exchange value with use value
and utility in general. This tendentious confounding transformation is accomplished in Ricardos work by treating the capitalist labor process and the creation of wealth through thein reality historically specificcapitalist exchange
relation as natural and by assigning, in Marxs word, merely a ceremonial
form to exchange value. In other words, for Ricardo
wealth itself, in its exchange-value form, appears as a merely formal mediation

of its material composition; thus the specific character of bourgeois wealth
is not graspedprecisely because it appears there as the adequate form of
wealth as such, and thus, although exchange-value is the point of departure,
the specific economic forms of exchange themselves play no role at all in his
economics. Instead, he always speaks about distribution of the general
product of labour and of the soil among the three classes, as if the form of
wealth based on exchange-value were concerned only with use-value, and as
if exchange-value were merely a ceremonial form, which vanishes in Ricardo
just as money as medium of circulation vanishes in exchange.170
In contrast to such approaches, the importance of grasping the necessary historical mediations of both exchange and utility could not be
greater. For the failure to identify the historically specific mediations in theoretical analysis can only yield the profundity of conveniently embellished
290
tautologies which, on the basis of their ability to claim (common place)

self-evidence for themselves, frequently constitute only the preliminary
step and the jumping board to the most arbitrary assertion of ideological
vested interests at the next step. In this sense it is a tautology to say that
property (appropriation) is a precondition of production. But it is altogether
ridiculous to leap [in bourgeois political economy] from that to a specific
form of property, e.g. private property. (Which further and equally presupposes an antithetical form, non-property.)171
It is an obvious tautology to say that exchange is a necessary (and in that
sense universal) condition of human society. For how could the multiplicity of
human individuals exist and reproduce themselves in their societies without
exchangingsomething, sometime and other, somewhere, and somehow172
among themselves? For the individuals in question are neither genus-individuals, nor isolated individuals, as depicted in the bourgeois Robinsonnades
in modern timesliving each of them as single individuals on their particular
well stocked desert islands, like Robinson Crusoe, and waiting only for the
arrival of Friday to serve them as laboring hands, in accordance with the
ideal determinations of nature173but inescapably social individuals even
under the most extreme dehumanizing conditions of capitalist alienation.
The notion of exchange is tellingly reduced to a platitudinous tautology
when it is proclaimed as a universal and permanent panacea, devised for the
purpose of fallaciously smuggling into the equation as the necessary premise
of all reasoning in the field the desired apologetic conclusion, in the absence
of the really vitalinseparably social as well as historicaldimension of the
substantive relationships at issue.
The important category of exchange can acquire its theoretically relevant meaning only when it is inserted into the dynamic historical framework
of socially determined specific mediations174 and complex interrelations
through which the objective changes and transformations of its modalities
changes ranging from capillary alterations to qualitatively/radically different and all-embracing magnitudesare convincingly displayed. That is
to say, changes which unfold in accordance with the dialectic of continuity
in discontinuity and discontinuity in continuity characteristic of historical/
transhistorical development. But development is what we are concerned
with, even if often it is misrepresented as a simplistic straw-man linear
progress, invented for the purpose of being set to fire with a single matchstick
in the service of romantic structuralist laments.
Indeed the annals of history show substantive development from the
exchange relations of our distant ancestorswho are compelled to live for
291
a long historical period from hand to mouthto the globally interdependent and irrepressibly interactive, as well as potentially emancipatory,
present and future. The emergence of this emancipatory potential is an
integral part of the historical process itself, irrespective of how great might
be thesocially preventable or rectifiabledangers which are now inseparable from capitals globalizing modality of social metabolic reproduction
and from their historically specific and correspondingly destructive second
order mediations. Without the concrete grasp of the social and historical
determinations at stake in these matters the platitudinous tautology about
exchange commended as a universal panacea can only amount to the mystifying apologetics of the established order.
In the same sense, it is quite obvious that in necessarily changingand
not structuralistically frozen and reifiedhuman society there can be no
structure without history, in the same way as there can be no history of
any magnitude without its corresponding structures. Structural imperatives and historical temporality are closely intertwined. For human society
is inconceivable without its dynamic structuring determinations (often misrepresented as rigid architectural constructs, so as to be able to dismiss
the Marxian base and superstructure metaphor) which secure some kind
of cohesion even under the conditions of the antagonistic capital systems
structural centrifugality.
The structural imperatives may indeed assume the most rigid and even
destructive form under determinate historical conditions and assert themselves
behind the backs of the individuals if need be, as precisely they happen to
do that under our own conditions of existence. Accordingly, also the categories of structure and historyas all-embracing and temporally changing structural articulations of the corresponding forms of being (Daseinsformen)
are inextricably conjoined in actually existing human society.
However, without an inherently dialectical and historical treatment
of both of them, the concepts of structure and history are also as much
in danger of being turned into mere tautology as the timeless universal
panacea of exchange. This means that an adequate conception of their relationship must account not only for the historical genesis of any structure
whatsoever175 but also for the process of development in humanitys history
itself, i.e. for its genesis and dynamic transformations, in accordance with
its determination as an open-ended framework of societal change. And
that includes the potential move from antagonistic prehistory to real
history consciously lived and ordained by the non-antagonistically selfmediating social individuals.
292
If such historical genesis and ongoing transformation is avoided in theory,

not to say even explicitly dismissed, as is done in Lvi-Strauss attacks on
Sartre, we end up with the earlier seen hopeless dichotomies of space and
time, continuity and discontinuity, subject and object, etc. Equally, we end up
with the characteristic reduction of history itselfsaid to be devoid of any
object and good for nothing but cataloguing the elements of any structureto a desolate collection of data complemented by the anti-progress mythologics of the retrograde structural anthropology propounded by
Lvi-Strauss.
It is necessary in connection with all of these fundamental social and
corresponding categorial relations to keep the objective prioritieswhich
happen to be both historical and logical primaciesin their proper perspective. For in the case of exchange, for instance, before one can envisage the
exchange of anything, the objects to be exchanged must be somehow produced. And so must be also the social relations under which their historically specific production becomes feasible. In other words, the question of
historical genesis must take precedence in these matters, as indeed it happens
to be most important also for dialectically settling the question of what may
or may not be legitimately considered the precondition, in contrast to the
result, in any determinate relationship. Thus in distribution, for instance,
analogously to exchange
The structure of distribution is completely determined by the structure of
production. Distribution is itself a product of production, not only in its object,
in that only the results of production can be distributed, but also in its form,
in that the specific kind of participation in production determines the specific
form of distribution, i.e. the pattern of participation in distribution. . . . In the
shallowest conception, distribution appears as the distribution of products,
and hence as further removed from and quasi-independent of production. But
before distribution can be the distribution of products, it is (1) the distribution
of the instruments of production, and (2) which is a further specification of
the same relation, the distribution of the members of the society among the
different kinds of production. (Subsumption of the individuals under specific
relations of production.) The distribution of products is evidently only a result
of this distribution, which is comprised within the process of production itself
and determines the structure of production.176
As we can see, all of the named factors relevant to the evaluation of the historically always specific productive/distributive relationship are dialectically
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treated here, fully respecting both the temporal and the structural priorities
involved. The same must apply to the assessment of the exchange relationship as much with regard to the most remote historical past as its capitalist
modality, as well as to its potential futureabsolutely vitaltransformation. For it is crucially important for the survival of humanity to institute a
radically differentcommunalexchange relationship in the not too distant
future, in place of the fetishistic and destructive domination of use value
(corresponding to human need) by increasingly more wasteful capitalist
exchange value.
Revealingly, those who mythically inflate the concept of exchange and
project its capitalist variety even into the most remote corners of the past,
obliterate not only the real historical dimension of the exchange relationship
itself but also the objective structural priorities, so as to block the road ahead,
with its qualitatively different mode of regulating social metabolic reproduction also in terms of the unavoidable exchange/interchange of humanity
with nature and among the particular individuals themselves in society. By
defining exchange in terms of the product (the result) of the processirrespective of the question of what kind of product is at issue, from material
goods to cultural entitiesthey obliterate all awareness of the specific productive activities and the corresponding relations of production at their roots,
as their necessary precondition, under which the producing individuals are
subsumed. They represent the exchange relationship in this way in order to
be able to banish from view the feasibility of instituting a historically viable
alternative. Thus the primacy of activity itself is characteristically wiped out
in the interest of eternalizing and absolutizing the historically contingent capitalist alienation of both the productive activity and its commodified product.
In reality there can be no aprioristic apodicticity for projecting the
socially always necessaryexchange relations in the form of products, let
alone of commodified products. The only reason for engaging in such projectionand grossly violating thereby both the historical and the conceptual
primacies involvedis to harmonize, in the interest of social legitimation,
the commodity form of exchange with the established, historically contingent
form of property embodied in the relations of production, with its antagonistic
second order mediations. For the given relations of production, ruled by the
imperative of perennial capital-accumulation, are incapable of producing
and distributing the products in any other way.
However, the characteristically absolutized legitimatory claims of the established form of property and appropriation are historically false. For as Marx
had clearly put it into relief in his discussion of property and appropriation,
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against the eternalizing claims attached to the notion of private property:

History rather shows common property (e.g. in India, among the Slavs, the
early Celts, etc.) to be the more original form, a form which long continues to
play a significant role in the shape of communal property.177
Thus, even if the historical primacy of common property is disputed
and denied, in the service of the vested interests of capital-accumulation, no
one can rationally deny the primacy of productive activity itself at the roots
of all conceivable forms and varieties of production, from material goods
to religious ideas and works of art. This is so even if this primacy can be
practically violated, of course, as a matter of historical contingency, through
capitals mode of class-exploitative appropriation, from the time of the primitive accumulation to the present.
In this sense, advocating the exchange of activities as the only viable historical alternative and a qualitatively different mode of production and distribution for the future, means restituting to productive activity its ontological primacy, overturned and usurped by capitals forcibly discriminatory
form of expropriating appropriation to which we have been accustomed for
a very long time. But it goes without saying that the institution of a qualitatively different exchange relationship, compared to its now dominant form,
based in the future on the self-managed exchange of activities in a consciously
planned and coordinated productive and distributive order, requires the
radical transformation of the alienated property relations into a communal
type. That is precisely the reason why in the ideologically dominant theories
(and mytho-logics) of the exchange relations even the mention of the feasibility of production and societal reproduction on the basis of the exchange
of activities by the freely associated producers must be avoided like plague.
Nevertheless, the necessity to regulate societal reproduction based on
the voluntary exchange of activities, in contrast to the authoritarian division
of labor inseparable from blindly pursued capital-accumulation, remains the
vital practical imperative of our historical time, no matter how sharply it
contradicts the apologetic structuralist schemes of interpretation. For that
is the only feasible way of reconstituting the one and only historically sustainable relationship between production and human need through restoring
use value to its rightful place in the exchange relationship, on the basis of
substantive equality. That is, a genuine socialist modality of exchange, freed
from the wasteful and destructive domination of formally reductive exchange
value and, accordingly, viable both in humanitys reproductive microcosms
and on the global scale.
8. The Role of Scarcity

in Historical Conceptions
I R O N I C AL LY, T HE W ID E SP REA D ID EA LIZATIO N of the established reproductive
order as a natural system takes care of everything, even of the problem of
potentially most destructive scarcity, when scarcity is acknowledged as part of
the overall scheme of difficult but workable solutions. For once the supreme
authority of nature itself is postulated178 by the ideological representatives of
the bourgeoisie as an integral part of the universal explanatory framework
and justification of the given relations and processes, even what might appear
at first sight as a major contradiction can be readily spirited away.
In this sense, the liberal theory of the state was founded on the self-proclaimed contradiction between the assumed total harmony of endsthe ends
posited to be necessarily desired by all individuals in virtue of their human
natureand the total anarchy of means. And the anarchy of means conceptualized in this way was the allegedly insurmountable scarcity of goods
and resources which must induce the human individuals to struggle, and
ultimately to destroy each other, unless they succeeded in establishing over
above themselves a superior authority, in the form of the bourgeois state, as
the permanent restraining force of their individualistic belligerence.
Thus the state was invented for the alleged purpose of turning anarchy
into harmony. That is, to dedicate itself to the universally commendable
task of harmonizing the nature-determined anarchy of means with the
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wishfully postulatedand equally nature-determinedharmony of ends

by reconciling the violent antagonism between these two natural factors:
unalterable human nature and forever dominating material scarcity. And,
of course, this reconciliation was asserted in the form of the absolute permanence of the states externally imposed political power over the individuals.
To be sure, if the factors which were highlighted in this way were really
the unalterable forces of nature, and consequently they could not be controlled in any other way than by an external supra-individual political
authority superimposed on the individuals constituted by nature itself as
antagonistically confronting and destroying one another as warring individuals, in that case the corrective state authority, in its capacity of making
harmonizable societal interchanges feasible at all, would have its permanent
legitimacy. In that case the Hegelian idealist version of this state ideology
according to which the Absolute Spirits originally hidden design, establishing the state as the only feasible supersession of the contradictions of
conflicting genus-individuals in civil society, and in this capacity the state
being both Spirits perfect embodiment179 and the image and actuality of
Reason180would be self-evidently true forever. There could therefore be
absolutely no question of envisaging the states withering away.
However, the fact that on the one hand the stipulated human nature181
was itself a self-serving assumption, invented for the purpose of a circular
plausibility of its mere assumption by virtue of what it was supposed to
explain and justify, and that on the other hand the actually existing scarcity
was an inherently historical category, and consequently subject to feasible
historical change and potential supersession, had to remain concealed in the
liberal theory of the state and civil society under the multiple layers of
circularity characteristic of such theory. For it was this kind of apologetic circularity, constituted on a merely assumed but totally unsustainable natural
foundation, which enabled the intellectual representatives of liberalism to
move at will backwards and forwards from arbitrary premises to the desired
conclusions, establishing on the a priori foundations of their ideological circularity the eternal legitimacy of the liberal state. Thanks to such fundamental circularity between nature-determined individuals as well as their
appropriately conflictual civil society and the idealized political state
which was supposed to overcome the identified contradictions without
changing the existing material reproductive order itselfboth capitals state
formation and its societal reproductive framework could be assumed as
forever given, in virtue of the justifying reciprocity and the thereby projected
absolute permanence of their interrelationship.
T H E R O L E OF S C AR C IT Y IN H ISTO RICA L CO NCEPTIO NS
297
Scarcity (or anarchy of means) played a vital role in this scheme of

things. It rationally justified both the irreconcilability of the warring individuals as genus individualswho, after all, had to assert their self-interest
in accordance with their stipulated human natureand at the same time
also provided the eternal reason for adopting the necessary corrective measures by the political state for making the system as a whole insurmountable
by preventing its destructive fragmentation to pieces through individualistically pursued antagonisms. But take away from this picture insurmountable
scarcity, and replace it by something akin to a sustainable availability of
productive and humanly gratifying resources, often simplistically referred
to as unqualified abundance, and you witness the immediate collapse of
the entire pseudo-rational self-justificatory construct. For in the absence of
fateful scarcity the allegedly nature-determined genus-individuals have no
reason to engage in the postulated life or death struggle among themselves
in order to survive.
By the same token, however, if you accept the proposition concerned
with nature-determinedand therefore by definition existentially primary,
insurmountable, and all-justifyingscarcity, then you are entrapped
by a structural framework in which the parts are reciprocally/circularly
positing one another, barring thereby any possibility of exit from their
vicious circle. For in that case you must accept even the fictitious postulate of nature-determined genus individuality, on the evidence that human
beings undoubtedly survived with (and despite) their conflicts all the way
to the present time in a world of scarcity within the confines of their civil
society and the state.
In this sense, if the socialist alternative intends to offer a way out of this
tendentious entrapment, conceived from the standpoint of capital, it must
challenge all of its circularly interlocking constituents. That goes not only
for a viable conception of historically defined and socially changing human
naturehighlighted by Marx in our earlier quote as the true community of
men182 and elsewhere as the changing ensemble of social relations183but
also for the rest. That is, for the eternalized bourgeois material reproductive
order of civil society as much as for its state formation, so as to be able
to envisage at the same time a radically different mode of social metabolic
reproduction. A mode of reproduction capable of overcoming the established antagonistic class relations, misrepresented in the bourgeois conceptionseven in the greatest of themas genus-determined individual conflictuality. For capitals antagonistic second order mediations necessarily
carry with them the perverse irrationality of eternalized scarcity even when
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its original material conditions are productively overcome in the course of

historical development.
PA R A DOX IC AL LY, D E S P ITE H IS PASSIO NATE D ETESTATIO N of the institutionally
secured inhumanities of bourgeois civil society and its protective political
state, Jean-Paul Sartre cannot break out from the entrapment mentioned
above. For it is not enough to negate only two of the fundamental constituents
of the perversely interlocking capital system. However, the difficulty is that
in as much as Sartre wants to give an existentialist ontological underpinning
to his conception of humanitys historical development even in the Critique
of Dialectical Reason, he must present us with a most problematical account
of scarcity in what he calls his existentialist enclave within Marxism.
As we have seen in chapter 6 above, Sartre categorically asserted in the
Critique of Dialectical Reason that to say that our History is a history of men
is equivalent to saying that it is born and developed within the permanent
framework of a field of tension produced by scarcity.184 We have also seen
that for Sartre this is not a question of historically surmountable social contingency but a matter of the human beings existential ontological determination according to which man is objectively constituted as non-human, and this
non-humanity is expressed in praxis by the perception of evil as the structure
of the Other.185 And to make matters worse, this quasi-mythical Other is constituted not simply somewhere outside but also inextricably in myself as the
Other. Accordingly, we are told by Sartre that It is man, and nothing else,
that I hate in the enemy, that is in myself as Other; and it is myself that I try to
destroy in him, so as to prevent him destroying me in my own body.186
Sadly, given the existentialist ontological presuppositions retained by
Sartre to the end, even when he calls himself a marxisant thinker, it is impossible to find a viable solution to the problems of scarcity in his writings. And
that goes not only for the first volume but also for the unfinishedand as we
have seen above, within Sartres conceptual framework on principle unfinishablesecond volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, which was supposed to give a dialectical account of real history, in contrast to sketching the
categorial outlines of the formal structures of history in the first.
His discussion of scarcity and its human impact in the second volume
of the Critique, presented with the much admired Sartrean graphic intensity
through the example of boxing, tends to be in terms of its validity grounded
on characteristics of the past andwith regard to the present and the future
confined to individual psychological plausibility despite the authors claims
to general validity.
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Sartre offers a curiously undialectical dialectic of the asserted interiorization of the contradictory predicament of the generic scarce man.
For what we receive from him in the second volume of the Critique of
Dialectical Reason is an unsustainable explanation of the depicted relationship, timelessly projected into the future. It is extended to the thornyand
in the existing societal reproductive order absolutely fundamentalissue of
the origin of profit, summed up in the Sartrean assertion in this way: profit
springs from the non-sufficiency of satisfaction (worker and wage) and from
non-abundance.187
The example of boxing claimed by Sartre to be representative of all
struggle is not simply problematical in this respect but quite inappropriate to the characterization of historically determined and capitalistically
enforced structural antagonism. The vital difference between the Sartrean
representation of the boxers struggle and the real antagonism between
capital and labor (for which boxing is also supposed to stand) transpires
when we read that
This bout in which the two [boxing] beginners are embroiled, each a victim
at once of his own blunders and the others, has a reality all the more striking
in that such domination of the labourers by their labour, by producing their
future before the eyes of all (they will vegetate at the foot of the ladder or
abandon the profession), causes it to be seen and touched as a signification and
as a destiny. . . . But it is a destiny, in so far as this domination of the boxers by
boxing is directly grasped as presence of their future misfortune. . . . The social
ensemble is incarnated with the multiplicity of its conflicts in such a singular
temporalization of negative reciprocity.
. . . In a direct sense, the fight is a public incarnation of every [Sartres
emphasis] conflict. It relates, without any intermediary, to the interhuman
tension produced by the interiorization of scarcity.188
However, in actuality the fundamental differencewhich arises from a

grave social antagonism concerned with two diametrically opposed social
metabolic alternatives and not from what could be characterized by the
negative reciprocity of every conflictis that labor, as capitals hegemonic
alternative, cannot abandon the profession. Its situation is not a profession at all but a structurally determined condition and a necessarily subordinate class position in the societal reproduction process. The particular
workerbut not labor as suchcan abandon this or that profession (in
the sense of changing a job), but due to his class situation he is at the same
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time forced into another one. Labor as a social class cannot do anything like
abandoning the profession.
Equally, the domination of the boxers by boxing is inapplicable to the
condition of labor. Labor is dominated by capital, and not by labor, in
the Sartrean sense of the boxer being dominated by boxing. The domination of labor is historically most specific, and it is not due to scarcity and
technology in Sartres sense, let alone to the interiorization of scarcity. In
fact we are concerned here with a non-symmetrical relationship of structurally enforced domination and subordination, quite unlike the symmetrical
struggle between two boxers who agree to co-operate within a voluntarily
accepted set of rules. In the case of labor the rules are forced upon the
members of the class as a whole (through their structurally enforced domination and subordination), and thefar from voluntarily embracedrules
are not forced simply on individual workers but on the class as a whole.
But even if the prevailing rules are not politically forced upon the
members of the class, as they are under the conditions of slavery and feudal
serfdom, they are forced upon them nevertheless, as economically imposed
determinations. Thus the regulatory determinations in question are in the
most fundamental sense objectivelymaterially/reproductivelyprevailing
rules. Moreover, a significant further qualification is also needed in this
respect. For the ultimate guarantoreven if only the ultimate guarantorof
safeguarding the materially/structurally predetermined and enforced rules
of commodity society is in fact the capitalist state, with its class-determined
legal system and the corresponding law-enforcing apparatus. For
Every form of production creates its own legal relations, form of government,
etc. In bringing things which are organically related into an accidental
relation, into a merely reflective connection, they [the political economists
of the descending phase of capitals historical development] display their
crudity and lack of conceptual understanding. All the bourgeois economists
are aware of is that production can be carried on better under the modern
police than e.g. on the principle of might makes right. They forget only that
this principle is also a legal relation, and that the right of the stronger prevails
in their constitutional republics as well, only in another form.189
Sartre needs the ahistorical absolutization of scarcityin the name of

historical intelligibility, of all thingsin order to make possible for himself
the avoidance of elaborating the categories and structures of real history.
He remains anchored to the formal structures of history in tune with the
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existential ontological determination given in his conception even at the time

of writing the Critique to evil as the structure of the Otherand the Other
also in myself engaged in permanent interiorized struggle over scarcity.
Sartres way of linking together scarcity, struggle and contradiction in the modality of insurmountable necessity is also most problematical.
For even if in the rather remote past we can identify the necessary linkage
between scarcity and struggle, this is not so once rational control of the conditions at stake by the social individuals becomes feasible, in conjunction
with sustainable productive advancement. Here, again, the example of the
boxers is inapplicable. For we are concerned with different orders and types
of rational control: one formally consistent with a voluntarily agreed set of
rules devised for the purpose of anadmittedly most lucrativesport, and
the other substantive, from the domain of real history.
To be sure, in the case of the two boxers their rationalityi.e. their
voluntary/conscious acceptance of the rules of their professionis inseparable from their claimed struggle. But their struggle is not a real struggle
at all in the sense of the life or death struggle over insurmountable scarcity constantly called by that name by Sartre himself. Nor is it even slightly
comparable, in its essential character, to the antagonistic confrontationa
very real historic struggle over the contested outcome of the structurally
determined antagonism between capital and labor over their incompatible
hegemonic historical alternatives. Only a dubious formal analogy can be
drawn between such fundamentally different forms of struggle, as the structural antagonism between capital and labor in real history and the consensual
ritual of the two boxers even when they fight over a purse of a hundred
million dollars.
Sartre can offer us in the case of the two boxers a psychologically plausible picture. Thus he is at his most eloquent when he asserts that what
is certain is that, in every brawl, the deep source is always scarcity . . . the
translation of human violence as interiorized scarcity.190 And he proceeds
with his graphic characterization of the meaning of the boxing match in the
same vein by saying that
The two boxers gather within themselves, and re-exteriorize by the punches
they swap, the ensemble of extensions and open or masked struggles that
characterize the regime under which we liveand have made us violent
even in the least of our desires, even in the gentlest of our caresses. But at the
same time, this violence is approved in them.191
302
In this way the depicted particular boxing contest can be generalized

by Sartre as representative of all human violence. This is how it appears in
volume 2 of the Critique: Every boxing match incarnates the whole of boxing
as an incarnation of all fundamental violence. . . . An act of violence is always
all of violence, because it is a re-exteriorization of interiorized scarcity.192
Thus a direct line is drawn between the psychologically plausible
depiction of two individuals in a boxing match and the general conditions
of human violence said to correspond to the re-exteriorization of interiorized scarcity. Accordingly, in the Sartrean picture the psychological plausibility of the boxing individuals motivations, and its projection (without
any intermediary, as he puts it elsewhere) as the claimed identity between
the particular act of violence and the general condition of necessarily interiorizedas well as violently re-exteriorizedscarcity takes the place of
what should be made socially/historically determinate and in that sense
plausible. But that could only be done in the categorial framework of real
history, where scarcity occupies its specific, but not absolutizable existential ontological place.
T H E P ROB L E M OF A BUN DAN CE often appears in some form counterposed
to scarcity. Sometimes this is done for the purpose of a priori dismissing
the possibility of overcoming scarcity any time in the, no matter how
distant, future because it is said to be totally unrealistic to envisage the
stable institution of abundance in human society in view of the insuperably
conflictual determinations of human nature. No further comments are
needed in relation to this position.
On other occasions, however, the possibility of overcoming scarcity by
abundance is not denied on principle, but none the less it is ruled out for
the foreseeable time ahead of us on the ground that it would require some
productively most advanced technological conditions which might perhaps
materialize (or not) in the distant future. And there is also a third, positively
assertive position about the emerging abundance which states that the conquest of scarcity is now not only foreseeable but actually foreseen.193
Marcuses position was much the same as the views just quoted from
an essay by the prominent Canadian Marxist thinker, C. B. Macpherson.
Marcuse insisted that the utopian possibilities which he advocated were
inherent in the technical and technological forces of advanced capitalism
on the basis of which one could terminate poverty and scarcity within a
very foreseeable future.194 He kept on repeating that technical progress has
reached a stage in which reality no longer need be defined by the debilitating
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competition for social survival and advancement. The more these technical
capacities outgrow the framework of exploitation within which they continue
to be confined and abused, the more they propel the drives and aspirations of
men to a point at which the necessities of life cease to demand the aggressive
performance of earning a living, and the non-necessary becomes a vital
need.195 And in the same work, written by Marcuse well before sinking into
deep pessimism in the last years of his life, he postulated a biological foundation to revolutionary change, saying that such a foundation
would have the chance of turning quantitative technical progress into
qualitatively different ways of lifeprecisely because it would be a revolution
occurring at a high level of material and intellectual development, one which
would enable man to conquer scarcity and poverty. If this idea of a radical
transformation is to be more than idle speculation, it must have an objective
foundation in the production process of advanced industrial society, in its
technical capabilities and their use. For freedom indeed depends largely on
technical progress, on the advancement of science.196
This generously well-meaning unreality was written and published by

Marcuse more than forty years ago, and we have seen absolutely nothing
pointing in the direction of its realization. On the contrary, we have witnessed
recently a devastating crisis of advanced industrial society, with food riots
admitted by one of the ideological pillars of the established orderThe
Economistto have taken place in no less than thirty five countries, despite
all of the significant technical progress undoubtedly accomplished in the past
four decades. Not even the slightest attempt has been made for the enduring
conquest of scarcity.
The great weakness of the Marcuse-type projections, shared by C. B.
Macpherson and many others, is that the positive results regarding the
actually foreseen conquest of scarcity are expected to arise from the propelling force of technical/technological progress and productive advancement. And that could not happen even in a thousand years, not to mention
forty or even a hundred. For technology is not an independent variable. It
is deeply embedded in the most fundamental social determinations, despite
all mystification to the contrary,197 as we have seen above on several occasion.
No one can doubt that the sympathy of the people who in this way anticipate the conquest of scarcity is on the side of the wretched of the earth who
fight the affluent monster.198 But their moral discourse cannot even touch
the fundamental objective determinations which so successfully perpetuate
304
the denounced plight of the exploited and oppressed, let alone effectively
alter them. To expect from productive advancement, arising from technical
progress in advanced industrial society, to move humanity in the direction of eliminating scarcity is to ask for the impossible. The same kind of
impossibility as expecting that the capitalist should set a limit to his appetite
for profit on the ground that he has enough profit already. For the society
Marcuse and others talk about is not advanced industrial but only capitalistically advancedand for humanity itself suicidally dangeroussociety.
It cannot take a single step in the direction of conquering scarcity for as long
as it remains under the rule of capital, irrespective of its growing technical
capabilities and the corresponding degree of improvement in productivity
in the future. For two important reasons.
First, because even the greatest technically secured productive advancement can beand under the conditions now prevailing in our society actually is and must bedissipated through profitable waste and the channels
of destructive production, including the state-legitimated fraudulence of the
military/industrial complex, as we have seen before. And secondwhat
happens to be more fundamental herebecause of the objective character
of the system of capital-accumulation. We should not forget that capital
personified and endowed with consciousness and a will cannot be interested
in the conquest of scarcity, and in the corresponding equitable distribution of wealth, for the simple reason that use-values must never be looked
upon as the real aim of the capitalist; . . . The restless never ending process
of profit-making alone is what he aims at.199 And in that respect, which is
inseparable from the absolute imperative of endless capital-expansion and
accumulation, the permanent structural impediment is that capital always
isand, this cannot be stressed strongly enough, it always must remain, as
a matter of inner systemic determinationinsuperably scarce, even when
under certain conditions it is contradictorily overproduced.200
with the conquest of
scarcity and its sustainable replacement by productively generalized abundance. He is firmly negative in that respect, describing the man of scarcity
as the man who imposes his will and expropriates abundance to himself.201
The existential ontological orientation and coloring of Sartres characterization of the insuperable conflictual relationship between myself and my
adversaries is retained to the very end of the Critique of Dialectical Reason
when he writes that in the field of scarcity an increase in the number or
power of my neighbours has the result of increasing the precariousness of
SA RT R E IS , OF C OU R S E , NOT IN TH E LEAST CO NCERNED
305
my existence. For that power seeks both to produce more (a ceiling though)
and to eliminate me. My alteration is suffered, and is what incarnates the
transformation in me.202
However, Sartres way of dealing with the problem of scarcity and abundanceby making scarcity the existential foundation of history, as its permanent framework produced by scarcity, as well as of historical intelligibility, rather than a (no matter how important) contingent factor in history,
capable of being overcome under significantly altered conditions at some
point in timedoes not solve the very real historical challenge facing us.
In truth, some elementary qualifications are required for a proper characterization of abundance itself which can be legitimately posited in the
context of overcoming the historical domination of scarcity. For at a relatively early stage of humanitys historical development the naturally necessary needswhich were for our distant ancestors fully in tune with the
overwhelming material domination of scarcityare actually superseded by
a much more complex, historically created, set of needs, as we have seen
discussed in The Dialectic of Structure and History. To be sure, the productive advancement in question does not represent the end of this burdensome story but, none the less, it means a significant move in the direction of
conquering the original domination of human life by scarcity. In this sense:
Luxury is the opposite of naturally necessary. Necessary needs are those
of the individual himself reduced to a natural subject. The development of
industry suspends this natural necessity as well as this former luxuryin
bourgeois society, it is true, it does so only in antithetical form, in that it itself
only posits another specific social standard as necessary, opposite luxury.203
Accordingly, consigning scarcity to the past is a long-drawn-out but,

despite all obstacles and contradictions, an ongoing historical process.
However, precisely because of the antithetical form in which this historical
development must be carried on in bourgeois society, the real question for
the future is not the utopian institution of unqualified abundance but the
rational control of the process of productive advancement by the social individuals, feasible only in a socialist reproductive order. Otherwise the historically no longer justifiable domination of scarcityin the form of perversely
wasteful but profitable destructive production in a variety of its capitalistically
feasible formsremains with us indefinitely. In the absence of the required
rational self-determination on a societal scalewhose absence under
the present conditions happens to be not a fateful existential ontological
306
determination but a question of historically created and historically superable impedimenteven the greatest (abstractly postulated) abundance
would be utterly powerless and futile as an attempt to overcome the domination of scarcity.
Thus we are concerned in this respect with a historically determinate
but not permanently history-determiningsocial force and impediment to
social emancipation which dominated human life for far too long. It is that
structural/systemic impediment that must be radically superseded through
labors hegemonic alternative to capitals established mode of social metabolic control according to the Marxian conception of the new historic form.
9. The Missing Dimension

I N H I S L AST IN T E RV IEW , published in Le Nouvel Observateur, Sartre
expressed both his extreme pessimism (called by him in the same interview
also despair) and his hope to find a way out of it. He admitted at the same
time that this hope must be founded.204 Accordingly, he promised at the
end of that March 1980 interview to dedicate himself to the task of founding
hope not simply in personal terms but with justifiable claim to general
validity in the years remaining of his life, but as we know its achievement
was denied to him. For unexpectedly he died two weeks later.
In fact the deep pessimism haunted Sartre for nearly a decade, as a
result of his great disappointment on account of the failure of the May
1968 radicalization and the conservative backlash. He readily confessed
his pessimism in the 1975 interview given to Michel Contat and published
also in Le Nouvel Observateur, addingeven with a touch of by his own
standard most unusual litism about the past efforts of a few men in
humanitys historythat If I am not completely pessimistic it is primarily
because I see in myself certain needs which are not only mine but the needs
of every man. To express it another way, it is the experienced certainty of
my own freedom . . . But it is true that either man crumblesand then all
one could say is that during the twenty thousand years in which there have
been men, a few of them tried to create man and failedor else this revolution succeeds and creates man by bringing about freedom. Nothing is less
sure. It is impossible to find a rational basis for revolutionary optimism,
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since what is is the present reality. And how can we lay the foundations for
the future reality? Nothing allows me to do it. I am sure of one thingthat
we must make a radical politics. But I am not sure that it will succeed, and
there faith enters in.205
In this way Sartre could indicate in 1975 the need for freedomsaid
to be felt not only by him but by every manas the possible foundation
of hope regarding a sustainable future reality, denying at the same time its
power to overrule pessimism. Moreover, what was called by him in 1975
the present reality was in the final interview described as this miserable ensemble which is our planet, and it was characterized as horrible,
ugly, bad, without hope. Understandably, therefore, to found hope with
a general claim to validity on the ground of the projection of such a desolate planetary picture would seem to constitute a prohibitive enterprise. For
while in 1975 Sartre could still advocate radical politics, as something that
must be made, confessing at the same time his grave doubts about its feasible
success, and openly admitting that his doubts prevailing on that score could
be countered only by faith, in the 1980 interview only the pure personal
faithfulness to theshould befiat of hope remained to him, in reiterating
that I continue to feel hope as my conception of the future.
But how can one build the required objective foundation of hope for
humanitys future on the subjective assertion of I feel hope? In other
words, if the feasibility of succeeding on that basis is questioned, what is
missing from the Sartrean conception of the world which confines himand
often in a self-torturing wayto a pessimistic overall perspective, despite
his passionate dedication to the cause of human emancipation throughout
most of his life? The somber Sartrean vision of elusive hope that in his view
must be founded, but to the very end he could not found, is closely related to
the way in which he treats the relationship between freedom and necessity.
In this respect the profound ambiguities of Sartres philosophical system
persist not only in his early works but in all of them. This is all the more
revealing because in the synthesizing works written in the 1950s and later he
makes very serious attempts to overcome them, or at least to reduce them to
what he considers inevitable in the present age. At the same time he is aware
of the problems he leaves unresolved and goes as far as stating that he will
never solve them. In a confession he says: From the period when I wrote La
Nause I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer
dreaming of doing so.206
In this respect it is necessary to single out here one of the most important aspects of this complex of problems: the role of projects in Sartres
T H E M I S S ING DIM E N S ION
309
philosophy. In his Critique de la raison dialectique Sartre strongly emphasizes that The simple inspection of the social field ought to have led to
the discovery that the relation to ends is a permanent structure of human
enterprises and that it is on the basis of this relation that real men evaluate
actions, institutions, or economic constructions.207 Nobody should quarrel
with these words. What needs, however, further clarification is the specific
character of various kinds of relations to ends which characterize the different kinds of human activity. While it is right to criticize the reductionism of
mechanistic materialism in this regard, it is very problematical to establish a
direct link between the abstract generality of relations to ends and the postulated category of mere particularity: the Sartrean singularity of the individuals. There is an enormous gap between these two poles appearing again
and again in Sartres philosophy. We can illustrate it with two quotations.
The first reads as follows: As this impulse toward objectification
assumes various forms according to the individual, as it projects us across a
field of possibilities, some of which we realize to the exclusion of others, we
call it also choice or freedom.208
The second quotation offers us this general conclusion: What we call
freedom is the irreducibility of the cultural order to the natural order.209
The question is: can the definition of freedom as the irreducibility of
the cultural order to the natural order throw light on the problem of why
we realize certain possibilities at the exclusion of others? Hardly. The reference to freedom in the first quotation puts an end to further questioning,
instead of illuminating the question itself. Freedom is assumed as an irreducible fact of human existence. On the other hand the idea of the singularity of the individual in no way helps to understand the cultural order,
even if we accept that it is irreducible to the natural order. Apart from the
fact that natural is an extremely ambiguous term in this connectionit
could also mean social as opposed to the individualwe find that the
Sartrean critique is made from the position of an assumption (the categorically claimed irreducibility of the cultural order) and not from the ground of
a sustainable argument.
Sartre often insists, rightly and with great rigor, that one should consider
the real individual as the focal point of philosophy in place of abstract categories. It is, however, rather doubtful whether he lives up to his own principle when he talks about the field of possibilities. For only the abstractly
postulated individual lives in the field of possibilities. The real individual
has to be contented with a field of actually feasible and realizable probabilities. By contrast for Sartre to say what man is is also to say what he can
310
beand vice versa. . . . Thus the field of possibilities is the goal toward which
the agent surpasses his objective situation.210
This is by no means a slip in Sartres philosophical conception. For
him it is necessary to replace probability by possibility because of his
definition of freedom as irreducibility opposed to the natural order.
At the same time the Sartre of the Critique de la raison dialectique wants
to circumscribe the limits of possibility in order to account for the development of the collectivity, as we have seen it discussed above. From
this dual concern emerges a most ambiguous system of thought: a way of
arguing which often takes away with one hand what it lays down with the
other. Thus in the Sartrean philosophical universe the non-existent (ce
qui manque) is given an ontological status equal to that of the objectively
existent, thereby rendering the foundations of Sartres system rather problematical. As he had put it:
Therefore we must conceive of the possibility as doubly determined. On
the one side it is at the very heart of the particular action, the presence of the
future as that which is lacking and that which, by its very absence, reveals
reality. On the other hand, it is the real and permanent future which the
collectivity forever maintains and transforms.211
This ambivalence persists at all levels. Possibility often stands for

the impact of the realm of manque on the natural order. However, on
numerous occasions it is synonymous with concretely circumscribed and
well determined probability. (Yet the proper evaluation of the category of
probability is conspicuously absent from Sartres conceptual framework.)
Similarly, can is interchangeably used for the real capabilities of the individual as well as for reaching ontological conclusions on the basis of an
utterly abstract normativei.e. thoroughly ought-riddencan, without
indicating the vital differences between the two usages.
There is a basic ambiguity also as regards the concept of scarcity. It
is treated both as a historical contingency and as a metaphysical absolute
inherent in the ontological structure of manque. Furthermore, in Sartres
conception scarcity is often entangled with the need which it negates
in fact. One could avoid this entanglement only by assessing the relationship between need and scarcity in terms of the dialectical interaction of a
complex system of historically created human needssome of which more
fundamental than othersin the comprehensive and constantly changing
framework of the community as a whole. The subjectively authenticated
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assertions I see in myself certain needs and I continue to feel hope as my

conception of the future cannot be a substitute for that.
But perhaps the most significant of the Sartrean ambiguities is his
conception of man. More often than not Sartre identifies man with
the individual and frequently attributes to him characteristics and powers
which could be validly predicated only about mankind as a whole, but
not about the singular individual. Thus the famous Sartrean project
becomes a somewhat derailing category in so far as it also stands for
activities and comprehensive historical processes which cannot possibly
be attributed to a self-conscious singular individual subject required by
Sartres frame of reference.
Mankind is often subsumed under the subjectivistic ontology of the
Sartrean individual. This entanglement of individual and mankind
systematically biassed in favor of the singular individualhas far-reaching
consequences. Sartres ontology is dominated by a form of extreme dualism.
(We should remember in this respect his categorial and categorical opposites: nant versus tre, manque, versus prsence, freedom versus
contingency, cultural order versus the natural order, individual
versus the collective, etc.all such categorial pairs of opposites are in his
view irreducible.)
Methodologically it is most significant that the all-important category of
mediation is not elaborated by Sartre. The assumption of irreducibility
functions as a surrogate in that respect, so as to link upwhile insisting on
their sharp oppositionsthe categories of freedom and contingency,
cultural order and natural order, etc., etc. And the ethical consequences
of the subsumptive entanglement of individual and mankind are that the
dream to create a morality has to be abandoned, as confessed by Sartre
himself, irrespective of the vast number of pages dedicated at various times
in his life to this enterprise. In other words, in such a framework of reference it is quite impossible to work out a general conception of ethics. All
categories that constitute one side of his dualistic ontologyindividual,
freedom, project, choice, singularity, possibility, cultural order,
etc.,are impregnated with an ethical substance of approval, even if this is
not always rendered explicit.
The insurmountable problem in this respect is that while in actuality it
is possible to find a vital ethical connection in the historically changing dialectical interaction between individual and mankind, there can be no ethical
sphere left if one is simply subsumed under the other. It does not matter which
of the two is subsumed under the other. An abstract collectivistic subsumption
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is as unable to produce a coherent conception of ethics as the other way

round. Such conceptionsboth in their individualistic and abstract collectivistic formsare characterized by the inadequate treatment of the category of
mediation. As regards Sartres philosophy, since the ethical bias and schism
is built into the sharply dualistic structure of existentialist ontology, subsuming mankind under the individual cannot be avoided. To politely entertain for the category of multiplicity at the time of writing the Critique the
notion of mankind according to taste, as we have seen above, is not enough.
Accordingly, there cannot be a sustainable moral theory within the limits of
such ontology without rectifying the stipulated categorial subsumption inseparable from the sharply dualistic conceptual framework.
Moreover, also the question of the relationship between possibility
and probability can only be disentangled in the same dialectical framework of interrelationship in place of insuperable dualistic oppositions. For
what are rather vaguely described as possibilities for the individuals considered in the abstract are in actuality already structured as a complex societal framework of more or less clearly articulated and feasible probabilities
for the real individuals from the very moment when they are inserted into a
historically constituted concrete community. At the same time, in so far as the
particular individuals objectively belong to the historically constituted actuality of humankind, as they all do, irrespective of how conscious they might
be of it, the challenges and achievements of the totality of individuals can be
consideredagain in the abstracttheir shared possibilities, in virtue of
the fact of such belonging.
Indeed, in determinate situationsnotably in socially created moral
situationsunqualified possibility (that is, possibility which is not specified in terms of concretely feasible probabilities in relation to the identifiable
actual capabilities of particular individuals) becomes nevertheless the viable
measure of evaluation of individual actionon the basis of some socially
justifiable moral imperativerejecting the acceptability of self-excusing
circumstances. However, such appeal to the concept of general possibilities invokes a normative postulate, with understandable valuational reference to mankind, and not a concrete social ontological category. As such by
itself it has a limited validity in relation to the particular individual and must
be complemented by the overall dialectical assessment of the historically
changing social complex itself, including its more comprehensive ethical
requirements of sustainability.
Naturally, the projects of the particular individuals are subject to the
same requirements and qualifications. Asserting, as Sartre does, that To say
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what man is is also to say what he can be is by itself not enough. Not even
if we add to it in Sartres sense the vice versa clause. For the concept of
can be invoked by Sartre in this context is a normative can, very much
in the Kantian mould of ought implies can be, with its reference in Kants
case to the intelligible world as the ground of his categorical imperative
of morality. However, in the case of the atheist existentialist Sartre the road
for appealing to the idea of that intelligible world is not open.212 At the same
time, Sartres goal toward which the agent surpasses his objective situation
cannot be made intelligible simply in terms of the claimed field of possibilities. This categorial difficulty asserts itself in the same sense in which any
appeal to normative canin the spirit of ought implies canis by itself
very far from enough for surpassing the objective situation of this miserable
ensemble which is our planet, in its horrible, ugly, bad state, without hope.
This is why founding hope needs a more secure ground than even the noblest
advocacy of the individuals deeply felt feeling and need for hope.
the insurmountable problems arise from
the sharply dichotomous general categorial framework of his philosophy.
But that is only a partial explanation. For not even the most general categorial
setting can be generated in such a way as to be able to sustain itself on its
own. Understandably, therefore, at another level Sartres insuperably dichotomous categorial network itself points to its equivalent in his social conception of the world.
In that respect, again, the dichotomous opposition and in terms of societal matters by Sartre openly acknowledged contradiction takes the form of
the anguished admission of failure or defeat. This is all the more significant because no one can deny Sartres fully committed search for a viable
emancipatory solution and his great personal integrity. In relation to our
problem we have to recall that in the important interview given to the Italian
Manifesto groupafter outlining his conception of the insuperably negative implications of his own explanatory category of unavoidably detrimental
institutionalization of the fused grouphe had to come to the painful conclusion that While I recognize the need of an organization, I must confess
that I dont see how the problems which confront any stabilized structure
could be resolved.213
Here the difficulty is that the terms of Sartres social analysis are set up
in such a way that the various factors and correlations that in reality belong
together, constituting different facets of fundamentally the same societal
complex, are depicted by him in the form of most problematical oppositions,
T H US F OR SART R E AT ONE LEVEL
314
generating thereby insoluble dilemmas and an unavoidable defeat. This is

well illustrated by the exchange between the Manifesto group and Sartre:
MANIFESTO:
on what precise bases can one prepare a revolutionary
alternative?
SARTRE: I repeat, more on the basis of alienation than on needs. In short
on the reconstruction of the individual and of freedomthe need for which
is so pressing that even the most refined techniques of integration cannot
afford to discount it.214
Thus Sartre in this way, in his strategic assessment of how to overcome

the oppressive character of capitalist reality, sets up a totally untenable
opposition between the workers alienation and their allegedly satisfied
needs, thereby making it all the more difficult to envisage a practically feasible positive outcome. And here the problem is not simply that he grants far
too much credibility to the fashionable but extremely superficial sociological
explanation of the so-called refined techniques of integration in relation to
the workers. Unfortunately it is much more serious than that.
Indeed the really disturbing problem at stake is the evaluation of the viability of advanced capitalism itself and the associated postulate of working
class integration which Sartre happens to share at the time to a large extent
with Herbert Marcuse. For in actuality the truth of the matter is that in contrast to the undoubtedly feasible integration of some particular workers into
the capitalist order, the class of laborthe structural antagonist of capital,
representing the only historically sustainable hegemonic alternative to the
capital systemcannot be integrated into capitals alienating and exploitative framework of societal reproduction. What makes that impossible is
the underlying structural antagonism between capital and labor, emanating
with insurmountable necessity from the class reality of antagonistic domination and subordination.
In this discourse even the minimal plausibility of the Marcuse/Sartre
type of false alternative between continuing alienation and satisfied need
is established on the basis of the arbitrary compartmentalization of capitals suicidally untenable globally entrenched structural interdeterminationsupon which the elementary systemic viability of capitals one and only
ruling societal metabolic order is necessarily premisedin the form of the
extremely problematical separation of advanced capitalism from the socalled marginal zones and from the third world. As if the reproductive
315
order of the postulated advanced capitalism could sustain itself for any
length of time, let alone indefinitely in the future, without the ongoing exploitation of the misconceived marginal zones and the imperialistically dominated third world.
It is necessary to quote here in its integrality the relevant passage in
which these problems are spelled out by Sartre. The revealing Manifesto
interview passage in question reads as follows:
Advanced capitalism, in relation to its awareness of its own condition, and
despite the enormous disparities in the distribution of income, manages
to satisfy the elementary needs of the majority of the working classthere
remains of course the marginal zones, 15 percent of workers in the United
States, the blacks and the immigrants; there remain the elderly; there
remains, on the global scale, the third world. But capitalism satisfies certain
primary needs, and also satisfies certain needs which it has artificially
created: for instance the need of a car. It is this situation which has caused
me to revise my theory of needs, since these needs are no longer, in a
situation of advanced capitalism, in systematic opposition to the system.
On the contrary, they partly become, under the control of that system, an
instrument of integration of the proletariat into certain processes engendered
and directed by profit. The worker exhausts himself in producing a car and
in earning enough to buy one; this acquisition gives him the impression
of having satisfied a need. The system which exploits him provides him
simultaneously with a goal and with the possibility of reaching it. The
consciousness of the intolerable character of the system must therefore no
longer be sought in the impossibility of satisfying elementary needs but,
above all else, in the consciousness of alienationin other words, in the fact
that this life is not worth living and has no meaning, that this mechanism is
a deceptive mechanism, that these needs are artificially created, that they are
false, that they are exhausting and only serve profit. But to unite the class on
this basis is even more difficult.215
If we accept at face value this characterization of the advanced capitalist order, in that case the task of producing emancipatory consciousness
is not only more difficult but quite impossible. But the dubious ground
on which we can reach such an aprioristic imperatival and pessimistic/
self-defeating conclusionprescribing from the height of the intellectuals
new theory of needs the abandonment by the workers of their acquisitive artificial needs, instantiated by the motor car, and their replacement
316
by the thoroughly abstract postulate which posits for them that this life is
not worth living and has no meaning (a noble but rather abstract imperatival postulate effectively contradicted in reality by the tangible need of the
members of the working class for securing the conditions of their economically sustainable existence)is both the acceptance of a set of totally
untenable assertions and the equally untenable omission of some vital determining features of the actually existing capital system in its historically irreversible structural crisis.
For a start, to talk about advanced capitalismwhen the capital system
as a mode of social metabolic reproduction finds itself in its descending phase
of historical development, and therefore is only capitalistically advanced
but in no other sense at all, thereby capable of sustaining itself only in an
ever more destructive and therefore ultimately also self-destructive wayis
extremely problematical. Another assertion: the characterization of the overwhelming majority of humankindin the category of poverty, including the
blacks and the immigrants, the elderly and on the global scale, the third
worldas belonging to the marginal zones (in affinity with Marcuses
outsiders), is no less untenable. For in reality it is the advanced capitalist world that constitutes the long term totally unsustainable privileged
margin of the overall system, with its ruthless elementary need-denial
to the greater part of the world, and not what is described by Sartre in his
Manifesto interview as the marginal zones. Even with regard to the United
States of America the margin of poverty is greatly underrated, at merely 15
percent. Besides, also the characterization of the workers motor cars as
nothing more than purely artificial needs which only serve profit could
not be more one-sided. For, in contrast to many intellectuals, not even the
relatively well off particular workers, let alone the members of the class of
labor as a whole, have the luxury of finding their place of work next door to
their bedroom.
At the same time, on the side of the astonishing omissions, some of
the gravest structural contradictions and failures are missing from Sartres
depiction of advanced capitalism, virtually emptying of meaning the
whole concept. In this sense one of the most important substantive needs
without which no societypast, present or futurecould survive, is the
need for work. Both for the productively active individualsembracing all
of them in a fully emancipated social orderand for society in general in
its historically sustainable relationship to nature. The necessary failure to
solve this fundamental structural problem, affecting all categories of work
not only in the third world but even in the most privileged countries of
317
advanced capitalism, with its perilously rising unemployment, constitutes

one of the absolute limits of the capital system in its entirety. Another grave
problem which underscores the present and future historical unviability of
capital is the calamitous shift toward the parasitic sectors of the economy
like the crisis-producing adventurist speculation which plagues (as a matter
of objective necessity, often misrepresented as systemically irrelevant personal failure) the financial sector and the institutionalized/legally buttressed
fraudulence closely associated with itin contradistinction to the productive branches of socioeconomic life required for the satisfaction of genuine
human need. This is a shift that stands in menacingly sharp contrast to the
ascending phase of capitals historic development, when the prodigious
systemic expansionary dynamism (including the industrial revolution) was
overwhelmingly due to socially viable and further enhanceable productive
achievements. We have to add to all this the massively wasteful economic
burdens imposed on society in an authoritarian way by the state and the
military/industrial complexwith the permanent arms industry and the
corresponding warsas an integral part of the perverse economic growth
of advanced organized capitalism. And to mention just one more of the
catastrophic implications of advanced capitals systemic development,
we must bear in mind the prohibitively wasteful global ecological encroachment of our no longer tenable mode of social metabolic reproduction on the
finite planetary world,216 with its rapacious exploitation of the non-renewable material resources and the increasingly more dangerous destruction of
nature. This is not being wise after the event. I wrote in the same period
when Sartre gave his Manifesto interview that Another basic contradiction
of the capitalist system of control is that it cannot separate advance from
destruction, nor progress from wastehowever catastrophic the results.
The more it unlocks the powers of productivity, the more it must unleash the
powers of destruction; and the more it extends the volume of production,
the more it must bury everything under mountains of suffocating waste. The
concept of economy is radically incompatible with the economy of capital
production which, of necessity, adds insult to injury by first using up with
rapacious wastefulness the limited resources of our planet, and then further
aggravates the outcome by polluting and poisoning the human environment
with its mass-produced waste and effluence.217
Thus the problematical assertions and the seminally important omissions of Sartres characterization of advanced capitalism greatly weaken
the power of negation of his emancipatory discourse. His dichotomous
principle which repeatedly asserts the irreducibility of the cultural order
318
to the natural order is always on the look-out for finding solutions in

terms of the cultural order, at the level of the individuals consciousness, through the committed intellectuals work of consciousness upon
consciousness. He appeals to the idea that the required solution lies in
increasing the consciousness of alienationthat is, in terms of his cultural orderat the same time discarding the viability of grounding the
revolutionary strategy on need belonging to the natural order. Material
need, that is, which is said to be already satisfied for the majority of
workers, and in any case constituting a deceptive and false mechanism
and an instrument of integration of the proletariat.
To be sure, Sartre is deeply concerned with the challenge of addressing
the issue of how to increase the consciousness of the intolerable character of
the system. But, as a matter of unavoidable consideration, the leverage itself
indicated as the vital condition of successthe power of the consciousness
of alienation stressed by Sartrewould itself badly need some objective
underpinning. Otherwise, in addition to the indicated leverages weakness
of self-referential circularity, the imperatival nature of its can prevail over
against the intolerable character of the system remains in dominance, as a
noble but ineffective cultural advocacy. This is most problematical even in
Sartres own terms of reference when, in his rather pessimistic words, the
need is for defeating the both materially and culturally destructive and structurally entrenched reality of this miserable ensemble which is our planet,
with its horrible, ugly, bad determinations, without hope.
Accordingly, the primary question concerns thedemonstrability or
notof the objectively intolerable character of the system itself. For if the
demonstrable intolerability of the system is missing in substantive terms, as
proclaimed by the notion of advanced capitalisms ability to satisfy material needs except in the marginal zones, then the long and patient labour
in the construction of consciousness218 advocated by Sartre remains well nigh
impossible. It is that objective grounding that needs to be (and in actuality
can be) established in its own comprehensive terms of reference, requiring
the radical demystification of the increasing destructiveness of advanced
capitalism. The consciousness of the intolerable character of the system
can only be built on that objective groundingwhich includes the suffering
caused by advanced capitals failure to satisfy even the elementary need
for food not in marginal zones but for countless millions, as clearly evidenced by food riots in many countriesso as to be able to overcome the
postulated dichotomy between the cultural order and the natural order.
319
T H E M I S S IN G DIM E N S ION of the deeply committed Sartrean advocacy of

emancipation is the political economic analysis of capitals historically no
longer tenable social metabolic order of reproduction in its entirety in
which politics must be put to its properly qualified place. However, out
of all proportion, Sartres theoretical and strategic frame of reference
for envisaging the necessary emancipatory change is the institutionally
articulated political domain and the greatly restricted assessment of the
concept of mediation inseparable from his overwhelming concentration
on politics, although he paradoxically admits at the same time even in
that regard his insuperable doubts in view of twentieth century political/
historical developments and the contradictory nature of the Soviet
postrevolutionary system. This issue directly concerns in our time the
historical viabilityor notof the fundamental social metabolic ground
of capitals materially overwhelming societal reproductive order as such,
which of course includes, but by no means in a dominant place within the
dialectically circumscribed overall perspective, also the feasible political
contribution to the required structural change.
Once upon a time the question of evaluating capitals viability as a mode
of social metabolic reproduction presented itself in a radically different way.
In the ascending phase of capitals historical developmentapproximately
up to the middle of the nineteenth centurythe objectively intolerable
character of the system itself as a productive system could not be effectively
raised, no matter how intolerable its impact undoubtedly happened to be on
significant sections of the working population, especially on child labor. For
the demonstrable and structurally irreversible unviability (and in that vital
sense objective intolerability) of capitals increasingly destructive determinations, together with a scientifically assertable conception of the really feasible hegemonic historical alternative to the established system as a mode of
social metabolic reproduction, was still missing in substantive terms. Indeed,
as mentioned earlier, the prodigious systemic expansionary dynamism prior
to the closure of capitals ascending historical phase of development carried
with it socially viable and further enhanceable productive achievements.
Understandably and revealingly, therefore, before the reversal of the historically ascending phase the most enlightened personifications of capitalthe
utopian socialist Robert Owen of New Lanark, for instancecould still
attempt to overcome the worst inhumanities of the system, like the gruesome exploitation of child labor and the productively detrimental excessive
working hours of the labor force in general, in a form well containable within
the confines of the capital system itself.
320
The objective closure of the ascending phase inevitably redefined these

conditions for the worse, pushing ever more dangerously into the foreground
capitals own imperative of prolonging the sustainability of unlimitable capital-expansion irrespective of the consequences, including the most absurd
conceivable normality of systemic destructiveness not only in production
and in inter-state relationsin the latter with the onset of monopolistic
imperialism and its catastrophic global warsbut even in relation to nature:
the elementary substratum of human life itself. Significantly, the intellectual
consequences of this fundamental historic reversal were extremely negative,
resulting in the pursuit of blatant theoretical apologetics in place of scientific
truth. In Marxs words these developments sounded the knell of scientific
bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question whether this
theorem or that theorem was true, but whether it was useful to capital or
harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of
disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize-fighters; in place of genuine
scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetics.219
This is why the concept of advanced capitalism itself must be challenged and radically demystified. For the present-day capital system is
advanced only in its boundless power of destruction, including its ability
to extinguish human life altogether on our planet. This is a devastatingly
advanced power, by now in evidence everywhere. The capital system did
not possess such powerexcept in its general tendency pointing in that
fateful directionin Marxs lifetime. This is what defines in our time the
objectively intolerable character of capitals social metabolic control which
reached such a stage in its historical development when it must carry on
maintaining itself at the cost of escalating destructiveness while inducing its
hired prize-fighters to cynically preach the sermons of democracy and
the claimed extension of freedom imposed through the military interventions of liberal imperialism. However, such destructiveness by its very
nature is also self-defeating and calls for a rational historic alternative as the
necessary objective material grounding upon which the consciousness of
the intolerable character of the system can and must be erected. Paying any
attention to diversionary sociological notions like the so-called refined techniques of integration in the postulated acquisitive society of advanced
capitalism is totally irrelevant in that respect.
As we have seen earlier, Sartre asserted that I am sure of one thingthat
we must make a radical politics. But I am not sure that it will succeed.220 He
was right in expressing his doubts. This had to be the case not only on account
of his many disappointments in the world of politics. More importantly, he
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expected far too much from the established institutions of politics, assigning
to them the role of necessary mediation. He considered that role of mediation
essential, in accordance with his general theory of the millions of individual
actions which had to be somehow connected in his vision of the irreducible multiplicity of the individuals who populated his existentialistand of
course also his marxisant existentialistgeneral ontological conceptual
framework. In relation to hisadmittedly disappointedpolitical hope once
attached to the Communist Party he insisted that
The real question is to know how to overcome the contradiction which
is inherent in the very nature of the party, so that (not only in its relation
with opponents and in its tasks as a fighting organization, but also in
relation to the class which it represents) the party may constitute an active
mediation between serialized and massified elements for the purpose of their
unification.221
Sartre conceptualized in the same sense Stalins role in postrevolutionary

Soviet society in his attempted work of not formally theorized but claimed
real history, in the second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason.
He raised this problem in relation to insurmountable scarcity and concluded
that this scarcity of means in turn affects and defines man, if man is to be a
means (in the sense in which the sovereign [in this case Stalin] serves praxis
and is a mediator between groups). If it is true that there are not enough
menor not the right menfor a specific undertaking, we sense through this
scarcity the incarnation of the following historical truth: man, as a product
of the world, is not made for man. . . . The men History makes are never
entirely those needed to make History, be they even as unrivaled as Stalin
or Napoleon.222 And later on in the same work we could find the following
summation: the schematic circularity of the single and the multiple in the
immanent field of scarcity is only the skeleton of the movement of enveloping
temporalization. The concrete and absolute reality of History can be only in
the singularity of the practical relations uniting singular men to the singular
objectives they pursue, in the singularity of the conjuncture.223 In this way
Sartres primary concern, in his attempt to make historical totalization in
real history intelligible, remained the question of indicating the role of
politicsreferred to in various contexts in connection with the concept of
sovereigntyas the necessary form of mediation for uniting the singular
men and the given individual multiplicities in the pursuit of singular objectives contained in the singularity of the given conjuncture.
322
This conception could not help being most problematical because of its
Sartrean ontological terms of reference, even if he hopelessly attempted to
counter the negative implications of this vision by his unifying postulate of
the political mediation of individualistic multiplicities. Yet his formal structures of history had to remain always formal, even in the course of Sartres
passionate struggle with hisunachievableaccount of real history. At
times he was even willing to admit this,224 without, however, modifying in
the least his inconclusively growing, even if often graphically expressive,
particular variations on the same theme spelled out in the same formal categorial framework of individualistic multiplicities.
Given the inherently individualistic ontological determination of such
multiplicities their unification in fused groups could only be transitory
and historically unsustainable. This is why he could only project the emergence of such groups from individualistic seriality only to be followed by
their fateful relapse into powerless seriality in the world of fateful institutionalization. Political mediation could not significantly alter that beyond the
occasionally favorable but ultimately untenable and disintegrative singular
conjuncture. Thus political mediation of the serialized and massified elements could be in this Sartrean vision both advocated/asserted and, when
the postulated institutional political mediation had to be frustrated so as to
end in failure, as in the case of the partys self-serializing institutionalizationwhich curiously had to arise from the contradiction inherent in the
partys naturealso firmly condemned/negated by the militant intellectuals
direct appeal to the individuals consciousness, in somber rejection of the
setting of institutionality.
We have seen in the latter respect Sartres anguished but doomed direct
appeal to the consciousness of the particular individuals, inviting them to
reject the serializing practice of voting, so that they should be able to try,
each according to his own resources, to organize the vast anti-hierarchic
movement which fights institutions everywhere.225 Tellingly, however, the
question of how the serialized particular individuals could fight the institutions everywhere could not be addressed by Sartre. For the way in which
he defined the serialized individuals, in the spirit of his general ontological
conception, made that impossible for him. They had to be condemned in
view of their serial thinking in these terms:
serial thinking is born in me, thinking which is not my own thinking but that
of the Other, which I am and also that of all the Others. It must be called the
thinking of powerlessness, because I produce it to the degree that I am the
323
Other, an enemy of myself and of the Others, and to the degree that I carry
the Other everywhere with me.226
These words of paralyzing stalemate are not the words of the young existentialist Sartre but of the militant thinker of nearly seventy years of age.
Words published thirty years after Being and Nothingness and fifteen years
after the Marxisant Critique of Dialectical Reason. They show Sartres
great consistency as well as his continuing anguished dedication to the cause
of a radical emancipatory change. But his direct appeal to individual consciousness cannot prevail, casting thereby a deeply pessimistic shadow over
his final years.
The main difficulty is that the millions of individual actions indicated
as Sartres seminal points of reference in accounting for the intelligibility of
history are in the really existing world of history always deeply embedded
in objectively structured and materially mediated social complexes. That
kind of embeddedness is what constitutes the capital systems structurally
entrenched fundamental problem of mediation. Even the most promising
political mediations can only arise from such objectively structured material ground, which under the conditions of capitals social metabolic mode of
reproductive control are intelligible only as antagonistic second order mediations, with their necessarily limitedno matter how longhistorical viability.
This means that we cannot discard the notion of objective historical
necessity, nor should we fear that it destroys the socially understood margin
of freedom. For in the Marxian sensewhich makes the vital distinction
between natural necessity, like the law of gravity, and historical necessity
emerging in the course of humanitys self-constitution and transformatory
action, inseparably from the development of social consciousness itself
the concept of historical necessity is defined not as some kind of fatality
but, on the contrary, as historically confined and likewise historically overcome necessity, or vanishing necessity.227 Vanishing not in an absolute
sense but according to the change of its objectively structured determinations and circumstances.
Accordingly, contrary to Sartres rejection of the we-subject, as seen in
different contexts in the course of this study, the historical agency of transformation cannot be the infinity of particular individuals who, as ontologically predetermined self-oriented individuals, carry with them everywhere
the Other as the necessary interiorization of ontologically insurmountable
scarcity, representing thereby a form of enmity toward all of the Others as
well as themselves. This picture is unredeemably bleak. Likewise, the enmity
324
depicted in terms of the internally torn individual who is simultaneously also

the antagonistic Other to the Other is equally insurmountableand bleak
in its fundamental existential terms of reference, despite Sartres agonizing
appeal to the individuals consciousness for a change. The power of graphic
poetic depiction cannot remove the Marxisant existentialist gloom spelled
out when Sartre writes about the historic movement:
Making oneself and overflowing oneself; gathering oneself only to flee oneself;
having oneself determined in the present by a future determination, and
thus producing oneself as a movement toward the infinite indetermination
of the future; realizing development in a spiral, as a compromise between
the axial line running from the need to the objective and the perpetually
recommenced failure of rewinding onto oneself (i.e. unifying the multiple
by a continuous displacement of quantity and scarcity); in short, at once
turning and simultaneously fleeing like a slipping stitch, engendering notknowing, not-known and the uncertain.228
To overcome the paralyzing stalemate of the projected schematic circularity we need more than the category of possibility, no matter how many
times multiplied. For the appeal tounrealized and in virtue of its conceptualization in terms of infinity unrealizablepossibility can only intensify
the feeling of anguish when Sartre asserts that the men who will be in a
position to exercise power will certainly represent a number of practical possibilities infinitely small in relation to the totalized series of possibles of that
kind. And every realized possibilityif it were to be replaced in the total
serieswould be separated by an infinity of possibles from the other realized possibles.229
Thus, in his own terms of reference Sartres agonizing pessimism
and feeling of despair about this miserable, horrible, ugly, bad ensemble
of our planet, without hope, as voiced in his last interview, is fully justified. However, founding hope, as he generously advocated and promised to the end, would require the most active contribution of the strategic
Archimedian material mediatory leverage missing from the horizon of
his philosophy. For only through the sustained creative application of such
leverage can capitals destructive mode of social metabolic reproduction be
irreversibly confined to the past.
Conclusion
The idea which I have never ceased to develop is that in the end one is
always responsible for what is made of one. Even if one can do nothing else
besides assume this responsibility. For I believe that a man can always make
something out of what is made of him. This is the limit I would today accord
to freedom: the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned
social being someone who does not render back completely what his
conditioning has given him. Which makes of Genet a poet when he had
been rigorously conditioned to be a thief. . . . The individual interiorizes
his social determinations: he interiorizes the relations of production, the
family of his childhood, the historical past, the contemporary institutions,
and then he re-exteriorizes these in acts and options which necessarily refer
us back to them.230
SA RT R E F OR A LONG T I ME REF USED to assign any limit to freedom in his

conception of the human reality. His refusal was so categorical that when he
revised his views after the war, under the experience of society, he had to
confess that he felt scandalized231 by the unreality of his earlier position.
Nevertheless, even when he acknowledged the force of circumstance, he
always continued to reassert his firm belief that one is always responsible
for what is made of one. In this sense, the same way in which against the
rigorous conditioning to be a thief Genet became a poet, also Sartre
himselfwho was from his earliest childhood and circumstances just as
326
rigorously conditioned to be an accommodatory bourgeoisbecame a

passionate rebel against his own class-belonging and remained one to the
end of his life.
In the course of the long interviews taped between 1970 and 1974 John
Gerassi asked the question: I want to know, Sartre, how a bourgeois like
youand you, Sartre, no matter how much you hate the bourgeoisie are still
a bourgeois through and throughbecame a revolutionary?232 We have seen
in this study the complex articulation of Sartres motivations and achievements in this respect which assign him a most important place in the cultural
and political developments of the twentieth century. At the roots of his political stand against the social order of his own class we could find a passionate
moral rebellion. This was what he stressed also in his interviews with Gerassi,
insisting that My approach was always ethical. Whenever I condemned the
communists or anyone else for that matter, it was always from a moral point
of view.233 His moral stance could be consistently maintained by assuming
responsibility both for his writings and political actions. He rejected any suggestion that there might be a contradiction between his literary work on the
one hand, which had to be inserted into the existing cultural setting, and his
revolutionary militancy on the other. This was the reason why he forcefully
asserted that I am both a bourgeois writer like Flaubert, and a revolutionary
activist like Babeuf. I assume responsibility for both.234 And he certainly
assumed that responsibility with the greatest integrity.
A generation earlier, when people like Lukcs became mature intellectuals, in the first decade of the twentieth century, rebels against the bourgeois order emerging from the rank of the bourgeoisie were much more
frequent than by the time when Sartre became a socially committed activist
during and after the second world war. Just preceding the first world war
we could perceive some kind of crisis of conscience among the best intellectual representatives of the bourgeoisie, resulting in many of them joining
even some revolutionary organizations in the aftermath of the Russian
Revolution, in contrast to the loss of conscience and corresponding disposition to side unreservedly with the defense of capitalism by most of them
who belonged to Sartres generation. This change could only underline the
significance of Sartres passionate moral rebellion against his own class, in
a period of history when the stakes involving the very survival of humanity
were becoming acute.
Sartres uncompromising rejection of the existing order and his advocacy of a very different alternative to it was often expressed in the most
painful and even pessimistic self-torturing form, saying that
C O N CLU S ION
327
In each social event that is important to us, that touches us, I see the
contradictionseither manifest or hardly noticed yet. I see the mistakes,
the risks, everything that can prevent a situation from going in the direction
of freedom. And there I am pessimistic because each time, the risks are in
fact enormous. Look at Portugal, where the kind of socialism we want has
a small chance now which it didnt have at all before April 25, and yet runs
the greatest risk of being postponed again for a very long time. Looking at
everything generally, I say to myself: Either man is finished (and in that case
not only is he finished, but he has never existedhe will have been no more
than a species, like the ant) or he will adapt by bringing about some form
of libertarian socialism. When I think about individual social acts, I tend
to think that man is finished. . . . If I am not completely pessimistic it is
primarily because I sense in myself certain needs which are not only mine
but the needs of every man. To express it in another way, it is the experienced
certainty of my own freedom.235
Thus Sartres appeal to the experienced certainty of freedom always

remained the pivotal point on his moral rebellion against the bourgeois
order, even when he attempted to give its full weight to the force of circumstance. His overwhelming concentration on politics in terms of which he
hoped, and pessimistically failed, to find the remedy was closely connected
with the inherently moral character of his radical negation of capitalism.
That was what circumscribed not only the nature of his passionate refusal
and the fundamental terms of his diagnosis of the existing orderits moral
untenability categorically condemned in the name of freedombut also
his conception of the socialist alternative, defined by Sartre as libertarian
socialism and a society without powers.236
The pessimism and despair confessed by Sartre, while reiterating with
noble constancy his appeal to the idea of freedom, was inseparable from
such diagnosis and projected remedy. Foras we have seen in the last
chapterpolitics can be considered only a limited part of the necessary
answers, in virtue of being articulated on the ground of capitals in our time
fundamentally destructive material determinations. If in this sense the political domain is not set in its proper perspective, the frustration experienced
by its perceived failure to produce the hoped for results, as expressed by
Sartre also in the quotation in which he anticipated postponement again
for a very long time, becomes overpowering. At the same time, paradoxically, the way in which these problems were approachedboth in Sartres
radical moral negation of the existing order and his definition of the socialist
328
alternativegranted far too much to the continuing objective viability of

advanced capitalism and organized capitalism. By the same token, and
even more paradoxically, the objective necessitythough of course not the
mechanistic determinismof the future socialist alternative was underrated,
despite Sartres persistent advocacy of the emancipatory perspective.
Naturally, Sartre was absolutely right in stressing that socialism is not
a certainty.237 But it is very problematical that he defined socialismof
course fully in the spirit of his moral negation of the existing orderas
a value: it is freedom choosing itself as the goal.238 Here the point is not
to deny that socialism as the commended general perspective of human
emancipation is a value, which certainly it is and must continue to be. But
it is also something else on the basis of which one can assert its irrepressible validity. Otherwise socialism could be simply ignored or cynically
dismissed by the hired prize-fighters of capital as nothing more than a
wishfully propounded but futile value, as befits the ideological dominance
of the ruling order.
The reason why such dismissal cannot permanently prevail is because,
come what may, socialism is also the objectively one and only sustainable
and in that sense objectively necessaryhistorical alternative to capitals
destructive social metabolic order. In this sense socialism as the ruling
orders hegemonic alternative is thecontradictorily but nonetheless objectively unfoldinghistorical necessity of our time. A necessity once undoubtedly possessed also by capitals reproductive order; in its ownnow by its
incorrigible destructive determinations in objective historical terms fatefully
anachronistichistorical time.
Sartres radical negation of the established order, with its leverage
centered on the moral and political dimension posited by him on the categorial basis of possibility, induced Sartre to demand as a general moral
imperative what cannot be achieved, for the sake of realizing the society
without powers advocated by him. He insisted for this reason that it is
the social structure itself that must be abolished, since it permits the exercise of power.239 The problem is that the social structure itself cannot be
abolished. In the case of capitals dehumanizing social structure, it can and
must be radically restructured, in accordance with the requirements of historical sustainability, through the constitution and ceaseless recreation of a
productively and humanly viable alternative social structure. Equally, the
question of exercising power can only be decided in terms of its historical
specificity and sustainability, through the shared determination and substantively equal exercise of power in a socialist global order. But what is at
C O N CLU S ION
329
stake is the constitution of a global order which cannot conceivably function

without the conscious determination and emancipatory exercise of power
by the social individuals for themselves. It is indeed the measure of viability
of the social structure the way in which it not only permits but also facilitates
that kind of exercise of power.
Understandably, in the light of bitter twentieth century historical experience Sartre was deeply concerned with what he called the irreducible
singularity of every man to the History which nevertheless conditions him
rigorously.240 Six years earlier, when he was still engaged with the task of
trying to elaborate his conception of real history in a combative mood, Sartre
wrote about the vital imperative to realize the concrete universal in these
terms: So we othersrats without cerebellawe are also so made that we
must either die or reinvent man. . . . without us, the fabrication would take
place in the dark, by tinkering and patching, if we, the debrained, were not
there to repeat constantly that we must work according to principles, that it
is not a matter of mending, but of measuring and constructing, and finally,
that mankind will be the concrete universal, or that it will not be.241
By the time Sartre gave his lecture on Kierkegaard in Paris, in 1964, he
had already abandoned writing the Critique of Dialectical Reason, but not
his passionate engagement with the difficult problems of the singular universal. He tried to bring Kierkegaard and Marx together in that spirit, in the
interest of the tasks that await us within the historical dialectic.242 Thus,
despite the solemn centenary celebrations he did not try to hide the failures
on Kierkegaards side, arguing that the Danish philosopher by
Pitting himself against Hegel, he occupied himself over-exclusively with
transmitting his instituted contingency to the human adventure and, because
of this, he neglected praxis, which is rationality. At a stroke, he denatured
knowledge, forgetting that the world we know is the world we make.
Anchorage is a fortuitous event, but the possibility and rational meaning
of this chance is given by general structures of envelopment which found it
and which are themselves the universalization of singular adventures by the
materiality in which they are inscribed.243
But he did not stop there. After stressing the great practical risk arising
from the exclusionin the name of a one-sidedly interpreted Marxthe
human singularity of the concrete universal,244 he finished his lecture
on Kierkegaard with these challenging questions, formulated fully in the
spirit of his own philosophy: How can we conceive of History and the
330
transhistorical in such a way as to restore to the transcendent necessity of

the historical process and to the free immanence of a historicization ceaselessly renewed their full reality and reciprocal interiority, in theory and practice? In short, how can we discover the singularity of the universal and the
universalization of the singular, in each conjuncture, as indissolubly linked
to each other?245
Sartre was right in leaving his questions open. For the task of providing
an appropriate answer to them can only be fulfilled by the most radical
emancipatory mass movement. A movement capable of qualitatively restructuring capitals hierarchically entrenched socioeconomic and cultural order
in such a way as to secure, on a historically sustainable material ground, the
shared determination and the substantive exercise of power by the freely
associated producers on a fully equitable basis. Our most extraordinary
comrade in arms, Jean-Paul Sartre, made in many different wayseven with
his wake-up calls voiced in despairan immense contribution to the development of that movement.
Notes
PARTS ONE A ND TWO
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Lalibi, interview, Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 November 1964; reprinted in

Situations, VIII, 12745, quotation from p. 142.
Les crits de Sartre: chronologie, bibliographie commente by Michel Contat
and Michel Rybalka (Gallimard, Paris, 1970) is invaluable for all those
interested in Sartres development. In addition to a complete bibliography of
his works, up to 1969, it contains excellent summaries, with extracts from his
numerous interviews, as well as nearly 300 pages of rare texts. Henceforth this
book will be referred to as C/R.
Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own. I. M.
La nationalisation de la littrature (1945), Situations, II, 35, 43. And in the
same article he remarks on the absurdity of being called the Master of neosurrealism who is supposed to have under his command Eluard and Picasso,
while in reality I was still wearing short pants when they were already masters
of themselves (ibid., p.37).
Cf. Henri Lefbvre, Existentialisme et marxisme: rponse une mise au
point, Action, 8 June 1945.
Gabriel Marcel, Prise de position, Nouvelles Littraires, 29 October 1964.
Cf. C/R , p. 329.
On the occasion of the publication of Sartres Entretiens sur la politique
(Gallimard, Paris, 1949) with David Rousset and Grard Rosenthal; cf. Le
Figaro, 25 April 1949.
Rponse Franois Mauriac, Le Figaro Littraire, 7 May 1949.
The exchange started with Sartres letter dated 13 April 1967, followed by
de Gaulles reply on 19 April 1967, and published in Le Monde, 25 April
332
9.
10.
11.
12
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
NOTE S TO PAG E S 1 8 3 4
1967. Sartres answer to de Gaulle took the form of an interview in Le Nouvel

Observateur, 26 April3 May 1967; the whole exchange is reprinted in
Situations VIII, 4257.
Sartres letter to the Swedish Academy, in which he tried to prevent their
decision in his favour, was later published in Le Monde, 24 October 1964.
The complete text of this letter, together with an account of the debate that
followed his refusal, is given in C/R, pp. 4018.
Andr Breton, Le rappel de Stockholm, La Brche, December 1964.
Le Figaro Littraire, 410 May 1970.
Le Monde, 6 June 1970.
Writing for ones age (1946), in What is Literature?, translated by Bernard
Frechtman, Methuen, London, 1950, p. 238.
Ibid., p. 233.
Interview by Jacqueline Piatier, Le Monde, 18 April 1964.
Ibid.
La nationalisation de la littrature, p. 38.
The purposes of writing (1959), Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism
and Marxism, translated by John Matthews, NLB, London, 1974, pp. 1314.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid., p. 14.
From a poem by Endre Ady (18771919).
The purposes of writing, p. 26.
I have discussed these problems in my book on Attila Jzsef e larte moderna,
Lerici, Milano, 1964.
A fragment by Attila Jzsef.
Ibid., p. 14.
Interview by Christian Gisoli, Paru, December 1945.
Interview by Jacques-Alain Miller, Les Cahier libres de la jeunesse, 15 February
1960.
Ibid.
Cf. Dtermination et libert (1966); C/R, pp. 73545.
Interview by Pierre Lorquet, Mondes Nouveaux, 21 December 1941.
Interview by Gabriel dAubarde, Les Nouvelles littraires, 1 February 1951.
Rponse M. Mauriac, LObservateur, 19 March 1953
Of rats and men (1958), Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, translated by Benita
Eisler, Fawcett Publications, Greenwich, Conn., 1965, p. 242. Sartres
footnote about the accidental individual refers to Marxs German Ideology.
See also note 37.
Marx, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right (1843), Marx & Engels,
Werke, vol.1, p. 284.
N OT ES TO PAG E S 35 43
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58
333
Itinerary of a thought (1969), New Left Review, Nov.Dec. 1969, p. 59.

Forgers of myths: the young playwrights of France, Theatre Arts, June 1946.
propos de lexistentialisme: mise au point, Action, 29 Dec. 1944; reprinted
in C/R pp. 653-8. Quotation from p. 654.
Interview by Claude Sarraute, Le Monde, 17 Sept. 1959.
Je-tu-il, preface to Andr Puigs novel, Linachev (The Unfinished),
Gallimard, 1970; reprinted in Situations, IX, 277-315. Quotation from p. 281.
Itinerary of a thought, p. 55.
Interview by Gabriel dAubarde, Les Nouvelles littraires, 1 Febr. 1951.
Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, p. 466.
To maintain a killing rhythm of work while writing his Critique of Dialectical
Reason, Sartre consumes a tubeful of corydrone each day; La Force des choses,
p.407.
Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre: strictly personal, Harpers Bazaar,
January 1946; a major portion is reprinted in C/R, pp. 41820.
Published in The New Ambassador / Revue Universitaire Internationale, Jan.
1927; reprinted in C/R, pp. 51730.
Enqute auprs des tudiants daujourdhui, by Roland Alix, Les Nouvelles
littraires, 2 Febr. 1929. Parts of Sartres letter are reprinted in Simone de
Beauvoirs Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Penguin edn., 1963, pp. 3423.
Si grande que soit mon admiration pour Proust, il mest tout oppos: il se
complait dans lanalyse, et je ne tends qu la synthse. Interview by Pierre
Lorquet, Mondes Nouveaux, 21 Dec. 1944.
It is perfectly true, isolated subjectivity is, in the opinion of the age, evil; but
objectivity as a cure is not one whit better. The only salvation is subjectivity,
i.e. God, as infinite compelling subjectivity. The Journals of Kierkegaard:
18341854, edited and translated by Alexander Dru, Fontana Books, p. 184.
The paintings of Giacometti (1954), Situations (English), pp. 1245.
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, p. 342.
Jean-Paul Sartre has done the finest critical appreciation of (Csaires)
Cahier as poetry, but his explanation of what he conceives Negritude to mean
is a disaster. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, 2nd revised edition, Vintage
Books, New York, 1963, p.401.
Les Temps Modernes, Dec. 1957, p. 1137.
Lcrivain et sa langue (1965), interview by Pierre Verstraeten, Revue
dEsthtique, July-December 1965; reprinted in Situations, IX, 4082.
Quotation from p. 75. It is worth stressing that Lukcs deals in much the same
way with this problem in his Correspondence with Anna Seghers.
The paintings of Giacometti, p. 132; I have changed supra-determination
to overdeterminationthe generally accepted term for surdetermination,
which is the expression used by Sartre; cf. French edition of this essay in
Situations, IV, p. 359.
334
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
The paintings of Giacometti, p. 132.

See C/R, p. 429.
Interview by Alain Koehler, Perspectives du Thtre, MarchApril 1960.
Interview by Robert Kanters, LExpress, 17 September 1959.
A friend of the people, interview by Jean-Edern Hallier and Thomas
Savignat, LIdiot International, reprinted in Situations, IX, , 45676 and in
NLB volume, Between Existentialism and Marxism, pp. 286-98. Quotation
from p. 295 of the latter.
This is recognized to some extent when Sartre declares: If I had to rewrite
Roads to Freedom, Id try to present every character without commentary,
without showing my feelings. Interview by Jacqueline Autrusseau, Les Lettres
franaises, 1723 September 1959.
Nausea has been accused of being too pessimistic. But lets wait for the
ending. In a forthcoming novel, which will be the continuation, the hero shall
redress the machine. We shall see existence rehabilitated, and my hero act,
tasting action. Interview by Claudine Chonez, Marianne, 7 December 1938.
Cf. Chapter 3, Section 2.
This is how Sartre describes in an interview the relationship between Being
and Nothingness and Huis Clos: The story of mine about souls in torment
was not symbolicI had no wish to repeat Being and Nothingness in different
words. What would have been the point? I simply made up some stories with
an imagination, sensibility and thought that the conception and writing of
Being and Nothingness had united, integrated and organized in a certain way.
Interview by Jacqueline Autrusseau, Les Lettres franaises, 1723 September
1959.
Interview by Bernard Dort, Thtre Populaire, Winter 1959.
Sartre talks to Tynan, Tynan Right and Left, Longmans, London, 1967, pp.
30212. Reference is to pages 31011. Other relevant passages are as follows:
the theatre is not concerned with reality: it is only concerned with truth. The
cinema, on the other hand, seeks a reality which may contain moments of
truth. The theatres true battlefield is that of tragedydrama which embodies
a genuine myth. There is no reason why the theatre should not tell a story of
love or marriage, as long as it has a quality of myth; in other words, as long as
it occupies itself with something more than conjugal disagreements or lovers
misunderstandings. By seeking truth through myth, and by the use of forms
as non-realistic as tragedy, the theatre can stand up against the cinema (p.
304). I dont think theatre can be directly derived from political events. For
instance, I would never have written Altona if it was merely a simple question
of a conflict between Left and Right. For me, Altona is tied up with the whole
evolution of Europe since 1945, as much with the Soviet concentration camps
as with the war in Algeria. The theatre must take all these problems and
transmute them into mythic form (p. 307). I am always looking for myths; in
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
335
other words, for subjects so sublimated that they are recognizable to everyone,
without recourse to minute psychological details (p. 310). Furthermore,
there are also gradations or varieties of myth on the objective to subjective
scale: the work of Tennessee Williams is permeated with subjective myths
(p. 308). And the whole category of myth, subjective as much as objective,
is opposed to symbolism: I have not liked Becketts other plays [other than
Waiting for Godot, that is] particularly Endgame, because I find the symbolism
far too inflated, far too naked (p. 307).
In Theatre Arts (New York), June 1946.
In Le Point, January 1967.
Interview by Nicole Zand, Bref, FebruaryMarch 1967.
Interview by Alain Koehler, Perspectives du Thtre, March-April 1960
La recherche de labsolu (1948), Situations, III, 300301.
Ibid., p. 301.
Masson (1960), Situations, IV, p. 389.
Ibid., p. 401.
La recherche de labsolu, p. 293.
Les mobiles de Calder (1946), Situations, III, pp. 30811. And he writes
on Giacometti that his works, constantly in the course of making, are always
half-way between nothingness and being (La recherche de labsolu, p.
293.)
The purposes of writing, pp. 1112.
Le choix libre que lhomme fait de soi-mme sidentifie absolument avec ce
quon appelle sa destine (Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, Gallimard, Paris,
1947, p. 224.) And another important passage concerning this problem:
nous touchons ici au choix originel que Baudelaire a fait de lui mme, cet
engagement absolu par quoi chacun dcide dans une situation particulire de
ce quil sera et de ce quil est. (p.20.)
Interview by Claudine Chonez, Lobservateur, 31 May 1951.
Dfense de la culture franaise par la culture europenne, Politique
trangere, June 1949.
Interview by Franoise Erval, Combat, 3 February 1949.
Interview by Alain Koehler, Perspectives du Thtre, MarchApril 1960
Lgende de la vrit, Bifur, June 1931; Reprinted in C/R, pp. 53145.
Interview by Claudine Chonez, Marianne, 23 November and 7 December
1938.
Of rats and men, Situations, p. 245.
See note 33.
Sartre, Saint Genet: comdien et martyr, Gallimard, Paris, 1952, p. 536.
336
96.
97.
La nationalisation de la littrature, Situations, II, p. 53.

La Libration de Paris: une semaine dApocalypse, Clarts, 24 August
1945; reprinted in C/R, pp. 65962.
Gribouille, La Rue, November 1947.
Limagination au pouvoir, entretien de Jean-Paul Sartre avec Daniel CohnBendit, Le Nouvel Observateur, Special Supplement, 20 May 1968.
Interview by Serge Lafaurie, Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 March 1969; reprinted
in Situations, VIII. Quotation from p. 254.
La Libration de Paris: une semaine dApocalypse, C/R, p. 661.
Dtermination et Libert, C/R, p. 745.
LArt cinmatographique (1931), first published in a brochure of the
Lyce de Le Havre, Distribution solennelle des prix, Le Havre, 12 July 1931;
reprinted in C/R, pp. 54652. Quotation from pp. 54852.
Interview by Yvon Novy, Comoedia, 24 April 1943.
Quand Hollywood veut faire penserCitizen Kane dOrson Welles, LEcran
franais, 1 August 1945.
LArt cinmatographique, C/R, p. 551.
Ibid., p. 549.
Interview by Yvon Novy, Comoedia, 24 April 1943.
propos de Le Bruit et la Fureurla temporalit chez Faulkner (July 1939),
Situations, I, p. 68.
Ibid., p. 71.
Ibid., p. 72.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 74.
Lucien Goldmann has discussed in several of his works the relationship
between Lukcs and Heidegger, cf. Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der
Philosophie Immanuel Kants (Europa-Verlag, Zrich, 1945), Recherches
dialectiques (Gallimard, Paris, 1959), and in particular his posthumous
volume, Lukcs et Heidegger, ed., and with an introduction by Youssef
Ishaghpour (Denol/Gonthier, Paris, 1973.)
Heideggers preface to the seventh German edition of Being and Time,
translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell, Oxford,
1967, p. 17.
La temporalit chez Faulkner, p. 73.
Ibid., pp. 745.
Ce Soir, 16 May 1938.
Quand Hollywood veut faire penser . . . , cf. note 105.
Quest-ce-que lexistentialisme? Bilan dune offensive, Interview by
Dominique Aury, Les Lettres franaises, 24 November 1945.
Interview by Jacques-Alain Miller, Les Cahiers libres de la Jeunesse, 15
February 1960.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
122.
123.
124.
125.
126.
127.
128.
129.
130.
131.
132.
133.
134.
135.
136.
137.
138.
337
Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, p. 214.

Interview by Robert Kanters, LExpress, 17 September 1959.
Quoted by Thomas Mann in his Essay in Autobiography.
The purposes of writing, p. 31. The same view is expressed in Words: I
have renounced my vocation, but I have not unfrocked myself. I still write.
What else can I do? Nulla dies sine linea. It is my habit and it is also my
profession. For a long while I treated my pen as a sword: now I realize how
helpless we are. It does not matter: I am writing, I shall write books; they are
needed; they have a use all the same. Penguin edition, p. 157.
Sartre quoting Isaac Deutscher in A friend of the people, pp. 2923.
Ibid., pp. 2935.
Ibid., p. 45.
A friend of the people, pp. 293 and 295.
Interview by Jacqueline Piatier, Le Monde, 18 April 1964.
Lange du morbide, published in La Revue sans titre, 15 January 1923.
Jsus la Chouette, professeur de province, La Revue sans titre, 10 and 25
February and 10 March 1923.
His Esquisse dune thorie des motions (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions)
was written in 1936 but probably revised before publication in 1939.
LImagination (English title: Imagination: a psychological critique) was
written in 1935 and published in 1936. And LImaginaire (English title: The
Psychology of Imagination) was written and in part published in 1939, and as
a book in 1940.
Meanwhile Sartre was writing a treatise on phenomenological psychology
which he entitled La Psych, and of which in the end he published an extract
only, calling it Esquisse dune thorie phnomnologique des motions (The
Emotions: Outline of a theory). Here he developed his theory of psychic
objectivity, which had been sketched out in the essay on The Transcendence
of the Ego. But to his way of thinking this was little more than an exercise, and
after writing four hundred pages he broke off to complete his collection of
stories. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, Penguin edition, p.318.
See for instance the following passage: The third reason for choosing
Flaubert is that he represents a sequel to LImaginaire. You may remember
that in my very early book LImaginaire I tried to show that an image is
not a sensation reawakened, or reworked by the intellect, or even a former
perception altered and attenuated by knowledge, but is something entirely
differentan absent reality, focused in its absence through what I called an
analogon; that is to say, an object which serves as an analogy and is traversed
by an intention. For example, when you are going to sleep, the little dots in
your eyesphosphenesmay serve as an analogy for every kind of oneiric
or hypnagogic image. Between waking and sleeping some people see vague
338
139.
140.
141.
142.
143.
144.
145.
146.
147.
148.
149.
shapes pass, which are phosphenes through which they focus on an imagined
person or a thing. In LImaginaire, I tried to prove that imaginary objects
imagesare an absence. In my book on Flaubert, I am studying imaginary
personspeople who like Flaubert act out roles. A man is like a leak of gas,
escaping into the imaginary. Flaubert did so perpetually; yet he also had to see
reality because he hated it, so there is the whole question of the relationship
between the real and the imaginary which I try to study in his life and work.
Intimacy, The Wall, The Room, Erostratus, and The Childhood of
a Leader.
Action, 29 December 1944; reprinted in C/R, pp. 6538.
A lecture delivered on 28 October 1945, and published as a volume by Nagel,
Paris, 1946.
Written in 1945 and published in 1946.
Le R.D.R. et le problme de la libert, La Pense socialiste, Spring 1948.
Faux savants ou faux livres? (1950), Situations, VI, p. 28.
Pourtant, aprs avoir applaudi la victoire du militant, cest laventurier que
je suivrai dans sa solitude. Il a vcu jusqueau bout une condition impossible:
fuyant et cherchant la solitude, vivant pour mourir et mourant pour vivre,
convincu de la vanit de laction et de sa ncessit, tentant de justifier son
entreprise en lui assignant un but auquel il ne croyait pas, recherchant la totale
objectivit du rsultat por la diluer dans une absolute subjectivit, voulant
lchec quil refusait, refusant la victoire quil souhaitait, voulant construire
sa vie comme un destin et ne se plaisant quaux moments infinitsimaux qui
sparent la vie de la mort. Aucune solution de ces antinomies, aucune synthse
de ces contradictoires. . . . Pourtant, au prix dune tension insupportable, cet
homme les a maintenus ensemble et tous la fois, dans leur incomparabilit
mme; il a t la conscience permanente de cette incompatibilit. . . . je
pense quil tmoigne la fois de lexistence absolue de lhomme et de son
impossibilit absolue. Mieux encore: il prouve que cest cette impossibilit
dtre qui est la condition de son existence et que lhomme existe parce
quil est impossible. . . . une cit socialiste o de futurs Lawrence seraient
radicalement impossibles me semblerait strilise. (Portrait de laventurier,
1950, Situations, VI, pp. 2021.)
It is worth remembering that in 1945, in his lecture Existentialisme est un
humanisme Sartre characterized Lawrence as an existentialist. No doubt as
a result of criticism received from his socialist friends, Sartre omitted such
references from the published text.
Saint Genet, p. 177.
Ibid. A substantial part of Saint Genet appeared in 1950, in several issues of
Les Temps Modernes.
La bombe H, une arme contre lhistoire, Dfense de la Paix, July 1954.
339
150. See Ce que jai vu Vienne, cest la Paix, Les Lettres franaises, 18 January
1953; and an interview by Marcel Saporta, Cuadernos Americanos, January
February 1954.
151. La pense et la politique daujourdhui nous mnent au massacre parce
quelles sont abstraites. . . . Chacun est lAutre, lennemi possible, on sen mfie.
Il est rare, en France, mon pays, de rencontrer des hommes; on rencontre
surtout des tiquettes et des noms. Ce quil y a de neuf et dadmirable dans ce
congrs de la Paix, cest quil runit des hommes. . . . Nous avons rsolu, non
de nous substituer nos gouvernements, mais de communiquer entre nous,
sans eux. Sartres intervention at the opening session of the Vienna meeting,
on 12 December 1952; published in Congrs des Peuples pour la Paix, Vienne,
1219 Dec. 1952, Paris, 1953.
152. The purposes of writing, p. 13.
153. Les Temps Modernes, February 1956.
154. Interview by Simon Blumenthal and Grard Spitzer, La Voie communiste, new
series, JuneJuly 1962.
155. Les Temps Modernes, November-December 1956January 1957, pp. 577
697.
156. Itinerary of a thought, p. 46.
157. The purposes of writing, p. 9.
158. Echoing his own earlier hopes about a broadly based yet effective political
rassemblement (see his participation in the RDR), he sees the militancy of La
Cause du Peuple in a similar light: the militants of La Cause du Peuple do not
constitute a party. It is a political group [rassemblement] which can always
be dissolved. . . . This procedure allows a way out of the rigidity in which
the Communist Party has imprisoned itself. . . . Today, the Maoists criticize
and break out of the notion of leftism: they want to be the left and to create a
broad political organization [rassemblement]. (Interview by Michel-Antoine
Burnier, Actuel, No. 28, and Tout va Bien, 20 February20 March 1973;
translated by Robert dAmico, Telos, Summer 1973; quotations from pp. 93
and 95 of Telos.) It does not matter here that leftism is often characterized
precisely by a voluntaristic wanting to be the left which disregards the
objective relation of forces. Nor are we concerned with the question whether
or not the reality of French Maoism corresponds to Sartres description. What
matters in this context is the reassertion of Sartres ideal of a broadly based
and extremely flexible political organization: a rassemblement of individuals
as opposed to a highly disciplined and structured political party.
159. Itinerary of a thought, pp. 589.
160. Of course Sartres works are inherently problematical, but not in such a way
that the later works might be considered less problematical than the earlier
ones. Roads to Freedom is not a more mature novel than Nausea (in the sense
in which Thomas Manns Magic Mountain is incomparably more mature than
his Royal Highness), nor is Critique of Dialectical Reason more mature than
340
161.
162.
163.
164.
165.
166.
167.
168.
169.
Being and Nothingness in the field of philosophy, or The Idiot of the Family
than Saint Genet in the field of biography. In the later works there are some
new principles at workalongside with a great many they share with the
earlier onesthat is all. It is Sartres lifework as a whole which is problematical,
with its overpowering negativity, and not one or two of its limited phases that
might be characterized in relation to one another in terms of radical breaks.
We cannot stress enough, Sartrein some ways like Picassoproduces not
so much representative works as a representative lifework. If we want a
great parallel from the pastkeeping in mind, of course, all the differences
and specificitieswe may think of Voltaire, with his all-embracing negativity.
Situated at another juncture of great socio-historical transformation and
transition, Voltaire subjects the old order to the most devastating criticism
and satirequite unlike Rousseau, who organically complements his radical
negativity with anticipations of a new order. As we all know well, only a tiny
fraction of Voltaires immense lifework is read today. But if we try to imagine
the eighteenth century without his contribution we must immediately realize
how much the poorer it would be for that.
Interview by Dominique Aury, Les Lettres franaises, 24 November 1945.
Being and Nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology (1943),
translated by Hazel E. Barnes, Methuen, London, 1969, pp. 526 and 529
(henceforth referred to as B & N).
Interview by Robert Kanters, LExpress, 17 September 1959. The theme
of being judged appears many times in Sartres writings, including an
interview with Kenneth Tynan in which he says: The point is that we know
we shall be judged, and not by the rules we use to judge ourselves. And he
adds: In that thought there is something horrific (K. Tynan, Tynan Right
and Left, 1967, p. 304.) Thus there is always something threatening, sinister,
tragic on the horizon. Even when Sartre declares that he has always been an
optimist, indeed too much of an optimist, he does that in conjunction with
some sombre metaphysical statements, like: The Universe remains dark.
We are sinister animals. And although he insists in the same interview that
alienation, exploitation and hunger are the evils we should be concerned
about because they relegate to the second plane the metaphysical evil, the
latter remains menacingly looming in the background in the Sartrean dark
Universe. (See his interview by Jacqueline Piatier, Le Monde, 18 April
1964.)
La recherche de labsolu, Situations, III, p. 293.
Interview by Michel-Antoine Burnier, loc. cit., p. 99.
La question (1965), Thtre vivant, September 1965.
Preface for Portrait of a Man Unknown by Nathalie Sarraute (1948), translated
by Maria Jolas, Situations, Fawcett, Greenwich, Conn., 1965, p. 139.
Ibid., p. 141.
Ibid., p. 139.
341
170. Merleau-Ponty (1961), Situations (English edition), p. 185.

171. The Problem of Method (1959), translated by Hazel E. Barnes, Methuen,
London, 1963, p. 20. (Henceforth referred to as Method).
172. See the description of his prisoner of war camp experience (Chapter 1, note
18) which is used to authenticate his analysis of distance as a concept
meaningful only in a human context. That he contradicts elsewhere the
statement that close proximity to others in the camp was never disturbing,
as the others were a part of me, only underlines the fact that such personal
references do not appear in his work for the sake of their descriptive content
but for their authenticating function. It does not really matter whether or
not Sartre actually had the experiences he describes. What is structurally
important is that his crucial theoretical propositions are coupled and
integrated with existential authenticating subjective references.
173. Je le dis tout de suite: vos attaques me paraissent inspires par la mauvaise foi
et lignorance. Il nest mme pas sr que vous ayez lu aucun des livres dont vous
parlez. (Sartre, propos de lexistentialisme: mise au point, pp. 6534.)
174. Ses [Lukcss] arguments sont nuls et non avenus: il na pas lu Ltre et le
Nant (Interview by Franois Erval, Combat, 3 February 1949). On the other
hand, when the principal object of his criticism is the French C.P., Sartre
completely reverses his severe judgement and refers to Lukcs in the highest
terms of praise: Le seul qui tente en Europe, dexpliquer par leur causes
les mouvements de pense contemporains, cest un communiste hongrois,
Lukcs. (Le Rformisme et les ftiches, Les Temps Modernes, February
1956, p. 1159)
175. I have at least this in common with Hegel. You have not read either of us. You
have such a mania for not going to the source. (Reply to Albert Camus,
1952), Situations, p. 66.
176. Les Temps Modernes, December 1957, p. 137.
177. Une ide fondamentale de la phnomnologie de Husserl: lIntentionnalit,
(January 1939), Situations, I, p. 30. Henceforth referred to as Une ide.)
178. The Transcendence of the Ego, translated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, The Noonday Press, New York, 1957, pp. 3940.
179. Ibid., pp. 878.
180. Ibid., p. 103.
181. The refutation [of solipsism] that Husserl presents in Formale und
Transcendentale Logik and in Cartesianische Meditationen does not seem to
us capable of unsettling a determined and intelligent solipsist. As long as the I
remains a structure of consciousness, it will always remain possible to oppose
consciousness, with its I, to all other existents. (Ibid., p 103.)
182. Ibid., pp. 1034.
183. Ibid., pp. 1046.
184. This is how Simone de Beauvoir describes Sartres encounter with Husserls
philosophy: Sartre was coming to realize that in order to give the ideas dividing
342
his mind some coherent organization, help was essential. The first translation
of Kierkegaard appeared about this time: we had no particular incentive to
read them, and left them untouched. On the other hand, Sartre was strongly
attracted by what he had heard about German phenomenology. Raymond
Aron was spending a year at the French Institute in Berlin and studying
Husserl simultaneously with preparing a historical thesis. When he came to
Paris he spoke of Husserl to Sartre. We spent an evening together at the Bec de
Gaz in the Rue Montparnasse. We ordered the speciality of the house, apricot
cocktails; Aron said, pointing to his glass: You see, my dear fellow, if you are a
phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of
it! Sartre turned pale with emotion at this. Here was just the thing he had been
longing to achieve for yearsto describe objects just as he saw and touched
them, and extract philosophy from the process. Aron convinced him that
phenomenology exactly fitted in with his special preoccupation: by-passing
the antithesis of idealism and realism [materialism], affirming simultaneously
both the supremacy of reason and the reality of the visible world as it appears
to our senses. On the Boulevard Saint-Michel Sartre purchased Lvinass book
on Husserl, and was so eager to inform himself on the subject that he leafed
through the volume as he walked along, without even having cut the pages.
(The Prime of Life, translated by Peter Green, Penguin Edition, pp. 1356.)
The contrast with Lukcs couldnt be greater. As Sartre from Raymond Aron
twenty years later, Lukcs gets an enthusiastic account of phenomenology
during the first world war from Max Scheler, but he reacts to it with extreme
scepticism. This is how Lukcs himself describes the incident: Als mich
zur Zeit des ersten Weltkrieges Scheler in Heidelberg besuchte, hatten wir
hierber ein interessantes und characteristisches Gesprch. Scheler vertrat
den Standpunkt, die Phnomenologie sie eine universale Methode, die
alles zum intentionalen Gegenstand haben knne. Man kann zum Beispiel,
fhrte Scheler aus, ber den Teufel phnomenologische Untersuchungen
machen, man muss nur zunchts die Frage der Existenz des Teufels in
Klammer setzen.Freilich, antwortete ich, und wenn sie dann mit dem
phnomenologischen Bild ber den Teufel fertig geworden sind, dann ffnen
sie die Klammerund der Teufel steht leibhaftig vor uns. Scheler lachte, zuckte
mit den Achseln und antwortete nichts. (Georg Lukcs, Existentialismus oder
Marxismus, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin, 1951, pp. 367. Lukcss early philosophy
has been constituted on the basis of a positive response to Plato, Kant and
Hegel, in accordance with his fundamental interest in finding a secure way
of transcending the world of deceptive appearances while remaining on the
ground of reality, and therefore the idea of phenomenological bracketing and
reduction had to be totally alien to him.
185. The Psychology of Imagination, translated by Bernard Frechtman, Washington
Square Press, New York, 1966, p. 233 (henceforth referred to as LImaginaire).
186. Une ide, p. 32.
N OT ES TO PAG E S 98 10 2
343
187. Ibid.
188. B & N., p. 626.
189. Eugen Fink, Die phnomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserl in der
gegewartigen Kritik, Kantstudien, 1933.
190. Transcendence, pp. 1023.
191. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, translated by Philip Mairet, Methuen,
London, 1962, p. 81 (henceforth referred to as Emotions).
192. Imagination: a psychological critique, translated by Forrest Williams, The
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1962, pp. 1413 (henceforth
referred to as Imagination).
193. LImaginaire, pp. 2412.
194. Ibid., p. 243. Also, we should bear in mind the following qualifications: In
an imaginary world, there is no dream of possibilities since possibilities call
for a real world on the basis of which they are thought of as possibilities.
Consciousness cannot get perspective on its own imaginations in order to
imagine a possible sequence to the story which it is representing to itself: that
would be to be awake. . . . All anticipation at a given moment of a story derives
from the very fact that the anticipation appears as an episode of the story. I
cannot entertain, conceive another ending. I have no choice, no recourse, I
am compelled to narrate the story to myself: there is no blow for nothing. So
each moment of the story occurs as having an imaginary future, but a future
I cannot foresee, which will come of its own accord, in its own time, to haunt
consciousness, against which consciousness will be crushed. So, contrary
to what could be believed, the imaginary world occurs as a world without
freedom: nor is it determined, it is the opposite of freedom, it is fatal. (Ibid.,
pp. 220-21) We can conclude that the dreamcontrary to Descartesdoes
not at all occur as an apprehension of reality. On the contrary, it would lose
all its sense, its own nature if it could posit itself as real even for a moment.
It is primarily a story and our strong interest in it is of the same sort as that
of the nave reader in a novel. It is lived as a fiction . . . Only it is a spellbinding fiction: consciousness . . . has become knotted. And what it lives,
at the same time as the fiction apprehended as a fiction is the impossibility
of emerging out of the fiction. Just as King Midas transformed everything he
touched into gold, so consciousness is itself determined to transform into the
imaginary everything it gets hold of: hence the fatal nature of the dream. It
is the seizure of this fatality as such which has often been confused with an
apprehension of the dreamed world as reality. (Ibid., p. 228) The dream is
a privileged experience which can help us to conceive what a consciousness
would be which would have lost its being-in-the-world and which would
be, by the same token, deprived of the category of the real. (Ibid., p. 229)
The last remark is particularly important for understanding Sartres way of
asserting the function of the real in relation to consciousness while rejecting
all deterministic accounts.
344
195.
196.
197.
198.
199.
200.
201.
202.
203.
204.
205.
206.
207.
208.
209.
210.
211.
212.
213.
214.
215.
216.
217.
218.
219.
220.
221.
222.
223.
224.
225.
226.
227.
228.
NOTES TO PAG E S 1 0 3 1 1 9
Emotions, p. 93.
Imagination, pp. 156.
See in particular Emotions, pp. 3248.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, p. 128.
See the last section of this chapter.
For a classic analysis of these problems, see Lukcss essay on Reification
and the Consciousness of the Proletariat (written in 1922, first published in
1923), History and Class Consciousness, translated by Rodney Livingstone,
Merlin Press, London, 1971, pp. 83222.
LImaginaire, pp. 24041.
Ibid., p. 245.
Ibid., p. 241.
Ibid., pp. 2434.
See note 212 and 214.
LImaginaire, p. 241.
Ibid., p. 245.
Ibid., p. 244.
Nausea, translated by Robert Baldick, Penguin edition, p. 22.
His blue cotton shirt stands out cheerfully against a chocolate-coloured wall.
That too brings on the Nausea. Or rather it is the Nausea. The Nausea isnt
inside me: I can feel it over there on the wall, on the braces, everything around
me. It is one with the caf, it is I who am inside it. Ibid., p. 35.
The Nausea hasnt left me and I dont believe it will leave me for quite a
while; but I am no longer putting up with it, it is no longer an illness or a
passing fit: it is me. Ibid., p. 182.
Ibid., pp. 1823.
We should recall here Sartres early critique of the notion of will to power,
etc., in his contribution to the student enquiry. See note 50.
Nausea, pp. 18392.
Emotions, p. 90.
See note 163.
Emotions, pp. 845.
Ibid., pp. 9091.
Method, p. 130.
Ibid., p. 59.
Ibid., p. 152.
Ibid., p. 94.
Ibid., p. 95.
Ibid., p. 80.
See in particular pp. 779 of Method.
Method, p. 88.
Ibid., p. 78.
229.
230.
231.
232.
233.
234.
235.
236.
237.
238.
239.
240.
241.
242.
243.
244.
245.
246.
247.
248.
249.
250.
251.
252.
253.
254.
345
Ibid., p. 115.
Interview by Michel-Antoine Burnier, p. 99.
Method, p. 90.
Ibid., p. 79.
There are some important changes in method in the development of Husserl
and Heidegger, as well as of Merleau-Ponty.
Method, p. 52. (Sartres reference is to Henri Lefbvres Perspectives de
sociologie rurale, Cahiers de sociologie, 1953.)
Method, p. 52.
We shall define the method of the existentialist approach as a regressiveprogressive and analytic-synthetic method. It is at the same time an enriching
cross-reference between the object (which contains the whole period as
hierarchized specifications) and the period (which contains the object in its
totalization). Ibid., p. 148.
Emotions, pp. 934.
Imagination, p. 128.
Method, p. 135.
According to Heidegger Because Marx, through his experience of the
alienation of modern man, is aware of a fundamental dimension of history, the
Marxist view of history is superior to all other views. (See Irving Fetscher,
Marxismusstudien, in Soviet Survey, No. 33, JulySeptember 1960, p. 88.)
It goes without saying, Marx did not experience alienation as the alienation
of modern man, but as the alienation of man in capitalist society. Nor did he
look upon alienation as a fundamental dimension of history, but as a central
issue of a given phase of history which can be historically transcended. The
Heideggerian idea of alienation as a fundamental dimension of history is in
fact profoundly anti-historical.
The concept of non-positional self-consciousness plays a very important
part in Sartres thought. See in this respect also note 326.
Transcendence, pp. 1056.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 1012.
The phenomenologist will interrogate consciousness, the human reality
about emotion. Emotions, p. 26.
Ibid., p. 63.
Ibid., p. 78.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 80.
See LImaginaire, p. 199, for instance.
See note 146.
346
255. Transcendence, pp. 1045.

256. Even in the Itinerary of a thought, where Sartre is critical of the extreme
form in which he stressed in some earlier works mans freedom and
responsibility, he reasserts this fundamental idea in a somewhat different form:
the idea which I have never ceased to develop is that in the end one is always
responsible for what is made of one. Even if one can do nothing else besides
assume this responsibility. For I believe that a man can always make something
out of what is made of him. ed. cit., p.45.
257. Emotions, pp. 235.
258. M. Rubel criticizes me for not making any allusion to this Marxist
materialism in the article I wrote in 1946, Materialism and Revolution. But
he himself supplies the reason for this omission. It is true that this author is
directing his comments at Engels rather than at Marx. Yes, and even more at
contemporary French Marxists. (Method, p. 34; see also p. 104 of Method for
Sartres critique of Engels.)
259. This is one of the principal themes of Method.
260. Itinerary of a thought, p. 46.
261. . . . cela [Sartres preoccupation to provide a philosophical foundation to
realism] ma permis, plus tard, dassigner certaines limites au materialisme
dialectiqueen validant la dialectique historique tout en rejetant une
dialetique de la nature qui rduirait lhomme, comme toute chose, un simple
produit des lois physiques. (Sartre par Sartre, Situations, IX, pp. 1045.)
262. See, for instance, Mary Warnock, The Philosophy of Sartre, Hutchinson,
London, 1965, Chapter 6: The radical conversion, pp. 13581.
263. Method, p. 181.
264. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin
Milligan, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1959, p. 136.
265. LAnthropologie (1966), Situations, IX, p. 93.
266. Marx, Capital, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, vol. 1, p.
486.
267. What is Literature? p. 157.
268. Both quotations Ibid., p. 159.
269. Emotions, p. 16.
270. Both quotations Ibid., p. 51.
271. Ibid., pp. 534.
272. . . . this language produces a mythology of the unconscious which I
cannot accept. I am completely in agreement with the facts of disguise and
repression, as facts. But the words repression, censorship, or drivewords
which express one moment a sort of finalism and the next moment a sort
of mechanism, these I reject. Let us take the example of condensation, for
instance, which is an ambivalent term in Freud. One can interpret it simply as
a phenomenon of association, in the same way as your English philosophers
and psychologists of both the 18th and 19th centuries. Two images are
273.
274.
275.
276.
277.
278.
279.
280.
281.
282.
283.
284.
285.
286.
347
drawn together externally, they condense and form a third: this is classical
psychological atomism. But one can also interpret the term on the contrary as
expressive of a finality. Condensation occurs because two images combined
answer a desire, a need. This sort of ambiguity occurs again and again in
Freud. The result is a strange representation of the unconscious as a set of
rigorous mechanistic determinations, in any event a causality, and at the same
time as a mysterious finality, such that there are ruses of the unconscious, as
there are ruses of history; yet it is impossible to reunite the two in the work of
many analysts. I think that there is always a fundamental ambiguity in them;
the unconscious is one moment another consciousness, and the next moment
other than consciousness. What is other than consciousness then becomes
simply a mechanism. (Itinerary of a thought, pp. 467.)
B & N, p. 626.
Ibid., p. 135.
To use a later expression whichlooking back upon the existential venture
sums up well the meaning of Sartres early concern too. (Method, p. 9.)
Ibid., p. 10.
Ibid.
It is a clear example of the internal tensions of Sartres philosophy that while
on page 10 of the Method he admits that the existentialist thesis holds only
to the degree to which knowledge remains powerless to transform being, on
page 181 he reasserts in an unqualified form the separation of being from
Knowledge and, without any evidence, claims that Marx, as opposed to later
marxists, holds the same existentialist view.
Numbers standing alone in brackets in this chapter refer to Being and
Nothingness (B & N).
LExistentialisme est un humanisme, Nagel, Paris, 1946, p. 62.
Ibid., p. 63.
Merleau-Ponty, in Situations, p. 161. Sartres text speaks of eidetics
(eidetique) and not of an eidetic imagery. I modified the translation
accordingly.
The Writer and his Language (an interview with Pierre Verstraeten, 1965),
in Sartre, Politics and Literature, translated by J.A. Underwood, Calder and
Boyars, London, 1973, p. 112.
. . . philosophy is a matter of borrowing and inventing concepts which
progressively, through a kind of dialectic, bring us to a broader awareness of
ourselves on the experiential level. Ultimately philosophy is always designed to
cancel itself out. . . . What this amounts to is that philosophy must continually
be destroying itself and being reborn. Philosophy is thought in so far as thought
is invariably the dead moment of praxis since, by the time it occurs, praxis is
already framed. To put it another way, philosophy comes after, while none the
348
less constantly looking forward. It must not allow itself to dispose of anything
other than concepts, i.e. words. Yet even so what counts in philosophys favour
is the fact that those words are not completely defined. The ambiguity of the
philosophical word does after all offer something which can be used to go further.
It can be used in order to mystify, as Heidegger often does, but it can also be used
for the purposes of prospecting, as he uses it also. . . . Philosophy is concerned
with the creator of the sciences and it cannot deal with him in scientific words;
it can only deal with him in ambiguous words. The Writer and his Language,
pp. 11011.
287. Ibid., p. 96.
288. This is true, of course, not only of Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason, but
of his later work in general. For instance, in The Writer and his Language
he takes up an important theme from B & N, without referring to it explicitly.
The issue concerns the existential significance of wish: for me the concrete
universal must always imply a kind of self-awareness that is other than
conceptual, a kind of self-awareness that is awareness of Wish, awareness of
History. Take awareness of Wish, for example. As I see it, a wish necessarily
utilizes the force of need, but whereas need is a simple requirementthe need
to eat, and to eat no matter what so long as it is ediblewish is on the level of
Epicurus titillation, i.e. I need to eat this rather than that. As soon as I want to
eat this rather than that, the thing I want to eat inevitably refers me back to the
universe. Because basically if I detest oysters but love lobster, or vice versa, it
is always for a reason which goes beyond oyster or lobster themselves; there
are certain relationships to life, relationships to whole hosts of things, which
refer us back to ourselves at the same time as referring us back to the universe.
(The Writer and his Language, p. 103)
The statement that our taste refers us back to ourselves and to the universe
is both monumentally vague and opaque. If we want to find out the meaning
of the relationship hinted at, we have to go back to B & N which gives as
examples even the same type of food: To eat is to appropriate by destruction;
it is at the same time to be filled up with a certain being. In a word, this
synthesis signifies a certain being; and when we eat, we do not limit ourselves
to knowing certain qualities of this being through taste; by tasting them we
appropriate them. . . . Certain tastes give themselves all at once, some are
like delayed action fuses, some release themselves by degrees, certain ones
dwindle slowly until they disappear, and still others vanish at the very moment
one thinks to possess them. . . . We conclude that flavour . . . has a complex
architecture and differentiated matter; it is this structured matterwhich
represents for us a particular type of beingthat we can assimilate or reject
with nausea, according to our original project. It is not a matter of indifference
whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimps, if only we know how to
unravel the existential significance of these foods. Generally speaking there is
no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative
289.
290.
291.
292.
349
choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify

them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the
ultimate end of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value
which haunts it. (6145)
As we can see the suggestion that our preference for certain types of food
refers us back to ourselves and to the universe does not represent any
advance on B & N. Indeed it may be argued that while in the context of
Sartres existentialist theory of a symbolic appropriation of being the problem
can be discussed with a high degree of suggestive particularization which aims
at establishing the existentially significant identity of particular instances of
action and the appropriation of being, the later work suffers from the vagueness
of simply referring the issue to the poles of individuality (ourselves) and
universality (the universe). Sartres greater social awareness after the war
brings with it a new problem, but not necessarily its solution. For while
the original formulation in B & N bypasses the problem of mediation by
stipulating a direct relationship of identity between the particular examples
of appropriative behaviour and the universality of a symbolic appropriation
of being (there is no irreducible taste or inclination), the later work, by
shifting its frame of reference in the direction of a greater social concretization,
imposes upon itself the burden of providing the categories of an adequate
social mediation between particularity and universality. The vagueness could
be removed only by filling the rather forbidding gap between ourselves and
the universe through a well defined social mediation.
See in this respect section 2 of the previous chapter: In Search of the
Individual: The Early Works.
These expressions refer essentially to the same thing.
Again we can note both the similarities with and the differences from Kant.
Just as in Kant ought implies can, in Sartre the force of circumstance is
never allowed to challenge the existentialist demand for authenticity. At the
same time, the fact that Sartres frame of reference is existential-ontological,
and not transcendental, significantly modifies the function of ought in his
system. The Sartrean ought is subsumed under the general demand for
authenticity which in its turn is spelled out in direct opposition to the various
existing systems of value, including of course all forms of religious axiology.
However, this is a much more complex problem than it would appear at first
sight. See in this respect also note 312.
Notice the ambiguity of syntax in this sentence, which is just as evident in the
French original as in the translation: La causalit premire, cest la saisie de
lapparu avant quil apparaisse, comme tant dj l dans son propre nant
pour prparer son apparition. (259) The appeared is said to be already
there in its own nothingness before it appears so as to prepare its (?)
apparition. If it is the appeared which prepares its apparition, then it
must really prepare its own apparition. The ambiguity of syntax, coupled
350
293.
294.
295.
296.
297.
with the vaguely undefined character of prepares, radically exclude any

deterministic reading. This is why the appeared must first exist in the mode
of its own nothingness which in its turn is called upon to prepare its
own apparition as actually appeared. Such a conception of causality (as the
apprehension of the preparatory, but of course not determining, function of
nothingness in the apparition of the appeared) brings with it a few pages later
a definition of motion as the least being of a being which can neither arrive,
nor be abolished nor wholly be.(213)
See the chapter on Sartres conception of the formal structures of history in
Part Three.
The discussion of this important issue regarding Sartres use of metaphors
is far too long to be included here in a footnote. For this reason the reader
can find it at the end of this chapter, under the title : A Note on Being and
Nothingness.
There is a great deal of uneasiness even in the inspired 1965 interview on The
Writer and his Language in Sartres discussion of the relationship between
philosophy and literary prose. After condemning the use of a literary turn
of phrase in a philosophical work as a breach of trust in the name of strictly
philosophical terms (p. 96), he goes on to contrast philosophy and prose
like this: literary prose seems to me to be the still immediate, not yet selfaware, totality, and philosophy ought to be powered by the ambition to attain
that awareness while disposing only of concepts. (p. 108) Yet a few pages
later, in the context of dismissing Husserls idea of philosophy as a rigorous
science by calling it the idea of a madman genius, but a mad idea none the
less, he not only exalts ambiguity but also the literary element by saying that
philosophy always contains concealed literary prose. (p. 122) And when
towards the end of the interview Pierre Verstraeten tries to pin him down on
some specific points, he produces some curious answers: I dont believe I
ever used the word will without giving it inverted commasthat is to say
theoretical inverted commas, invisible ones. (p. 122) And again: I write in
so many different languages that things pass from one to another; I write the
language of prose, I write the language of philosophy, I write the language of
theatre, and so on. (p. 123) The latter is very true, but of course it cannot
constitute an answer to the question of relationship between philosophical
language and literary prose.
To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no
longer to believe. Thus to believe is not to believe any longer because that is only
to believethis is the unity of one and the same non-thetic self-consciousness.
To be sure, we have here forced the description of the phenomenon by designating
it with the word to know; non-thetic consciousness is not to know. But it is in
its very translucency at the very origin of all knowing. Thus the non-thetic
consciousness (of) believing is destructive of belief. (p. 69)
bergreifendes Momentthe moment of overriding importance.
351
298. Emotions, pp. 5961.

299. Interview by Jacques-Alain Miller, Les Cahiers Libres de la Jeunesse, 15
February 1960.
300. On page XLII of B & N Sartre insists that Necessity concerns the connection
between ideal propositions, and on pages 46970 he writes that the
connection between the derived possible (to resist fatigue or to give in to
it) and the fundamental possible is not a connection of deducibility. It is the
connection between a totality and a partial structure. The view of the total
project enables one to understand the particular structure considered. But
the Gestalt School has shown us that the Prgnanz of the total forms does not
exclude the variability of certain secondary structures. There are certain lines
which I can add or subtract from a given figure without altering its specific
character. There are others, on the contrary, which cannot be added without
involving the immediate disappearance of the figure and the appearance of
another figure. The same thing is true with regard to the relation between the
secondary possibles and the fundamental possible or the formal totality of my
possibles.
301. Indeed, this hermeneutic of existence is envisaged as the sufficient
foundation for an anthropology. (Emotions, pp. 245): a recurrent theme of
Sartres philosophy, from the early works to his Critique of Dialectical Reason.
302. In the same way, the concept of seriality in the Critique of Dialectical Reason
is not derived from the graphic situation of the bus queue; on the contrary, it
produces the latter and other similar examples.
303. The idea that an organic totality transforms itself into inert matter, in
accordance with the objective requirements of its location, so as to be able
to function in its material environment, is an important theme in Sartres
discussion of Need in his Critique of Dialectical Reason. A related idea is
Sartres definition of analytical thought as thought that renders itself inert so
as to be competent to deal with the inert. The Writer and his Language, p.
119.
304. Glissez, mortels, nappuyez pas. See also Sartre, Words, Penguin edition, p.
178.
305. Letter to Simone de Beauvoir, 6 January 1940, published in Magazine
Littraire, No. 103104, September 1975, p. 24.
306. Sartre himself never paid much attention to such considerations (see, for
instance, his encounter with Husserls thought), and it would be quite
wrong to use the measure of scholarly accuracy in evaluating his work.
Sartres references to other thinkers are always strictly subordinate to his
own immediate concerns, and major shifts in evaluation (from an essentially
negative to a highly positive and then again back to an almost completely
negative assessment of Marx, for instance) are likewise the result of his
changing preoccupations. Consequently our attitude toward Sartres work
must hinge on the validity of his concerns inasmuch as they can be sustained
352
307.
308.
309.
310.
311.
312.
on their own ground, and should not be clouded over by our disagreement
with his highly self-oriented interpretations of other thinkers.
See, for instance, Klaus Hartmann, Sartres Ontology, Northwestern University
Press, Evanston, 1966.
There is a fairly common tendency to seek to identify free acts with voluntary
acts and to restrict the deterministic explanation to the world of the passions.
In short the point of view of Descartes. The Cartesian will is free, but there
are passions of the soul. Again, Descartes will attempt a physiological
interpretation of these passions. (441)
It is not by chance that materialism is serious; it is not by chance that it is
found at all times and places as the favourite doctrine of the revolutionary.
This is because revolutionaries are serious. They come to know themselves
first in terms of the world which oppresses them, and they wish to change this
world. . . . Marx proposed the original dogma of the serious when he asserted
the priority of object over subject. Man is serious when he takes himself for
an object. (580) Here we can see a good example of the problem mentioned
in note 306. Marx proposed nothing of the kind here attributed to him by
Sartre whose strictures apply to the worst kind of vulgarization of Marxism.
However, this crude distortion of Marxs thought does not affect the validity
of Sartres idea that man is serious when he takes himself for an object.
In contrast to Descartes physiological determinism, Later there will be an
attempt to instate a purely psychological determinism. Intellectualistic analyses
such as Proust, for example, attempts with respect to jealousy or snobbery
can serve as illustrations for this concept of the passional mechanism. In
this case it would be necessary to conceive of man as simultaneously free and
determined, and the essential problem would be that of the relations between
this unconditioned freedom and the determined processes of the psychic life:
how will it master the passions, how will it utilize them for its own benefit.
(441)
Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason is very different indeed in this respect,
as we shall see in Part Three. However, no one should conclude that for this
reason Critique of Dialectical Reason is a less important work.
In point of fact, religious references in B & N are numerous, and none of them
could be described as nihilistic. On the contrary, Sartre is anxious to account
for the meaning of many religious categoriesfrom sin and original sin to
pride, shame, fall from grace, ideal being, passion of Christ, etc.
in terms of his own discourse, instead of just dismissing them, as a nihilist
would. Notwithstanding his severe critical references to religious axiology
as the loss and sacrifice of the human reality in the interest of the ens
causa sui, the religious problematic constitutes a vitally important element
in Sartres reasoning in Marxs sense, according to which the negation of the
negation (i.e. the negation of religion as a negation and alienation of man)
remains inextricably intertwined with and necessarily dependent on what
313.
314.
315.
316.
317.
318.
353
it negates, in that it is unable to define the human reality in positive, selfsustaining terms.
Again, this position should not be confused with nihilism. For Sartre goes on
to say that this indifference does not mean that we cannot radically escape
bad faith. But this supposes a self-recovery of being which was previously
corrupted. This self-recovery we shall call authenticity, the description of
which has no place here. (70) The difficulty with Sartres position is that
since he has established the ontological primacy of bad faith over good faith,
he cannot attempt a positive description of good faith and authenticity without
the danger of falling into bad faith. Thus coming to grips with authenticity
and good faith, in an ethics of deliverance and salvation, remains the elusive
promise of some other work.
the situation, the common product of the contingency of the In-itself and
of freedom, is an ambiguous phenomenon in which it is impossible for the
For-itself to distinguish the contribution of freedom from that of the brute
existent. In fact, just as freedom is the escape from a contingency which it has
to be in order to escape it, so the situation is the free coordination and the free
qualification of a brute given which does not allow itself to be qualified in any
way at all. (488) See also pages 4837 and 509 of B & N.
. . . the fact of not being able not to be free is the facticity of freedom, and the
fact of not being able not to exist is its contingency. Contingency and facticity
are really one; there is a being which freedom has to be in the form of nonbeing (that is, of nihilation). To exist as the fact of freedom or to have to be a
being in the midst of the world are one and the same thing, and this means that
freedom is originally a relation to the given. (486)
Also called unreflective consciousness, non-thetic consciousness and
pre-reflective cogito. As we have seen in note 296, though this non-thetic
consciousness does not give us knowledge, it is in its very translucency at the
origin of all knowing.
See in this respect the quotation in note 300.
The past which I am, I have to be with no possibility of not being it. I
assume the total responsibility for it as if I could change it, and yet I cannot
be anything other than it. (116) we must proceed from this antinomy:
human reality originally receives its place in the midst of things; human reality
is that by which something we call place comes to things. (490) I exist
my place without choice, without necessity either, as the pure absolute fact
of my being-there. I am there, not here but there. This is the absolute and
incomprehensible fact which is at the origin of extension and consequently
of my original relations with things (with these things rather than with those).
A fact of pure contingencyan absurd fact. (491) facticity is the only reality
which freedom can discover . . . freedom is the apprehension of my facticity.
(494) To be sure, in being born I take place, but I am responsible for the place
which I take. We can see clearly here the inextricable connection of freedom
354
319.
320.
321.
322.
323.
and facticity in the situation. (495) the irremediable quality of the past
comes from the actual choice of the future; . . . while freedom is the choice of
an end in terms of the past, conversely the past is what it is only in relation to
the end chosen. (499) A living past, a half-dead past, survivals, ambiguities,
discrepancies: the ensemble of these layers of pastness is organized by the
unity of my project. (500) That we choose our past in the light of a certain
end, but from then on it imposes itself upon us and devours us. (503) Thus
like place, the past is integrated with the situation when the For-itself by its
choice of the future confers on its past facticity a value, an hierarchical order,
and an urgency in terms of which this facticity motivates the act and the
conduct of the For-itself. (504)
Sartre is by no means embarrassed by the circularity involved. He asserts that
it is in the nature of consciousness to exist in a circle, (XXIX) and in another
context he defines the world as a synthetic complex of instrumental realities
inasmuch as they point one to another in ever widening circles. (17) Similarly,
the relations with the Other are characterized by the circle, (408) and Sartre
reiterates again and again that we can never get out of the circle. (See for
instance p. 412)
See for instance Itinerary of a thought, New Left Review, 58, NovemberDecember 1969.
Coefficient of adversitya term adopted from Gaston Bachelards LEau
et les rves, ed. Jos Corti, Paris, 1942. It stands for the resistance of things or
objects vis--vis human projects.
In LExistentialisme est un humanisme Sartre writes that if one day men
decided to establish fascism and other men were coward and crippled
enough to let them do it, from that moment fascism would be the human truth,
and all the worse for us. (pp.534) Despite the fact that Sartres own position
is clearly visible as opposed to fascism, the underlying principle is extremely
problematical. It is very similar to Bertrand Russells paradoxical predicament
toward the end of his life. For having spent the greater part of his life totally
relativizing value judgements as a form of emotionalism, he found his own
commitment to nuclear disarmament and to many other worthy causes totally
unsustainable in terms of his own philosophy.
The question of a major conversion is realistically formulated in some
particular contexts. For instance, when Sartre writes: There is no doubt
that I could have done otherwise, but that is not the problem. It ought to be
formulated rather like this: could I have done otherwise without perceptibly
modifying the organic totality of the project which I am? . . . at what price?
(456) And later on, writing about yielding to fatigue, he makes the point that
This does not imply that I must necessarily stop but merely that I can refuse
to stop only by a radical conversion of my being-in-the-world; that is, by an
abrupt metamorphosis of my initial projecti.e. by another choice of myself
and of my ends. Moreover, this modification is always possible. (464) This
324.
325.
326.
327.
328.
329.
330.
355
is all very clear and feasible, in that the radical conversion in question only
implies switching from one set of personal policies and strategies to another
while many of the particular projects can belong to both, in accordance
with the principle of Prgnanz which defines the relationship between the
secondary possibles and the fundamental possible. However, there is a
world of difference between this kind of radical conversion and the one
merely postulated in the apocalyptic footnote on the ethics of salvation.
Sartre quite openly acknowledged his own anarchistic libertarianism in some
interviews. Simone de Beauvoirs description of their experience in a caf in
Rouen (see note 275) when they decided that the proletarian struggle was not
their struggle, is highly relevant in this respect, though of course the roots of
such a decision go much further back in the past. In B & N Sartre attributes
anarchism to the bourgeoisie: the weakness of the oppressing class lies in the
fact that although it has at its disposal precise and rigorous means for coercion,
it is within itself profoundly anarchistic. The bourgeois is . . . a consciousness
which does not recognize its belonging to a class. (428)
See for instance Sartres ontological proof on page XXXVII of B & N.
In this respect see my essay on Marxs relation to philosophy in my book on
Philosophy, Ideology and Social Science, Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1986.
Situations, I, p. 32.
The same epistemological optimism is in evidence in The Transcendence of the
Ego. By contrast now the crowd becomes a monstrous materiality and the
helpless individual is depicted as submerged in the crowd-instrument by the
look of the leader. (422)
In his essay on Sartres existentialism Marcuse writes: It was said in a note
in Ltre et le Nant that a morality of liberation and deliverance was possible,
but that it would require a radical conversion. Sartres writings and the stands
he has taken over the last two decades are a conversion of this kind. (Studies
in Critical Philosophy, NLB, London, 1972, p. 189) This may be true of
Sartre personally, but such a personal conversion (if we may describe Sartres
development in those terms) does not resolve the contradiction between the
postulated ethics of deliverance and salvation, and the ontological structure of
being as articulated in B & N.
The fact that the myth of Medusa (430) is turned the other way round in
order to fit the theory (for in the original it is not the mythical Others look at
me which causes my petrification but my own forbidden look at Medusa) need
not worry us unduly. Much more important is the general use to which the
claimed symbolic relations are put. Ultimately they all hinge on the question
of appropriation: on Sartres individualism preventing him from conceiving
appropriation in other than symbolic terms since a full appropriation in
relation to the isolated individual is clearly inconceivable. This position is
mythically projected into a past which precedes the division of labour, and
there we meet Sartres existentialist version of the Robinsonade which is
356
331.
332.
333.
334.
335.
336.
337.
338.
designed to bring production in line with appropriation as individualistic, and

as such ontologically fundamental. We are presented with a fictitious armchair
anthropology, in the name of an ontological description of the fundamental
relations, and we end up with a perverse conclusion which identifies luxury
as closest to original ownership: originally it is I who make myself the object
which I want to possess. My bow and arrows [Friday comes later] . . . Division
of labour can dim this original relation but cannot make it disappear. Luxury
is a degradation of it; in the primitive form of luxury I possess an object which
I have had made (done) for myself by people belonging to me (slaves, servants
born in the home). Luxury therefore is the form of ownership closest to
primitive ownership. (589)
See Marxs discussion of these problems in The German Ideology, especially
pages 8486.
Ibid., especially pages 78, 86, 87, 88.
This perpetual Third should not be confused with the absolute Third,
nor with the neutral Third. (429)
See Marxs discussion of the class for-itself in his Introduction to the
Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right.
See my essay on Contingent and necessary class consciousness, in Aspects of
History and Class Consciousness, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1971.
See Marxs discussion of generations of men inheriting determinate conditions
of existence and proceeding from there toward their transformation, in The
Poverty of Philosophy, 1847
In B & N Sartre is very critical of Paul Bourgets Essai de Psychologie
Contemporaine: G. Flaubert, saying that such a psychological analysis proceeds
from the postulate that an individual fact is produced by the intersection of
abstract, universal laws. The fact to be explainedwhich is here the literary
disposition of young Flaubertis resolved into a combination of typical,
abstract desires such as we meet in the average adolescent. What is concrete
here is only their combination; in themselves they are only possible patterns.
The abstract then is by hypothesis prior to the concrete, and the concrete is only
an organization of abstract qualities: the individual is only the intersection of
universal schemata. Butaside from the logical absurdity of such a postulate
we see clearly in the example chosen, that it simply fails to explain what makes
the individuality of the project under consideration. . . . In addition this method
rejects the pure individual who has been banished from the pure subjectivity of
Flaubert into the external circumstances of his life. (5589) Later he addresses
the same criticism to Marxism in general.
In my book on Flaubert, I am studying imaginary personspeople who like
Flaubert act out roles. A man is like a leak of gas, escaping into the imaginary.
Flaubert did so perpetually; . . . Writing on Flaubert is enough for me by way
of fictionit might indeed be called a novel. Only I would like people to say
that it was a true novel. I try to achieve a certain level of comprehension of
357
Flaubert by means of hypotheses. Thus I use fictionguided and controlled,

but nonetheless fictionto explore why, let us say, Flaubert wrote one thing
on the 15th March and the exact opposite on the 21st March, to the same
correspondent, without worrying about the contradiction. My hypotheses are
in this sense a sort of invention of the personage. (Itinerary of a thought, loc.
Cit., pages 53 and 55.) Many years earlier, in Nausea, very similar ideas are put
forward by Roquentin in his reflections on the problems of a biography which
he plans to write about Rollebon: Well, yes: he may have done all that, but
there is no proof that he did: I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever
be proved. These are reasonable hypotheses which take the fact into account:
but I am only too well aware that they come from me, that they are simply a
way of unifying my knowledge. Not a single glimmer comes from Rollebons
direction. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves at a pinch to the order
I wish to give them, but it remains outside of them. I have the impression of
doing a work of pure imagination. And even so, I am certain that characters in
a novel would appear more realistic. (p.26)
339. This project is spelled out in a fairly detailed form in B & N, (55962) in
the context of existential psychoanalysis. And Sartre concludes: This
psychoanalysis has not yet found its Freud. At most we can find the
foreshadowing of it in certain particularly successful biographies. We hope
to be able to attempt elsewhere two examples in relation to Flaubert and
Dostoevsky. (575)
340. In this sense the particularization is in fact the most abstract of all possible
generalizations since it aims at establishing a symbolic relationship of identity
between the incomparably unique and the ontological absolute, a priori
excluding all categories of social mediation which belong to the sphere of the
strictly psychological experience of historic man immersed in a working
universe of alienated objectification on the surface of being.
341. Anybody who can lump together Marx, Halbwachs and de Manas Sartre
does in B & N, (513) in the name of an alleged inferiority complex
demonstrates a singular incomprehension of Marx. Likewise in his description
of Marx as the originator of the dogma of seriousness mentioned above.
PA RT THRE E
1.
Itinerary of a thought, p. 44. Sartre wanted to do much more. He tried to

establish contact with the Communist resistance movement, for the purpose
of taking part in it, but the party spread around him the rumor that he was an
agent provocateur. This may have been due to his close friendship (in fact
since childhood) with Paul Nizan, who resigned from the French CP in protest
against the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and Stalins Russia
in 1939. Nizan was killed at the front, in May 1940, and Sartre passionately
defended him in 1947 against slander voiced by the communists. Sartre also
358
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
wrote a moving introduction in 1960 to Nizans republished volume of essays

entitled Aden Arabie.
The Rassemblement Dmocratique Rvolutionnaire.
See note 3 in Part One.
Condemned in such terms by Fadeev.
See note No. 4 in Part One.
I can fully recommend reading Staughton Lynds article which deliberately
addresses itself to one of the most controversial aspects of this complex of
problems. It was published in Monthly Review (February 2011, pp. 4353)
under the title: Is There Anything More to Say About the Rosenberg Case?
Sartres powerful condemnation of the Rosenbergs executionentitled Les
Animaux malades de la ragewas first published in Libration, 22 June
1953, and subsequently in many other places. It is now easily accessible on
pages 704708 of the Contat/Rybalka volume.
See Sartres interview referred to in note 154 of Part One.
See Sartres interview on Masses, Spontaneity, Party given in August 1969
to the Italian Il Manifesto group to which we must return in Chapter 9.
Sartre, Le rformisme et les ftiches, Les Temps Modernes, No. 122, February
1956, pp. 1153-64.
Ibid., p. 1155.
Ibid.
Le Fantme de Stalin, Les Temps Modernes, Numbers 129130131,
NovemberDecember 1956, January 1957, pp. 577697. See C/R, p. 309.
Questions de mthode, Les Temps Modernes, No. 139, September 1957,
pp. 338417, No. 140, October 1957, pp. 658698. This Problem of Method
was later incorporated into the original French edition of Sartres Critique of
Dialectical Reason by Gallimard in Paris in 1960.
See notes 235240 attached to Chapter 4 of Part One.
See Henri Lefbvre, Existentialisme et marxisme: rponse une mise au
point, Action, 8 June 1945
See C/R p. 311.
Quoted in Lukcs Gyrgy politikai vgrendelete (Gyrgy Lukcss
political testament), Trsadalmi Szemle, April 1990, p. 84.
The reader can find in note 223 attached to Part Two of my book: Beyond
Capital the report on how this public break happened under the conditions of
their detention in Rumania. It was communicated to me in December 1990 by
someone who was an eyewitness to Lukcss public break with Zoltn Sznt.
This eyewitness was Mikls Vsrhelyi, one of Imre Nagys best friends and
closest political advisers, who had to spend several years in prison after Prime
Minister Nagys execution on the order of the Soviet Authorities.
I saw on his desk neatly laid out a dozen or so beautifully hand-written pages
of one of the early chapters of his Critique of Dialectical Reason which he was
working on at the time.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
359
In contrast to their past disagreements, Sartre and Lukcs had a very friendly
encounter in Helsinki in June 1955. As we have seen in a passage referred to in
note 174 of Part Two above, Sartre wrote about Lukcs in the highest terms of
praise in his article on Le Rformisme et les ftiches, published in Les Temps
Modernes in February 1956.
My letter to Lukcs from Paris was posted to him on 29 November 1957. It is
in the Lukcs Archive in Budapest.
We conversed also about this book and the motivation as well as the
circumstances of its writing. For Die Gegenwartsbedeutung des kritischen
Realismus was in part written during Lukcss deportation to Rumania. The
English translation of the book was published by The Merlin Press, London,
in 1962, under the title: The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. The fully
accurateby Lukcs programmatically chosenEnglish title of this book
should have been: The Contemporary Significance of Critical Realism.
Evidently, such an ongoing working relationship with Sartre would have been
also a great political support to Lukcs under the conditions of the sharp
attacks which he had to endure in that period. This was an important part of
my concerns.
Lukcs, Letter to Istvn Mszros, 23 February 1958.
This defense of History and Class Consciousness against the dogmatic attacks
by Lszl Rudas and Abram Deborin was written by Lukcs in Vienna, and its
title is Chvostismus und Dialektik (in English Tailism/Suivism and Dialectic).
The text resurfaced from a Russian Archive of the Comintern only seventy
years later, in the mid 1990s.
First published, with a brief Preface by Sartre, in 1947, by ditions Myrte,
Paris. It was republished in a much more popular form by ditions du Seuil,
Paris, in 1965.
ditions de Minuit, Paris, 1958.
See Sartre, Il faut rtablir la justice, interview by G. A. Astre, Action, 24
January 1952.
See Sartres Introduction to the book LAffair Henri Martin, published by
Gallimard in Paris, in 1953.
See Sartres article: M. Pinay prpare le chemin dune dictature, Libration,
16 October 1952.
See in this respect the article: Jean-Paul Sartre ouvre un dialogue, in
Peuple du Monde, No. 11, 1819 June 1949. Peuple du Monde was a monthly
supplement of the journal Combat, edited by Camus.
Claude Lefort was a close friend and political soulmate of Merleau-Ponty.
The first article was published in Les Temps Modernes in July 1952.
Sartre, The Communists and Peace: With an Answer to Claude Lefort, Hamish
Hamilton, London, 1969, pp. 11819. Translated by Irene Clephane.
See chapter 5 of Merleau-Pontys book, Les Aventures de la dialectique,
published by Gallimard, Paris, in the spring of 1955, and in English by
360
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
Heinemann, London, in 1973. Sartres break with Raymond Aron was of an

earlier date, on the ground of Arons enthusiastic support for the Atlanticist
perspective and of his subservience to American political and military
domination.
See my discussion of Merleau-Ponty and the League of Abandoned Hope
in my book: The Power of Ideology.
The illusions attached to the hoped for but never realized political success of the
R.D.R. were projecting precisely an electoral umbrella formation made up from
such an agglomeration of isolated individuals, which was of course expected to
include, utterly in vain, a great number of French working class people.
Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, translated by David Pellauer, The University of
Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1992, p. 472.
Sartre, La bombe H, une arme contre lhistoire, Dfense de la Paix, July
1954.
Sartre, interviewed by Benny Lvy, Le Nouvel Observateur, March 1980.
In fact in an interview given to Madeleine Chapsal in 1959 Sartre optimistically
asserted that The first volume will be published within a month, and the
second within a year. See The Purposes of writing, in Jean-Paul Sartre,
Between Existentialism and Marxism, NLB, London, 1974, p. 9.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Theory of Practical Ensembles,
NLB, London, 1976, pp. 6971. Sartres emphases.
We must recall that Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason was conceived
and written in the aftermath of some major upheavals in Eastern Europe,
particularly in Poland and Hungary.
See my detailed analysis of Sartres overall trajectory as a great intellectual of
the twentieth century in Parts One and Two of my book: The work of Sartre:
Search for Freedom, first published by The Harvester Press, Brighton, 1979.
Sartre, Critique, NLB edition, p. 36. Sartres emphases.
Sartre, Itinerary of a thought, New Left Review, November-December 1969,
pp. 5859.
Sartre actually admitted in the 1969 interview that in his most detailed
interpretation and reconstruction of Flauberts life, running into several
thousands of pages, he had to inventas if he was writing a novelthe person
at the centre of his monumental enquiry.
Istvn Mszros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom, pp. 8687.
As he had put it in the first volume of the Critique: I regard Marxism as
the untranscendable philosophy for our time, and I believe that the ideology
of existence, along with its comprehensive method, is an enclave within
Marxism itself, both produced and rejected by Marxism. p. 822.
See his interview by Michel Contat: Self-Portrait at Seventy, first published
in Le Nouvel Observateur, June and July 1975. In English reproduced in
the volume: Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre in the Seventies: Interviews and Essays,
Andre Deutsch Ltd., London, 1978. See in particular page 60 of this volume.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
361
See pages 5961 of the same book.

Although, primarily for political reasons, he tried to qualify in this work the
retained elements of the existentialist ontological orientation as an ideological
enclave only, the truth of the matter is that it was incomparably more decisive
than just an enclave.
Sartre, Critique, p. 125.
Ibid., p. 36.
Ibid., pp. 1312.
Calling himself marxisant at the time was Sartre himself.
On the historical problem of antagonistic second order mediations see
especially Section 8.6 of my book on The Social Determination of Method.
The perilous implication of certain types of transformations, under the
irrational and destructive imperatives of uncontrollable capital-accumulation,
is not that they modify the relationship of human beings to naturewhich is
characteristic of the whole of human historybut that they do it in a most
inappropriate, simultaneously destructive and self-destructive way.
We must return to the intricate problems of scarcity later in this chapter and
more extensively in chapter 8.
Toward the end of Sartres most revealing and moving interview conducted by
Michel Contat in 1975, the interviewer puts to him that In general, your political
statements are optimistic, even though in private you are very pessimistic. This
is how Sartre responds to Contats observation:
Yes, I am. . . . If I am not completely pessimistic it is primarily because I
see in myself certain needs which are not only mine but the needs of every
man. To express it another way, it is the experienced certainty of my own
freedom . . . But it is true that either man crumblesand then all one could
say is that during the twenty thousand years in which there have been men, a
few of them tried to create man and failedor else this revolution succeeds
and creates man by bringing about freedom. Nothing is less sure. . . . It is
impossible to find a rational basis for revolutionary optimism, since what is is
the present reality. And how can we lay the foundations for the future reality?
Nothing allows me to do it. See pages 8385 of the interview quoted in note
10 of this chapter.
Freedom must revolt against forms of alienation, Ibid., p. 88.
In English it is published in, and quoted from, the volume: Jean-Paul Sartre,
Sartre in the Seventies: Interviews and Essays, Andre Deutsch Ltd., London,
1978, pp.198210.
As Sartre himself expressed this in his interview conducted by Michel
Contat: This was the period in which I broke with the Communists after
362
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
Budapest. . . . Writing the Critique of Dialectical Reason represented for me

a way of settling my account with my own thought beyond the Communist
Partys sphere of influence over thought. Sartre in the Seventies, p. 18.
The analysis of the nature and contradictions of the Soviet type post-capitalist
experience under Stalin is attempted by Sartre in the second volume of
the Critique in the same formal categorial framework. This is why Sartres
long descriptions of the chosen particular political events and conflicts
tend to go around in circles, repeating at every new turn the same generic
assertions about the used formal structures. This is, above all, what denies
him the possibility of bringing to the fore in the necessary categorial terms
the underlying material structural determinations which would encapsulate
the salient characteristics of the historical totalization that must prevail
under the circumstances of the post-capitalist capital system, in view of the
pursued modality of social metabolic reproduction oriented toward, and
likewise constrained by, the politically enforced extraction of surplus labor,
in sharp contrast to its primarily economic extraction in the form of surplus
value asserting itself even under the greater part of the monopolistic phase
of capitalism. Until, that is, hybridization, with direct political involvement
and massive financial support provided by the state out of general taxation for
the military/industrial complex and for rescuing private capitalist enterprise
from ever-escalating bankruptcy begins to create some major, and potentially
insuperable, complications.
Sartre in the Seventies, pp. 2012.
Ibid., p. 203.
Ibid., p. 210.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Masses, Spontaneity, Party, The Socialist Register, 1970, p.
245. Originally published as Classe e partito. Il rischio della spontaneit, la
logica dellistituzione, Il Manifesto, No. 4, September 1969.
Page 204 of Sartre in the Seventies.
Lide neuve de mai 1968, observations reported by Serge Lafaurie, Le
Nouvel Observateur, 26 June2 July 1968.
We should recall in this respect his answer given to Michel Contat quoted in
note No. 23 above.
See on this issue several chapters of my book on Social Structure and Forms
of Consciousness, especially Chapters 3, 7, and 8 of volume one: The Social
Determination of Method.
That is, the relatively shortlived French political movement calling itself
Revolutionary Democratic Assembly.
See Revolutionary democrats, Sartres interview by Mary Burnet, New York
Herald Tribune, 2 June 1948.
Sartre, Le R.D.R. et le problme de la libert, La Pense socialiste, No. 19,
Spring 1948, p. 5.
Rousseau, The Social Contract, Everyman edition, p. 78.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
363
He writes in 1972: Even though I have always protested against the

bourgeoisie, my works are addressed to it, are written in its language . . . Now,
we must say that this work [on Flaubert], assuming that it has some value,
by its very nature represents the age-old bourgeois swindle of the people.
The book ties me to bourgeois readers. Through it, I am still bourgeois and
will remain so as long as I continue to work on it. However, another side of
myself, which rejects my ideological interests, is fighting against my identity as
a classic intellectual. Sartre in the Seventies, p. 185.
As we have seen earlier, the necessary critique of capitalshistorically
specificantagonistic second order mediations is absent from Sartres
lifework. This is due to a large extent to his concern to give an existentialist
ontological underpinning to some of the key categories adopted also in his
marxisant existentialist phase of development.
In the eternalizing ideology of the established mode of production the
necessary historical limitations of the capital system are denied already at the
classical phase of political economy (and philosophy) conceived from capitals
standpoint, and of course in the most blatant way in the descending phase
of capitalist development. Yet the uncomfortable truth is that in all human
history prior to the unfolding of capitals mode of societal reproduction there
never existed a mode of production which could not function at all without
imposing, at whatever cost, its imperative of unlimitable expansion. Naturally,
this unique historical condition carries the gravest implications for the future.
Sartre in the Seventies, p. 85.
Marcuse, Freedom and the Historical Alternative, in Herbert Marcuse,
Studies in Critical Philosophy, N.L.B., London, 1972, p. 223.
Sartre, The Maoists in France, Sartre in the Seventies, p. 171.
Already in his optimistic phase Marcuse is trying to model his vision on
Kantian ideas in the form of the work of a supra-individual historical
Subjectivity in the individualjust as the Kantian categories are the syntheses
of a transcendental Ego in the empirical Ego. (Op. cit. in note No. 46, p.
217.) And he adds a few lines further on: Kants transcendental construction of experience may well furnish the model for the historical construction
of experience. (Ibid., p. 218.) However, in Marcuses final years pessimism
becomes overwhelming. We are told by him that The world is not made
for man, and it has not become more human. (Marcuse, Die Permanenz der
Kunst, Carl Hanser Verlag, Mnchen, 1977, p. 53.) In this sense Marcuse
presents the bleakest possible picture by saying that in reality evil triumphs,
leaving to the individual nothing but the islands of good to which one can
escape for short periods of time. (Ibid.) Accordingly, Kant reappears in this
totally pessimistic vision, quoted to sustain Marcuses explicitly desperate
hope attached to art as a regulative idea [Kant] in the struggle in despair for
the transformation of the world. (Ibid., p.74.)
364
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
In his optimistic years Marcuse insisted that the utopian possibilities

which he advocated and whose success he projected without a sustainable
social analysis, were inherent in the technical and technological forces of
advanced capitalism on the basis of which one could terminate poverty and
scarcity within a very foreseeable future. (Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation,
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, London, 1960, p. 4.) He also told his readers
that this qualitative change must occur in the needs, in the infrastructure of
man (Ibid.), altering people to the point that the stipulated moral ought of
the rebellion would then have taken root in the very nature, the biology of the
individual (Ibid., p. 5.), establishing in the organism itself the institutional
basis for freedom (Ibid., p. 10.) and the biological need for freedom. (Ibid.,
p. 52.) These hopes and expectations, as we can see, directly linked an overgenerous belief in the technical and technological transformatory power of
advanced capitalism with the wishful postulate of the biological need for
freedom. Marcuses disappointment, therefore, had to be quite devastating
after the failure of his expectations.
One should not forget the immense brutality of primitive accumulation
under Henry VIII. and other great rulers in the early stages of capitalist
development, whose unspeakable inhumanity induced Thomas More to
say in his Utopia (1516) that sheep are eating men in the interest of the
unfolding profitable enterprise of wool production.
To use Max Webers capital-apologetic terms. On this issue see Section 2.7
(Formal Rationality and Substantive Irrationality) in my book, The Social
Determination of Method.
See p. 628 of Being and Nothingness, Methuen & Co., London, 1958. The
fragments of Sartres ethical work written in 1947 and 1948 were published
under the title: Notebooks for an Ethics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
and London, 1992, (583 pages), and the French original by Gallimard, Paris,
in 1983.
Sartre interviewed by Simon Blumenthal and Grard Spitzer in La Voie
communiste, JuneJuly 1962.
The subsequent transformation of thefor a long time dogmatic Stalinist
French Communist Party first into an unprincipled social democratic
formation, providing active support for President Mitterrands capitulatory
government, and then into a neoliberal force in full complicity with the
established order, provided a most unhappy confirmation of Sartres skeptical
judgement. I wrote at the time when the unprincipled departure of some
of the major communist partiesin their more remote past committed to a
Marxist strategic transformation of societystarted to take place that: When a
once important historical force, the French Communist Party, reduces itself to
the role of a fig leaf, in order to hide the non-existent endowments of Franois
Mitterrand as a socialist, no one should be surprised that a commensurate
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
365
shrinkage takes place not only in its electoral fortunes but, more importantly,
in its impact on the unfolding social developments. (Istvn Mszros, The
Power of Ideology, Harvester/Wheatsheaf, London, and New York University
Press, New York, 1989, p.53.)
Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, George Braziller, New York, 1963
(published in French in 1952), p. 186.
Including Franois Mauriac and Gabriel Marcel.
His lost writings on the problems of ethics alone, pursued again and again in
different periods of his life, are said to amount to at least 2000 pages.
See Sartre, Dtermination et Libert, a lecture delivered at the Gramsci
Institute in Rome on 25 May 1964, reproduced in Les crits de Sartre:
Chronologie, Bibliographie comment by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka,
Gallimard, Paris, 1970, pp. 73545.
Kant, Theory and Practice , in Carl J. Friedrich (ed.), Immanuel Kants
Moral and Political Writings, Random House, New York, 1949, pp. 41516.
Rousseau, A Discourse on Political Economy, Everyman edition, p. 254.
Ibid., p. 234.
This is how Sartre generously praised the Maoists, in the spirit of his own,
for a long time idealized, conception of what a revolutionary movement of
committed individuals should be like: The militants of La Cause du Peuple
do not constitute a party. It is a political group [rassemblement] which can
always be dissolved. . . . This procedure allows a way out of the rigidity in
which the Communist Party has imprisoned itself. Today the Maoists criticize
and break out of the notion of leftism: they want to be the left and to create a
broad political organization . Sartre interviewed by Michel-Antoine Burnier,
Actuel, No. 28, and Tout va Bien, 20 February20 March 1973.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 4229.
Ibid., p. 429.
Ibid., p. 125.
Ibid., p. 814.
Sartre, Critique, pp. 81415. Sartres emphases.
See Sartre, Itinerary of a thought, New Left Review, November-December
1969, p. 59.
Sartre, Critique, pp. 81617.
Ibid., p. 818.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 125.
Ibid., p. 816.
Sartre in the Seventies, pp. 2425.
Marx, Notes on Bakunins book: Statehood and Anarchy, MECW, vol. 24, p.
521.
Ibid., p. 518.
366
118. It is revealing that in his critique of the serialized voters Sartre equates,
most problematically, their abstract possibility with a claimed sovereigntyconstituting power. He writes: When I vote, I abdicate my powerthat is, the
possibility everyone has of joining others to form a sovereign group. (Sartre in
the Seventies, p. 204.) Of course in the circumstances of Pompidous relatively
undisturbed France, way after the defeat of Mai 1968 which contributed to
the consolidation of the Gaullist system, the possibility of joining others to
form a sovereign group advocated by Sartre is a purely abstract possibility.
Under the conditions of a massive and intensifying socioeconomic crisis
such abstract possibilities may well become concrete possibilities, leading to
significant historical change. But it is extremely problematical to call abstract
possibilities real powers in the absence of such a major socioeconomic crisis,
as Sartre called it in 1973.
119. In fact that is the basis on which the classical left parties can be, and should
be, legitimately questioned for their strategic inadequacy, and not for their
alleged nineteenth century political attachment.
120. The Dialectic of Structure and History, Monthly Review Press, New
york, 2011. See in particular Section 4.4, concerned with The Radical
Transformation of the Legal and Political Superstructure.
121. In accord with the Marxian concept of the bergreifendes Moment, i.e. the
factor of overriding importance under a given set of circumstances.
122. Marxs circular addressed to the Federal Council of the Romance Switzerland,
Documents of the First International, Lawrence & Wishart, London, n.d., vol.
3, p. 361.
123. Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970, p.
50.
124. Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet, A Young Socialist Publication,
Colombo, 1967, p. 62.
125. The main reason offered by Sartre in 1975 for abandoning the Critique of
Dialectical Reason was that in the case of the Critique there is the additional
problem of time, since I would have to go back to studying history. (Sartre in
the Seventies, p. 75.) Undoubtedly the historical knowledge mastered by any
particular thinker is a contributory factor in this respect. But only contingently.
The necessities lie elsewhere. The much more serious impediments in
Sartres case, imposing insurmountable difficulties on his projected Critique,
were not due to the limitations of his historical knowledge but primarily
to his marxisant existentialist ontological approach to the problems of
intelligibility in the dialectically unfolding history of humanity.
126. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 171.
127. Le structuralisme en personne, see Jean-Marie Auzias, Clefs pour le
structuralisme, Seghers, Paris, 1967, p. 85.
128. LExpress va plus loin avec Claude Lvi-Strauss, a major interview published
by LExpress, 1521 March 1971, p.61.
367
129. Of course the ultra-eclectic opportunist Jrgen Habermas must join in the
fashionable scramble for the invention of catchy post labels, talking in
a most pretentious and confused way even about post-history. He writes:
Hegels concept of the ethical totality . . . is no longer an appropriate model
for the mediatized class structure of organized, advanced capitalism. The
suspended dialectic of the ethical generates the peculiar semblance of posthistoire.. . . For the leading productive forcecontrolled scientific-technical
progress itselfhas now become the basis of legitimation. Yet this new form
of legitimation has cast off the old shape of ideology. J. Habermas, Toward a
Rational Society, Heinemann, London, 1971, pp. 110-11. The words posthistoire and ideology are italicized by Habermas. For a detailed discussion
of his work see Sections 1.2 and 3.4 of my book, The Power of Ideology,
Harvester/Wheatsheaf, London, and New York University Press, 1989.
130. Not surprisingly, the wide-ranging promotion of structuralism was associated
with empire-building and a search for respectable ancestors, from linguistics to
ethnography. Even Jacob Grimm was adopted as a distinguished structuralist
ancestor. Thus we could read about him in a book on linguistics that His
language lacks precision and he was guilty of gross inconsistencies, but his
intent is clear. He was far, far ahead of his time. He was, in fact, one of the
first structuralists. John T. Waterman, Perspectives in Linguistic, University
of Chicago Press, 1963, p. 82.
131. For a documented discussion of these problems see my book: Philosophy,
Ideology and Social Science: Essays in Negation and Affirmation, Wheatsheaf
Books, Brighton, 1986, and in particular its Introduction and the chapter on
Ideology and Social Science, pp. ix-xix and 156; the latter first published
in 1972.
132. Characteristically, Auzias praised structuralism personified by saying that:
Structuralism is not an imperialism! It wants to be scientific: and it is. . . .
Lvi-Strauss thought is satisfied with applying itself to the human sciences,
and exclusively to them, eminently and insistently refusing by his own rigorous
practice any concession to ideology, no matter under what kind of philosophy
it might hide itself. Jean-Marie Auzias, Op. cit., pp. 1011.
133. See in this respect one of the seminal passages of Lvi-Strauss wide-ranging
interview given to LExpress in March 1971, as quoted in Section 8.6 of The
Social Determination of Method. In that interview he was asserting that:
Today the greater peril for humanity does not come from the activities of a
regime, a party, a group, or a class. It comes from humanity itself in its entirety;
a humanity which reveals itself to be its own worst enemy and, alas, at the same
time, also the worst enemy of the rest of the creation.
134. As we know, Marx forcefully underlined already in one of his earliest works
that We know only one science, the science of history (MECW, vol. 5, p. 28;
Marxs emphases), insisting in the same spirit about the vital importance of
history throughout his life.
368
135. See Les structures lmentaires de la parent, Paris, 1949. See also:
Mythologiques, vol. 1: Le cru et le cuit, Paris, 1964; vol. 2: Du miel aux cendres,
Paris, 1966; vol. 3: Lorigine des manires de table, Paris, 1968.
136. Tellingly, as noted by the English anthropologist Edmund Leach, LviStrauss monumental discussion of American indian myths does not carry the
title of Mythologies but that of Mythologiques; which means: the Logics of
Myth. See Edmund Leachs book in the Fontana Modern Masters series,
Lvi-Strauss, Fontana/Collins, London, 1970, p. 10.
137. A book translated into English under the title: The Savage Mind, George
Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd., London, 1966.
138. See LExpress va plus loin avec Claude Lvi-Strauss, LExpress, 1521
March 1971, p. 66.
139. Sir Lewis Namier, Vanished Supremacies: Essays on European History, 1812
1918, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1962, p. 203.
140. 1971 interview, p. 66.
141. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, 18161882, the racist orientalist author of
The Inequality of Human Races and Les religions et les philosophies dans lAsie
central, was a friend and for some time also the Secretary to Alexis de Tocqueville
in his Foreign Ministry, and a member of the French diplomatic service between
184977. He was also the inventor of the myth of the superman.
142. The revealing utopia aimed at perpetuating capitals established
reproductive order, with at least a modicum of doubt about its realizability, was
propounded in the nineteenth century also by the liberal thinker John Stuart
Mill, who advocated the institution of the stationary state of the economy in
his Principles of Political Economy.
143. See note 93 above.
144. LExpress va plus loin avec Claude Lvi-Strauss, Op. cit., p. 66.
145. Ibid., p. 61.
146. This is how Descartes had put it in his Discourse on Method: I perceived it
to be possible to arrive at knowledge highly useful in life; and in room of the
speculative philosophy usually taught in the schools, to discover a practical
[philosophy] by means of which . . . we might also apply them to all the uses
to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of
nature. Everyman Edition, p. 49.
147. Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 26162.
149. See note 94.
150. A relevant connection in this respect is that The Savage Mind is dedicated to
Maurice Merleau-Ponty who vehemently attacked Sartre for his alleged ultrabolshevism in Les Aventures de la dialectique.
151. Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 256.
152. Ibid., p. 254.
153. Ibid.
369
154. Ibid.
155. Je mefforce moi-mme de faire oeuvre scientifique. Mais je ne peux
mempcher de penser que la science serait plus aimable si elle ne servait
rien. Page 66 of LExpress va plus loin avec Claude Lvi-Strauss.
156. See Hayeks Road to Serfdom, discussed in Chapter 4. of Beyond Capital.
157. Edmund Leach, Op. cit., pp. 1920.
158. Nest-ce pas trs ractionnaire, entre guillemets, ce que vous dites l? p. 66.
159. Ibid.
160. Ibid., p. 65.
161. As we are constantly told even today, nothing could be more ideally
equilibrating in due courseprovided that we are able and willing to
suffer long enough with patience the unavoidably disruptive and creatively
destructive crisis periods of the systemthan the capitalist exchange relations
embodied in the market, even in the historical period of its globalization.
Appropriately, in Lvi-Strauss view the great passage for North American
indians from nature to culture has been accomplished through the
establishment of commerce. (See 1971 interview, p. 65.) Also, in the societies
without writing idealized by him, the embodiment of the exchange relations
in the elementary structures of kinship is the common denominator of
politics, the law, and the economy. Ibid., p. 63.
162. 1971 interview, p. 61.
163. Ibid.
164. Ibid., p. 63.
165. That is, the historically constituted human subject who could remedy at least
in principle the situation by appropriately confronting the problems and
contradictions of the real world, including its own, now antagonistically selfmediating but transcendable negative relationship to nature, so as to transform
the earlier discussed constraints of historical necessity into a progressively
vanishing necessity in accordance with human need.
166. 1971 interview, p. 60.
167. Ibid., p. 66.
168. In fact Sartres apartment was bombed not once but twice.
169. Lvi-Strauss March 1971 interview, p. 66.
171. Ibid., pp. 8788.
172. Of course what really decides the matter is what, when, where and how the
human beings exchange in their specific kind of exchange relationships in
which they engage not only among themselves but also with nature.
173. It is worth recalling again that according to one of the greatest political
economists of all times, Adam Smith, the bourgeois societal reproductive
order is constituted as the natural system of perfect liberty and justice.
174. As such, the second order mediations are by no means necessarily/aprioristically
antagonistic. Indeed, the constitution of the exchange relationship between
370
175.
176.
177.
178.
179.
180.
181.
182.
183.
184.
185.
186.
187.
188.
189.
190.
191.
192.
193.
194.
195.
196.
humanity and nature and among the individuals themselves in the form of
antagonistic second order mediations is intelligible only as an inherently
historical category, which implies their historical transcendability.
Sartre rightly criticizes structuralism for never showing how History
produces the structures. Situations IX, Gallimard, Paris, 1972, p. 86.
Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 9596.
Marx, Grundrisse, p. 88.
This is done even by the idealist philosopher, Hegel, with his revealingpurely
ideological way of doing it in defense of the most iniquitous determinations
of the established orderas we have seen it discussed in chapter 6 of The
Dialectic of Structure and History.
Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, p. 17.
Ibid., p. 222.
As Marx made it very clear, in his sharp critique of the approach which
postulated the idea of the nature-determined and necessarily warring isolated
individuality as the fictitious foundation of human nature from which the
political apologetics of an absolutely permanent bourgeois state order could
be readily derived: Human nature is the true community of men. The
disastrous isolation from this essential nature is incomparably more universal,
more intolerable, more dreadful, and more contradictory than isolation from
the political community. Marx, Critical Marginal Notes on the Article by a
Prussian, MECW, vol. 3, p. 205.
MECW, vol. 3, p. 205.
Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.
Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 125.
Ibid., pp. 13132.
Ibid., p. 133.
Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, Verso, London, 1991, p. 424.
Ibid., pp. 2122.
Marx, Grundrisse, p. 88.
Sartre, op. cit., p. 23.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., pp. 2728.
C. B. Macpherson, A political theory of property, in Macpherson, Democratic
Theory: Essays in Retrieval, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973, p. 138.
John Maynard Keynes was rhetorically anticipatingin one of his Essays
in Persuasionthe realization of the ideal conditions of abundance in the
capitalist Millennium by the year 2030. But that view, voiced in a lecture in
1930, was not to be taken too seriously.
Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, Allen Lane The Penguin Press,
London, 1969, p. 4.
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid. p. 19.
371
197. We may well recall the views of Habermasone of the most fashionable
eclectic opportunist mystifiers in this fieldwho postulates the scientization
of technology when in reality so much damage is generated by the fetishistic
technologization of science in the service of destructive production.
198. Marcuse, Ibid., p. 7.
199. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 152.
200. It is most relevant here that If capital increases from 100 to 1,000, then 1,000
is now the point of departure, from which the increase has to begin; the tenfold
multiplication, by 1,000%, counts for nothing; profit and interest themselves
become capital in turn. What appeared as surplus-value now appears as simple
presupposition etc., as included in its simple composition. Marx, Grundrisse,
p. 335. Emphases by Marx.
201. The man of scarcity, seeking his abundance, seeks it as a determination of
scarcity. Not abundance for all, but his own, hence the deprivation of all.
Sartre, Critique, vol. 2, p. 421.
202. Ibid., p. 437.
204. See Sartres interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, March 1980.
205. Sartre, Self-Portrait at Seventy, Le Nouvel Observateur, June and July 1975.
In English in Sartre in the Seventies: Interviews and Essays, Andre Deutsch
Ltd., London, 1978, pages 8385.
206. From an Interview with Sartre reported in Encounter, No. 62, June 1964.
207. In English this part of Sartres Critique was published as a separate volume.
It is quoted from page 157 of this volume: Sartre, The Problem of Method,
Methuen & Co., London, 1963. In French original p. 98.
208. Ibid., p 151. In French p. 95.
209. Ibid., p. 152. In French p. 96.
210. Ibid., p 93. In French p. 64.
211. Ibid., p. 94. In French p. 65. That which is lacking (ce qui manque) is
italicized by Sartre.
212. It appears only as a somewhat nostalgic and unresolved paradoxical
admission in Words when Sartre says: I depend only on those who depend
only on God, and I do not believe in God. Try and sort this out! Certainly
Sartre himself never sorted it out. But nothing is more self-servingly
absurd than Gabriel Marcels earlier quoted denunciation of Sartre as a
systematic blasphemist and the patented corruptor of youth. On the
contrary, Sartre would wish to challenge the youth in the spirit of the highest
moral imperatives about the imperiled destiny of the world and their own
responsibility in it, in tune with the Kantian can which constitutes the
insuperable moral tension of his philosophy, with the explicit admission of
faith and the need for hope inseparable from it. What he cannot provideno
matter how much he would like, and despite his repeated promises, spelled
out even in terms of the positively oriented radical conversion toward the
372
213.
214.
215.
216.
217.
218.
219.
220.
end of Being and Nothingnessis the non-religious grounding of such faith

and hope.
Sartres interview given to the Italian Manifesto group, published in The
Socialist Register, 1970, p. 245.
Ibid., p. 242.
The Socialist Register, 1970, pp. 2389.
The gravity of this problem can no longer be ignored. To realize its magnitude
it is enough to quote a passage from an excellent book which offers a
comprehensive account of the unfolding process of planetary destructiveness
as a result of crossing some prohibitive thresholds and boundaries put into
relief by environmental science: these thresholds have in some cases already
been crossed and in other cases will soon be crossed with the continuation of
business as usual. Moreover, this can be attributed in each and every case to
a primary cause: the current pattern of global socioeconomic development,
that is, the capitalist mode of production and its expansionary tendencies.
The whole problem can be called the global ecological rift, referring to
the overall break in the human relation to nature arising from an alienated
system of capital accumulation without end. All of this suggests that the use
of the term Anthropocene to describe a new geological epoch, displacing the
Holocene, is both a description of a new burden falling on humanity and a
recognition of an immense crisisa potential terminal event in geological
evolution that could destroy the world as we know it. On the one hand, there
has been a great acceleration of the human impact on the planetary system
since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly since 1945to the point that
biogeochemical cycles, the atmosphere, the ocean, and the earth system as a
whole, can no longer be seen as largely impervious to the human economy.
On the other hand, the current course on which the world is headed could be
described not so much as the appearance of a stable new geological epoch (the
Anthropocene), as an end-Holocene, or more ominously, end-Quarternary,
terminal event, which is a way of referring to the mass extinctions that often
separate geological eras. Planetery boundaries and tipping points, leading to
the irreversible degradation of the conditions of life on Earth, may soon be
reached, science tells us, with a continuation of todays business as usual. The
Anthropocene may be the shortest flicker in geological time, soon snuffed
out. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift:
Capitalisms War on the Earth, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2010, pp.
1819.
See my Isaac Deutscher Memorial Lecture, The Necessity of Social Control,
delivered at the London School of Economics on January 26, 1971. Italics in
the original.
Sartre, Ibid., p. 239.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 14.
221.
222.
223.
224.
225.
226.
227.
228.
229.
230.
231.
232.
233.
234.
235.
236.
237.
238.
239.
240.
241.
242.
243.
244.
245.
373
Sartres Manifesto interview, The Socialist Register, 1970, pp. 2367.

Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, pp. 23031.
Ibid., p. 335.
Thus he conceded in the unfinishable second volume that this wholly formal
characterization of the totalizing movement has been madeas a pure, empty
abstractionfrom a standpoint of quasi-exteriority. Sartres Critique of
Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, p. 335.
Ibid., pp. 201-2.
In Marxs words eine verschwindende Notwendigkeit.
Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, pp. 234.
Ibid., p. 220.
Sartre, Itinerary of a Thought, p. 45.
Ibid., p. 44.
Joseph L. Walsh, Conversations with a Bourgeois Revolutionary, Monthly
Review, June 2010. (Walshs review article of John Gerassis book: Talking
with Sartre: Conversations and Debates, Yale University Press, New Haven,
CT, 2009)
Walsh quoting these words from Gerassis book.
Ibid.
See in this respect Chapter 6 above and the discussion of the relevant passages
from pages 2425 of Sartre in the Seventies.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 52.
Kierkegaard: the Singular Universal, in Jean-Paul Sartre, Between
Existentialism and Marxism, N.L.B., London, 1974, p.168.
Sartre, Des rats et des hommes, Situations, IV, Gallimard, Paris, 1964, pp.
656.
Sartre, Kierkegaard: the Singular Universal, p. 169
Ibid., p. 168. The words praxis and knowledge are italicized by Sartre.
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid.
Index
Ady, Endre, 332n21
Alix, Roland, 333n50
Alleg,Henri, 232
Althusser, Louis, 202
Anouilh, Jean, 47
Aron,Raymond, 121, 280,
342n184, 360n35
Astre, G. A., 359n28
Auriol,Vincent, 18, 233
Aury, Dominique, 336n121,
340n161
Autrusseau, Jacqueline, 334n68
Auzias, Jean-Marie, 366n127,
367n132
Baudelaire, Charles, 67, 80, 86,

335n83
Beckett, Samuel, 335n70
Bergson, Henri, 59, 73, 98, 107
Blumenthal, Simon, 339n154,
364n93
Bosch, Hieronymous, 41
Bourget, Paul, 356n337
Brecht, Bertolt, 27, 4849, 55, 83
Breton,Andr, 18, 332n8
Brunschwicg, Lon, 91
Burnet, Mary, 362n78
Burnier, Michel-Antoine,
339n158, 340n165, 365n102
Babeuf, Franois-Nol, 326

Bachelard, Gaston, 354n321
Bakunin, Mikhail, 271, 365n116
Baldick, Robert, 344n209
Barnes, Hazel E., 340n162
Calder, Alexander, 49, 335n81

Camus, Albert, 41, 47, 81, 92, 94,
235, 341n175, 359n31
Csaire, Aim, 333n55
Chapsal, Madeleine, 82, 360n41
376
Chonez, Claudine, 334n65,

335n84, 335n92
Churchill, Winston, 16
Clark, Brett, 372n216
Clephane, Irene, 359n34
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 336n99
Contat,Michel, 229, 269, 307,
331n1, 358n6, 360n50,
361n63, 361n67, 362n75,
365n98
dAmico, Robert, 339n158

dAubarde, Gabriel, 332n34,
333n45
Davis,Gary, 234
deBeauvoir,Simone, 38, 41,
47, 65, 78, 92, 121, 13739,
175, 230, 333n46, 333n48,
333n50, 333n54, 337n123,
337n137, 341n184, 344n198,
345n234, 347n273, 347n275,
351n305, 355n324
de Gaulle, Charles, 18, 23334,
331n8
de Man, Paul, 357n341
de Tocqueville, Alexis, 368n141
Deborin Abram, 359n25
Debray,Rgis, 83
Descartes, Ren, 180, 282,
352n308, 352n310, 368n146
Deutscher,Isaac, 69, 337n128,
372n217
Dort, Bernard, 334n69
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 193
Dru, Alexander, 333n52
INDEX
Duclos, Jacques, 234

Drer, Albrecht, 100
Eisler, Benita, 332n36
luard, Paul, 331n2
Engels, Friedrich, 132, 346n258
Epicurus, 348n288
Erval,Franois, 38, 335n86
Fadeev, Alexander, 17, 358n4
Faulkner, William, 11, 5962,
78, 126, 12829, 336n109,
336n117
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 18
Fink, Eugen, 99, 343n189
Flaubert, Gustave, 3335, 5152,
67, 7274, 78, 82, 84, 86, 93,
122, 165, 178, 207, 242, 326,
337n138, 356n337, 356n338,
357n339, 360n47, 363n81
Foster, John Bellamy, 372n216
Frechtman, Bernard, 332n13
Friedrich, Carl J., 365n99
Freud, Sigmund, 136, 346n272,
357n339
Fuk, Julius, 86
Gance,Abel, 58
Genet, Jean, 33-36, 5455, 67, 81,
86, 93, 325
Gerassi,John, 326, 373n233
Giacometti, Alberto, 26, 40,
4243, 4849, 52, 55, 58, 86,
92, 333n53, 333n58, 334n59,
335n81
INDEX
Gide, Andr, 193

Giscard dEstaing, Valry, 18
Gisoli, Christian, 332n27
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur Comte
de, 281, 368n141
Goethe, Johann W. von, 21, 69, 71
Goldman, Lucien, 336n115
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 9
Gorz, Andr, 52, 83
Gramsci, Antonio, 365n98
Grimm Jacob, 367n130
Gurin,Daniel, 42, 94
377
197, 256, 341n177, 341n181,

341n184, 343n189, 350n295,
351n306
Ionesco, Eugne, 47
Ishaghpour, Youssef, 336n115
James, C. L. R., 333n55
Jeanson,Francis, 230, 232
Jolas, Maria, 340n167
Jzsef, Attila, 23, 332n23-24
Kdr,Jnos, 229
Kafka, Franz, 33, 45, 52
Habermas, Jrgen, 367n129,
Kant, Immanuel, 28, 53, 131,
371n197
14447, 153, 18991, 259,
Halbwachs, Maurice, 357n341
26162, 313, 342n184,
Hallier, Jean-Edern, 334n63
349n291, 363n88, 365n99
Hamilton, Hamish, 235, 359n34
Kanters, Robert, 334n62,
Hartmann, Klaus, 352n307
337n124, 340n163
Hayek,Friedrich von, 286,
Keynes, John Maynard, 370n193
369n156
Hegel, Georg W. F., 24, 33-34, 37, Khrushchev,Nikita, 228
50, 71, 109, 140, 174, 195-198, Kierkegaard, Sren, 36, 40, 140,
154, 329, 333n52, 342n184,
202, 205, 207, 259, 262, 265,
373n240, 373n242
296, 329, 341n175, 342n184,
Koehler, Alain, 334n61, 335n74,
367n129, 370n178180
335n87
Heidegger, Martin, 3637, 6061,
106-107, 11617, 121, 126,
174, 178, 191, 336n115116, Lafaurie, Serge, 336n100, 362n74
Lawrence, T. E., 80, 338n146
345n241, 348n286
Le Lap,Alain, 234
Hikmet, Nzm, 86
Leach,Edmund, 286, 368n136,
Hobbes, Thomas, 198
369n157
Hoffmann, E. Th. A., 45
Lefbvre,Henri, 12223, 22829,
Husserl, Edmund, 96-103, 105,
331n3, 345n235, 358n15
113, 12122, 14447, 170,
378
Lefort, Claude, 359n32, 359n34

Lenin, Vladimir, 36, 68
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 27994,
366n128, 367n13233,
368n136, 368n138, 368n144,
368n147, 368n151, 369n155,
369n161, 369n169
Lvinas, Emmanuel, 121,
342n184
Lvy, Benny, 360n40
Livingstone, Rodney, 344n200,
Locke, John, 192
Lorquet, Pierre, 332n32, 333n51
Lukcs, Gyrgy, 5960, 71,
94, 126, 209, 22931, 326,
333n57, 336n115, 341n174,
342n184, 344n200, 358n17,
358n18, 359n2025
Luxemburg,Rosa, 27273,
366n123124
Lynd, Staughton, 358n6
Macpherson,C. B., 302303,
370n193
Macquarie, John, 336n116
Mairet, Philip, 343n191
Mallarm, Stphane, 35, 67, 81, 86
Malle, Louis, 19
Malraux, Andr, 17
Mann,Thomas, 26-27, 337n126,
339n160
Marcel,Gabriel, 16, 331n4,
365n96, 371n212
Marcuse, Herbert, 25860, 263,
302304, 314, 316, 355n329,
INDEX
363n86, 363n88, 370n194

196, 371n198
Martin,Henri, 18, 233, 359n29
Marx, Karl, 34, 36, 37, 68, 75,
109, 119, 13234,175
76,180, 195, 202, 208, 271,
272, 27475, 27778, 27980,
282, 284, 28789, 29394,
297, 320, 329, 332n37,
345n241, 346n258, 346n264,
346n266, 347n280, 351n306,
352n309, 352n312, 355n326,
356n331, 356n334, 356n336,
357n341, 367n134, 370n176
177, 370n181, 370n183,
370n189, 371n200, 356n331,
n334, n336, 351n306,
352n309, 352n312, 365n116,
366n122, 366n126, 367n134,
368n148, 369n170, 370n176177, 370n181, 370n183,
370n189, 371n199200,
371n203, 372n219, 373n227
Masson, Andr, 4849, 335n78
Matthews, John, 332n18
Mauriac, Franois, 1819, 331n7,
332n35, 365n96
Merleau-Ponty,Maurice, 18, 41,
52, 81, 83, 92, 121, 23536,
341n170, 345n233, 347n284,
359n32, 359n35, 360n36,
368n150
Mszros, Istvn, 355n326,
356n335, 359n24, 360n36,
360n48, 361n58, 364n91,
INDEX
379
Owen,Robert, 319
Ranke, Leopold Von, 70, 281

Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 357n1
Ricardo, David, 289
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 21
Robinson, Edward, 336n116
Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel,
358n6
Rosenthal, Grard, 331n6
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 25354,
262, 340n160, 362n80,
365n100
Rousset, David, 331n6
Rubel, Maximilien, 346n258
Rudas, Lszl, 359n25
Russell, Bertrand, 18, 233,
354n322
Rybalka, Michel, 331n1, 358n6,
365n98
Parsons, Talcott, 280

Pascal, Blaise, 178, 181
Pellauer, David, 360n38
Petfi, Sndor, 12
Piatier, Jacqueline, 332n15,
337n133, 340n163
Picasso, Pablo, 26-27, 76, 331n2,
340n160
Pinay, Antoine, 359n30
Pius XII (pope), 1617
Plato, 342n184
Politzer, Georges, 12526
Pompidou, Georges, 366n118
Proust, Marcel, 26-27, 40, 59, 98,
180, 333n51, 352n310
Puig, Andr, 333n43
Sagan,Franoise, 3738
Saporta, Marcel, 339n150
Sarraute, Claude, 333n42
Sarraute,Nathalie, 92, 340n167
Savignat, Thomas, 334n63
Scheler, Max, 342n184
Schiller, Friedrich, 33
Seghers, Anna, 333n57
Simmel, Georg, 126
Smith, Adam, 262, 369n173
Spinoza, Baruch, 96
Spitzer, Grard, 339n154, 364n93
Stalin, Joseph, 1617, 82, 84, 209,
227-228, 321, 357n1, 358n12,
362n68
Stendhal, 200
365n94, 367n131, 372n217

Michel,Georges, 47
Mill, John Stuart, 368n142
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 332n28,
336n122, 351n299
Milligan, Martin, 346n264
Mitterrand, Franois, 364n94
Molotov, Vyacheslav, 357n1
Moore, Henry, 74
More, Thomas, 364n89
Nagy,Imre, 229-230, 358n18
Namier, Lewis, 281, 368n139
Nizan, Paul, 52, 64, 83, 86, 92,
126, 357n1
Novy, Yvon, 336n104, 336n108
380
Stphane,Roger, 80
Strindberg, August, 48
Sznt,Zoltn, 230, 358n18
Thatcher, Margaret, 9
Tintoretto, 35
Titian, 41
Tynan, Kenneth, 4748, 334n70,
340n163
Villon, Franois, 33
Voltaire, 340n160
Walsh, Joseph L., 373n232234
Warnock, Mary, 346n262
Waterman, John T., 367n130
Weber,Max, 126, 280, 364n91
Welles,Orson, 58, 65, 336n105
Williams, Forrest, 343n192
Williams, Tennessee, 335n70
Underwood, J. A., 347n285

York, Richard, 372n216
Vsrhelyi, Mikls, 358n18
Verstraeten, Pierre, 333n57,
347n285, 350n295
Zand, Nicole, 335n73

Zola, mile, 65

MÉSZÁROS, István. The Work of Sartre

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The Work of Sartre

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Satire and Reality, Szpirodalmi Knyvkiad, Budapest 1955

The Work of Sartre

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

Copyright 2012 by Istvn Mszros

Monthly Review Press

The Unity of Life and Work: Outline of Sartres Development

Search for Freedom

The Challenge of History

For Donate lla

A M A N C A R R IE S A WHOL E E POCH WITHIN HIM,

The Purposes of Writing

I D E P E ND ON LY ON THOSE WHO D E PE ND ONLY O N G O D,

I T I S NOT M Y FAULT IF R E AL ITY IS M ARXIST.

Sartre Quoting Che Guevara

TH E FUNDAM E NTAL QUE STION IS :

Preface to the Expanded Edition

be an individual participation in it. I dont embrace Sartres philosophical

In this sense the relevance of Sartres uncompromising message about the

P R EFAC E TO T HE E XPAN D ED ED ITIO N

So we othersrats without cerebellawe are also so made that we must

P R EFAC E TO T HE E XPAN D ED ED ITIO N

I N 1 9 7 9, WHE N T H E WO R K O F SA RTR E : S E A R CH F O R FR E E D O M was first

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JEA N -PAU L SART R E IS A MA N W H O LIVED half his life in the limelight of

In May 1949, following Mauriacs attack on his political position,6 Sartre

If literature is not everything, it is worth nothing. This is what I mean by

This conception of literature as a critical mirror19 of man and the

opinion, Sartres passionate rejection of it appears as unforgivable scandal,

In Sartres view, Art in its totality is engaged in the activity of a single

intransigence (not to be confused with the quarrelsome pursuit of narrow

No easy comfort for men:

Comfortless, cold clarity pervades many of Sartres works, and no

always refers to the artists lifework as its immediate ground. Theirs is a

description of the works reviewed: a superfluous and hopeless venture.

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The Unity of Life and Work:

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1. The Writer and His Situation

self-complacent coming-to-a-halt (for example, the institutionalized and

No doubt this is already a synthesishowever preliminary: the result

Simone de Beauvoir writes of Sartre that if it had been necessary, he

inadequacies to such a taskwould mean the worst kind of subjectivity, that

neglecting many others. The deceptive translucency of analytic dissection,

Todaysince 1945the situation is complicated. One needs less courage,

elsewhere his internal difficulties63 for

abandoning Roads to Freedom.

2. Philosophy, Literature and Myth

is by no means confined to Sartres conception

As we can see, ever since the time of writing Barionawhen Sartre

Today I think that philosophy is dramatic in nature. The time for

definition of contemporary European culture as only one aspect of a much

do not comprehend everything.

fact, according to Sartre, the sphere of singular universality87 is beyond

The beginning of the answerwhich is simply I dont feel like it

generalitydramatic philosophy and philosophical theatre at one pole and

conception of philosophy and literature appears at a very early age. The

Similarly, authentic feelings, essential to the production of good literature, are

concept of overdetermination). He refers to Abel Gances Napoleon in

a substantial manuscript on his Morale. It could be inserted into the pages

have seen above, the one-sided impression of subjectivity disappears. The

3. From The Legend of Truth to