The Historical Conditions of Possibility of the Rise and Fall of Sartrean Existentialism and Existentialist Marxism
- The Historical Conditions of Possibility of the Rise and Fall of Sartrean Existentialism and Existentialist Marxism
Assistant Professor of French Studies, Rice University Understanding Sartre (1990); From Existentialism to Poststructuralism and the Coming of the Post-Industrial Age (1991)
Notes
1. Is there not something strange in the fact that Sartre's association with left-wing ideology has proved so fatal to his reputation when one thinks of the consequences of Heidegger's involvement with Nazism for the degree of interest which the German philosopher has managed to continue to provoke while Sartre is an object of complete neglect or merely incidental opprobrium? After all, while it is true that, until the publication of Farias's book, the general perception was that Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis had gone no further than an ill-considered flirtation, there has been no dearth of well-known figures who, while deploring the Nazi connection, have continued to defend and sustain the topicality of Heidegger since the full extent of Heidegger's Nazism has become known. (For my own part, I have no problem with this position.) Sartre's engagement with Marxism, on the other hand, was always powerfully critical and can in no sense be held to be complicitous with heinous crimes: not only did the writings from the war-time trilogy onwards elaborate a constant problematization of Marxism and Communist political practice (no figure on the French political Right was ever vilified by the French Communist Party [or Pravda] in terms as virulent as Sartre was), but Sartre vigorously denounced the gulag in 1950, the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan (endorsing the boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games in response to the latter), protested the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the Union of Soviet Writers, declined to take part in the Tenth Congress of Soviet Writers in order to protest the trial of the dissident writers Sinyavsky and Daniel, and severed relations with Castro over the imprisonment of Padilla. Nothing like Heidegger's denunciations of Jewish colleagues can be attributed to Sartre. While I endorse the continued interest in Heidegger - it is simply impossible to understand recent philosophy without him (I also consider Heidegger to be a great philosopher) - this preferential treatment of Heidegger over Sartre reminds us that the capitalist West has always, since Munich, feared Communism more than Fascism.
2. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ trans Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon 1984), 45. This historical ontology, what Foucault also refers to as a ‘critical ontology’ (47), is described as ‘a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. ... it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom’ (46).
3. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press 1959).
4. Quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday 1988), 34.
5. It is important to mention that, as one might expect, inextricably bound up with an economic agenda we find here a familiar gender ideology which elaborates a classical opposition between a feminine Nature (symbolized by the chestnut tree) which is, because of its femininity, disgusting and threatening (despite its being meaningless and absurd!), and a masculine domain of art and mathematics. I have dealt with the significance of gender ideology in Nausea and Sartre's writings in general in my Understanding Sartre (forthcoming from University of South Carolina Press).
6. Réné Descartes, ‘Discours de la méthode,’ Oeuvres et Lettres (Paris: Gallimard 1953), 136 (my translation).
7. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1982), 318–20 and Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 1 (translation slightly modified). This outcome is inextricably bound up with what Benjamin...
