The radical project: Sartrean investigations

The radical project Sartrean investigations

Bill Martin

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

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•

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Oxford

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC: Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc; 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com 12 Hid's Copse Road Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England Copyright © 2000 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

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Martin, Bill, 1956The radical project : Sartrean investigations I Bill Martin. p. cm. - (New critical theory) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8476-9698-7 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-8476-9699-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Sartre, Jean Paul, 1905- I. Title. II. Series .. B2430.S34 M36 2000 194-dc21

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National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992.

For David Detmer and Kerri Mommer

/'

Contents

.'

Ackll:owledgments Intr?duction

ix

Ever since May: The radical project

1

Dictatorship "for" the proletariat: Sartre's theory of

15

2 3

Between Mao and Moses: Sartre's final decade

35

Beyond the varieties of Sartrophobia, toward Sartre's

47

4'

Political theory after Bataille and Derrida:

63

5

The political space of Sartre in the text of Derrida

71

6,

Elections: Still a trap for fools? Revisiting Same's 1973 essay

79

7

Sartre and the critique of postmodern capitalism

91

the Stalin period

legacy for radical intellectuals On the critique of "project"

Afterword: A philosopher of his century after his century

107

Bibliography

117

Index

123

By the Same Author

127

vii

Acknowledgments

Aithough this is by far my shortest book, it seems that I have more people than ev.er to thank for their help and encouragement. I hope this means that there has been a general expansion of the radical project, of its circle.

Patricia Huntington and Martin Matustik encouraged me to pull the project to­

gether for the New Critical Theory series, of which I am very grateful to be a part.

I have been fortunate to have the friendship of Martin and Patricia for more than teri:years now-they are wonderful people and impressive thinkers. Maureen Mc­ Grogan is a legendary editor with whom I

thank her for her patience.

-l have had the

am

very pleased to be associated. I also

great fortune to participate in the meetings and discussions of

the North American Sartre Society since the fall of

Philosophy Association, when I

am

1991. As with the Radical

with the Sartreans I feel a certain sense of

"homecoming," and I look forward to every meeting. Sartreans know that we

choose our world; to refuse to do so is to live in bad faith. Having chosen the

wqrld, all of my fellow Sartreans are, I suppose,'tesponsible for the contents of this book as well, though I won't hold them to it! Still, I want to thank all of my

Sartrean fellow travelers for their comments and criticisms on my work, and for

the role they are playing in continuing the dissemination of the work of Sartre.

I would especially like to thank the following: Tom Anderson, Hazel Barnes, Bill Becker, Linda Bell, Debra Bergoffen, Robert Bernasconi, Betsy Bowman, Betty Cannon, Joe Catalano, Peter Caws, Matt Eshleman, Tom Flynn, Lewis

Gordon, Helen Heise, Sonia Kruks, Gail Linsenbard, Steve Martinot, Bill

McBride, Liz Morelli, Constance Mui, Jay Murphy, Julie Pederson, Michel Ry­

balka, Ron Santoni, Bob Stone, Steven Storch, Adrian van den Hoven, Joe

Walsh, and Kathy Wider. lowe a special dept to Steve Hendley, with whom I have been paired on numerous panels, and whose comments bear quite directly on several of the essays here.

I would also like to thank the following for their continuing encouragement

and for sharing their thoughts and work with me: Linda Alcoff, Ken Alpern, ix

x

Acknowledgments '

Bob Avakian, Heather Barnes, Peg Binningham, Alison Brown, Tom Buford,

q

Al Cinelli, Ann Cudd, Andrew Cutrofello, Donald Davidson, Jac ues Derrida,

Martin Donougho, Jim Edwards, Jim Faulconer, Dia'na Fuss, Aaron Fi¢htelberg, Robert Fripp, Roger Gottlieb, Craig Hanks, Graham Harmon, Stephen Houl­

gate, David Ingram, Tom 1eannot, Cindy Kaffen, Doug Kellner, Davia Krell, Niklaus Largier, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Andrew Ligh�, Raymond Lotta, Lynne Margolies, Jim Marsh, Wjll McNeill, Joanne Molina, Darrell Moore, Bob Mul­

vaney, Patrick Murray, Michael Naas, Mecke Nagel, Angelica Nuzzo, Susanna Pagliaro, Jeff Paris, Elbert Peck, Anne Pomeroy, Gail Presbey, Dan Price, Ram­

sey Eric Ramsey, Garry Rindfuss, Ron Scapp, Jane Scarpantqni, Paul Schafer, Jeanne Schuler, Gary Shapiro, Christina Smerick, Chelsea Sn�lgrove, David Schweickart, George Trey', David W illiams, Whomever I have left out of this list is most welcome to up­ braid me mercilessly. As always, l owe a tremendous debt to my life companion, Kathleen League.

This book is dedicated to David Detmer and Kerri Mommer. David is a true

Sartre scholar from whom I have learned a great deal. Our discussions of Sartre,

Chomsky, Marxism, and politics in general are very much reflected in the essays

here. We also share an interest in that other "nineteenth-century" preoccupation, progressive rock music. Kerri is a superb editor who has helped me greatly with

disseminating philosophical ideas regarding that same subjeat. Both are also eth­

ically committed vegans, and Kerri is an extraordinary cook, and without a doubt the best meals this mere vegetarian has experienced in recent years have been at

the Mommer-DetIller homestead. Their son, Arlo, is a delight, and I hope that one day he will catch an actual glimpse of the redeemed society dreamt {)f in this book. David and Kerri are from Kansas, as is my wife, Kathleen, and pow I am too-and, as the Texans say, "I'll defend it." But most of all Kerri and'David are

good friends, people with whom I have shared the experience of breaking through ' the hyperseriality of this emerging postmodem capitalist world.

Introduction Ever since May

The radical project

. . . into this world we're thrown ...riders on the storm . . .

_

-Jim Morrison If I understand a certain longstanding trend in philosophy correctly, a trend that

I identify with Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Marx, and others, the'most impor­

tant thing is first of all to imagine the possibility of a good society and of an eth­

ical relation, and then to let metaphysical or ontological concerns follow in the

wake of this imagination. Or, indeed, if I understand the point of Kant's third for-

-,mulation of the categorical imperative, or Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, the most important thing is to struggle-with our hands, our hearts, our minds­ to l;>rlng about a just society, and to fashion theory that serves this project.

Did Jean-Paul Sartre begin philosophical life with such a project in mind? Cer­

tainly his earlier work exhibits a strong preoccupation with ontological concerns,

,though of a sort that deeply connected with wlmt Marx called (again, in those fa­ mous theses)

sensuous reality. "!t

the search for useful categories. In examining the relationship between Being and

Nothingness and the Notebooksfor an Ethics, one might be tempted to assimilate Sartre to what may or may not be an age-old philosophical activity-and, is it the

theological activity par excellence?-but which has certainly become a lens

through which much historical scholarship in philosophy is now focused: first

one gets the ontology right, then one can perhaps turn to ethical or social con­

cerns. This is simply to recapitulate what became, in the twentieth century, the

"traditional" distinction between "hard" and "soft" philosophy-ontology, epis­

temology, and logic on the one side, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics on the other. Certainly one can form a respectable interpretation of Sartre's oeuvre

that conforms to this schema.

Sartreans, however, tend to be resistant to this interpretation, and this has

everything to do with how and why we became Sartreans in the fIrst place. We

2

Introduction

'-

were inspired,by engagement, The rap oQ.-the early Sartre is that he, atrbest, pop­ ularized certain aspects of Heidegger's Being and Time, I do not have

the com­

petence t6enter into a long comparison between Sein und Zeit aridL'etre et Ie neant, though this territory has been well covered by others. This much,is clear

enough: Heidegger went ever further away from the realm of social p ractic�, to create what has become, at least in some version's, a substitute religion of "Being," while Sartre, from this perspective, was hopelessly mired in the "ontic." Those of us who were drawn by Sartre into philosophy or intellectual life more generally have perpetuated this orientation toward beings, plural and perhaps

even "mere" (to echo Wallacj! Stevens's title), all the while keeping to a central

concern of all philosophers of practice, from Plato to Kant to Marx and perhaps

even Heidegger: the possibility that persons might live as ends-in-themselves and

not mere means only. We might find an interesting extension of this idea in Hei­ degger and some others (deep ecologists, Latter-day Saints, etc.), in which there

is a questioning of any treatment of any being as a mere "thing." In light of such thinking, perhaps there is something to Heidegger's critique of Sartre's "human­

ism." Certainly Sartre can be accused of being "species-ist." Personally, I do find that to be a limitation, and yet I think that we must also worry about what might

count as a "transcendence" or "overcoming" of humanism. If there is a reaching out to the possibility of the flourishing, the co-flourishing,,Pf all beings, is this to be achieved through a sense that all ontic reality must accept appropriation by

Being Itself (which is where the Heideggerian substitute religion comes in, and

the connection to J>olitical quietism should be clear)? Or, do we only find the pos­ , sibility of the flourishing of other forms of life by struggling to find the possibility of our own species? _

My sense is that Sartre has at least half of the answer to that question. We would do well to hold to that half; if Heidegger has some insights tha,t,we should

also not let go of (especially having to do with language and technoiogy), even so there is generally an orientation toward practice as somehow ultimately con­ templative. That is, if we

are

forced by "ontological considerations" to be some­

what ambivalent about humanism and the priority of ethics over ontology,'

does not mean that we should let go of humanism and what Sartre might teach us

about the humanist struggle toward the ethical relation. The fundamentally Hei­

deggerian readings of Derrida's arguments on this point (as found in the seminal essays "Violence and Metaphysics" and "The' Ends of Man," and in Of Spi rit, Chap. 10) stress the ambivalence only to assimilate humanism to the "tradition"

that must be "overcome." What these readings miss is the fact that Derrida's ar­ guments are for a true ambi-valence, a double strategy and double reading that does not let go of either side. For those Marxists, Sartrean or otherwise, who find it hard to live with such an ambi-valence, it must be pointed out that these two tracks exist, often in great ten­

sion with one another, in Marx as well. On the one hand there is the political

economy-or, as Marx put it in The German Ideology, "the real movement of

Ever since May: The radical project

3

things-that must "inevitably," through the operation of "iron laws," lead to com­ munism. One-sided focus on this "real movement," or perhaps more specifically

these ''things'' (recall also Engels's expression, "the pure administration of things," as a description for the political form that communism will take) is what

Sartre critiqued in "Materialism and Revolution" and attempted to provide an al­

ternative to in the whole of the

Critique (both volumes plus Searchfor a Metl!od).

- IFor, just as surely, there is the other side of Marx-perhaps best exemplified in . �'the Critique of the Gotha Programme- which breaks the bounds of narrow eco­ . nomic calculations and moves toward a human possibility that cannot be speci­ fied in advance, but that transcends reification and commodification.

Another way to approach these issues is to ask what would it mean for the . ethical relation to be incarnate? Under what material circumstances might jus­

tice be made manifest in the world? Kant speaks of the two things that held him

in awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I can't help but think

. that he wondered if there was some connection. Though such a thought may' seem very distant from what appears, at times, to be the essential

loneliness of

. Sartre's writing (and so well captured in the sculptures of Giacometti, or in

Francis Jeanson's phrase, "the positively sequestered man"), the oscillating ten­

sion between ontological concerns and the possibility of ethical relations,

staged in the context of struggle, links these two great "moralists." Certainly, if

. humanity does not come to understand the structures that actiVely prevent such

a manifestation or justice, then there cannot be such a thing. But Sartre under­ stands as well as Marx that such understanding does not come through a pri­

marily contemplative approach to philosophy, but instead through engagement with sensuous reality, through struggle.

Having set the stage this way, let me say that the unifying element in the es­

says presented here is political rather than philosophical or even thematic. My

aim is to recover and extend the

radicality of Sartre's political project. AlI of

these essays were originally presented as papers at meetings of either the North

•

American Sartre Society or the Sartre Circle sesSions at the American Philosoph­

ical Association. I have benefited greatly from the comments and criticisms of my fellow Sartreans at these forums. In an earlier book

(Politics in the impasse) I

hailed my fellow members of the Radical Philosophy Association, especially the

founding generation, for the support and encouragement they have given to me and other, y ounger, rad�cal social theorists. Not surprisingly, there is a significant

overlap in membership between the RPA and the N ASS. Even more there is an overlap in spirit, as both organizations were inspired by the events of May 1968

and their aftermath. Many of us, indeed, were inspired to take up philosophy or intellectual life in a special way, an

engaged way, by the conjoined influences of

May '68 (or "the sixties" more generally) and Sartre's example. Following that example, and keeping to that conjunction, these essays may be said to be more

exercises in a Sartrean mode rather than what might be more properly called "Sartre scholarship."

4

Introduction

Indeed, these essays could easily be seen as quite marginal to a more typical scholarly project. While some of the works of Sartre that I take up hete lire those more likely to be discussed by mainstream scholars-for example, "What is Lit­

erature?" or the Critique of Dialectical Reason-more often I deal witjl pieces that are quite polemical and demonstrative of very direct political engagement. These would include the 1946 essay, "Materialism �nd Revolution," as well as some of the essays and interviews given in the aftermath of May '68, and the final interviews with Benny Levy (Hope Now)-and, even with the Critique, I focus on the controversial second volume. In a couple of the essays here I am not so much interested in drawing'citations from Sartre as I am in defending his notion of the "project" from attacks by what might be called the Foucauldian or perhaps

Deleuzean Left.

What is more, some readers will readily see that there is a decidedly Maoist

cast to these essays. Certainly this will place these essays far out of the main­

stream of academic scholarship on Sartre, but, I hope, not so far from Sartre's ac­

tual political concerns. Sartre certainly had his moments, as for instance when, like many in France and Europe more generally, he thought that he could inter­

twine the melodies of the Internationale an9 the Marsellais. (This is "'{hat Mao

called "combining two into one.") But Sartre differed from almost all of the �ther

"Western Marxists" in that he went against Eurocentrism in both theory and prac­

tice. Although not a "Leninist" per se, he understood quite well that to side with the oppressed in places such as Algeria and Vietnam meant going against the in­ terests of "one's own" country and ruling class. (This is what Lenin called "rev­

olutionary defeatism"-ignored not only by most Left intellectuals, but indeed

most of the Left in general.)ILike Marx, Sartre remained focused on the world­

historic transformations and the possibilities that might be generated for human

freedom. Like Mao, Sartre was vitally concerned with what had begOlpe of the

first large-scale experiment with socialism, the Soviet Union. For both, the

"Stalin question" was not merely a problem for "backward" people outside of the

"advanced" civilization (perhaps the latter word should be in scare-quotes as well) of Europe. W hile I do not think it can be argued that Sartre was a "Maoist,"

certainly he had many concerns in common with Mao, and their positions .over­

lap or complement one another in important ways. I hasten to add, however, that

in some ways Sartre was a better "Maoist" than some of his Maoist comrades in

the post-May period. For this reason, among others, I also find it hard to tlfink of Sartre as a "Western" Marxist,.despite his often being anthologized that way. This is not the place to argue for the Maoist perspective in toto; I simply hope that some of the analyses presented here will persuade readers of the efficacy of at least parts of this perspective. The Western powers and the corporate media

have been able to accomplish an immense smear job on Mao and the Chinese

Revolution under his leadership. The restoration of capitalism in China since

Mao's death, which is plain for everyone to see, ought to be one very big tip-off as to the nature of this smear. The open-minded reader will also see that my par-

Ever since May: The radical project

5

ticular Maoist approach is highly unorthodox and does not seek to set itself up as an orthodoxy. In his discussion of the Stalin question, Sartre criticizes a policy of "socialism in one country" that has assumed the character of an institution. In his view, such a set-up represents the entrenchment of the practico-inert, and there­ fore the possibility for strategies of reification to once more rule society. Sartre's argument here complements Mao perfectly, and both go very much against the - /.grain of European Mapdst orthodoxy. For both Sartre and Mao grasp that the essence of socialism is not primarily the creation of certain institutions; forces of reification can work through legal frameworks that "guarantee" the public own­ ership of means of production, if the permanence of the revolution is not contin­ ,!lally reaffirmed through the self-activity of the masses. Indeed, both seem to argue that there is never an end-point to this process (and Jacques Derrida has made similar arguments in his recent Specters of Marx), and Maoism might learn a thing or two from Sartre on how reification might continue to regenerate itself , even after certain formal structures of capitalism are overthrown. In any case, there are many aspects of my particular Maoist perspective that , make more orthodox Maoists, to say nothing of more orthodox Marxists, quite uncomfortable. But so be it. In particular, the way that I have argued for a "post­ secular" approach in social theory, taking up parts of Judaism, radical Christian­ ity, Kant, communitarianism, Derrida, etc., is highly problematic from,a more or­ ,thodox or monistic perspective. (Some of my friends call this "petty-60urgeois eclecticism," but my aim is to learn from many sources and to put this learning at the service of emancipatory projects.) However, some virtues of this perspec­ -rive might be seen in making a contrast between, on the one' side, the compli­ mentarity of Sartre and Mao, and, on the other side, a recent attempt at creating a philosophy that is fully secular. I opened this introduction with a line from Jim Morrison of The Doors. I've always appreciated the ambience of "Riders on the Storm," as well as the line I quoted, but most of the rest of the lyrics are, frankly, a somewhat flaky version of " existentialism. The more profound and ethereal ;;dstential vibe is better captured by Jim Morrison's tone and Phil Manzanera's electric piano than by the lyrics themselves. One feels adrift in the world, without any safe port, without any god to save us. Certainly the rest of the lyrics take these themes in purely individual­ istic and amoral (or at least morally relativistic) directions. I mention this because some would argue tha�, even if despite itself, Sartre's existentialism has to go in these directions. (And, of course, these are some Sartreans who would prefer to stay with only the lonely, individualistic side of Sartre.) A useful comparison might be made, then, between Sartre and someone else who has attempted to thirtk about politics and philosophy under conditions of absolute contingency, namely Richard Rorty. A more extended discussion of Rorty's project would show, I thirtk, that his aim is the complete secularization of philosophy, the severance of thought and politics from any notion or hint of teleology, eschatology, or some big, all-encompassing,

, �,

6

Introduction

picture. For Rorty, what has to be gotten rid of is any sense of a grand "story" (or metanarrative) that explains the state of the world or anyone's place in it. Apart

from avowedly theological visions, Rorty's prime example of the kind of big pic­

,ture that must be set aside is History as one finds it in Hegel and Marx. If Marx's global history is out the window, then so is, for Rorty, internationalism ot any

larger sense of a common human project. We are left with the secular, fragmented, and contingent histories of se&ments of humanit . Anything more, in Rorty's

y

view, would constitute the dreaded and dangerous- metanarrative. Curiously, Rorty has no difficulty with expressions such as "we Americans." And yet, if one

were to take stock of what "we Americans" (or "we Frenchpersons," or "we Ger­ mans," or "we Europeans," etc.) means in the world, then it seems to me that the sort of immanent critique practiced by Marx would lead in the direction of an un­ derstanding of colonialism and imperialism and the possibility, therefore, of in­ ternationalism and anti-imperialism. But perhaps Rorty's argument is that stories just do not come that big? Perhaps then, for Rorty, the only way to argue for in­

ternationalism or to talk about developments in world history is to "go theologi­ cal," so to speak. As a philosopher who writes after the death of God and in terms of a world

where we confront contingency at every turn, Sarfre seems somewhat congenial to Rorty. Indeed, one might see a connection between them that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been stated explicitly in the philosophical literature, and this

has to do with Kant. Of modern figures, it appears that Kant is the one whom

Rorty is most at pains to either refute or avoid. It is not hard to see that Rorty

would agree with Hegel that Kant's ethical philosophy constitutes an "empty for­

malism." Devices such as the categorical imperative (or the Golgen'Rule of the

Sermon on the Mount) may prove pragmatically useful-that is, useful for solv­

ing problems-but we do not need to afford deep metaphysical status to them. In­ stead, Rorty recommends, let's just agree that it may be usefuJ, for some pur­

poses, to talk in a certain way, for example, in terms of "persons" who should be

treated as "ends" rather than "means." W hat this means, of course, �s that other

people really are means to my ends, but things would work out better (for me) if

I were to adopt this more "respectful" or "polite" language. The reality is actually

that other people are my "hell," and there is no sense in which the other can be understood except as, ultimately, an obstacle. If this is what Sartre reaRy thinks,

then one can see how he might be enlisted in,a fundamentally Hobbesian politi­ cal-philosophical project wherein conceptions of the good are ruled out (as meta­

physical, as giving us grandiose world pictures that are, in Rorty's phrase, "well

lost") and the best we can hope to achieve is a situation where we avoid some of the worst aspects of the bad. In contrast, Kant can be seen as simply a moralizer, a theologizer, someone who has no place in our disenchanted and demytholo­ gized world. Another way to put it is that, if Kant's transcendental ethics holds central the fundamental regard for the other (in this, the requirements of his ethics

go beyond those of the Golden Rule), then an antitranscendentalist politics

7

Ever since May: The radical project

should-on a Rortyan account-simply bite the bullet and declare itself on the

side of the logic of the same. This results in Rorty's frank acceptance of ethno­

centrism and of the existing political institutions of Western societies as funda­ mentally just. Accordingly, the "longing for total revolution" is something to be

abandoned (see "Habermas, Derrida, and the functions of philosophy, in

- I: ,�!

and Progress, 307-326).

Truth

Just to complete a thought, it seems to me that the dichotomy represented by

Kant and Hobbes, in the form of theory of the good/theory of the bad (the good

',as ideal, versus the bad as what is to be avoided), is a useful one for mapping nor­ ,mative social theories and political philosophies. Although one kind of Marxist

; critique might say that this language brings us too close to metaphy sical cate­

gories, including ones dealing with "human nature" (an idea that, after all, Sartre

was very much interested in undermining), and perhaps even to simple-minded

, homilies about "optimism" and "pessimism," and although the warnings of this . Marxism oUght to be heeded when venturing into such territory, at the end of this

road is a place where norrnativity is not to be found at all. And although this is

indeed where one strand of Marxism (perhaps even most of the kinds that have

been dominant, intellectually and politically) ends up, my hope is that it is not the

only strand. I hope that further arguments will show that Sartre,.aimed to take

Marxism and radical social theory in another direction. Still, the point

of. the pres­

:ent comparison (of Sartre with Rorty) is to show where a politics of contingency must stand with regard to norrnativity and existing social institutions.

", Also, to complete the thought as regards Kant, it ought to be noticed that, in

�orty's secularization of philosophy and politics, the presecular world ends not

with a bang, but with a whimper. With Sartre and Kant I think you get the bang.

For Kant, the age of enlightenment and autonomy means that humankind has

been released by God into an adventure, into a time of fmding its own place in the world. I think the same goes for Sartre, with the possible exception that there

is also an element of abandonment (or "thrown,pess") to this release. Kant, for

�ure, saw the dangers of this adventure. This is why (in my view), in the time of increasing global commerce and trade (and therefore "foreign relations"), Kant proposed universal principles (not only the categorical imperative, but also doc­

uments such as "Perpetual Peace") that have impersonal formulations. That is, in

the face of global forces and large-scale changes in the possibilities for humanity, Aristotelian arguments about character and virtue will just not cut it. It seems to

me that Sartre follows this sort of thinking all the way, whereas Rorty finds it dan­ gerous because it engages too much with the terms that need, to be simply "set

aside." In other words, theologized history must end with a Whimper, it must sim­ ply run out of steam, otherwise one is still responding in some form to a god, even

if to one who is no longer there. Rorty hopes to affIrm one side of Sartre-the

side that philosophizes contingency -and no side of Kant. But clearly there are many sides to Sartre that Rorty does not want to

most of all.

(In

affIrm : the "Stalinist" perhaps

a larger discussion I would argue that Rorty is still caught up in

8

Introduction

interesting ways in his Trotskyist roots; Trotskyists often use tenns such as "mor­

alizer" and "utopian" as curse-words, and they remain fundamentally within Eu­

rocentric and narrowly economic frameworks.) In what follows, I will emphasize the key issues in a thematic way, in the hope of showing two very different ways we might think about "politics without a net" (so to speak).

. A few quotations from Rorty will give a taste o�his approach to the politics of

contingency with regard to questions of nonnativity and social institutions.

In the name of "the view'that freedom is the recognition of contingency rather

than of the existence of a specifically human realm exempt from natural neces­ sity," Rorty argues that we should expect less from philosophy.

In particular, we

should not expect to find what Habennas hopes for, "universalist pragmatics and strong theoretical strategies." Our aim should be to generate "proposals for spe­

cific changes in social arrangements-in laws, company regulations, administra­

tive procedures, educational practices, and so on." From this perspective, we will

find ourselves no longer using tenns such as "'late capitalism,' 'modem indus­

trial society,' and 'conditions of the production of knowledge'" (and I assume

that tenns such as "mode of production" or "relations of production" or even "working class" are to be rejected as well), and instead we will find tenns such as "worker representation" and "laws against unprodJctive financial manipula­ tion" more useful.

In other words, "we" will be reformists, not revolutionaries-and it is interest­

ing that Rorty connects the latter category with someone whom most of us who

believe in the need for radical social transfonnation see as completely reformist, namely Habennas. Indeed, Habennas and almost all of the Habennasians see

themselves this way, so why is Rorty picking on him? The final paragraph from the essay from which I have been quoting ties these issues together._

"

A preference for this level of concreteness rather than that characteristic' of large­ scale German-style "social theory" is, of course, not simply a deduction from large philosophical premises. It is justified, if at all, not simply by a desire for the recog­ nition of contingency but by a political judgment: namely, that the rich democracies of the present day already contain the sorts of institutions necessary for their own re­ form and that communication among citizens of those democracies is not "distorted" by anything more esoteric than greed, fear, ignorance, and resentment. This amounts to saying that the instruments of perfectibility are already, in the rich North Atlantic constitutional democracies, in place -that the principle institutions of contemporary democratic societies do not require "unmasking" but rather strenuous utilization, supplemented by luck. Such a judgment is risky, and perhaps mistaken. But if it is mistaken, it will not be shown to be so by "universalist problematics and strong the­ oretical strategies," but by continued trial and error. (Truth and Progress, 326) Presumably, Sartre in the

Critique would be quite guilty of engaging in "large­

scale Gennan-style social theory," If I could ask Professor Rorty just one ques­

tion at this particular juncture of his social commentary, especially taking into

Ever since May: The radical project consideration his recent

9

Achieving Our Country, it would be this: "Do you see system?" For

any room whatsoever for discussing what we used to call a social

sure, Sartre and Rorty would agree that greed, fear, etc., are contingentfeatures

of individuals, that they are part of no human "essence." Unfortunately, Rorty

does often write as though the problem is that in fact there are simply some greedy people who happen to have money or power. This allows him not to have to address capitalism as such-and he doesn't.

Sartre is much more radical in his understanding of contingency: not only are

, greed and resentment, and the rest, not an essential feature of any human persons, they are also not essential features of human social formations. But they are indeed a part of our existing societies, and they are expressive of something even deeper

that has gotten into society, something that does not accord, so to speak, with the

contingent existence of persons, but indeed imposes a certain serialized essence

,(or perhaps it is simply a necessity) on society and persons. Indeed, Sartre wants

. tb go so far, in the

Critique, as to say that there was no absolute necessity that hu-

manity took the path that it did, long ago, with regard to scarcity and the social sur­

plus.

Thai is, humanity faced a crossroads at the point where social surpluses were

generated (when the labor process created more than was strictly necessary for

subsistence); as we know, the path entered into was one where society was divided into classes. Certainly this was expressive of one human possibility, even if, as

with all choices, other possibilities were closed off by it. And yet, for Sartre, this

way of looking at the issue shows (much as Engels had demonstrated empirically, in·his

The Origin ofthe Family, Private Property, and the State, where he used the

example of the Iroquois Indians of North America) that there is another possibil­ ity of humanity, namely

communism, that remains imbedded in history. (Consid­

ering Engels's example, we might say that only some societies entered into the

path of class division, but that these have managed to "infect," in one way or an­ other, all other societies in the unfolding of history.) •

And yet-and again, here, I see Sartre's thinkiDg of contingency as much more

radical than Rorty's-there is no essence that is speaking through a history that might frod its way toward communism. Redemption, then, is indeed a "work,"

even if it also depends

011

the "grace" (which is in some sense infinite) of all the

possibilities that are set out before us and are indeed within us. Meaning in his�

tory has to be made, in just the same sense that Marx said the working class must

emancipate itself-no one else can accomplish this.

But, wait a second, why is Rorty not just as open to the contingencies of his­

tory as Sartre? Indeed, why not see Rorty as even more open, in that he wants to

affmn the side of Sartre's thinking that seeks a "consistently atheistic position in philosophy," while abandoning anything that appears to be a theological hang­

over and (what seems to Rorty to be linked to the theological language) "Stalin­

ism." Perhaps the two figures find their strongest and most provocative unity

when Rorty affmns Sartre's statement at the end of "Existentialism is a Human­

ism" that even Nazism, if it were to triumph, could become the "tfl!,th of history."

Introduction

10

Certainly those who ask, ironically, "Why did the heavens not darken?" (the title of Amo Mayer's Marxist analysis of the Holocaust), are recognizing, in a mate­ rialist way, that there is no overseer external to history who can say, "no, that is not the truth of history, instead it is this other thing." Instead of attempting, how­ ever, as those who raise this question do (and as Sartredid with the

Griiique and

with analytical tools such as seriality afld the practi�o:inert), a systematic analy­ sis of the social basis of his.t9rical catastrophe, Rorty only gives us lists of names (his usual-and shopworn-litany is Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Pol Pot) and vague notions such as "cruelty." This last has primarily to do, in Rorty's argot, with instances where we impose our own definitions of selfhood upon others (or where we tamper with the attempt of others to define themselves). What is seen here, given of course that Rorty is not a "Sartrean" per se, rather he instead wants to take only certain things from Sartre, is what I once called "logical existentialism," something I associated with Wittgenstein. (In my clever

exposition, in an as-yet unpublished paper, I turned the "E" in ,existentialism backwards and put it in parentheses with the "x," to form the symbol for the quan­ tification of "there is some x, such that.") Wittgenstein is certainly closer to Rorty's heart than is Sartre, and I wonder if this might be true of V{ittgenstein's sense of contingency as well. Of course, Rorty talks about the "world well lost," the world that can be known without any mediation (or, at least, the world that "exists" beyond any knowing of it). But then, Rorty also does not go where at least the early Wittgenstein points, toward the essential mystery of the "thatness" of the world. So, speaking of hearts, I think that Sartre and Wittgenstein take this concern deeper into their hearts than does Rorty. After all, Rorty would only see this as an interesting question insomuch as it has to do with some, specific prob­ lem that might be solved (though one is of�course welcome to engage in theolog­ ical speculation in one's private time, if one finds this helpful in the 'pursuit of self-creation). Therefore, what really "floats" for Rorty are language games and ' forms of life, personal "vocabularies." Somehow Sartre remains concerned with a world-and "being"-where con­ tingency goes all the way down, even to existence itself. That is� the existence of anything and "everything" is contingent. The difficulty is then one of thinking about ethics and politics in a world without necessary existence, which for both Rorty and Sartre means a world without God. And yet, clearly their senses of the meaning of such a world-a world, to use Heidegger's language, of purely ontic reality-are different, the one attempting to bring this existential project into in­ tegration with Marxism, the other with "postmodern bourgeois liberalism." Are these very different political engagements themselves merely contingent features of what remain similar readings of contingency, or

are

their readings of contin­

gency in fact different? I wonder if the difference can be found in the different approaches of pragma­ tism and Marxism to the theory of knowledge. I should add here that I am only referring to Rorty's pragmatism, which may be somewhat close to Dewey's, but

11

Ever since May: The radical project

less so to James's and Pierce's. But in saying this I am arguing backwards, in that

. what I am thinking about is the way that Rorty and Dewey have both served as apologists for U.S. imperialism, while James was a leading figure in the AnticIm­

perialist League. And yet I think this form of argumentation is appropriate, be­

I cause it goes to the question of engagement. Mao once summarized Marxist epistemology quite succinctly: if you want to know an apple, bite into it. In· this

' · engagement, both the apple and the consumer of the apple

are

transformed. By

"contrast, for Rorty, projects of self-transformation are essentially private. Indeed, . the thing to be engaged with, when it comes to problems in society, is the way

that someone's private psychological state-as greedy, cruel, etc.-has come to

play a limiting role in society when it comes to the ability of others to engage in

private defmitions of their vocabularies. For all that some analytical philosophers see Rorty as a traitor to their cause, his :lnain activities

are

typical of at least the

predominant trend in analytic philosophy: debunking and clarifying. I do not

m�an this as a broadside against analytic philosophy (and, insomuch as a certain

trend in continental philosophy provides only a mirror image of these activities, namely hyperbole and obfuscation, it is no alternative), and certainly some of Rorty's clarifications are helpful.

But this is where one can see Sartre's basic unity with Marx's famous Eleventh

Thesis: Rorty goes part of the way -one might even say that he goes the :'bour­ geois liberal" part-toward grasping contingency as a

modality, as something to modality, but I do not see that he understands what it might mean not only to be thrown into a contingent world, but also, as engage­ ment, to throw oneself into this contingency. This is a world where Nazism may be.contrasted to necessity as a

become the truth of history-Rorty embraces this problematic, but, to put it

crudely, what does he do about it? I do not mean this as any sort of "indictment"

of the intellectual enterprise-please do not misunderstand. It was as an engaged

answer to this question that Sartre threw himself into struggles over capitalism, fascism, colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism, and imperialism. The outcome of these struggles was far from predetermined, and Sartre broke with any triumphant

"materialism" (such as that of the French Communist Party) that saw victory as

"in the cards." It was in the context of such struggles that Sartre engaged with the

Soviet Union, under the leadership of Stalin, as one possibility for how commu­

nism might be incarnated in this contingent world-this world that is not simply

one'of dreaming the liberal utopia in the privacy of one's own cyberspace or

video game. (It was also from this perspective that Sartre later broke with the So­

viet Union and PCF.) For this reason, Sartre also has something to tell us about the actual unfolding of the Stalin period. I do not see that one will learn anything specific on this issue from reading Rorty.

Is this backwards argument justified, or is it really just a kind of personal at­

tack? Perhaps I should state for the record that I almost always find Professor

Rorty's arguments provocative. I will give him credit for this: quite often when

I read him, my first impulse is to get to work with refuting him. That is not an

12

Introduction

entirely bad thing. But let me come at this from yet another angle. If one gives up the notion that history unfolds according to some law of necessity, in other words, if one gives up History, does one therefore abandon the analysis of what indeed unfolded? If there is no totalizer, is there therefore no totality and no · work of understanding concrete totality? If there is such an analysis and work, how does the theorist situate hiffiself or herself with regard to it? To think that one could situate oneself externally seems to partake of the sort of theological and "totalitarian" approach that both Sartre and Rorty want to cast off. What is it, then, to fully grasp the alternative? In light of this question, I propose that Rorty does well enough with contingency if it is just a matter of grasping con­ tingency as concept or modality-but, then, does this not simply lead us into an­ other (illusory) externally grasped totality? Indeed, isn't contingency, under­ stood on this level, just as merely formal as the "freedom" experienced in postmodern bourgeois liberal, that is, capitalist, society? Finally, we might ask why, if Sartre seeks a consistently atheistic position, he is so inclined toward theological terms, even if they are "inverted." (Here Sartre is again not unlike Marx, especially the �arly Marx.) Rorty seems to be reading backwards here, from Sartre's use of such terms and his concrete political en­ gagements, to supposed limitations in the understanding of contingency, and it is hard to see why Rorty would not be entitled to such a reading. Let us ask the question another way: Why, unlike Rorty, does Sartre not see the contingent world in which we find ourselves as a world where we must intellectually engage in the project of disenchantment, especially if we are to break with traditional and authoritarian forms of morality and politics? My hope is that the set of investigations that form this book will give some sense as to why Sartre is a philosopher of possibility and not prImarily of secular disenchantment. It seems to me that the answer to Rorty's reading of the politics of contingency ultimately has to do with Sartre's sense of the momentousness of the struggle for human possibility, in the face of everything that is set against it. Despite the fact that we have to accept the proposition that we might not have ex­ ' isted at all ("we humans," or we anything, and certainly any one of us as indi­ viduals) in this world after Darwin and quantum mechanics, and that even so we are seemingly insignificant bits of dust wandering about on one insignificant grain of sand in an inunense beach - or perhaps because of these things -the pos­ sibility of making something of ourselves (the possibility, of course, of our noth­ ingness, not our somethingness, to use more Sartrean language, which then means concretely analyzing the structures that would reduce us to thingness) is not something to approach in a disenchanted way. More than likely, Rorty would see both Sartre and Marx as allies in the proj­ ects of disenchantment and secularization. This, however, would be to confuse the priorities of the latter pair. Marx and Sartre were first of all concerned to show the material bases of a society that passes beyond the narrow horizons of bour­ geois right, toward the possibilities of a global community of mutual flourishing.

- Ever since May: The radical project

13

To be sure, there were times when both lost sight of the redemptive aspects of this project. Both were at times too entirely future-oriented. This issue has been ad­ dressed well by redemptive Marxists from Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams to Fredric Jameson. As with the question of humanism, perhaps there is some one-sidedness toSartre. And yet I think this is a different question from that of the one-dimensionality of Rorty's secularism, a quality for which "postmodern \' bourgeois liberalism" seems an appropriate name. tJ So, let us go now into a series of investigations into that "different question," -, the question of fmding a social time beyond reification. We will begin with what has probably been the central quandary of the twentieth century, theStalin period I and the fate of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement under Stalin's leadership. As much as there is a postmodern tendency to say "enough" to "all that," it seemed clear to Sartre that the fate of socialism in the ,twentieth century was the historical question around which all other questions 'navigated. We will conclude with an examination of the emergence of postmod­ ern capitalism itself, as understood especially by an intellectual with deep Sartreiln roots, Fredric Jameson. In Jameson's view, with which I concur, fateful historical questions, such as that of theStalin period, are being swept aside by the new forms of the capitalist juggernaut. In such a space, it becomes increasingly difficult for political questions to appear as such. Society passes over more and more into the "pure administration of things" (not in the sense that Engels had hoped for with the withering of the state-at least that is what one would like to believe, but we now also see that Engels's formulation was troublesome, to say the least). The permanence of the institution, rather than that of the revolution, looms. CanSartre help us here? I continue this discussion in the afterword.Sartre has been so identified with the twentieth century; what can he say to us now that "his century" is over? I have come to believe that not all nostalgia is bad. There might be a "critical Jlostalgia" that is part of a project of radical retriev�. ("Only reconnect," I said in my book, Listening to thefuture, giving a spin to E. M. Forster's well-known say­ ing.) Those of us of a certain generation (born in the fifties), or older, fmd our­ selves in the strange position of looking back upon the twentieth century with a degree of nostalgia and regret that we are leaving the place. After all, unless med­ ical advances drastically extend our lifespans fairly soon, it will have been the century where we spent most of our lives. But, what a strange century to look back upon with any kind of nostalgia-the bloodiest century in history! We are lucky to be getting out of it with our lives. However, I think that our nostalgia is oriented toward something even larger, a certain promise that we thought history was making, despite the fact of contingency. We associatedSartre with this prom­ ise. (I associate Derrlda with this promise as well, which is yet another reason wily the assimilation of his work to "postmodernism" is inappropriate-and this is what makes his remark concerning the generation of intellectuals from 1968, in his obituary for his friend Gilles Deleuze, all the more poignant, "Now I will

14

Introduction

have to go on by myself'). Now we seem to be infonned, on a d.aily this promise,is to be packed away with all of the other nicknacks of those worn­ out Constructs, "modernity" and "history." Too much nostalgia will lead us into the dead-end of "revolution" as some sort of grind-it's a crummy job, but some­ one's got to do it. But loss of connectioh altogether lands us in the posthistorical space of objectification with no outside. Can Sartre still speak to us in this diffi­ cult time of apocalypse as whimper? Can he speak to another generation for whom the twentieth century, the Stalin period, the struggle against fascism, the Chinese Revolution, May 1968, and the rest cannot help but seem very foreign? With these investigations, my hope is that he can and will.

1 Dictatorship "for" the proletariat i

Sartre's theory of the Stalin period

It was necessary to choose between disintegration and deviation of the Revolu­ tion. Deviation also means detour: Stalin was the man of that detour. "Hold on! Produce! . . . Later generations will go back to principles." And this was right, except that he did not see how in this very way he was producing generations which contained within them-as the inert materiality of the circumstances to be transcended-the deviation that had produced them and that they interiorized. -Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2

S ometime ago, before postmodernity really began to set in, there used to be something that people thought of as an historical watershed. We were still en­ tranced by the idea that historical events could matter, that comers could be turned. Marx said somewhere that when the locomotive of history turns a cor­ ner, all of the intellectuals fall off. But, of course, to make such a claim is to as­ s\!me that intellectual activity, and for that matter,jts social basis in the practice of the masses, is on the locomotive to begin with. As we enter a period when "history" means something like the form of entertainment one receives by watching the History Channel, the sense of such turning points becomes ever more difficult to recover. In a Marxist frame, it is not hard to associate turning points of the twentieth century with wars and even battles. In 1 968, and at least into the early 1970s, there was no disputing that the Vietnam War was a turning point for Western im­ perialism, and for U.S. imperialism specifically. David was defeating Goliath. If one were thinking in a very teleological way, then one could see the Vietnamese resistance to the imperialists as related to, and perhaps even a continuation of, the comer that seemed to be turned at the battle of Stalingrad, when the Red Army decisively beat back the Nazi Wehrmacht. And yet, while both events constituted major victories against imperialism, neither alone nor together did they constitute even a very large interruption of the imperialist system. 15

Chapter 1

16

Marx might have said, people make historical teleology, but they do not make it just as they please. The historical forces that might overcoine capitalism are still amassing themselves. At Stalingrad, where things were especially dire, but then where it also seemed a corner had been turned, there was something else as well. The onward march of imperialism w!Js interrupted, just as it was interrupted by the Tet Offensive in 1968. But in. Stalingrad we also saw a concentrated form of . the "detour" that Sartre speaks of. . I could imagine a good arg ument that would say it is simply Eurocentric to focus on the Stalin period, and the Soviet Union and the international communist movement in that period, as the place where the gathering teleology of the move­ ment beyond capitalism got decisively off track. After all, one might argue that the Bolshevik Revolution represented, in the first place, a moment in the shift of revolution from the West to the East, and ultimately from the metropoles to the countryside of the world, from the First World to the Third. If one wants to point to the historical legacy of the Stalin period, why not also point to the failure of revolution in the more developed countries of Western Europe? Why isn't the failure theirs? Clearly, in at least one sense this is not a bad question: If the work­ ing class in Western Europe had not been so bought off with the spoils of impe­ rialism, if it had not been so narrowly focused on its immediate material condi­ tions and issues that have to do with little more than adjustments in the wage contract , if it had been able to raise its sights toward internationalism and ques­ tions that are properly political, then certainly we would be living in a different world today. Lenin, and Stalin after him, were keenly aware of having come into thoroughly uncharted territory, what Antonio Gramsci iroIrlcally called "a revo­ lution against Capital"-meaning both the social formation and Marx's book. The same tendencies, common to Sartre and Mao, that resist pinning all revolu­ tionary hopes on Europe (or other advanced capitalist countries, mainly the United States and Japan), also lead us to consider what might be made of a revo­ lution against capital, wherever it appears. Against the calls of those Lenin la­ beled "Philistines," whose continual bleat was, "they should not have taken to arms" (this being heard especially in the cases of the Paris Commune, the Easter Rebellion in Ireland, and the Bolshevik Revolution), Lenin argued that there are opportunities rare in history, and not to seize such opportunities constitutes his­ torical betrayal. The erstwhile leaders of the working class in Western Europe had indeed engaged in such betrayal; was Lenin bound, then, to follow course and wait for Germany? Now we are back into a language where such questions seem to matter. Whether that significance can still be recovered in our day is not something of which I feel entirely sure. Certainly, for Sartre, the issue of what Stalin's leadership meant for the first experiment in socialism on a country-wide scale was decisive; one could not understand the curve of the epoch (to use Sartre's expression from the Flaubert study), and therefore one could not

live in the most important sense-because to

really live is to live in the curve of one's epoch-without engaging with the ques-

Dictatorship "for" the proletariat

17

tion of Stalin. I think, and Sartre thought, that there are also reasons for moving beyond this question, toward the possibilities for postcapitalist society that were generated in the Third World, especially in China. Here, now, at the precipice of . postmodern capitalism, if there is still an historical question of capitalism, and an historical question of what comes after, then perhaps we will be able to reconnect . with the question, "What happened to socialism in the Stalin period," a question (' that remained decisive even after the movement against capitalism and imperial­ , ism shifted further East and South. (When I think of people struggling today in , .those parts of the world, I can imagine some postmodern response-and this is \vhere all the neoconservatives are just as blithely postmodern as anyone-saying, , "Haven't they gotten the word? Don't they know that the world is done with all that?" But, no, apparently they haven't heard.) There is a more specific issue here, regarding how we frame the .question, and this concerns the idea, accepted by even a good many Sartreans, that the need for .analysis of the Stalin period has been eclipsed by the so-called "failure of com­ munism" and "collapse of communism" in the 1989-91 period. (Not that the events that transpired in the former Eastern Bloc are not remarkable.) What col­ lapsed in the Soviet Union in those years was not socialism; without going into the question fully at this point (this will come later), it is necessary to recall that this was the position also held by Sartre, at least by the early 1960s. Mao.Tsetung came to the same conclusion around that time. A larger study exploring to what extent the views of Sartre and Mao converge regarding capitalist restoration is still to be done (though I hope that what follows contributes to such an effort). My sense is that they agree with and/or complement each other in important ways (though with significant disagreements too). They certainly share the basic per­ spective that, in the Stalin period, the proletarian revolution got off track, and that to investigate the reasons and factors involved is a question of immense histori­ cal and practical importance. With Stalin, socialism is, to say the least, very much in a muddle. In my view, one cannot understand the theory and practice of so�ialism in China, under Mao's leadership, without viewing it against the background of this muddle. And yet, even with Maoism, there is a tendency to see socialism in China as the "next stage" but without making all of the qualitative breaks with Stalin that are neces­ sary. Such a tendency is part and parcel of Marxism and materialism, I think, be­ cause there is always a pull toward reductivism and quantitative thinking. To un­ derstand how things could be a part of the same process, and yet also to see qualitative transformations in the process, is a hard thing, and ultimately this can­ not be understood apart from practice and struggle. Part of the reductivist ten­ dency is to give the kind of defense of Stalin that largely avoids the issue of how the ground was laid for the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union under his leadership. This, of course, has not been the main tendency in the discussion of Stalin and his role in the international communist movement, but Sartre's ques­ tion concerned the revolutionary critique of Stalin.

Chapter 1

18

With both Mao's and Sartre's arguments in mind, I believe that it is appropri­ ate to say that the Stalin experience is a "segment of the spiral." That is, this ex­ perience belongs to the proletarian revolution. However, there is

a

tendency

among the Maoists to see this segment as, on the whole, "moving upward"-even as Mao's nonlinear notion of history: 'opens the way for understanding how there can be "bad socialism," as it were. Sometimes the idea among Maoists is that the Mao experience "takes over" at the point where Stalin leaves off, which then makes the whole process linear again, and which therefore closes the way toward radical rupture. (Derrida calls such ruptures "the experience of the impossible," an idea I find crucial in this context.) One version of linearity that is well-known is Mao's famous 70/30 assessment - Stalin was seventy percent good, thirty per­ cent bad. Perhaps it is good on some level to try to quantify things-at least, it does not hurt to look at certain aspects of the Stalin experience and differentiate among them. Certainly this is better than to see the experience as all bad or all good. But suppose the experience on this account was sixty percent bad and forty percent good. Would we then have to say that the Stalin experience was not a part of the experience of socialist revolution? Clearly we need a way toward a more qualitative understanding. There were, to my mind, real achievements of the So­ viet people and the international communist movement under the leadership of Stalin (and though some of these achievements were accomplished

despite that

leadership, not all of them were). The "upward" assessment (70/30 and the rest; of course, if one wants to see the truly fawning assessment, one has to venture into Enver Hoxha territory-see

With Stalin, it is fascinating stuff) has largely

�

been a response to the unrelentingly "downward" assessm nt of an interesting array of people and political forces, from reactionaries who never hoped for any­ thing other than that socialism would be defeated, to honest progressives and rad­ icals who believe that socialism, even under enormously difficult circumstances, should have achieved much more and should have put the masses in a better po­ sition to struggle against and defeat capitalism. It is within such a complex field that Sartre attempted to not simply apply 20120 hindsight, but instead to get in­ side the logic of history. Because I have already mentioned Mao a good bit in this discussion, perhaps this is the point to say that I do not think the problems of the Stalin period go away if one simply disavows Mao (as is the fashion within much of the Left these days). Capitalism, as no one will deny, is a very tough nut to crack, especially in the way that it works through capillary movements into every nook and cranny of life and society. Mao's argument is that socialism is a contradictory social for­ mation, in which class struggle continues and even, in some ways, intensifies. This intensification takes place especially where power is concentrated, in the top leadership of the communist party (and, indeed, within individual leaders) . The class struggle then makes itself felt as a two-line struggle, between those taking the capitalist road and those attempting to give leadership, on various fronts, to the struggle to cross the narrow horizons of bourgeois right . Class struggle can-

Dictatorship "for" the proletariat

19

not be waged if the leadership denies that there is class struggle under socialism. Stalin did in fact deny this in the mid-1930s, arguing that the material basis for the restoration of capitalism had been completely wiped out, at least insofar as the internal dynamics of the Soviet Union were concerned. The only basis for restora­ tion, S ' talin argued, was external; thus all activity that ran counter to the wishes of the leadership was necessarily the work of agents of capitalist powers. It is es­ s!(,ntial to see thatStalin's thinking here, as dogmatic as it was, and as dogmati­ cally as it was applied, represented the conventional wisdom among Marxists at the time. Among these would be Trotsky, who did not argue that the dreaded "bu­ reaucracy" was itself a class. Here, as elsewhere, my understanding of Maoism is very much shaped by the writings of Bob Avakian, in particular his Conquer the World? The International Proletariat Must and Will. Though I have never been overly fond of the title, I find this to be an extremely insightful overview of the development of the inter.-national communist movement from the time of Marx and Engels to the present period. The present discussion, in fact, could be quite fruitfully expanded to en­ compass the arguments of Sartre, Mao, and Avakian. Avakian argues that, witll the seizure of power in one or a few countries, and the beginnings of socialist construction, the proletariat can no longer be said to simply have "nothing to lose but its chains" (to quote the last words of the Communist Manifesto). The exis­ tence of a socialist country in a world still dominated by capitalism presents the international communist movement with a contradiction that cannot simply be re­ solved in a linear way. This argument is very much anticipated by the section of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 2, that has come to be known as "Socialism in One Country." (This is the title that was given to the section when it was published separately in New Left Review number 100; in CDR2, the section ' forms the bulk of the chapter on "the unresolved struggle as anti-labor.") Apart from arguments concerning the overall coherence of the unfinished second vol­ ume of the Critique, the sections on the Stalin period provide some crucial theo- retical tools. (The manuscript for CDR2 was not"ublished until 1985, five years afterSartre's death, in an edition edited by Sartre's adopted daughter and literary executor, Arlette Elkaim-Sartre. Different views on the book's integrity are pre­ sented by Ronald Aronson, in his Sartre 's Second Critique, where it is argued that the book essentially hangs together, and William McBride, in his Sartre 's Politi­ cal Theory, where the claim is that the project is not really integrated and perhaps cannot be. I am more inclined toward the former view.) In particular, I will con­ centrate on the idea of the "dictatorship for the proletariat" as a key link in un­ derstanding what happened to socialism underStalin's leadership. So, let us tum now to Sartre's conception of the impasse of socialism that was the penultimate result of Stalin's leadership-the ultimate result being the restoration of capitalism when Khrushchev and company decisively resolved Stalin's muddle. Already some of the analysis that has been presented thus far in outline form explains some important aspects of th,eStalin experience. That

20

Chapter 1

is, on some level, Stalin's errors represent limitations in what was generally understood by Marxists in that period concerning the construction of social­ ism. What is more difficult is to create an analysis that shows decisively where and when, in a fully contextualized sense, the Stalin "deviation" went beyond bad; dogmatic Marxism into the impa.sse of Marxism. In other words, I find the "spiral" concept explanatory on the whole, and I would especially propose the idea of the Stalin period as a segment of the spiral against those who want to deal with problems of socialism simply by disavowing major parts of the so­ cialist experience (so that, when things go wrong or bad, they simply say, "that wasn't us"; I am thinking especially of the various Trotskyist arguments, and an interesting point for further exploration is that we might take these argu­ ments as concentrated versions of all Eurocentric arguments that also take the definition of socialism to be something like the "full realization" of democ­ ' racy; part of my point here is that, if we do not take responsibility for social­ ism when it messes up, then how can we expect to fix it?). However, without some mediating concept that explains the impasse of socialism-or the aspects of the Stalin experience that represent an impasse-we will tend to have too linear a view of how revolution might be "restarted." That is, we might lose sight of the crucial point that it is never simply a matter of taking up where things left off, but , rather of reinventing revolution. The deviation and impasse are not, I think, equivalent to the idea of "de­ generation" as this term is often used-that is, in Trotsky's conception of a "degenerated workers' state." There was degeneration, to be sure (just as there was bureaucratization), but to describe the Stalin period as a whole as simply a period of degeneration,Sartre seems to indicate, is not accurate. Instead, the experience is more of a mixed bag. T his assessment, I would argue, is certainly implied by "Socialism in One Country," where Sartre clearly believed there was at that time still a revolution to be defended; I believe this claim is not controversial, despite the fact that some Sartreans have recently joined in with "failure of socialism" rhetoric. Part of my rehearsal of some similarities be­ tween Sartre and Mao on the question of capitalist restoration has to do with this turn among some Sartreans. I am recalling especially a session at the 1991 meeting of the North American Sartre Society in which the Critique was ap­ plied to more recent events in Eastern Europe, as if socialism had existed in that part of the world until the end of the 1980s. I found this strange and not at all true to Sartre (whatever other arguments might have been mustered for the positions offered). It also seemed to me as if the sixties, during which many people realized that the Soviet Union was not a force for liberation, Sartre not least of all (nor was he quiet about it), had been forgotten - even though (or was it especially though?) the people presenting the papers at this session were from the sixties generation. A passage from What Is Literature ? gives us a feel forSartre's sense of the im­ passe in 1947:

Dictatorship "for" the proletariat

21

We were not unaware that a time would come when historians would be able to survey from all angles this stretch of time which we lived feverishly minute by minute . . . . But the irreversibility of our age belonged only to us . We had to save or lose ourselves gropingly in this irreversible time. These events pounced upon us like thieves and we had to do our job in the face of the incomprehensible and untenable, to bet, to conjecture without evidence, to undertake in uncertainty and persevere " wi�out hope. Our age would b e explained, but no one could keep it from having I, been inexplicable to us. (Romano , 566)

d

This passage is quoted at the end of a review of Tony ludt's book, Past Imperfect.

ludt's ai.m is to discredit Sartre by claiming that he was an uncritical supporter of Stalin. The reviewer, Carlin Romano, does a good job of defending Sartre- even if his defense is predicated on the typical Stalin-bashing that does not move us closer to understanding the Stalin period, which is of course what S artre tried to do. It is not surprising that neoliberals are turning their guns on Sartre, as did neo­ conservatives before them. There

are

many dimensions to this attack, including

the need to discredit, in advance of any new period of social turmoil and rebel­ lion, the idea of the engaged intellectual. Although some (perhaps most) readers will find this strange, I also see this sort of attack as a reminder of why we needed (and still need, though it may be too late) a radical defense of Paul de Man and perhaps even (God forgive me) Martin Heidegger: the neoconservative attacl}s on them had nothing to do with any attempt to understand fascism, but instead were maneuvers in the general war· on critical thought that was launched as part of the Reagan era. For reasons that we will turn to in a moment, Stalin did not see the role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War as a kind of "bet." (The "without hope" part in the Sartre quotation goes beyond, I think, Sartre's critique of determinist materialism; instead, I see this 'as a kind of class marker, an expression of a petty­ bourgeois outlook.) Stalin did not see that fight as an "undertaking without cer­ tail!ty" in the name of the proletarian revolution. To l>e sure, the outcome of the war was far from certain, and the S oviet Union could have been defeated. But the perspective of putting things on the line, indeed, putting everything on the line, for the larger aims of the world revolution was not Stalin 's perspective. (Here I am especially indebted to Avakian's arguments .) In a moment we will say more about the outlook that was characteristic of Stalin, but we can already see that, under-the perspective that the revolution is only a "conjecture with evidence" (the

evidence of the one existing socialist country), the revolution could not help but

find itself in an impasse. The accomplishments of the revolution could not help but turn, in the long run, into their opposites . As Sartre so famousJy put it in

Searchfor a Method, "Marxism stopped": Marxism, after drawing us to it as the moon draws the tides, after transforming all our ideas, after liquidating the categories of our bourgeois thought, abruptly left us stranded. It did not satisfy our need to understand. In the particular situation in which

22

Chapter 1 we were placed it no longer had anything new to teach us, because it had come to a stop. . : '. Marxism stopped. Precisely because this philosophy wants to change the ' world, because its aim is "philosophy-becoming-the-world," because it is and wants to be practical , there arose within it a veritable schism which rejected theory on one side

/

and praxis on the other. From the moment the USSR, encircled and alone, undertook its gigantic effort at industrialization, Marxism found itself unable to bear the shock of these new struggles; the practical necessities and the mistakes that always arise from them. At this period of withdrawal (for the USSR), of the ebbtide (for the proletariats),

the ideology itself was subordinated to a double need: security (that is, unity) and the construction of socialism inside the USSR. Concrete thought must be born from praxis and must turn back upon it in order to clarify it, not by chance and without rules , but­ as in all sciences and all techniques-in confonnity with principles. Now the party leaders, bent on pushing integration to the limit, feared that the free process of truth, with all the discussions and all the conflicts which it involves, would break the unity of combat; they reserved for themselves the right to define the line and to interpret the event. In addition, out of fear that the experience might not provide its own clarities, that it might put into question certain of their guiding ideas and might contribute to "weakening the ideological struggle," they put the doctrine out of reach. The separa­ tion of theory and practice resulted in transfonning the latter into an empiricism with­ out principles; the former into a pure, fixed knowledge.

(21-22)

Even before turning to Sartre's discussion of the line struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, we might note that something of this characterization already applies to the period of Civil War and War Conununism (the latter is Lenin's term for a pe­ riod in which the embattled revolution must proceed as something of a "forced march")-and, certainly, it is accurate up to a point to characterize the Stalin pe­ riod as the return to a seemingly permanent state of War Conununism. Nothing must break the unity of combat! Given the direction the discussion of these mat­ ters almost always takes, my one proviso here is that, in considering the politics of desperation, even where the desperation seems to be a gross overreaction-this is always easy to say with 20120 hindsight, but certainly this characterization has to apply to aspects of Stalin's leadership-one must never lose sight of the causes of the desperation. During the actual period of "War Conununism" (roughly from the Civil War until the New Economic Program, 1918-21), for instance, some of the more authoritarian measures were authorized by Trotsky -who seemingly never hesitated over such things. In other words, simply chanting the mantra, "Stalinism," ad infinitum, does not help to explain much. At the beginning of "Socialism in One Country," Sartre claims that "[we] are simply taking an example, which we shall consider notfor its own sake but for its pedagogic value" (98). This I find hard to believe! In fact, this section, which amounts to about eighteen pages, is so rich, that a short book could be written about it. One aspect of the analysis that I will not pursue at length here has to do with the way that Sartre shows the personalities of Trotsky and Stalin interacting with the line struggle that unfolded in the twenties. One does wonder what might be said if the same question and methodology that Sartre applied to Gustave

Dictatorship "for" the proletariat

23

Flaubert -"What can be known of a man?"- were to be applied to the antago­

nists in this case. In any case, Sartre does not resort to the standard Trotskyist

claim that Stalin was "the outstanding mediocrity of his time," or that Stalin had

no roots among the masses . In fact, Sartre argues that the lack of roots was pre­ cisely the problem for the emigres , those who spent a good deal of the period from about 1903 until 1917 in Western Europe. The way that Sartre frrst of all in­ fegrates the "personalities" question is in pitting the "westernizing intellectual"

-against the militants working in Russia. I believe that his analysis here is useful, at least in a preliminary way, for seeing the Eurocentrism that remains the hall­ mark of Trotskyism (and, again, for all forms of socialism that define the project primarily in terms of "true" or "radical" democracy; on these points, see espe­

cially 1 10-1 1 ). Sartre's analysis also points to the problems of intellectualism.

But all of these issues - personality, intellectualism, a fundamentally Western ori­

entation- only make sense, in Sartre's perspective, in terms of the actual contra­ diction embodied in Stalin's line .

Let us go directly to the relevant passages.

Against universalist radicalism, Stalin infelicitously defmed what might be called a particularist radicalism. And, of course, that monstrous object did not remain at the level of the verbal formulation. Insomuch as it was to define a propaganda, a penna­ nent character of praxis, and a certain future, it could be termed an institution. . : • Any positivist history that sought to explain the Stalinist slogan ["socialism in one country"] by the internal weakness and isolation of the USSR around 1925-30, and re- . garded these as passively suffered, would miss the crucial point. Of course, everyone did suffer poverty, they all did suffer isolation; but at the same time these conditions were products of revolutionary praxis . . . . Poverty, shortage of technicians and cadres·, encirclement: these were mortal dangers for the Revolution, and at the same time they were the Revolution itselfcoming into being in a particular situation. (104-5) One very important strength of Sartre 's analysis is that he does not argue that

the revolution should not have occurred because conditions were not yet

"ripe." (This was Kautsky's claim in the aftermath of 1917, representing Eu­ rocentric Marxist orthodoxy.) For he goes on to say that a revolution elsewhere would also have had to deal with the

particular contradictions involved in

coming into existence in a p articular situation (Sartre discusses the example of England in this light; see 107). To this it might be responded that, while it is

undeniably true , there is a particular p articularity that Marx was concerned with, namely the state of development of the mode of production. The issues

at stake here are well known: the economies of backward countries are not de­

veloped enough to sustain socialism, as they are barely even able to sustain

capitalism (if that), and therefore any attempt at socialist revolution in such a

country is doomed in advance. This remains the view within certain Marxist

orthodoxies; if I may, I will illustrate using the example of a personal en­

counter that is entirely typical.

Chapter 1

24 In the spring of

1 998 I had the good fortune to attend the opening confer­

iIw

ence of a:new society of Marxist academics in England, meet

at John

Moores University in Liverpool. The keynote speaker for the gathering was

the well�known Marxist literary scholar, Terry Eagleton. His talk restated the

bit of orthodoxy mentioned just now, the sort of thing that has been heralded in recent years as a "return to classical Marxism." Let us recall again that, in

relation to this "classical" view, Sartre is often labeled as a "moralizer" and a

"Third World-ist." Here we see the great divide in Marxism; on the one side is

what Lenin called economism and Mao called the "theory of productive forces," while, on the other side is what I would call internationalism and anti­

imperialism, and which I associate with Sartre , as well as with Lenin and Mao.

In the discussion period after his talk, I had the opportunity to raise the fol­

lowing question to Professor Eagleton: "If socialism can only be built in places

where the productive forces are in an advanced state of development, what would one say then to people who are struggling in Peru , or Haiti, or Indone­

sia? Should we just tell them to wait and see what the Germans come up

with?" In response, Eagleton quoted Lenin: "It can begin here, but it cannot be

finished here." Lenin , of course, was referring to Russia, and his words would

seem to be a response to the idea, which Stalin set out in the terms that we are

discussing, of "socialism in one country." But it seems to me that these words

divide into two, and that the Eurocentric slant of Professor Eagleton's use of

them actually goes against the thrust of Lenin's position. One part of Lenin's

statement is that the revolution to take the world beyond its present form of so­

cial organization is a global process, one that cannot be completed within the confines of any one country. (In our time, I think we are still trying to under­ stand this point, and the issue is complicated by transformations within capi­

talism itself.) If one reads this statement from Lenin in the context of a Marx­

ism that is oriented first of all toward the developVJ,ent of the productive

forces, however, what Professor Eagleton is really saying is that we will quote this statement if the question of an economically "backwards"country, and the

particular particularity we are concerned with, namely the productive forces,

is raised; but we will not raise the iSSUe, or not in the same way, if it is a mat­

ter of socialism arising in the "advanced" countries.

Undoubtedly, there are obstacles to the construction of socialism that

are

deeply and directly connected to the economic level of a given society - and its level of culture,

as well. To express these difficulties mainly in terms of the "re­

turn to classical Marxism," however, then turns out to work on three levels that run up against the project of human emancipation as international and global:

( 1)

a canceling of the twentieth century, which then circumvents the development of imperialism in the sense that Lenin used the term; (2) a fundamental orientation

toward Europe, and therefore toward the better-off and more bourgeoisified strata

of the working class; (3) a return to economic determinism, whereby culture is

Dictatorship "jor" the proletariat

25

merely the epiphenomenal excrescence of the productive base. On the matter of culture, what is also missed by the economist trend is the fact that a great pro­ portion of the masses in imperialist countries have received decades of schooling in the culture of imperialism. Sartre locates the fundamental contradiction of the Stalin period elsewhere, and then assimilates these economic particularities to it. The crux of the matter, ,for Sartre, is the question of incarnation: . the Revolution, incarnated in the center of the world as a long-tenn praxis defined by definite material circumstances, could not itself develop without engendering-by its actual course, albeit in contradiction with its leaders' project-the impotence of for­ eign proletariats. In this sense,

it can be said that its incarnation was in direct con­ tradiction with its universalization. (105, my emphasis)

This is the most important argument here: the revolution as it must incarnate it­ self creates a contradiction /or the revolution. When I say, "as it must incarnate itself," I mean, as the revolution actually comes into the world. To abandon this contradiction, however, is to abandon the revolution itself-either through Kaut­ sky's "they should not have taken to arms," because the situation was not yet "ripe," or through Trotsky's invocations of "internationalism" or "permanent rev­ olution." To see why the point applies in the latter case, we need to look further at the way that Sartre fleshes out the contradiction: The contradiction here derived from the fact that the proletarian Revolution in the USSR, instead of being a factor in the liberation and emancipation of Europe's work­ ing class masses - as it should have been- was achieved at the cost of plunging them into relative impotence.

(105)

Sartre refers in a footnote to "[t]he subsequent and crucially important achieve­ ments" that the Revolution made, "directly or indire&tly (defeat of Nazism, tri­ umph of communism in China, emergence of the Third World)," but argues that these cannot be figured into an appraisal of the first phase of the revolution , where- I agree with Sartre-there were real contradictions between pursuing the revolution in Russia and unfolding revolution in Europe. (Perhaps the Brest­ Litovsk treaty is the most important example of this from the earliest period of the Bolshevik Revolution. The signing of the treaty allowed some "breathing room" for the revolution in Russia, and it also provided an example of the with­ drawal from imperialism, but it also allowed the nations that continued the war to attack the masses even more violently. The Soviet Union also signed border agreements that effectively traded security for the revolution for the suppression of communists in other countries.) The point, again, is that the trade-off in the concrete situation was between a "particularist universalism" and an "abstract universalism," and this trade was already being made in the earliest period of the

Chapter 1

26

revolution. In the name of the concrete gains of the revolution, the particular, the incarnate,' \.

- .'

Stalin himself, despite innumerable acts of treachery, did still help the Chinese, Spanish, etc., to the extent he believed possible without provoking armed interven­ tion by the West.

(106)

Everything, in other words, had to be subordinated to the defense of the Soviet Union, to consolidation of the revolution. Although this was a form of "national"

defense, and although nationalism came to play a very large role-especially leading into the Second World War, when an increasing number of icons from Russia's tsarist past were revived -the all-consuming emphasis on consolidation was not simply the "betrayal" of the revolution. (This is not to say that there was not a significant

element of betrayal.)

"socialism in one country" was the product of revolutionary praxis reflecting upon its effects and the contradictions it had engendered. Synthetically, and approaching

the dogma of the Bolshevik Party's interiorization of these contradictory results, it

an attempt to lift the mortgage of internation­ alism, while retaining the USSR's ability to give assistance to foreign revolutionary parties in accordance with its means and the risks involved. (106, my emphasis) can be grasped in its intelligibility as

This passage needs to be understood in its entirety. TPe problem is this: how could it be said that "the workers have nothing to lose but their chains, the work­

ers have no country," when indeed the workers had now acquired a country (and a rather large one at that, one-sixth of the world's landmass)? And, if the workers

did have a country, shouldn't the workers and their leaders do their part to take

very good care of it, and not risk it carelessly? I do not believe that any . other Marxists in the first fifteen or twenty years of the revolution understood this con­

tradiction any better than Stalin

did; in fact, to this day, it seems to me that the

anti-Stalin trends still do not understand the contradiction. This is because, on all

sides (Stalin, Trotsky, Kautsky) there was a tendency to think that, if it is really a

revolution we are talking about, then it must proceed without fundamental con­ tradictions . (After all, the revolution itself, it is supposed, would have resolved the fundamental contradiction between social production and individual accumu­ lation , so it is now merely a matter of staying this course, in "permanence.")

Clearly there was a good deal of dogmatism, and it obviously cannot be said that Stalin was the least of the dogmatists and determinists.

What was worse, there was a basic distrust of the masses on the part of Stalin. Ironically, although Stalin wrote his first pamphlet on the difference between Marxism and anarchism, the latter trend not being something anyone would think

to associate Stalin with, still there was something of the "outlaw" and "renegade" in at least Stalin's early life. For instance, when Stalin was a Bolshevik leader in

Georgia, his section of the Party became famous for what were called "expropri-

Dictatorship "for" the proletariat

27

ations" - armed bank robberies. While I do not have any moral qualms with such robberies-I'm reminded of Brecht's famous quip that it is better to rob a bank than to own one-a tendency to rely on such methods was sufficiently criticized by Lenin, in

What Is To Be Done? Lenin argued that there is a fundamental unity

between terrorism, on the one side, and economism and reformism, on the other. !Vhile the "expropriations" were not exactly "terrorism," still, they were armed actions that were not deeply rooted in mass activism. (Perhaps there is a similar­ 'tty' here to Che Guevara's theory of "focoism" -the "roving band" model of or­ ganization.) Sartre also presents a compelling analysis of this distrust, one more rooted in the dynamics of the "monstrosity," socialism in one country. Sartre ar­ gues that the contradiction embodied in the revolution's incarnation breaks "any relation of reciprocity" between the USSR and the proletarians of other lands . "If the USSR could build socialism on its own, it did not really

need foreign help;

and if it still had to intervene-when it could-to aid revolutionaries in danger in . the capitalist nations, this was its

mission, its generosity" (CDR2, 106). 20/20 hindsight, but it seems to me

Perhaps this is an observation made with

that these errors on Stalin's part, errors in handling an objective contradiction en­ gendered by the revolution itself, were never an adequate excuse for the slavish­ ness of the socialists and communists in the West. Their continual bleat (and one hears this still today from certain quarters) has been that "Stalin- or, the Stalin­ ists-would not let them have a revolution." The situation was enormously com­ plicated, of course, and ·communists and other radicals believed sincerely in the imperative not to bring the wrath of the capitalist states down on the USSR, but what kind of revolutionary waits for permission to make revolution? Fortunately, Mao did not wait. But what Mao and Sartre both grasped was that socialism is an inherently contradictory social formation, because the incarnation of the revolu­ tion has not yet brought about a complete transcendence of capitalism-and yet, there is no going around specific incarnations and therefore there is no avoiding the contradictions of socialism. (Mao argues , famously, that every social system will have its contradiction, even communism.) In other words, whatever aspects of Stalin's personality may have played a role in the problems of the Soviet sys­ tem and the international communist movement in the Stalin period, this is not the place to begin an analysis of the fate of socialism in that period. The psychobiography approach is especially associated with Trotsky and Trotskyism. One thinks of Trotsky's use of terms such as "Asiatic," which strikes me as simply racist and a reflection of Trotsky's Eurocentrism, as well as his description of Stalin as "the outstanding mediocrity of our time ," and of course the Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher wrote a psychobiography of Stalin. In this vein, allow me to make the following observation, which has somehow escaped most commentators and, to be honest, did not occur to me until somewhat re­ cently. The discussion of the dynamic in the Soviet Union is almost always framed in terms of "Stalin versus Trotsky." My observation is that, even if Stalin had never been born, there is no way that Trotsky would have ever become the

28

Chapter 1

leader of the Bolshevik Party or the Soviet Union. Trotsky did not have roots in the party. On the contrary, he spent a good deal of his time between 1907 and

1 9 1 6 being harshly critical of Lenin. The idea that, in 1917, Lenin came to ac­

cept Trotsky's theory of revolution is a concoction- significantly, the Tr€ltsky­ ists maintain that, at the same time, Trotsky came to accept Lenin's "theory of '

organization." Not only is this not really the case even in its own terms, hence

the ongoing comedy of the Trotskyist splinter groups, but the terms are flawed to begin with. What Lenin proposes in

What Is To Be Done? is ftrst of all a thee

ory of knowledge-having to do with how the proletariat and its allies comes to an understanding of the possibility of its self-activity and therefore, secondarily, what forms of leadership and organization are needed in this project. Further­ more, because Trotsky was an intellectual oriented toward the West, who spent parts of his journalistic career arguing for spurious notions such as a "United States of Europe," there was a basic distrust of Trotsky within the Bolshevik Party and even among the masses. Trotsky was a talented orator and intellectual , to be sure, but he was also given to demagoguery -in contrast to which Stalin

was regarded as "dull ," at least by Trotsky himself. While this is not the place for a complete critique of Trotskyism, my point here is that, along with the fact that his political line did not correspond to the working out of the objective con­ tradiction represented by the Bolshevik Revol ution and the emergence of the So­ viet Union, neither was there a real possibility that he would have become the leader of the Bolshevik Party in any case. With 20/20 hindsight, and attempting to look back through many years of the "Stalin versus Trotsky" interpretation, and keeping with Sartre's arguments about the political line, one can see better why Stalin emerged as the leader. Two of the main contenders - Zinoviev and Kamenev -were discredited by their having broken ranks with the Party leadership over the insurrection of October (old calendar) 1 91 7. Bukharin was somewhat younger than the others,

and he was also seen as someone who wanted to perpetuate the New Economic

Programme more or less indeftnitely ("we will build socialism at a snail 's pace," was his proposal). Although this is something of a simpliftcation, one might look at the matter in the following way. The Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of the USSR was the affirmation of a certain "spirit," represented first of all by Lenin, or by his conception of the dynamics of imperialism and proletarian revolution. Certain institutions "incarnated" this spirit, though most of the S oviet institutions that were set up between October 1917 and Jan­

uary 1 924, when Lenin died, were either not well developed or of a highly pro­

visional nature -most especially the N.E .P. "Socialist construction," as it was

called (after Lenin's famous statement after the October insurrection, pro­ claiming the existence of the USSR: "We shall now begin to construct the so­ cialist order"), really fell to Lenin's successors, and had no blueprint. In the wake of Lenin's passing, all of the leaders of the Communist Party of the So­ viet Union published accounts of what they considered Lenin's legacy to be,

Dictatorship ''for'' the proletariat

29

what they thought the meaning of the October Revolution was , and what they thought the future of the Soviet Union should be. Stalin's contribution to this

debate was

The Foundations of Leninism. While the book is what one might

call "workmanlike" if one were reviewing its aesthetic properties, there is a

very plausible argument that, of all the accounts published at that time, Stalin's

was the one that most represented the continuation of Lenin's line .

. It is not simply that Trotsky had not been a member of the Bolshevik Party until

Yess than a year before the Revolution, though of course there were reasons for this, and these reasons are generally obscured in Trotskyist accounts. When Trot­

sky joined the Bolsheviks, it was as part of a group of Mensheviks called the "Menshevikki Internationalists." Why were they the "internation

a!i:sts"? Because

they had broken to some extent with the Menshevik position-or nonposition ­

on imperialism. By this last term I mean "imperialism" as Lenin understood it,

capitalism as a fully global mode of production, which creates a bifurcation in the

world that replicates the class struggle on a global scale (imperialist countries that are in a position similar to that of the bourgeoisie in individual countries , domi­

nated countries that are more in the position of the proletariat) , and which creates

a basic division in the international working class itself. Two conclusions that

Lenin drew in light of this division were that the revolutionary party had to always

strive to go "lower and deeper" among the proletariat and basic masses (and there­

fore

not base itself on the immediate economic demands of the better-off work­

ers-in other words, this is Lenin's critique of what he called "econornism"), and

that; in the imperialist countries, the revolutionaries had to promote what Lenin

called "revolutionary defeatism." That is, whenever the social system in an impe­

rialist country goes into crisis, which in Lenin's view will ultimately lead to war,

the proletariat and its allies must work for the defeat of "their own" ruling class.

These are positions that were resisted by the Mensheviks and by Trotsky (who was something of an "independent operator" in the period from

1907 to 1916, but

was formally a member of the Mensheviks), and that-are resisted to this day by

Trotskyists. (This goes especially for Lenin's argument about the division in the

working class.) For Lenin, there was a basic connection between this understand­ ing of imperialism and real internationalism, and there could be no "socialist rev­

olution" except on the basis of internationalism and a recognition of the reality of

imperialism. All of this became muddled somewhat through the course of

1917,

because it was widely recognired that the social system in Russia was rotten to

the core, and Lenin presented the famous "Land, Peace, and Bread" formulation

as a way of popularizing the Bolshevik program. He also made alliances with the

left wings of the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionary Party (this was a party

of agrarian reform, popular among the peasants), in order to build the broadest

base of unity for the revolution. But the basic idea was a revolution against not only capitalism, but against what capitalism had become, namely imperialism.

When Trotskyists talk, as they often do lately, of a reaffIrmation of "classical

Marxism," they are in fact denying this qUalitative development of capitalism

Chapter 1

30

(and, relatedly, they generally affinn the most economistic side of Marx). The

Bolsheviks were known for something else, their internationalist I'\nti-imperial­ ism, and Stalin, for all his personal flaws and all his tendencies toWard dogmatic and nondialectical materialism, was seen as carrying on this tradition.

There is one additional element of this consideration of Trotsky and his real

prospects for leadership in the Soviet Union, an element that I cannot do justice to

here. This is the question of the role that anti-Semitism played in the whole affair. Whether this question can be elevated to a central place in the conflict with Trot­ skyism I am not prepared to say - but I am prepared to recognize anti-Semitism as

a factor that significantly shaped politics , including radical politics, in Russia. This

is more than obvious , I realize. Sartre does pursue the question of what he calls "Stalinist anti-Semitism" in the second volume of the

Critique (263-271), though

without focusing on Trotsky. Still , more investigation is warranted.

Now, what does this seeming digression have to do with Sartre, beyond the more general points that have already been made? I think: that developing this context helps us understand better what seems to be an extraordinary incongruity: how did this great intellectual who, probably more than anyone in the twentieth century, was associated with the idea

offreedom, come to defend-if that is the

word, but I think: it is indeed the word - a fonn of Marxism that, in power, was

very often authoritarian, reductivistic, and, to put it crudely, "locked up"? Perhaps what we really see, in the transition from Being and Nothingness to the

Critique of Dialectical Reason and Sartre's engagement with historical materialism, is the recognition that "freedom" is a very complicated issue. There may be some re­

spect in which it is ontologically simple, even if with complex ramifications, but freedom is also historically, socially, and politically complex - which then of course must have ontological ramifications for an anti-essentialist philosopher such as Sartre. Let me make this very concrete. When Sartre speaks of "the subsequent and crucially important achievements" of the Soviet Revolution, and, for instance, in­ cludes the "triumph of communism in China," the Eurocentric and "all that" crowd tends just to say "ho hum." ButJet us consider the historical context of Sartre's claim, and how this context relates to the question of freedom- includ­ ing the freedom

to live. Yes , it is true that the Chinese Communists, led by Mao

Tsetung, and the Chinese people, made their revolution for the most part despite

Stalin. Part of the "locked up" aspect of Stalin's Marxism was that he could not

recognize certain kinds of new developments. (Though this is again a place

where, for example, Trotsky's understanding was not any better.) Still, when the People's Republic of China was declared in 1 949, it was recognized by and given

material support by the Soviet Union. Furthennore, the People's Republic was

supported by Stalin and the very existence of the Soviet Union; even if this may seem like the most passive fonn of "support," it was in fact a decisive element in the ability of the revolutionary regime in China to survive its early years. For, let us be realistic here and ask, what would have happened to the revolution in China

Dictatorship "for" the proletariat

31

if there had not been a powerful socialist regime i n the Soviet Union, however flawed, at the time of its emergence? Of course, we cannot know for sure - cer­

tainly Mao was not one to back away from threats . But I do think that we can say

with something approaching certainty that the Western capitalist powers , and ftrst

of all the United States, would have brought down every form of violence and

military technology on the Chinese people . Let us recall: the United States in

1945 used nuclear weapons to destroy two cities in Japan (the targets having been

decided in terms of where the working class areas were)

primarily as a way of

sending a message to the Soviet Union. The U.S . military planners, including Eisenhower, were ftrm in their view that dropping the atom bombs had nothing

to do with defeating the Japanese -they were already defeated (see Alperovitz). Furthermore , the United States launched a new war in Asia soon after the triumph of the Chinese Revolution - acting under the pretext of there being "two Koreas ," when these were in fact the creation of colonialism and imperialism. The United States was undoubtedly attempting to assert itself as the inheritor of Japanese and European (especially English and French) colonialism and imperialism in Asia.

Why would we have any reason to think otherwise than that the United States

hoped not only to march across Korea, but on into China as well? The fact that Mao and the Chinese people responded to this before U.S. troops

in that specific instance made it into China (because, of course , U.S. troops had been �n China

already, not so long before)-the fact that Mao beat the United States to the punch, as it were-is no vindication of the United States, nor is it any reason to

think that China was in any sense an "aggressor" in this conflict. (Neither is it a vindication, of course, that, the United States was not able to carry out its plans.) Furthermore, taking over for Japanese and French imperialism on the south side of China, and again employing the bogus idea that a country just somehow man­ aged to divide itself into two parts and that one of the parts was asking for U.S. intervention, the United States proved von Clausewitz's famous adage that "war is the continuation of politics by other me�" by using the most horriftc weapons- many of which were devices of mass torture, such as napalm and agent orange -in Vietnam . In the case of both Korea and Vietnam (and China, for

that matter) , the United States continually threatened to use nuclear weapons,

holding not only those countries , but indeed the entire world, in a state of nuclear

terror and blackmail. These were also the days when, recall, the United States

promoted the idea and practice of exploding one hydrogen bomb after another ei­ ther in or above the ground. As a result, whole , inhabited, islands in the South Pa­ cific were blown up, and radiation was allowed to drift across Utah because it was

specifically calculated that the Mormons would not raise a ruckus. Those so un­ fortunate as to be in the vicinity of fallout were advised to simply "duck and cover" and then brush the dust off of one's clothing . This is the context in which Sartre is considering the Stalin question. Sartre is fully aware of this context. I think that it is not at all extreme to assert that, if the Soviet Union had not existed in 1 949, the United States might very well have

Chapter 1

32

dealt with the Chinese Revolution by using nuclear weapons and whatever other means of mass destruction and torture that it had at its disposal. bf course, we can never know any of this with certainty, for who knows what the course of history might have been if there had not been a revolution in Russia in 1 9 1 7 , or if Stalin had not defended that revolution in the middle twenties against the Eurocentric perspective? But I will say this: without the Soviet Union in that period, capital­ ism's global reign of terror would have been even far worse than it already was. I think: this is the implicit question of freedom that is in the background of Sartre's analysis of Stalin and the Soviet Union under his leadership. The historical irony is that what Sartre is calling the "monstrosity," the isola­ tion of the Soviet Union that required a period of "socialism 'in one country," be­ came a kind of "norm. This is what Sartre is calling (in the passage cited as the epigraph to this chapter) the "interiorization of the deviation." Sartre argues that one aspect of this interiorization was the "transcendence of negativity"; in the mode of permanent consolidation, the sense on the part of Stalin was that the Oc­ tober Revolution inaugurated an era of general positivity. Recalling the language with which I began this chapter, concerning the idea of history turning a corner (there I was referring to the Battle of Stalingrad). Stalin's consolidationist tendency, fully integrated with the events of the period from 1917 through the mid- 1 920s, was not to see things in terms of struggle and upheaval. Thus, Sartre argues that Stalin was unable to understand Mao's militant stance against impe­ rialism, and indeed was harshly critical of it (CDR2, 235). (However, in my view Sartre does not entirely do justice to Stalin's views; in Economic Problems ofSo­ cialism in the USSR, published in 1 952, Stalin reaffIrmed Lenin's basic argument that "capitalism means war," and that the road to communism was not going to simply be one of "peaceful transition.") What is more is that, Between

1948

and

1953 , Stalin's praxis became a monstrous caricature of itself. He

could not resolve the problems posed by the existence of new socialist States . The man of retreat and solitude felt only mistrust when Russia emerged from isolation.

(CDR2, 235)

This passage occurs more than a hundred pages after the section of the second volume of the Critique dedicated to the question of "socialism in one country." Let us return to the end of that section to underscore the point, and to conclude this argument. Thus the Stalinist formula-at first false, then more and more true- eventually de­

cayed and lapsed into an honorific role when the situation no longer justified it: i.e., when the Chinese Revolution and the appearance of the people's democracies in Central Europe abolished "socialist isolation" and required another praxis on the part of the Soviet government. Meanwhile, of course, the counter-finalities of that tran­ scended praxis had transformed the USSR: stratifications , practico-inert structures. That singular incarnation was progressively singularized in the process of institu­ tionalization.

(CDR2, 1 1 6-17)

Dictatorship "for" the proletariat

33

The necessary particularization and concretization of the revolution now stood

in their most direct contradiction with the universalization of the revolution. The deviation became more fully internalized, producing practico-inert structures. The whole point of revolution was increasingly lost, and, in a Sartrean frame, we must

concede that there was no simple touchstone that could have been returned to in order to restore the revolution-and this includes "classical Marxism." An anti­

essentialist conception of revolution is one that must continually reinvent itself through actual historical unfoldings and contradictions -the universal must be un­

derstood in the concrete and particular. This does not mean, either, that we cannot

continue to raise, as a principle that all the same will remain art empty placeholder without historical engagement and contextualization, what might be taken to be

the ethical core of Sartre's work-a core that is essentially Kantian in its thrust:

the unalterable right of human beings not to be made into mere things . However, the practico-inert structures that emerged in Soviet society, transcending negativ­

ity and pushing that society toward complete integration (this is language from

236-37), cannot be understood simply in terms of "ethics" (especially as that term

is most often used in philosophy today) or in terms of the categories of classical

Marxism, but instead only in terms of the imperialist organization of the world.

Sartre was the only "Western Marxist" to grapple with this-and therefore the label probably does not fit -and this is why his analysis of the Stalin peripd stands

apart from those undertaken from a Eurocentrlc perspective.

2 Between Mao and Moses

Sartre's final decade

. they are nice because I

am going to die soon." -Sartre, "Today's Hope"

Not so long after, "they" stopped being very nice. Of course, they were never nice: "God, how they hated him," was the title of one eulogy (Jean-Francois K,ahn,

194).

In the well-known and much argued-over conversations that Sartre participated

in with Benny Levy in the last months of his life, the latter remarks, "You thought

you were opening a moral perspective at the end of Being and Nothingness and then you did not write a book offering a solution, but [instead] you engaged in debate with Marxism. One must believe that both things are closely related" ("Today's

Hope,"

158). Sartre responds, "Intimately." But how might these two seemingly

disparate discourses, of historical materialist politics and economics, and the moral

dimension of human relationships , be brought together, even intimately? It is not only Sartre for whom this question is a great diffICUlty, but I hope to show here that Sartre, even if not fully closing the gap between morality and materialism, at least

maintained the problem in its difficulty, not giving up on either aspect.

Sartre's trajectory in the seventies would seem to have followed the same

course that leads from Pierre Victor to Benny Levy. (In his Maoist period, Levy

llsed the nom de guerre Pierre Victor.) The question of how much this trajectory represents the authentic Sartre has been debated at great length, no less today than back in the seventies. For some, Sartre was already no longer himself, or no

longer developing as a philosopher (but instead degenerating), even at the begin­

ning of the seventies, when he allied himself with the Maoists. For others , the last

interviews with Levy represent a Sartre who has given himself over to bourgeois moralizing. (The range of positions on this question is discussed by Ronald Aron­

son in his introduction to Adrian van den Hoven's translation of the interviews; see Hope Now,

3-40).

35

Chapter 2

36

y

M claim here will be that Sartre continued to develop philosophically and po­

litically in the seventies. Furthermore, Sartre remained faithful to his earlier im­

pulses, but he also reached toward a different (and I would say, higher) synthesis

than that represented by either his earlier, existentialist phase, or his later, Marx­

ist phase. Where did his sense of the intimate connection between morality and a

possible reading of Marxism lead him? I would argue that it led him to a place between "Maoism" and "Judaism." (What are these things? This has to be spelled

out, hence the scare-quotes.) Sartre was looking for, I will argue, a "Marxism of alterity," or what might also be called a "materialism of transcendence." He came close to finding this, and we will not find this form of Marxism without consid­

ering Sartre's thinking in his final decade. I would argue that we-those of us

who believe in the need for radical social transformation-very much need this Marxism of alterity. Sartre continually struggled toward this praxis of revolution:

God, how they hated him! (But, to be hated by the enemy is a good thing , as Mao

put it.) To be sure, this synthesis is not systematically worked out by Sartre; this

remains for us to do, but we can accomplish this only if we work toward a broad understanding of the project, and part of this means getting clear on what at­

tracted Sartre to the Maoists and "Maoism," at least as he understood it. My be­ lief is that much of the commentary on this point has not been very helpful .

In this essay, I would like to generate a broad outline of the project of Sartre's

final years. This outline can be set out by looking at five documents , and by or­ ganizing our inquiry under four headings . Let us proceed as follows. First, let us

look at the antecedents of this Marxism of alterity in the 1 946 essay, "Material­ ism and Revolution." In this investigation we can also call on Hazel Barnes's

essay, "Sartre as Materialist." Second, we wiJl jump ahead to the very end of Sartre's life and consider his engagement with "Judaism" -our texts here will be

the aforementioned conversation with Levy, "Today's Hope," and a very inter­

esting essay by Steven Schwarzschild, "Jean-Paul Sartre as Jew." Third, I propose

to argue from this "Jewish" position back to Sartre's "Maoist" engagement, in

order to show how the two are closely related. Here we will discuss Sartre's well­

known essay, "The Maoists in France." Finally, let us attempt a definition of what I am calling a Marxism of alterity, also showing how this formulation connects

with Sartre's positions.

r?

To really give this subject the full treatment that it deserves, there

are

a num­

ber of other texts that would need to be brought into play, but especially the col­ laborative work

On a raison de se revolter, composed with Pierre Victor and

Philippe Gavi between November 1972 and March 1974. Such a treatment is a

good deal beyond the more modest aim that I have here. My understanding is that

Arlette Elkaim�Sartre, Sartre's adopted daughter and literary executor, has not

given (and is unlikely to give) permission for this work to be translated into Eng­

lish. A good way to get around this might be a book-length treatment of the text,

one that quotes a substantial number of passages. The publication of such a text or even the translation of the book would lead to an interesting test, concerning

Between Mao and Moses

37

whether anyone would any longer be interested in such works . One would not ex­

pect multitudes to line up for the texts, of course, but complete lack of interest might be a bellwether. But this does not just have to do with Sartre or intellectual activity in the wake of

1968, but also what sorts of "excitement" might attend in­ Specters ofMarx, Fredric Jameson

tellectual activity in general. In an essay on

even puts forward the provocative hypothesis that Derrida and some other con­

temporary French intellectuals are turning again to Marx (at the time of his death,

Gilles Deleuze was also writing on Marx) in part out of a reaction to the waning

of intellectual life in general in France (see "Marx's Purloined Letter") . There

was a period when Sartre defined the intellectual field (from about

1945-60),

then there was a general reaction against Sartre, which we identify with struc­

turalism, but at least there continued to be an intellectual field where these reac­

tions took place. Now we are seeing the loss of that. Is it overreaching to see a

close linkage between the Sartrean intellectual field , the intellectual field more

generally, political radicalism, and the passage into a postpolitical space? (These themes are pursued further in the next chapter.)

The material already before us , however, will be more than enough to occupy

us, the project here not being simply a close reading of these texts , but instead the

understanding of a project of human emancipation.

1 . "Materialism and Revolution." Like Mao Tsetung-and why no one has

been willing to put it this way is a remarkable point in itself-Sartre in the for­

ties and fifties grappled with what had become of the Marxism of Stalin. As so­

cial activists as well as theorists (one perhaps more "active" than the other, to be sure), both were confronted with the realities of the model of "socialist construc­

tion" presented by Stalin's leadership in the Soviet Union and the Comintem. We should remind ourselves that this was not an academic question for Sartre in

France in

1946 (nor for Mao in China, especially after 1927). Though Sartre was

to become more comfortable, as Hazel Barnes demonstrates, with the term "ma­

terialism" (and, again as Prof. Barnes shows, e�n a materialism that is dialecti­

cal, in a well-defined, specifically anti-"Diamat" sense) , this was to be on his own terms. The key terms for Sartre in

1 946 are "consciousness" and "freedom," as

related to the project of clearing a space for human agency in the midst of a pol. itics dominated by deterministic "materialism."

The opening lines of "Materialism and Revolution" are so interesting, so

strange:

Young people of today are uneasy. They no longer recognize their right to be young.

. . . They no longer take the time, as we did at their age, to play about with ideas be­

fore adopting one set in particular. . . . They are now told to choose between mate­ rialism and idealism; they are told that there is nothing in between and that it must" be one or the other.

(185-87)

Surely Sartre would be sympathetic, in the aftermath of the war and in light of

political possibilities that may or may not open up in this aftermath, to an activist

Chapter 2

38

,sensibility. that demands , even of the youth, that people "get on with it," decide and declare their allegiance . But what Sartre is not sympathetic to is this demand

to declare a position in a debate on ontology, first and foremost, and a debate that is skewed toward a "materialism" that is in reality the other side of the coin of the detested "idealism" at that. In the first case, a point that Sartre does not clearly frame as such, we find him speaking "a language already familiar to us, to Judaism," as Levinas put it in his eulogy thirty-four years later. For Sartre is not in the first case interested in on­ tology, but instead, like Marx, with praxis. As ontology, Sartre argues , materialism of the "Diamat" sort oversteps its bounds, making all sorts of claims that are clearly underdetermined by its eviden­ tiary base. These claims are therefore speculative and "metaphysical" in just the sense that orthodox Marxists claim to loathe. ("Diamat" and "Histomat" are names for the formulaic and dogmatic types of dialectical and historical materialism given expression by Stalin.) Among these claims are the denial of "the existence of God and transcendent finality" ( 187); and yet, coming quickly on the heels of

these denials is a material eschatology that leads the intellectual leaders of the PCF to declare that the policies of Stalin repiesent the proverbial "sure thing," with no

real wager required. "It is impossible, they think, for them to fail. History is a sci­ ence, its consequences are already inscribed, we have only to decipher them. This attitude is patently a flight"

(232). This flight is an avoidance not only of the pos­

sibility of failure, Sartre argues , but of the fact that, without this possibility, human beings are surely reduced to the level of things and even appendages of things. But it is from the hope of revolution and of those who, whatever their avowed "mythology" (this is what Sartre calls the deterministic materialism of the ortho­ dox Marxists), act so as to bring about a true rebellion against reification, that hu­ manity rises above thingness. The movement of Sartre's thought from "Material­ ism and Revolution" to the

Critique of Dialectical Reason was to outline a (233). In the

philosophy that "revolutionary demands . . . trace, of themselves"

latter work, while not disavowing earlier claims about radical freedom, Sartre aims to show better how this rev

olt against thingness arises , dialectically, from material

conditions , in the midst of reification itself. One also sees better in the later work how this struggle is unending. These themes can also be connected to Marx's ar­ gument, in

The German Ideology, that communism is not principally a "goal" or

a "theory," but instead the "real movement of real people in history"; but this can, of course, be read in two opposing ways, and Sartre's aim is to bring to the surface

the idea that this is not a movement of mere things, but rather of conscious actors , or at least of material beings capable of conscious activity. And yet, despite this re­ working of materialism, Sartre argues that a central condition of this freedom is the fact that, as Hazel Barnes puts it, "no objective state of the world can by itself evoke a revolution" (670).

As Prof. Barnes goes on to summarize, "It is [people] who must question [the

world] and decide to act. Unlike natural processes , human actions are future-

Between Mao and Moses

39

oriented, motivated by the drawing power of an envisioned state which does not

yet exist" (670). Admittedly, for Sartre the experience of future-orientation, and

the imagination of a future state, is very much conditioned by material circum­ stances, and especially by class. The capitalist certainly finds him- or herself in

the position of imagining a capitalist future, and undoubtedly this vision is situ­

ated. But even for the capitalist this future will not simply come about by itself.

The capitalist has to plan, to project. This also means that the capitalist is re­

sponsible for his or her projects, at least under one valid, necessary, and irre­

ducible description, even if, under another valid description, the capitalist is also

a tool of capital, of a certain material organization of soc�ety. The point is, o f course, the Kantian one, but without the usual dualistic treatment, that responsi­

bility is real. For Sartre, there could be no possibility of revolution, or even a

meaning of the term "revolution," without the reality of this responsibility. Now, if I may quote one longer passage from the essay, we will already see Sartre's po­

�sition set between what we may call "Maoism" and "Judaism":

[If a person] happens to plan, as Marx expressly states, to "change the world," it means

� begin with, a being for whom the world exists in its totality, [in such a

that he is

way] as a piece of phosphorus or lead, which is a part of the world and ridden by forces

to which it uncomprehendingly submits, will never be. This means that man transcends

the world toward a future state froin which he can contemplate it. It is in changing the world that we can come to know it. Neither the detached consciousness that would soar over the universe without being able to get a standpoint on it, nor the material object which reflects a condition without ever understanding it[,] can ever "grasp" the total­

ity of,existence in a synthesis, even a purely conceptual one. (236).

,"If you want to know an apple, bite into it," Mao once said, illustrating the fact

that the gaining of knowledge requires a particular kind of engagement, one that changes both the knower and the known. (Mao develops an argument for this

claim, by the way -he didn't just set it down as � platitude or a bit of folk wis­ dom; see "On Practice," in

Five Essays on Philosophy.) And what sort of "tran­

scendence" is Sartre speaking of here? When he says that this transcendence is

"toward a future state from which [a person] can contemplate [the world] ," he is, of course, not arguing that the aim o f this transcendence is contemplation, but in�

stead the creation of a new world out o f the existing world. In "Today's Hope,"

Sartre will link this transcendence with the specifically Jewish understanding o f messianism and resurrection. Sartre i s interested i n the possibility of being in the world, but not of it.

2. "Judaism." Allow me to open this part of the discussion by quoting from the

essay, "Jean�Paul Sartre as Jew," by Steven Schwarzschild. In turn, Schwarz­ schild quotes Sartre and Levy, and thereby brings Hegel into the conversation. Levy asks: "The history that Hegel put on our map wanted to get rid of the Jew, and it is the Jew who will allow us to get out of this history that Hegel wanted to impose

40

Chapter 2 on us?" And Sartre replies: "Absolutely . . ." Compare, to the contrary, what Sartre

Critique of Dialectical Reason [significantly, 1947]. "If there is a history it is that of Hegel. There can be no

wrote in his preparatory notes for the these notes date from other."

(1 63)

What a rich double-entendre, intentional or not, this last sentence is !

It would be the easiest thing in the world to just beat up on Hegel here, or at

least a certain interpretation of Hegel that is not all of Hegel , but an interpretation whose force has been felt historically and that accurately describes a very real historical dynamic. I think there is a "Hegel of negativity" and a Hegel of a di­ alectic that is open-ended, even if this Hegel must be found by reading in the mar­

gins. But I also believe that there is a Hegel of violent assimilation and exclusion

and, ironically, one sees this Hegel especially in the interpretations of his work

!

offered by theorists who deny there is such a H gel. (I have dealt with this ques­ tion at length elsewhere, for example, in

Matrix and line, 56-63 , and Politics in

the impasse, 1 43-57.)

Well into the conversation, Sartre and Levy tum in a more focused way to Jew­

ish questions . Levy says, "has one wondered what Messianism, Hebrew Mes­

sianism, was exactly? No, everyone acts as if they knew. When will we recognize that we don 't know and that it is crucial for us to know? Can we forget that ig­ norance is at the basis of the anti-Jewish filth?"

( 1 76). In response, Sartre dis­

cusses the aspects of Jewish messianism that appeal to him:

The Jewish religion implies an end to this world and the appearance at the same time of another one, another world that will be made from"this one but where things will be organized differently. There is also another theme that I like: dead Jews and the other dead, as well, will be resurrected, will come back to the Earth. Contrary to the Christian conception, they do not jave-the present Jewish dead- any existence

other than the tomb, and they will be born again as living in this new world. This new world is the end.

(179)

Levy asks, "in what way does this Jewish Messianic end interest you today?" Sartre responds, Precisely because it does not have a Marxist quality, that is, the quality of a defined end beginning with a situation that is present and projected into the future, with stages that will make it possible to attain by developing certain facts today. . . . The Jewish end has nothing of that. It is, so to speak, the beginning of the existence of men for each other. That is to say, a moral end. Or, more precisely, it is morality. The Jew thinks that the end of the world, and the appearance of the other, means the , arrival of the ethical existence of man.

(1 79)

In some respects here, Sartre seems to have not only come full circle, return­ ing to the critique of reductivist materialism of "Materialism and Revolution," but even to have gone quite explicitly into a kind of idealist framework. This is

Between Mao and Moses

41

somewhat the interpretation that Schwarzschild gives to these statements, though we will have to examine more fully the last sentence in the passage, which is pre­ sented as a summation of what has come immediately before: [W)hile the Marxist conception of ideal society is held to evolve out of paSt history and is, therefore, afflicted with the wounds and determined by the evils of the past, in Jewish eschatological historiography it is the

summum bonum that produces in­

cremental truth and goodness in history-in other words, the "pro-jected" infinite fu­

ture produces the past, not the other way around. The Messianic goal can be attained only through Messianic action, which in tum is defined by the law. In short, Mes­

sianism tries to remake the world ethically through permanent revolution. (163; word order altered slightly)

Significantly, Levy and Sartre speak not simply of action "defined by taw," but also ofthe transcendence of the law, even if by its fulfillment rather than by mere transgression (which, as Levy notes, is an approach connected to political moder­ nity; we might consider this point when thinking about recently fashionable, pur­ portedly "transgressive" postrnodem theories that often lead to merely academic and merely llberal strategies , though sometimes with some "naughty bits" thrown in, as the English like to say; perhaps this is nothing but a minor variation on modernity, but, then again, perhaps the line between transcendence aI).d trans­ gression is not so easily drawn) . But let us also focus on the idea of "Messianic action," which SchwaIischild does not go on to define except obliquely, in tenns of the pennanent ethical revolution. The question we need to ask here is, What is Sartre trying to break with in setting Jewish Messianism against a Marxism of

"stages"? There are two parts to the question: (1) Would Sartre limit this Mes­

sianism to a politics of incrementalism? (2) Is the infInite future that produces the

past simply "disconnected" from the past, materially? One wonders at the quota­ tion marks sUrrounding "pro-jected" in Schwarzschild's fonnulation-are they 'simply there to show that Sartrean tenninology is.. being referred to, or do they also play the role, even if unintentionally, of bracketing the fact that this project comes from somewhere and some time? The project cisely a materially situated "break-from."

is a "break," but it is pre­

. Levy proposes, and Sartre accepts , the idea that " [t]he Jew, then, in his pro­

found reality, can be disconnected from the philosophy of history." But it seems to me that this "disconnection" is in fact a matter of struggle, of material fulfill­

ment and transcendence of the law, of revolution, of a material project. The "highest good" is itself a project, not a guarantee: there are material stakes, there is the possibility of failure.

3 . "Maoism." In other words , let us not forget the context, or perhaps the sev­ eral contexts, of Sartre's project. In "The Maoists of France," Sartre sums up the Maoists' activities under three headings: violence, spontaneity, and morality. This must be understood in contrast with an established "Left" (and especially the Communist Party of France) that had made its peace with capital (at least as

42

Chapter 2

opposed to any talk of overthrowing capitalism), that preferred any "order," in­ cluding that of Charles de Gaulle, over outbreaks of rebellion from the rabble (0(, "elements foreign to the working class," as they used to put it back in those days- students, non-European workers), and that only had the most narrow and philistine conception of "interest." Anything not fitting with this narrow con­ ception was branded "idealism." So, we are still on the terrain of "Materialism and Revolution," for it is clearly the "materialism" of orthodox Marxism's de­ mand for order that Sartre continues to oppose. Despite his disavowal ("I am not a Maoist"), in some ways Sartre was a better Maoist than his young comrades were. What's more, in some ways Sartre was, at least in his theoretical representations of � revolutionary project, a better Maoist than Mao himself. Mao was a busy person, of course, and while he sometimes captured in words the Maoism that he was preoccupied with giving expression to in praxis, his texts, even taken as a whole" do not adequately represent the Maoist revolutionary project, for two reasons. First, what is there in the texts-and this is quite a lot, really, and it has to be pointed out that many commentators on Mao and Maoism, especially those who make cursory dismissals, have not begun to deal with these texts-is in need of systematization. Second, there is also the mat­ ter, to return again to the program set out in "Materialism and Revolution," of tracing out, in theory, the meaning of the revolutionaries' practices, demands, and hopes. Sartre also put it, "I have not attempted to describe the Maoists' beliefs, but rather to bring out the implications of their actions" (238). Mao went a great distance beyond Stalin's theoretical apparatus, but there is still the need to go even further in theory, in a way to be specified, looking to the praxis of Maoism to draw out its implications-and S�e helps us here. It is unfortunate, of course, that most commentators on Sartre do not develop this context-if they did, per­ haps they would not express such bewilderment at Sartre's fellowship with the Maoists or, even if seeing this as the product of some sort of radical "good will," wish that all of this was not tied up with the name and project of Mao Tsetung. 1t is true that Sartre probably read only bits of Mao's works, if that (he was pretty much blind by the time he started working with the Maoists), and it is probably also true that Sartre's understanding of events such as the Cultural Revolution was spotty (though I suspect that the lack of investigation into the aims and events of the Cultural Revolution on the part of many commentators on Sartre is too much transferred from the latter to the former). But, again, Mao and Sartre both begin with deep frustration over the experience of the Stalin period, and they converge on many points. More orthodox Marxists have great difficulty accepting indeterminacy, and certainly what Sartre calls "contingency." In a Heideggerian challenge to this or­ thodoxy, Sartre reminds us, at the opening of "Materialism and Revolution," of not only the contingencies of history, but of existence as a whole. Of course, this question of being is dismissed in strictly positivist fashion by orthodox Marxism, as not making any sense, or else it is said that it is not politically efficacious to

Between Mao and Moses

43

even think about the question, leading as it supposedly does to despair or qui­

etism. And yet, "today 's hope," on whatever day one finds oneself wondering

about human possibilities , radically depends on this contingency, and the con­

comitant sense and possibility of taking responsibility for one's situation.

Unlike Stalin, Mao did in fact attempt to take account of indeterminacy, es­

pecially paying attention to the innovations in physics brought about by Ein­

stein and the theorists of quantum mechanics. (These innovations had been dis­

missed as "bourgeois" by Soviet ideologists.) This is a real advance, but

Maoism, and Marxism generally, has not been able to deal with the idea of there being two basic categories of indeterminacy, one of them applying specifically to conscious , language-using beings . This second indeterminacy is , in Sartre's

view, irreducible to the indeterminacies of merely physical things. To the extent

that many Marxists , and many Maoists, still hope to find the "dialectics" that will reduce mind to matter (in the sense called "physicalist" by contemporary

analytic philosophers) , they are still under what Sartre called the "myth" of ma­

terialism. As Sartre argues, this myth cuts both ways, sometimes helping the

cause of the revolutionary, but, ultimately undercutting revolutionary theory and practice':'iihd , we might summarize, any real possibility for today 's hope­

for, in the determinist view, the future is simply a done deal, unfolding accord­

ing to material-historical laws .

But here we have. to tum to Sartre's category of "morality" as an aspect of

Maoism. It is often argued by Marxists that a recognition of two qualitatively

different indeterminacies leads us into "Kantian dualism." (For example, Helena Sheehan argues this repeatedly in her otherwise fine book, Marxism and the Phi­

losophy of Science.) It seems that the (seemingly) infinite material of our uni­ verse can give rise to such wonders as human minds, which then do not follow

strict physical laws; whether this is a position that oUght to be called "dualism"

(and whether this "dualism" is appropriately ascribed to Kant) is a longer dis­ cussion. (In my view, Donald Davidson's argum�t for "anomalous monism" is

a good, "materialist" response to this claim.) But what might be of interest to us

here is that there seems to be an implicit recognition of the indeterminacy of the mental (and agency, etc .) in Mao's famous summation of historical materialism:

"Marxism consists in thousands of truths, but they all come down to one thing:

It is rignt to rebel." Note that he does not say that they all come down to the ten­

dency of the rate of profit to fall, or the tendency for the organic composition of

capital to rise, or even the tendency for there to be a succession of modes of pro­

duction, driven by efficiency criteria (or the tendency of the forces of production

to outgrow the relations of production), etc. Instead, Mao sums up Marxism under what sounds like an ethical imperative. One could not imagine this state­

ment coming from Stalin (or from Trotsky, for that matter, and possibly not even

from Lenin -though Lenin is closer to this in spirit, I think). Of course, the "sci­

ence" of this imperative is far from worked out, and it remains a stumbling block

to the Maoism that is still too orthodox. And yet, the idea that "it is right to

44

Chapter 2

rebel," 'even against Marxism itself, permeates the whole project of revolution that Mao led. Making sense of this project is the real theoretical task involved in going beyond Stalin and every other form of deterministic, economistic Marx­ ism. To the extent that Sartre helps us with this task, he also shows where we might draw out the possibilities of Maoism. 4. "Jewish Marxism" -a Marxism of alterity, a materialism of transcendence. When I say the Right, I mean the lkstards. This Left, either it dies, and at the pres­ ent moment, it is [humanity that] is dying, or it fmds some new principles. ("Today's Hope,"

1 58)

When Sartre rejects a "Marxism of stages," what is he most interested in reject­ ing? The general tendency is to see Sartre here as rejecting Marxism, and the sort of analysis that Marxism allows us to do, and the history of the Marxist move­ ments, tout court. Certainly this is the way that Benny Levy and Steven Schwarz­ schild interpret Sartre's interest in Jewish messianism. But, justified or not, what is represented in this evaluation is their own rejection or nonacceptance of Marx­ ism. In "Today's Hope," however, Sartre does not completely reject the Marxist political involvements of his past. Further, he asserts, against Levy's too-easy summation, that "[t]oday, [the term] Stalinism is used to denigrate anything." This statement and its context indicate two things , in my view. First, it is clear that Sartre rejects simply using the term "Stalinism" as though there is no obli­ gation to try to come to grips 1th the Marxism of the Stalin period and why it had such a hold on people. Second, Sartre rejects using this term as though it now sums up all of the possibilities within Marxism. Levy asks, "How can it be ex­ plained that intellectuals had a need to hold on to, I mean, find a support and a basis in that junk [that is, Stalinism]?" Sartre responds, Because it was a question of finding a future for society. It was necessary for society to stop being the shit it is today, everywhere. I did not think I could change the world

by myself. by my own thought, but I distinguished those social forces that were try­ ing to move forward and I found my place among

them. (160)

It does not seem to me that Sartre is, at the end of his life, rejecting this strategy. He goes on to say, evolution through action would be a series of failures from which something posi­ tive, already contained in the failure and ignored by those who had wished to suc­ ceed, would result unexpectedly. This positive result would be these partial, local successes, difficult to recognize by those who had worked for them but, which, from failure to failure, would accomplish some progress. It is thus that I have understood history.

(I61)

Now, this scheme does not sound so different from saying that there are different levels- or stages-of social development that can be attained. But it is true that

Between Mao and Moses

45

this progress works through failure, and not through a fully planned-out succes­

sion of stages. For Sartre, as with Marx and Mao, we do not know in advance

where the revolution will take us, for "We are not whole [persons] . We are beings

who struggle to arrive at human relations and to a defInition of [humanity]" (161).

(We might note that, for Mao, one indication that the revolution is getting some­

where is that there are

new problems.) Sartre is rejecting some major aspects of

Marxism (he speaks to many other aspects in the interview, including the pro­ ductivist paradigm), and especially a Marxism oftgUarantees and mere interests.

And yet it is abundantly clear that he continues to believe in both the goal of com­

munism and the material analysis of society that could help to achieve this goal.

To sum up Sartre's position here as an abandonment of these material analyses

would really be to accept the argument that the [mal Sartre wasn't the "real"

Sartre. Of course, this is a possibility, but it makes much more sense to attempt to generate, systematically, what Sartre was searching for in these [mal discus­

sions. Perhaps the incompatibilities of Jewish and Marxist messianisms cannot be

resolved under the heading of any Marxism, however heterodox, that could still

be recognized as such, as a form of historical materialism. I am not at all con­

vinced of thi�d I worry that some are simply using the fInal interviews as an

easy way to co'nvince themselves of Sartre's "rejection" of Marxism in order to

smooth the way toward an easier reassimilation of Sartre into the mainstream of philosophical discourse. However, the possibility that the economistic and deter­

ministic side of Marxism will ultimately defeat any ethical impulse that may be

seen there (or possibly read into Marxism) has to be considered. But then, the fact that we have to read Hegel differently in light of the supposedly impossible real­

ity of Jewish experience does not mean that we can so easily get rid of Hegel­

for he represents a reality as well, even if one that, in some respects , we might wish to escape.

That we seek for transcendence does not in itself "overthrow the difficulties of

immanence. Both Jewish messianism and Maoism"aim for the appearance of the

ethical in the midst of the law, in the midst of materiality; the paradox of the

human situation is the struggle for ethical transcendence within the material of history (without which there could be no struggle, no humanity, no situation, even

if the mere fact of materiality does not mean that there necessarily will be these things, eit1!er). Already by "Materialism and Revolution" Sartre was systemati­

cally thinking the possibilities of Maoism and Jewish messianism, and therefore

it is no mistake that he gravitated to both in the [mal decade of his life. Going fur­

ther with this systematic work, of creating a Marxism of alterity, a materialism of transcendence, a Jewish Marxism, or, if need be, a Marxist Judaism, means, cru­

cially, bringing the ethical implications of Jewish messianism more fully to the

heart of the Maoist historical engagement. Without this kind of engagement, or

avoiding this engagement, we really would do no more than to make of Sartre a

mere moralizer in his [mal days , and we would thereby rip the heart out of Sartre's life project.

46

Chapter 2

In this essay I have quotedfrom the translation of "Today 's Hope " that appeared in Telos in the summer of 1980, not long after Sartre died, rather than from the newer translation by Adrian van den Hoven. This is onlyfor the reason that I have been working with the former translationfor many years, indeed, since itfirst ap­ peared. However, for those who are now coming to thefinal interviews, or are re­ turning to them, 1 recommend both the van den Hoven translation and Ronald Aronson 's valuable introduction.

3 Beyond the varieties of Sartrophobia, toward Sartre's legacy for radical intellectuals

He was a generous and courageous man. He always defended the cause of the marginalized, of the exploited, and of the oppressed. He always struggled for freedom, most often with the communists and, if necessary, against them. He beli�ed in .the strength of reason and in the contagious power of the idea of freedom. But above all, for me and I have said it several times, he was our Jean­ Jacques Rousseau. He reminded me irresistibly of the statement of Marx about Rousseau, which I quote from memory: "This man, who, no matter what his f�11ies, was of a profound intransigence, and who never accepted the least com­ promise with the established power." There is no greater compliment for an in-. tellectual, in my opinion. I hope, in this respect, more than all our differences of opinion, that the number of Sartre's disciples will be infinite. -Louis Althusser To be hated by the enemy is a good thing. -Mao Tsetung

For a time, in

the aftermath of the French Resistance, the movement against the

French colonization of Algeria, the movement against the United States' war

against the people of Vietnam, the Events of May 1968, and many other situations

in which ·determined opposition to the machinations of oppressive power was called for, the number of those who would come forward as disciples of Jean-Paul Sartre did indeed appear to be unlimited. Indeed, in the late sixties, when the notion of a "public intellectual" meant considerably more than providing another calm and

charming, if mildly critical, article for Harper's or

The Atlantic, three names stood

out as those of exemplary engaged intellectuals: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beau­

voir, and Herbert Marcuse. Each made important theoretical contributions to un­ derstanding oppressive social systems and liberatory alternatives , and each was willing to go to the barricades in various ways - and none more so than Sartre.

47

Chapter 3

48

What Michel Rybalka has appropriately termed "Sartrophobia"- about which at least an entire book might be written -has been in play since

1 945. As John

Gerassi wrote in1ris biography, "No intellectual, no writer, no man is more hated by academics and newsfolk, by eggheads and politicians on both sides of the At­ lantic than Jean-Paul Sartre. Nor is this new: Sartre has been hated by them for half a century"

(30). In his chapter, "L' Adulte Terrible," Gerassi supplies an

amazing compendium of these hatreds , the most telling of which was Germaine Bree's from her book,

Camus and Sartre:

Finally, she damned Sartre because "he never to my knowledge supported any polit­ ical candidate who had the slightest chance of winning nor has he ever supported any action taken by the French government" -thus naively handing Sartre the best com­ pliment he ever received. (34) Beating up on Sartre, in other words, has been and continues to be a well-es­ tablished pastime. (One of the high points of meetings of the North American Sartre Society is the review of recent Sartre scholarship by Michel Rybalka, which includes a look at new examples of Sartrophobia. At our

1997 meeting at

Emory University in Atlanta, for instance, Rybalka noted that well-known Mexi­ can poet and essayist

Octavio

Paz has gotten into the act. And "leftist" writer

Tony Judt continues with his campaign against Sartre.) I would venture that this Sartrophobia has as much to do with Sartre's model of the radical intellectual as it does with any of his ideas regarding nothingness , reciprocity, authenticity, groups, the practico-inert, or the rest. To be sure, sheer intransigence- as back­

handedly acknowledged by Bree- is part of this model, but so is a dynamic

thinking of the contradictions involved in attempting to do intellectual work . Both elements are present in this passage from The

Words: "For a long time I took

my pen for a sword; I now know we're powerless. No matter. I write and will

keep writing"

( 1 59). "Powerless" -why? Because the pen ultimately is not a

sword? Anyone who has read one of Sartre's polemical pieces , for instance on the execution of the Rosenbergs ("Mad Beasts,"

1953), knows that his words could

be sharper than daggers . Gerassi concludes "L' Adulte Terrible" by saying,

But he was wrong. He had a lot of power. The proof? All those who hate him. All those who followed him to the cemetery of Montparnasse. All those who love him. (36) As an intellectual, in fact, Sartre's "power" was - and perhaps remains -unri­ valed. Anna Boschetti has written a book on what might be called the "career" of Sartre's power,

The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modeme. Al­

though many of the details of the story that she assembles are fascinating, I find her methodology quite disturbing at times - Boschetti measures Sartre's intellec­ tual power not only in terms of its effect on the intellectual "field" in its time (a conception she borrows from Pierre Bourdieu) , but also in terms of intellectual capital, "market share ," and "bankability." Her quest is to discover the circum-

Beyond the varieties of Sarlrophobia

49

stances under which Sartre exercized hegemony over the intellectual field in France 1 945-60 or thereabouts. Boschetti's final chapter attempts to show how Sartre's intellectual "capital" was mostly spent by-this part is unclear, because she wraps up the sixties and its aftermath in only a couple of pages- 1960 or 1961 or 1 968 or perhaps 1970. For sure, Sartre's intellectual "hegemony" in the fifteen years following the Sec­ ond World War was beyond remarkable. As Boschetti writes, "To fmd comparable dominion, we must go back to Hugo, or even to Voltaire." By 1968, in Boschetti's view, this hegemony was long gone. And yet, when I and others ask, where are our Sartres and de Beauvoirs and Marcuses today, where are our radical intellectuals who can speak truth to power with a power of their own, we are talking about fig­ ures who led at lea�t "double lives ." Just taking the example of Sartre, what I am getting at is that, w!1ile the figure we are seeking is one of the main voices of 1968 jUld its aftermath, he is also the figure who produced important and famous philo­ _sophical and literary works in the period of his intellectual hegemony. To state the perfectly obvious, there is a relation between the earlier "classical intellectual" who, for the myriad of reasons that Boschetti discusses, became hegemonic in the post-war intellectual field, and the emergent "revolutionary intellectual" who playecDm important role in 1 968 and thereafter. In other words, because he was an important classical intellectual, Sartre could also play the role of an imp'ortant rev­ olutionary intellectual. If this is the case, however, then two things follow. First, Sartre's own underStanding of the revolutionary intellectual appears to be flawed in certain respects. Second, we need to look at Sartre's varying conception� of the engaged intellectual, conceptions that reflect both his writings on the subject as well as his actual practice; we need to do this in order to get a clearer picture of what we might call the "Sartrean radical intellectual." The "flaws" I refer to are in fact the result of a constant rethinking on the part of Sartre, of what it means to be an engaged intellectual. One might hope that it could go without saying that this rethinking is itself no "flaw." Toward the end of his life, Sartre was grappling with the possibilitY of fully making the transition from classical to revolutionary intellectual, a transition that he was quite aware of never fully completing. In some sense, it might be said that Flaubert, and Flaubert, stood in the way. But there is more to the problem than this, because it may be that, at least for this historical period in which society is divided into classes, there is nothing other for the radical intellectual to do than to be in con­ stant, critically reflective transition. The classical intellectual, to say nothing of what Sartre calls the "technician of knowledge," is resistant to such transition. In light of this resistance, and before attempting to draw a more systematic picture of the Sartrean model, let us turn to what might be called "left Sartrophobia." In revolt against Sartre's philosophy and the Sartrean engaged intellectual, other models of the radical intellectual de­ veloped in the late sixties, models that have perhaps become hegemonic in the West (or is it only in North America, or only in the United States?) in recent years.

Chapter 3

50

This new "hegemony," it must be underscored, exists almost entirely in the acad­ emy. There are various reasons for this, but one of them is certainly that these

post-Sartrean or anti-Sartrean models are demonstrative of a peculiarly narrow, academic form of intellectual hegemony. -Perhaps the "left-Sartrophobic" models ought to be called "anti-Sartreanlpost­ Althusserian," in that their rise depends on two developments. First, the Critique

of Dialectical Reason, volume one, was published at precisely the moment of ex­

istentialism's wane and structuralism's rise. I do not know why we have to accept Boschetti 's terms concerning market share and intellectual capital, or even no­

tions of intellectual fashions that seize the public for a time and then give way to

other trends . If Sartre's work exercised intellectual hegemony for a remarkable period, surely Boschetti's discussion of the "field" is more to the point:

The whole intelleOJual field is involved. Sartre commands the attention of the philo­ sophical world and the literary world, the world of high culture and that of the lead­ ing dailies, and thereby crosses the two frontiers which have historically marked the functioning of the field: the dividing line between the philosophical circuit and the literary circuit, and the line between legitimate success and popular fame. He unifies a polycentric system by becoming the single reference point in relation to which the other sectors must define-or redefine-themselves. So much so that we need only reconstruct Sartre's position at war's end by running the range of comments about him to be able to reconstruct the whole field. Not a single voice which counts fails to answer up in one way or another. (9) By the late fifties , as we see in the concluding chapter of Boschetti 's account, there are a number of important developments in the intellectual field, espe­ cially the displacement of philosophy by the human (that is, social) sciences,

and a concomitant vogue for structuralism (Levi-Strauss publishes Structural Anthropology in 1 958; Barthes's Mythologies has already appeared a year ear­ lier, while Foucault's Madness and Civilization followed in 1 961 ) , develop­ ments that began to displace Sartre and existentialism. (Significant as well is

the fact that some of Sartre's most important interlocutors in his formulation of existentialism and existential Marxism had died in a short space of time ­ Camus in

1 960, Fanon and Merleau-Ponty in 1 96 1 .) The rigid hierarchy in the

French school system that had held for so long, and which placed someone such as Sartre , who graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure and held the agre­

gation in philosophy, in the center of the intellectual universe, was beginning

to break down. Ironically, these shifts-or their underlying causes - helped pre­

pare the way for the uprisings that were to come in the later sixties. (Some have argued that, in 20120 hindsight, the uprisings themselves constituted a chapter

in a process of modernization-in educational institutions and in the economy more generally - that was required by French capitalism as much as they might

have been part of an antica pitalist movement as well.) In this light, it might be tempting to see Marcuse's and Sartre's interventions as a renewed attempt to

Beyond the varieties of Sartrophobia

51

"make the world philosophical ," as Marx put it i n his famous letter to his fa­ ther, regarding his own "conversion" to Hegelianism. Be that as it may, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French disciples of Leo Strauss, obviously take a certain glee in quoting Raymond Aron: "The god of the intellec­ tuals of the sixties was no longer the Sartre who had dominated the postwar period but a mixture of Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Althusser and Lacan" (French Philosophy

of the Sixties, 62). The French title of Ferry's and Renaut's book is La Pensee 68, or "68 thought." I find it strange, and I think that most sixties-inspired intellectu­ als would agree with me, that the notion of such a "thought" would somehow not include Sartre. But then, perhaps this is because Sartre's work in the sixties (or from the time of the Critique) was increasingly part of a larger political landscape

rather than merely one or another intellectual trend or fashion. While I am no longer as fond of Althusser or Foucault as I was some years ago , there is un­ doubtedly much one could learn from both of them. Lacan is perhaps interesting here for the fact that his thought seems equally indebted to structuralism and Hegel (and Kojeve) and Sartre . But then, Lacan was more of Sartre's generation than were Althusser and Foucault. My point is that, even insomuch as the work of these structuralists or "poststructuralists" can be placed under the heading "68 thought,"

still , it �as Sartre who was most of all involved with the young activists and rev­

olutionaries, and not just as an intellectual "celebrity." What's odd is that, while

the chief intention of Ferry and Renaut is to discredit and negate

"68. thought,"

which they identify with "antihumanism," they rarely mention Sartre , even though they surely have no great love for him, either. This makes me wonder if, in some perverse way, Sartre is not the real target of their attack. With the rise of structuralism and the human sciences , another shift that we see in the intellectual field is a return to the separation of literary and philosophical endeavors . Or, at least, these endeavors are no longer combined in the way and to the degree that Sartre combined them. Does thiS" separation also necessarily lead to a rift between "legitimate success" and "popular acclaim" (as Boschetti put it)? One possible exception to this development-rnight be seen in the entire con­ stellation of work around the journal

Tel Quel. Inspired by structuralism, semi­

otics, psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism, "Telquelians" such as Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers viewed Sartre as their "major rival." The latter, for his part, argued that the events of May and their aftermath intensified the class contradiction that is at the heart of intellectual activity; that is, while even the nouradical intellectual (the technician of knowledge) must, in principle, believe in the universality of knowledge , this knowledge will all the same tend to serve the existing system. Even engaged intellectuals are caught in this class bind. They will almost certainly, as a result, suffer from a guilty conscience, but actual social rebellions and incipient revolutions demand more of the intellectual -the de­ mand, as Sartre put it in "A friend of the people," is for the As Danielle Marx-Scouras says in

concrete universal. The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel, "Sartre ar­

gued that many intellectuals were hostile toward the May movement because it

Chapter 3

52 contested �heir role

part"

as

intellectuals and demanded a radical conversion on their

( 1 5 1 ) . Resisting- and actively critiquing - this notion of a conversion de­

manded by events and social practice, the Telquelians instead embraced Al­ thusser 's notion of "theoretical practice." Sartre himself faced what appeared to be a dilemma: even within the period of the May events and their aftermath, he led a double life as a writer and intellectual, continuing to work on the immense Haubert project at night even as he was out in the streets by day. The Tel Quel

solution was to circumvent the dilemma and to deny the need for any sort of

transformation (or conversion), by defending writing not only as a practice but as

the only practice that the writer need worry about:

Clearly, Telqu�'lians did not assume the "guilty conscience" of the intellectual. We have seen how Tel Quel demarcated itself from the onset from this engage impasse. For Tel Quel, the writer did not have to feel guilty about being a writer; the writer's raison d'etre was in his or her writing. The relationship to writing, and to language in general, determined the relationship to society at large. (Marx-Scouras, 152) Significantly, insomuch as the Telquelians felt that they could not ignore May

1968 and its aftermath, the position they took was to align Tel Quel with the Com­ munist Party of France (of which, of course, Louis Althusser was a member and leading intellectual) rather than with what they took to be a "confused and ap­ parently ephemeral movement":

TelqueJians were not about to follow Sartre out into the streets, megaphone in hand. The fact that Sartre supported the movement was a further incentive for them to take another route, for they had always done exactly the opposite of their major rival. (153) Rather than dwell on the pathetic and disgusting specter of intellectuals, who, in the name of avant-garde writing, align themselves with what was well-exposed as a bastion of the establishment, we might instead focus on the model of intel­ lectual activity that is represented by this alliance. The idea seems to be that the

avant intellectual is not one who needs to change or transform him- or herself in

any way; if anything, the masses , especially that part of the masses that does not

fit into the narrow, orthodox Marxist conception of the "industrial working class" (who can supposedly, according to the PCF view of things, transform society in an orderly, well-planned way, without the need for revolutionary upheaval) , are the ones who need to be taught and led by the intellectuals . Sartre's perspective, by contrast, was much more in the spirit of Mati's third thesis on Feuerbach: "the educator needs to be educated" -or consider Mao 's advice to revolutionaries: "The important thing is to be good at learning." There are two other forms of left-Sartrophobia that might be mentioned briefly. Both are in some sense antidialectical, in that they not only valorize difference, but seem to do so in an absolute way. Counterposed to Sartre's models of uni­ versality and totalization , Foucault proposed the notion of the "specific intellec-

Beyond the varieties of Sartrophobia

53

tual." There are two main aspects to this conception. First, the specific intellec­ tual aimS to work on particular problems, with no overarching scheme of values and no large conception of history or teleology. Indeed, these things must be rig­ orously resisted. To play on the well-known political slogan of the post-sixties pe­ riod, the idea is to "think locally, act locally." Second, and taking this last princi­ ple even further, the intellectual is not and should not claim to be the representative (or spokesperson) of anyone other than him- or herself. Both of these questions have to do with the critique of "representation" that was a noisy intellectual fashion in the post-1968 period and that, more recently, has given us identity politics . Sartre himself grappled with these questions, and he attempted to work for a more direct relationship with the masses, and for ways that expressions of the masses could be presented in less mediated ways. The most famous example of this Jatter effort was Sartre's championing of the Maoist newspaper, La Cause du Peuple, which ran headlines and stories that were simply verbatim accounts of the words of ordinary workers. (Sartre presents accounts of his involvement with the paper in both "The Maoists of France" and "Justice and the State.") In a moment I will re�rn to the question of how this new role that Sartre had taken up in the early 1 970s squares (or doesn't square) with his conception of the intellectual presented in 1965 in "A Plea for Intellectuals." There Sartre argues that one trait of the intellectual is that he or she gets involved in things that are "not his busi­ ness." Clearly there was something of a shift in Sartre's thinking after 1968, but my point here is that it does not look as though he had entirely joined the camp of those who were putting forward the critique of representation -even if Sartre had his own critique of representation-and who were heading toward identity politics . Perhaps the fact that he, as a famous intellectual and as someone the state was not likely to repress very harshly, came forward to take over the editorship of La Cause du Peuple at the moment when it was banned showed that there was still a good deal of interplay occurring between the position he had set out in 1965 and his attempt to fully become a revolutionary in'fellectual (as he saw it) in the post-1968 period. All of this has to do with Sartre's refusal of the sort of politics represented by Tel Quel, which the former must have seen as simply a reification of the division of labor, and indeed a reification that was to the advantage and for ' the fundamental physical security of an elite group. A related critique of Sartre's position-or positions, as the case may be-on engaged intellectual activity has come from advocates of "micropolitics." This position is influenced, as the reader most likely knows, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Todd May presents a systematic argument for this politics in his book, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism ( 1994; Foucault is a major part of his argument as well). While I cannot provide a discussion of this text here, I want to point to the way that May argues for what he calls a politics that is �tactical," as opposed to "strategic." This seems to me to connect with a common thread in all of the anti-Sartrean figures and positions mentioned,

Chapter 3

54

namely that they are also antihumanist. May puts this forthrightly: "Ifpoststruc­

turalist political thought could be summed up in a single prescription, it would be that radical political theory, if it is to achieve anything, must abandon hu­

manism in all its forms"

(75). The ambiguous legacy of humanism is dealt with 5 here, on Sartre and Derrida, and I have written a book on this SUbject, Humanism and its aftermath; I note here with some inter­ to some extent in Chapter

est that two of the key figures of these texts , Kant and Derrida, have mostly been

set aside by the advocates of Foucauldian and Deleuzean antihumanism. This is

�priate, for humanism is of a piece with ethical-political universalism and

app

with a strategic sense of political change. In a Kantian frame, Derrida argues that

this universalism is something that we are "condemned" to (just as Kant said that we are condemned to metaphysics and system-building), even while, from a de­

constructive standpoint, we are also condemned to the perpetual critique of uni­

versalisms and therefore to a radical questioning of the constitution of every "we" (see, for example,

Of Spirit, Chap . 10). If Sartre's humanism is , therefore,

a good deal more naive than , say, Derrida would prefer, this does not mean, ei­

ther, that we ought to simply jettison it-or even that we ing that we would want to .

could do this, suppos­

Arguments in this "poststructuralist anarchist" vein, such as Todd May's (an­

other systematic text that should be mentioned here is Michael Hardt's and An­

tonio Negri's Labor of Dionysus), often criticize what Foucault called Marxism's

"fetish for the state." The argument is that Marxism is too hung up on the state as

either an oppressive institution and the center of power relations in an oppressive society, or as, in some form , the locus of the overcoming of oppressive power re­

lations (either through the radical reform of the existing state, or through the over­

throw of the existing state and its replacement with some new form of state, for example the dictatorship of the proletariat). In a Foucauldian and Deleuzian mode, micropolitics recognizes no such central locus , and therefore the activity

of the intellectual must be more "specific," more narrowly focused. Sartre, of course, generally wrote and spoke of power relations as finding a concentrated

form in the state, even while also presenting, perhaps even more so in his literary

works than in the philosophical ones (though here there is the combination of phi­

losophy and literature that does not exist so much for structuralist and "post­

structuralist" intellectuals such as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, and Deleuze; here

again Derrida is quite different from this "poststructuralism") , an extraordinary

sense of the quotidian and the psychological. But then , Sartre is also giving us a

critique of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, and of societies divided into

classes, and of the mechanisms that perpetuate these social forms, so naturally he finds himself encountering the state.

Here is what is remarkable, and, I think, telling with regard to the anti-Sartrean

arguments. Whenever Sartre went up against oppressive power relations , whether in his writing (again , one might simply use his essay on the Rosenbergs as an ex­

ample) or his activism, he found himself up against the state. What is telling is that

Beyond the, varieties of Sartrophobia

55

the same can be said about Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, etc. Referring to the early

seventies, Mark Poster writes: "During these years Foucault was perhaps the most

eminent and widely acknowledged intellectual who participated in leftist politics .

Ironically, Foucault was at that time criticizing the role and function of the tradi­ tional intellectual"

(Foucault, Marxism, and History, 5). While every cause that

Foucault took up had aspects that cannot simply be described in the facile and re­

ductive terms of "it's the state," still , there was not one of these causes , from pris­

oner's rights to antipsychiatry to Stonewall and gay rights to the Iranian Revolu­

tion of 1979, where state power was not a significant aspect. Indeed, in every case, as the radicality of opposition deepens , so comes closer the point where the state

will present, forcefully if necessary, its own definition of justice.

One might consider in this respect the way that some leftist newspapers tend

to write, "that's capitalism for you," as though this is self-explanatory and one does not need a systematic investigation into the capillary action of power rela­

tions . Foucault excelled at the analysis of such capillary movement, which he dis­

cussed in terms of "disciplinary matrices." His focus tended to be more on the

iI)ed body rather than the reified consciousness, and in some sense his po­

discipl

litical sympathies were inspired by various revolts of the body. Perhaps Sartre can be faulted here for what may appear in contrast to remain a form of Enlighten­

ment rationalism. After all, even though this is too quick, it is clear that 'Sartre maintained, even at the point where he was most straining against the traditional

model of the intellectual , a Socratic sense that oppositional politics must speak

truth to power; as we know, Foucault had a different view of the powerlknowl­

edge relationship. Does this mean, in the latter case, that there is no place where

one might fmd the general matrix of power matrices, the sort of concentration that

Marxism finds in the state? Or, does it instead mean that overthrowing capitalism and every form of oppression is a very complicated thing? To say that it is com­

plicated, that power is diffuse and that different oppressions are not so quickly re­

duced to one form, is this to say that there are not nMal points and, in particular, the nodal point called "the state" where, if power is not addressed in, that form, then, as the Maoists say, "all else is illusion"?

The point, more simply stated, is that, for all of this healthy discussion over

the role of the intellectual , when it came to activism, many of the radical intel­

lectuals who were advocating micropolitics and the specific intellectual more or less did the same sorts of things that Sartre did, and they found themselves up

against the state.

The discussion of these models has become exceedingly "academic" in the

United States, in some cases leading to a form of identity politics that is so nar­

row that, in fact, it has to do with little more than personal careerism in colleges

and universities. What is needed instead is to see how, in France, the discussion

played out against the background of two related issues that the Events of May

and their aftermath put on the agenda in concentrated form:

(1) the Soviet model,

both during the Stalin period and after, as well as the slavish adherence of the

Chapter 3

56

Communist Party of France to "actually existing socialism"; and (2) Mao, the

Chinese Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, and the activities of the Maoists of France . In China, Mao wrote and spoke about different levels of contradictions, and about how there are contradictions among the people that are different from (even

jf related to) antagonistic class contradictions. In an essay titled, "The Ten

Major Relationships," Mao addressed all sorts of social relations (for example , between the town and countryside, and between the army and the masses) in a nonreductivistic way. Many of the discussions in France regarding the role of the

intellectual, such as those found in the Power/Knowledge collection (Foucault) or in the conversations between Foucault and Deleuze and radical students found in

the former's Language,

counter-memory, practice (where Foucault famously says

that the point of intellectual activity is to create a "tool kit for revolutionaries") cannot be understood apart from this background. There is a tendency in the United States, and now in France as well, to throw all of this background and tumult into the dustbin of "all that"; perhaps what is even more the case is that younger, postmodern intellectuals have internalized the fragmentation of capitalist society in such a way that Eurocentrism is almost an unconscious assumption. One would not suspect, for example, from recent ex­ amples of Foucauldian discourse , that Foucault and Deleuze conclude their con­ versation on "Intellectuals and Power" ( 1972) by discussing the tactics of the Vietnamese revolutionaries or the way that diverse struggles are "linked to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat" (216). Somehow all of this went by the wayside, so that it may not be appropriate to charge Foucault and Deleuze, but instead their interpreters and especially their American interpreters in the academy, with the "Sartrophobia" of which we have been speaking. Significantly, "Intellectuals and Power" begins with Foucault saying the following:

A Maoist once said to me: "I can easily understand Sartre's position in siding with us; I can understand his goals and his involvement in politics; I can partially under­ stand your position, since you've always been concerned with the problem of con­ finement. But Deleuze is an enigma." I was shocked by this statement because your position has always seemed particularly clear to me. Deleuze responds:

Possibly we're in the process of experiencing a new relationship between theory and practice. At one time, practice was considered an application of theory, a conse­ quence; at other times, it had an opposite sense and it was thought to inspire theory, to be indispensable for the creation of future theoretical forms. In any event, their re­ lationship was understood in terms of a process of totalization. For us, however, the question is seen in a different light. The relationships between theory and practice are far more partial and fragmentary. (205) Let us note two things here . First, Sartre, Foucault, and Deleuze (and many others, with the exception , significantly, of some of the Telquelians), are opening

Beyond the varieties of Sartrophobia

57

themselves to the reformulation of their intellectual practice in light of the expe­

rience of revolt that is occurring around them and that they are participating in on various levels. Second, what Deleuze seems to be saying is that, through this process and the social upheaval and counterculture that are inspiring it, the dif­

ference that is opening up between himself and Foucault, on the one side, and

Sartre on the other, has to do with totalization-for it is clearly no accident that Deleuze invokes this term, which is so much associated with Sartre.

Foucault and Deleuze return to this theme at the end of their conversation, and

my question is whether or not the summation they provide really does authorize an anti-Sartrean (and anti-humanist, -totalizing , -universalist, -strategic, etc.) po­

sition to the extent that others have argued for this. Allow me to quote at some

length; as we reenter the conversation, Deleuze is discussing the "present revolu­

tionary movement," which , he argues,

, has created multiple centers, and not as a result of weakness or insufficiency, since a certain kind of totalization pertains to power and the forces of reaction. (Vietnam, for

�e, is an impressive example of localized counter-tactics.) But how are we to

ins

define the networks, the transversal links between these active and discontinuous points, from one country to another or within a single country?

Foucault responds: The question of geographical discontinuity which you raise might mean the, fol­ lowing: as soon

as

we struggle against exploitation , the proletariat not only leads

the struggle but also defines its targets, its methods, and the places and instru­ ments of confrontation; and to ally oneself with the proletariat is to accept its po­ sitions, its ideology, and its motives for combat. This means total identification. But if the fight is directed against power, then all those on whom power is exer­

cised to their detriment, all who find it intolerable, can begin the struggle on their own terrain and on the basis of their proper activi� (or passivity). In engaging in a struggle that concerns their own interests, whose objectives they clearly under­ stand and whose methods only they can determine, they enter into a revolutionary process. They naturally enter as allies of the proletariat, because power is exer­ cised in the way that it is in order to maintain capitalist exploitation . They gen­ uinely serve the cause of the proletariat by fighting in those places where they find themselves oppressed. Women, prisoners , conscripted soldiers , hospital patients , and homosexuals have now begun a specific struggle against the particularize\! power, the constraints and controls that are exerted over them. Such struggles are actually involved in the revolutionary movement to the degree that they are radi­ cal, uncompromising, and nonreformist, and refuse any attempt at arriving at a new disposition of the same power with, at best, a change of masters . And these movements are linked to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat to the ex­

tent that they fight against the contro Is and constraints which serve the same sys­ tem of power. . . . In this sense, the overall picture presented by the struggle is certainly not that of the totalization you mentioned earlier, this theoretical total­ ization under the guise of "truth." The generality of the struggle specifically

Chapter 3

58

derives from the system of power itself, from all the forms in which power is ex­ ercised and applied. (216) r

Now, one might argue that Foucault and Deleuze went much further in the ar­ gument for locality and fragmentation and "tactics" (in the sense that Todd May uses the term) in the years after this. Perhaps it helps to contextualize the matter as follows . In the heady days of May 1968 and its aftermath, when the Maoists were a real social and intellectual force, Foucault and Deleuze and other, shall we say, post-Sartreans were drawn into some of the same terms that Sartre was grap­ pling with, and some of the similarities had to do with the vogue for what De1euze was to call "nomad thought." Out of this matrix also arose an interest in Antonio Gramsci and the questions of hegemony and the war of position. One might argue that, under the influence of Benny Levy, Sartre was also moving in very new di­ rections by the mid- 1 970s, directions that were less concerned with totalization. So, it might be argued, by this point not only Foucault, Deleuze, and the others were anti- or post-Sartre, but Sartre had moved in this direction as well. But in the second chapter here I have argued that this was not the case. A further point might be made that micropolitics as it is being practiced by in­ tellectuals who think they are inspired by Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, etc., really seems to be a dead end. If this is the case, and regrounding ourselves in what Fou­ cault and Deleuze at least claimed to be thinking back in those heady days when they were formulating their notions on radical intellectual activity in the midst of revolutionary events , we might adopt a more modest critique of Sartre's project of totalization, and this actually has to do with modesty itself, at least when it comes to the questions of totality and representation. But then we have to admit that Sartre himself had moved toward modesty when it comes to representation, in his model of the radical intellectual from the early 1970s, and we have to ac­ knowledge that Sartre's model of totality, especially from the second volume of the Critique, was one that warned of a "total integration" that destroys negativity. (On the "nomad thought" response to the question of totality, see my "Nomad and empire" and "Foucault: Power/Counter-power.") Perhaps intellectual modesty is needed in the case that theoretical totalization becomes overbearing or monolithic, or where the theorizer seems to be thinking that he or she is speaking ex cathedra. In a Derridean frame, one might be criti­ cal of "a certain apocalyptic tone," but, speaking from personal experience, I have heard this tone just as much in micropolitics and in a politics that is supposedly critical of "representation" as I ever heard it from Sartre . Perhaps this is only to be expected in a "politics" that is often confined to fairly petty power struggles in the academy-though, admittedly, not in every case is the confinement self­ inflicted, and those of us who wish for the days when Sartre, de Beauvoir, Fou­ cault, Marcuse, and others showed public audacity and courage must grapple with the facts of postmodern capitalism, where what would constitute a counterculture is no longer clear. (On this, more in Chapter 7.)

Beyond the varieties of Sartrophobia

59

The larger point would seem to be that, in "Intellectuals and Power," Foucault and Deleuze come full circle, for what is affIrmed in conclusion is that there is a relationship between theory and practice where the latter is primary. Yes , there is a great diversity of experience-but I do not know of any better model for the as. sertion of this diversity than Mao's leadership in forging a different perspective on revolution in the shadow of Stalin's monolithic totalization. One of Mao's chief arguments in the midst of all of that was that he heard much talk of "unity" and little of "struggle," whereas he took the latter to be primary. Totalization is generated by the system of power that is struggled against. '!\vo points ought to be made here. First, it is against this background that Sartre, Foucault, and Deleuze are grappling with the role of theory and intellectual activity; when that background is factored out, then we are left with micropolitics and identity poli­ tics as we have more recently seen them practiced. (I realize that I have said this already, but I think it bears repeating.) Second, if anything, Sartre, Foucault, and Deleuze can all be faulted with conceptions of struggle that do not open the way for that which escapes the dialectic of struggle and totalizing power. Certainly, on both ofvtgese points, Foucault's Hobbesian side is troubling, for it results in a "politics" where the war of all against all is taken to such microscopic levels that no system of power that exists on a more macroscopic level is really challenged. Furthermore, as Mark Poster notes , Foucault's challenge to Sartre see�s to re­ sult in a position that is antitheoretical, and more besides: Foucault was so deeply concerned to limit the scope of the theorist's epistemologi­ cal position that he refused to systematize his position or even to elaborate concepts to any great extent. He refused to explore at all the position from which he attained knowledge and at times went so far as to grant that he was a simple positivist in order to avoid the task of self-reflection. (24)

Foucault's antitheoretical stance is captured well.by Nancy Fraser's now-famous formula, "empirical insight and normative confusion ." What's more, and now to complete our compendium of posttheorizing with a brief mention of one more fIgure, Foucault is surprisingly close in this respect to someone who might be seen as the closest thing to Sartre that we have today in the United States , at least insomuch as engaged intellectual activity goes, namely, Noam Chomsky. It is neit appropriate to tag Chomsky with the "left Sartrophobia" that I think does indeed apply to some of the Tel Quelians and (seemingly all) advocates of micropolitics and identity politics. And, in fact, Chomsky's political positions are often not very different from ones that Sartre either took up or that one could imagine Sartre taking up today. But then, this could also be said of Foucault and Deleuze in many cases. The point is that Chomsky clearly thinks that all one needs is ob­ servations and positions; what is not needed is any kind of deep-going social the­ ory. As I am sure most readers of this text will know, Chomsky is extraordinar­ ily prolific in his political writings and speeches, which consist almost entirely

Chapter 3

60

of relentless exposures of the imperialist system. Those readers who are activists will be familiar with the form of political exposure known as the "fact sheet," the sort of thing %at is sometimes passed out at demonstrations and rallies. Chom­ sky's political work is something like the proverbial fact sheet whose pages, if set end to end, would perhaps reach the moon or some other heavenly body, so

dogged is he in the exposure of the workings and evil-doings of the system. A

few years ago I heard Chomsky speak at Loyola University in Chicago. His talk, which was a typical one for him, consisted in about an hour of this sort of expo­ sure, and then a one-line conclusion that went something like, "Never has the need for change been so great." Although a few people have attempted to show the connections between Chomsky's theoretical work in linguistics and his political work (for instance , Michael Albert , editor of

Z Magazine), Chomsky himself resists this. Although

this is a discussion that should be conducted at greater length, it seems to me that what one would find in such an examination is a concatenation of rationalism in the linguistics and empiricism in the politics. The connection might be made, at least as Albert has argued , between the basic capacity for language , especially at the level of grammar, and some basic desire for freedom-of a sort that Chom­ sky links with Rousseau. Perhaps one could then go further and make an argu­ ment about language and freedom, but Chomsky himself has not offered such an argument. Returning, however, to "our Rousseau," as Althusser called Sartre , Chomsky does present to us a provocative example . In the 1 965 argument con­ cerning the engaged intellectual- by which is meant the "real" intellectual­ Sartre gives as one characteristic of such an intellectual that he or she gets in­ volved in things that are "not his business." He is taking up the genealogy of the term, "intellectual," that goes back to the Dreyfus affair. Under this usage, Chom­

sky is an exemplary intellectual , in that his technical expertise is in linguistics but he also expends great energy in the exposure of U.S. imperialism. Who would say that this is not highly laudable , regardless of Chomsky's relationship with social theorizing or even the fact that he seems to be very skeptical of such theorizing? After all, is it not good when an intellectual , or anyone , opposes the principalities and powers when they are rotten? Is it not good when an intellectual who has tremendous prestige in her or his field brings that prestige to bear on oppressive social systems? My point is that the example of Chomsky thematizes the contradiction that

Sartre was grappling with, from

What Is Literature? to the dialogues with

Maoists and with the post-Maoist Benny Levy, concerning the role of intellectual activity in transforming the world. For, if the intellectual is one who gets involved in what is "not his business," then is it not primarily a matter of something that the intellectual "delivers up" to the masses , a kind of transfer of intellectual cap­ ital? This is what we see up until at least 1 965, but it may also be what we see in the early 1 970s, when Sartre is hoping to overcome the division of labor and to dissolve himself, so to speak, into the people . At the same time, we have Sartre

Beyond the varieties of Sanrophobia

61

the philosopher and social theorist, who i s attempting t o explain the world in order to change it. Certainly Chomsky assumes the ethical-political universalism that Sartre attempted to give a theoretical foundation for, though one might won­ der at an "anarchist" (as Chomsky sometimes calls himself) who voted for Bill Clinton and who thinks the U.S . federal government ought to be strengthened against threats from right-wing militia groups. If we were to fmd fault with some political position that Sartre upheld (for instance, many anti-imperialists question his position on the state of Israel), would we then trace this back to his theoreti­ cal work, all the while, in the case of Chomsky, tracing any questionable position to the lack of political theory? The question goes back to discussions of political "expertise" that are at least as old as Plato. In either case, Sartre or Chomsky, there is the "double life," the difference being that Sartre was always struggling to resolve the contradiction. In this light, I want to rum towliI'd some concluding ' remarks on Sartre's legacy for radical intellectuals. It is quite possible that many will find the conclusion I have come to not very satisfactory, for it is a conclusion that resists closure. There are contradictions at the heJl(t of the intellectual enterprise. To be an engaged intellectual seems to mean t*o things, simultaneously: to stand with the masses against oppressive systems, and to carry forward the intellectual work of radical social transforma­ tion. There are numerous examples of intellectuals who mainly or eVen only do one or the other, for instance Chomsky and Adorno, respectively. Sartre did both things and took it that there was a connection between the two, and in this he was like Marx. The term that we often use for standing with the masses aild their struggle is "solidarity," and, in some versions of this idea, there is no contradic­ tion between the masses and those who "stand with" them. Even in his final pe­ riod of theorizing about intellectual activity, Sartre recognized that there are con­ tradictions: of class, of one's social standing and cachet, in the division of mental and manual labor, in the difference between theory and practice. To say that there are no contradictions here, supposedly because there cannot be any if this is to be "real" solidarity, is in fact to undermine possibilities for transcending the contra­ dictions through social struggle. The contradictions between theory and practice and between mental and manual labor were not overcome in the Soviet Union in the Stalin period by adding the term "worker" to everyone's position-intellec­ tual worker, cultural worker, etc. Nor is the situation helped, in the final analysis, by Althusser's term (the effects of which are seen in Deleuze's comments about theory and practice), "theoretical practice." Of course the differences are not ab­ solute, nor should they be hypostatized as such. In the aftermath of May 1968, especially in working with the Maoists, Sartre thought that he could effect a more direct relationship between theory and prac­ tice, and to perhaps even dissolve the difference between being an intellectual and being a1l1ember of the working class. The principle aspect of this, to my mind, is that Sartre saw the revolutionary situation as necessitating a further transformation in intellectual work. Sartre wanted to go beyond his own intellectual hegemony,

62

Chapter 3

and beyond the situation where intellectual work might become capital -to be de­ livered ov� "in solidarity," but capital all the same.

Does the fact that, at least in class society, the contradictions of intellectual

work cannot be so directly overcome, mean that the engaged intellectual will ul­

timately remain a "fellow traveler"? The key to this question is to conceive fel­

low traveling not as primarily aimed at an organization or movement, but first of

all toward the oppressed and their higher aspirations. Keeping in mind that Sartre's conceptions of collectivity do not require the positing of some "collec­

tive subject," we can maintain that, for the foreseeable future, solidarity will re­

quire a continual grappling with difference.

If we return , then , to a certain "mourning" for the model that Sartre gives us

with his life even more than with his theory of that life, a series of questions fol­

lows. Of course we can ask again where our Sartres and de Beauvoirs and Mar­

cuses are today. I hope the foregoing discussion has deepened the question. I

hope that we have some sense now of what Chomsky lacks that Sartre had, but

we cannot lay all of this on Chomsky. For, one thing that we all lack now is a

sense of what a deep revolt and counterculture would look like. Sartre was one of the last writers who had his initial impact before television and other elec­

tronic media transformed our sense of the importance of understanding - as Neil

Postman put it, "there isn't much to watch in thinking ." Pierre Bourdieu argues

that we have now come to the point where every intellectual (who wants to be

heard, in any case) is supposed to b� telegenic, to be ready to perform as "Ie fast talker." In the United States, we did see a major revolt in recent years , starting

in Los Angeles and spreading quite far from there, in the aftermath of the first

verdict in the trial of the racist cops who beat Rodney King to within an inch of his life. Many intellectuals spoke out, including the group of thinkers who have come to be known as the "New Black Intellectuals"- people such as Cornell

West and Patricia Williams and Lewis Gordon. Nor did they fail to be eloquent

when faced with the necessity and opportunity of making their voices heard . Many of these people, including those just named , are conversant in the theo­

retical issues surrounding the question of engaged intellectual work, from Sartre to the critique of representation and beyond. We have to go further in our ex­

ploration of the circumstances of Sartre's hegemony, the intellectual hegemony of

1 945-60 and the political hegemony thereafter. Do these circumstances indi­

cate the possibility of a revival or some sort of extension of the Sartrean model

today? Or do present circumstances only favor post-Sartre, post-Althusserian

models? This is the question of Sartre in postrnodern times; significantly, it is also the question of politics in such times as these.

4 Political theory after Bataille and Derrida On

the critique of "project"

There has been much discussion in recent years regarding the political possibil­ ities of deconstruction. While there are many radical and, just to say it, good, pos­ sibilitids, there is also at least one wrong way to go, at least in my view. In this essay I will examine some problems in works by Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy on the question of community. I see these works as set against, at least to some extent and in significant ways, Sartre's conception of "project." While I find elements of their work admirable, in particular their continuation of the anti­ utilitarianlanti-"ethic of calculation" thrust of Georges Bataille and Jacques Der­ rida, it seems clear to me that their critique of the idea of a human and political project is being taken up in a politically quietistic way, at least by their admirers in North American continental philosophy circles. Even apart from this scene, however, I think the quietistic aspects of what might be called Blanchot's and Nancy's "communitarianism" are in the original sources. In the next chapter I will continue the Sartre/Derrida discussion. Both chapt¥.rs are really meant as prelim­ inary probes, aspects of the groundwork for more extended investigations .

For the generation that came of age in the 1960s, the idea of a political " proj_ ect" is most of all associated with Jean-Paul Sartre. While Sartre did not accept the idea of a human "essence," it is still the case for Sartre that part of what it means to be human is to be able to have a project, to pro-ject oneself into the fu­ ture. Thus, having a "future," in the sense of having a conception of what might unfold in the future and what conscious human activity (praxis) . might do to shape this unfolding is integral to the human form of sentience. As everyone knows, Sartre's voice defined the intellectual field in France and beyond from 1945 until about 1960,'and his political activities and writings con­ tinued to have a major influence until his death in 1980. There are perhaps several 63

64

Chapter 4

different "generations of '68," even if some of these generations are contempo­ raries. Insomuch as the Events of May were "Sartrean," there was certainly a Sartrean generation of 1 968 . I wonder if there is also a subgeneration of those who either caught the tail end of the sixties, or just missed it, in the sense of active par­ ticipation in the struggles of the day, but who still take fundamerital orientation from those struggles. (Now I am referring not only to the Paris Events, but also to struggles from Shanghai to Chicago and from Prague to Mexico City.) As a mem­ ber of this subgeneration, I read and still read books such as Mark Poster's Exis­ tential Marxism in Postwar France and Arthur Hirsh's The French New Left with great enthusiasm, feeling inspired by the idea of the engaged intellectual. If some of this activity was seriously overrated at the time, it is underrated now, and works such as Luc Ferry's and Alain Renaut's French Philosophy of the Sixties have ap­ peared as neoconservative antidotes to Poster, Hirsh, and similar works. Today, many of the important voices in philosophy and intellectual life more generally, the "senior" figures, still take orientation from the sixties . Although some of these voices have mellowed somewhat, few have actually gone over to the other side. When Derrida speaks of "the impossible," it is hard not to hear a resonance with a popular slogan of the Events of May, "Be realistic, demand the impossible!" Perhaps that is simply romanticism on my part, but, then again, I think we could use a little romanticism. The underestimation of Sartre today, the avoidance of him, has been accompa­ · nied by a concomitant promotion of the liberal figures of the French sixties, es­ pecially Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron. (The former, it might be said, was pushed into a comer by Sartre's hyperbolic rhetoric. However, beyond whatever personal and even perhaps oedipal issues might have been presentin the conflict, 20/20 hindsight shows that Merleau-Ponty could only see liberalism-I would say "mere liberalism" - as the alternative to Stalinist Communism.) Still ignored, except by the very specialized and politically isolated (somewhat self-isolated) researchers of contemporary continental philosophy, are Sartre's earlier critics from what might be called "the other existential left," the Nietzschean left, namely Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. Not that their work has not re­ ceived attention for itself, but the way that they were responding to the Sartrean field has been ignored by recent continental researchers, because Sartre himself is avoided. Jacques Derrida, as he has repeatedly acknowledged, owes a consid­ erable debt to this pair. In Bataille we find the critique of "project," of its sup­ posed reductivism and utilitarianism. Speaking a language that positivists cannot hear as discursive (in other words, as anything other than "poetry," perhaps good, perhaps bad-recall that Carnap praised Nietzsche as a poet, but referred to Hei­ degger's writing as "bad poetry"), Bataille asks, "What could be more ridiculous than reducing ' what is' -the universe, if you like-to analogies with useful ob­ jects !" (Guilty, 1 6) Derrida, in his essay on Bataille's reading of Hegel, "From restricted to gen­ eral economy," discusses the idea of a "perfect" economy, one in which every

Political theory after Bataille and Derrida

65

coin is accounted for. This economy is, of course, Hegel's system, which, while supposedly accounting for "everything," exercises a radical reduction on "what is." (This theme was already well developed by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and other nineteenth-century existentialist thinkers.) But what is the "outside" of this economy, and what is its relation to the "inside"? Given that Hegel's economy is first of all diachronic, the succession of historical stages from a well-defined ori­ gin to a well-defined end, one would think that the "remainders" of this economy must necessarily be outside of the structure of history and historical time. This interpretation of the remainder

as

"momentary" (as a moment that is not

continuous with and cannot be reinserted in the temporal or historical order) seems to be supported by Blanchot, in

The Unavowable Community, and Jean­ The Inoperable Community. The first half of Blanchot's text is a post-Bataille, post-Derrida analysis of the Events of May 1 968 . Blanchot takes it

Luc Nancy, in

as a virtue of the y oung militants that they were not "going anywhere;' that they put forward no positive program or project.

It was not even a question of overthrowing an old world; what mattered was to let a possibility manifest itself, the possibility-beyond any utilitarian gain-of a being together that gave back to all the right to equality in fraternity through a freedom of speech that elated everyone. (The Unavowable Community, 30) Indeed, it seems that, for Blanchot, May

1968 was the big "Love-In" that fits in

well with the recent wave of apolitical sixties nostalgia (or with the reduction of sixties politics to feel-good pop psychology rhetoric, such as Bill Clinton's sup­ posed ability to "feel y our pain"). At least , that is how Blanchot's characteriza­ tion of the Events reads now, within the antiproject framework. Consider, too, the notion of an "event," contrasted to the notion of an unfolding process. The prob­ lem with Hegelianism is that the event drops out, it has no real existence (recall the exclusion of sense-certainty from the systenil. We will return to look at the ' flip-side of this coin, as it were, in a moment . Nancy, whose Inoperable

Community was the immediate inspiration for Blan­

chot's text, focuses especially on the notions of "being toward death," which he takes from Heidegger, and "singularity." Where Heidegger, however, describes death as "that possibility which is one's ownmost"

(Being and Time, sec. 50),

Nancy is concerned with the death that summons one's finitude toward commu­ nity. As Patrick Hayden puts it, characterizing Nancy's position,

The finitude of community, the finitude of beings summoning community, is also the very absencing of community through this finitude. That which calls oneself into question most radically is the death of an other; not one's own death, which cannot be experienced as such, but an other's death that concerns one, that one shares. The sharing of the other's death brings out most forcefully the differences of beings-in­ common. Someone else's death removes me from myself, and their absence, impos­ sibly, is the very openness of community, its very possibility. Without death (which

Chapter 4

66

is the absolutely other, the most irreducible alterity), community would not be pos­ sible. ("(Re)thinking community: responding to Bataille," 21) Who is this "one" who is concerned with the death of the other? In Nancy's view, this one is not the atomistic individual of liberalism, but rather the "sin­ gularity." Indeed, Nancy 's remarks on the "absolutely detached for-itself' seem aimed not only at liberalism, but also at what might be understood as Sartre's radical individualism. In the place of the traditional, self-conscious subject of Descartes, the "being without relation" (4) , Nancy proposes the singular being, whose "consciousness of self turns out to be outside the self of consciousness"

( 1 9). Katherine Dow refers to this reconfigured subjectivity as "intrinsically ex­ trinsic" ("Ex-posing Identity," 6). Furthermore, whereas two sup,j ects merely

confront each other as objects in opposition, singular beings encounter each

other through the mode of "compearance ('co-appearance ') or mutual exchange" (Dow,

6).

Quite unclear to me, however, is whether these formulations, coupled as they are with Nancy's rewriting of "being toward death," really go so far beyond Sartre's existentialism. Indeed, they remind me of Sartre 's earlier existentialism, devoid of the later political understanding. This is the result, I think, of Nancy's and Blanchot's efforts toward avoiding any sense of personal transcendence; they seem to think such transcendence is an opening to "Stalinism" (see Nancy's essay, "The Compearance ," as well as volume

3 of Bataille's The Accursed Share,

"Sovereignty"). They are right, it does open that possibility. What, however, is the cost of foreclosing the possibility? To my mind it is

a

notion of "mutual ex­

change ," in a community that does not have to be created because it is "always already" here , but that also simply reminds one of liberalism. Nancy's "compearance" is not a "union," for the latter would assume "already given subjects (objects)." Rather, compearance "consists in the appearance of the

between as such" (28-29). (Nancy would have done well to have left the words

"as such" out of this formulation, as they undermine the idea of "the between,"

or what more properly should have been called "between-ness." Martin Buber 's term,

das Zwischenmenschliche, the "interhuman ," could also help us here; see 3 1 -47 .) One assumes that the notion of "solidarity," especially in

Mendes-Flohr,

tension with "autonomy," would have problems similar to those ascribed to "union ." And yet, I find nothing in the terms that accompany Nancy's "between" that really serves as a replacement for dialectically related notions of solidarity and autonomy, especially if this dialectic is structured, as it is in Sartre 's

Critique,

as a totalizing process without a totalizer, without a transcendental spirit that pro­

vides some final meaning to history. The same goes for Blanchot, especially when he speaks of a "mutual contestation" that deepens [the awareness of being isolated] in a solitude lived in common"

(Unavowable Community, 2 1 ). If the

only thing that makes this kind of talk not simply a form of gloomy existential­ ism is the lack of a "project," then shouldn't we say, "Vive Ie projet"?

Political theory after Bataille and Derrida

67

Perhaps Sartre's more Cartesian side is most easily seen in the famous "di­ alectics of boxing" example from the unfinished second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. But this side is only predominant if one focuses on each boxer individually, and the point of the example is precisely to show how proj­ ects are not the products of isolated, self-creating consciousnesses. An existential individualism is also readily apparent if one focuses on Sartre's choice of "sport." (I look forward to the day when a new society will abolish boxing; on this point, see McBride, Sartre 's Political Theory, 1 63-68.) All the same, there is still a sense of between-ness here that structures the event as it develops in time. There might be better analogies to use than boxing, though of course Sartre was also in­ terested in capturing the brutality of class struggle. I like to think about a group of children on the playground, not only dividing into teams, but also making up the game itself. Then again, this ideal, "free dialectic," not grounded in any straightforward material necessity, perhaps exemplifies the carnival · spirit that Blanchot is celebrating in the "moment" of May 1 968-as when Lenin called revolution a "festival of the oppressed." That is to move too quickly, however, in more ways than one. Blanchot's festival is one where, for a moment, people live as .though they have never been oppressed, or as if it is only a distant memory. TP.e other way that this moves too quickly-for Sartre and Lenin, I would say­ is that the moment of such a liberatory experience, as it was manifest in,Paris in May 1968, remains conditioned by the fact that France was and is an imperialist country. It is not that there should never be the feeling of liberation, the prefigu­ ration of redemption, in such a society, but certainly the conditions for such an experience are different from what they would be in the Third World. So, Sartre aimed for something quite brutal and direct with his boxing example, one where the participants are not likely to forget what it is like to live in this Hobbesian world. One might question whether the example leaves Sartre, especially know­ ing his sometime Cartesian proclivities, with two separate, opposing subjectivi­ ties. However, Sartre breaks out of Cartesianism: .fue subjectivities involved here are themselves founded and structured by the struggle. If there is a residual Carte­ sianism or radical subjectivity here, we still might ask how the idea of "mutual contestation" solves the problem-indeed, the idea appears to be quite similar to Sartre's. In "Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject," Christina Howells demonstrates a number of affinities between Sartre's and Derrida's conceptions and critiques of the subject. As she points out, both Sartre and Derrida are inter­ ested in the "reinterpretation" of the subject, and the latter even takes Nancy to task for speaking of the "liquidation" of the subject (348). Furthermore, where Blanchot and Nancy focus so much on the momentary "always already" structure of these contestations and exchanges, a focus that collapses in their work into its own kind of Cartesianism, Sartre is concerned in his later work to absorb the mo­ ment in a network of social processes. In favor of Sartre, too, I would say that, for all that there seems to remain a Cartesian kernel to even his later work, his social theory must be applied to a

Chapter 4

68

culture that itself is thoroughly Cartesian. One might just as well ask about the "Cartesianism" of Kierkegaard or any thinker-Bataille or Adorno , for that mat­ ter- who resists the complete obliteratlon of singularity by totality. But it is one thing to stand on the side of the negative moment in the dialectic, as that which resists reification and what Sartre calls the counterfinality of the institution, and another thing to hypostatize this moment into pure self-sufficiency. The "always already " community of Nancy and Blancho.t---jgnores the boxing match of our present form of society, its inherent Cartesiani �m that must be overcome as such, from within . (Cyberspace will present new and extraordinary problems in this regard, as the possibilities for embracing the evil genius, because he is us, mul­ tiply and deepen. But that is another story.) There always already might be a powerful way of overcoming the Cartesianism of Western liberal societies

if it

were integrated into a project.

I have admittedly overstated my case against Nancy and Blanchot; I find their

conceptions of community an inspiration in some respects. (Significantly, Derrida parts company with them, and with me, over communitarianism, which he re­ jects.) Some readers will say that the problem with my critique of these concep­ tions is that I want to

use them, or at, least to apply them. That is right. But even

beyond the question of integrating Nancy and Blanchot (and the general project of rethinking community in the way that they do) into the project of reconfigur­ ing the polis (or, in my conception, bringing the polis into being), I find three basic problems in their approach . First, one sees in their work the typical

insularity of much philosophy from

France. Nancy and Blanchot (and Bataille's conception of "literary communism," which Nancy takes up in the final part of

The Inoperable Community) have to be

understood in the context of the response to Sartre. Apart from this context (and even somewhat within it) their work seems to generate a momentary excitement that has no orientation toward practice, other than perhaps to a longer term "proj­ ect" of quietism. Second, apart from the example of the Events of May in Blanchot's work, there is an overarching rationalism here. There is no empirical consideration of tradi­ tional communities or so-called "elective communities." There is little sense that liberalism is quite a bit more than merely a conception to be philosophically dis­ sected, that atomism is a culture and a form of life and must be addressed as such. A little attention to the notion of ideology, especially in Althusser 's sense, would not hurt either. And one of the easiest things in the world is to go on about "Stal­ inism" without dealing with the history of the Soviet Union, the international communist movement , and the imperialist division of the world. Third, Nancy and Blanchot seem to get a positively existential high from con­ sidering the pathos of isolation and death (without even machine-gunning any Nazis in the process; rather the pathos is enjoyed in the space of quiet singular­ ity ) . There is, certainly, a very important point to emphasizing the meaning of iso­ lation and solitude, as Sophocles does at the conclusion of Antigone. Creon, hav-

Political theory after Bataille and De"ida

69

ing lost all respect from his subjects because of his hubris and his self-involved emptiness, says, "Take me away, quickly, out of sight. I do not even exist-I

am

no one, Nothing." But it seems to me a kind of morbid sensibility, typical of a cer­

tain strand in French philosophy since Bataille (and exemplified perhaps most of all in his "Acephale" group, which contemplated the idea of committing a ran­

dom murder as a way of forging their "community; see Allan Stoekl's introduc­ tion to Bataille,

Visions of Excess), to focus exclusively on the death of the other

as the other side of an isolated individualism that never gives rise to "singular

being." One gets little sense from Nancy that "life is with people" (as goes an old saying from the Jews of the Eastern European shtetls, before their destruction). In

"Problems of Deconstructive Communitarianism," Kathleen League makes the point forcefully:

in speaking of and for community, many deconstructionists are one-sidedly promot­ ing, emphasizing, and affirming the concepts of lack, absence, death, loss of the sub­ ject, nothingness, and unworking. They are doing this to the near total exclusion of reference to, evocation of, and concern with life and its affmnation and nurturance. Perhaps the selective emphasis on death is merely strategic-perhaps it does not con­ note a dark fascination with death, but is merely used against the counterproductive or facile tendency toward mere emphasis on life . I am not convinced that this is the case, however. [This selective emphasis] on death and absence not only reinforces the binary oppositions that deconstruction is supposed to challenge, . . . it also is no more healthy than a selective emphasis on life; it probably also does bespeak nihilist tendencies and fascinations. (2) Indeed, the B ataille-inspired fascination with death often seems to be the flip­

side of a sanguine and blithe affirmation . There are

found

useful, sometimes pro­ images here, but where is the negativity in this nihilism, where is the cri­

tique?

There is some force to the critique of "project,".and the question still remains:

Can there be a political project that does not close the way to the advent of the other, of the impossible?

Is Nancy's "inoperable community" the only political possibility of decon­

struction? It is the possibility, I would say, that one encounters in making a de­

constructive end-run around Marx and Sartre.

This essay is a revised version of a section of my earlier book, Humanism and 20-26. In the essay I quote, with permission, from papers written for a graduate seminar I held in spring 1991 at DePaul University, on the subject ofDerrida and social theory. I thank Katherine Dow, Patrick Hayden, and Kathleen League for their contributions. its afte'rmath: The shared fate of deconstruction and politics,

5 The political space of Sartre in the text of Derrida

There are at least three places in the work of Jacques Derrida where an engage­ ment with Sartre seems positively invited (and many other places, of course, where such an engagement would be both possible and fruitful). First, there are the comments that Derrida makes in his essay on Bataille, "From Restricted to

General Economy." Bataille's "literary communism" is contrasted with �artre's

arguments in What Is Literature? concerning the writer and his or her audience. This contrast is worked out further by a contemporary philosopher who studied with Derrida, namely Jean-Luc Nancy (in his

The Inoperable Community).

Second, and almost certainly a more fertile ground for a larger comparison, is

the fact that both Sartre and Derrida have written substantial tomes on Jean Genet, the former's

Saint Genet and the latter's Glas. Indeed, as Christina How­

ells argues in her very good introductory text on Derrida (besides the general ex­ cellence and judiciousness of this book, I have to admit to the pleasure of finding such a book written by a Sartrean) ,

Glas represents something of a "concealed

battle" with Sartre, especially over the question of Hegelian dialectic (85).

For readers not familiar with Glas, let me mention that it is a longish work where the text consists in two columns, one on Hegel and the other on Genet. In the largest sense, it is probably most appropriate to say that the work concerns the

questions of contamination and closure. These are, undoubtedly, two of the most important themes in all of Derrida's work.

Glas also partakes of the style of the

Kaballah, and thereby also thematizes the fact that Hegel was frustrated about his

inability to account for the Jews in his system. (On this point, see my Matrix and line, 5fr63, "The Jews who worry Hegel.") Through this thematization another

encounteli between Sartre and Derrida becomes possible, as the former is ar­ guably also not able to account for the Jews "as such," and then all of this leads to the discussion of Hegel and dialectic once again.

Howells goes so far as to claim, quite rightly I think, that "the commentary [in

Glas] is set up, in part, as a critical response to Sartre's seminal Saint Genet, 71

72

Chapter 5

published over twenty years earlier. Direct reference to Sartre is limited to a few relatively brief passages, but the precursor text underlies more of Derrida's writ­ ing than he acknowledges explicitly" (86). In moving to a third instance where an engagement between Sartre and Derrida is called for, I want to hold in the forefront of discussion a question that I can imagine Professor Howells wonders about as well, namely, how is it that Sartre always seems to drop out of the pic­ ture (or never enters the picture in the first place) in discussions of Derrida's work? After all, there are so many points of contact. First of all, Derrida , like many of his generation (and mine, for that matter) , became interested in philos­ ophy in part because of the overwhelming influence of Sartre. When Derrida first went to France from his home country of Algeria, having been drafted into the army, he heard Sartre being interviewed on the radio. This played a role in his realization that he wanted to be a philosopher. Second, both Sartre and Der­

rida have fundamental orientations to 1 968, even if there are some differences over how to understand that period. Third, I note with some amusement that, while Sartre engaged with the Maoists even while saying that he was not a Maoist, Derrida has also been accused of having a bit of Maoism in him, by crit­ ics on the right (for example, Stanley Rosen, in

Hermeneutics and Politics) and

the left (Terry Eagleton and Alex Callinicos, both of whom are Trotskyists) .

My sense is that the riddle is solved by looking at two different trajectories that

lead toward Derrida, the one more "philosophical" and the other more straight­ forwardly political . In the first case there are those who come to Derrida through what is understood in the United States and England as a central stream of "con­ tinental" philosophy, where the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger predominates . (Of course continental philosophy is not the central or predominant stream in the academic institutions of philosophy more generally in these countries , where an­ alytic philosophy continues to dominate; indeed, the key figures of this Niet­ zschean-Heideggerian stream in the Anglo-American scene are on the whole quite marginal to the larger institutions.) But there is another way toward Der­ rida's work in terms of philosophy, which intersects with the political trajectory. There is a way toward Derrida that comes through Marxism in general , and Marx­ ist philosophy in France in particular, and especially through Sartre and Althusser. (A fine demonstration of this trajectory can be found in "On Interpretation," the long introductory chapter of Fredric Jameson's

The Political Unconscious.) As

the reader might imagine, the Heideggerians are mostly either indifferent or hos­ tile toward anything that comes out of Marxism or May 1968, and so this dimen­ sion of Derrida' s work drops out for them . What is primary here, of these two tra­ jectories? I would say that the political is primary, and that these different philosophical orientations are situated within the political . From the perspective of situating Derrida's work primarily within a Heideg­ gerian framework (that either claims to be beyond the merely ontic reality of po­ litical questions or that in fact retains at least some aspects of a fascistic outlook), Sartre drops out of the discussion, because he is seen as simply a bad reader of

73

The political space of Sartre in the text of Derrida

Heidegger and as someone who was deeply mired in the ontic. Derrida at least credits Sartre with a "misreading" so creative that it was able to hold sway for a generation. My perspective is that once one does situate the philosophical in

terms of the political (which means, for example, that one rejects such Heideg­ gerian staples as the idea that the "own-ness" of one's death places one ultimately beyond politics; Jean-Luc Nancy develops this argument in The Inoperable Com­ munity), there are many insights from Heidegger that can and should be assimi­

lated to a radical perspective. These especially concern language and technology. In turning now to this third engagement, I want to begin to restore Sartre's place in the discussion of humanism. As I acknowledged in the introduction, I do think

there is something to be learned from Heidegger's "antihumanism," especially as regards speciesism and nonhuman animals, and especially if Heidegger's argu­ ments are resituated as much as possible away from their original context. But Derrida's work is often interpreted entirely in terms of this antihumanism, and

this is a one-sided reading of a philosopher who is famous for calling for the dou­ ble reading and the double strategy. Derrida's essay "The Ends of Man" deconstructs the humanism of Sartre­

whom Michel Foucault called (in a Nietzschean mode that is also one part but not the whole of Derrida's perspective) "the last great Hegelian." This is a straw man that both Foucault and Derrida sometimes take recourse to. But decon­ struction is not a purely "negative" activity. Derrida does in fact criticize; and in

a purely analytical sense, Sartre's "mistake" in reading Hegel, HusserI, and es­ pecially Heidegger anthropologically. He also uncovers the ontotheological pre­

suppositions that determine and motivate the structure of this "mistake ." What

has been missed in many analyses of this text is that Derrida is not merely re­

asserting a certain (non-Sartrean, to be sure) Heidegger against Sartre. This is a very important point, both politically and philosophically. A Heideggerian de­ construction of humanism is not Derrida's only end here- for

this deconstruc­ au­

tion would be no less a singular end than that posi�d by Kant. Kant's "end,"

tonomy, is really the humanism that Derrida's essay is perhaps most concerned with (the first of his three epigraphs is from the Groundwork/or the Metaphysics 0/ Morals). Derrida is intent on not allowing this end, autonomy, to be simply

c�celed by Heidegger's sense of the "ek-sistence of man" -"standing in the lighting of Being."

For Derrida, Heidegger's "proximity" (of humanity to Being) still requires a political reading . In this recognition, Derrida is not unlike Sartre, although of course Derrida's reading is quite different from Sartre's. Derrida insists that hu­

manity and Being share a similar relation to their ends, even if these are not the same ends: "Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since always, is its proper end , that is, the end of its proper" ( 1 34). It is the prolfimity of these twin autonomies, Being and humanity, that creates a "trem­ bling ." This trembling is not found in Sartre, because for him to speak of the au­

tonomy of human beings is only proper, and to speak of the "autonomy" of Being

74

Chapter 5

would perhaps violate his sense of the qualitative difference between culture and nature. At the very least we can say that the trembling of human autonomy in the proximity of scarcity does not lead Sartre to the same sort of deconstruction of humanism that follows from Heidegger's analysis in the "Letter on Humanism." We will return to this point. The key to sorting out these two readings, grasping their similarity and their difference, is found a little later in Derrida's analysis. Derrida proposes that "the effects of this total trembling" be read under three general rubrics. The first and third of these concern, respectively, Heidegger and Husserl, and Heidegger and Nietzsche. Most commentators have focused on these. Of course, Husserl does have an important role to play here, for we might see Sartre's work as an attempt to be another version of Heidegger, in the sense of getting something else from Husserl- something which goes beyond the Cartesian moment toward the social world. This world hardly exists for Heidegger, even if he in some sense set him­ self against its modem constitution. But the second rubric concerns what Derrida calls a "strategic bet," a choice between two strategies, "from the inside" (in proximity to the "outside," from which a radical trembling comes) where "we are" (Derrida puts these words in quotation marks) . These are strategies for lis­ tening to the radical trembling that comes from outside. The fIrst of these strate­ gies Derrida calls Heideggerian: To attempt an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house, that is, equally, in lan­ guage. Here, one risks ceaselessly confinning, consolidating, relifting (relever), at an always more certain depth, that which one allegedly deconstructs. The continu­ ous process of making explicit, moving toward an opening, risks sinking into the autism of the closure. ( I 35)

The second strategy, Derrida claims , "is mostly the one which dominates France today." Given that "today," in this instance, means the Events of May 1 968 and their aftermath (October, to be more specific), and that Derrida marks the date of his text in terms of the U.S. war against the people of Vietnam, the as­ sassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. , and the Events of May themselves , it is not especially extravagant to associate this strategy with Sartre. I hasten to add that his name does not appear at this place in the text, and instead only in the second epigraph. (But then, keep in mind that, in the second large text on Jean Genet to be written by a major philosopher, the name of the author of the first such text ap­ pears only rarely.) In this second strategy, the point is To decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally plac­ ing oneself outside, and by affinning an absolute break and difference. Without men­ tioning all the other fonns of trompe-l'oeil perspective in which such a displacement can be caught, thereby inhabiting more naively and more strictly than ever the inside

The political space of Sartre in the text of Derrida

75

one declares one has deserted , the simple practice of language ceaselessly reinstates the new terrain on the oldest ground. The effects of such a reinstatement or·of such a blindness could be shown in numerous precise instances. . . . It goes without saying " that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity for a "change of terrain." (135)

What does Derrida do with these two strategies that are somewhat at odds with one another? Derrida's answer to this question may not be surprising, but the dif­ ficult work of situating social theory within the problematic of his proposal has barely begun . Indeed, the reason for this , at least within social theory and prac­ tice that is influenced by Marxism, is that there is a strong reductivist tendency in Marxism. In the name of materialism, anything not reducible to "the one" is re­ sisted, set aside as philosophical idealism. (I discuss the question of "monolithic materialism" in the final chapter of my Politics in the impasse, "Crazy Quilt," 245-264.) However, regardless of whether or not Sartre's sense of dialectic may ultimately resolve into "the one" -and I cannot help but associate this with a gnosticism that ultimately must be refused, even if it serves in some cases as a regulative ideal-surely he must be credited with resisting any "materialism" in which "everything is already in the cards." This is what connects Sartre's think­ ing across all periods, especially from "Materialism and Revolution" to the final conversations with Benny Levy (as I argued in chapter 2). Let us rejoin Derrida at the point where he brings these strategies together: the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once. I would like to point out especially that the style of the first deconstruction is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the other is mostly the one which dominates France today. I am purposely speaking in terms of a dominant style: be­ cause there are also breaks and changes of terrain in texts of the Heideggerian type; because the "change of terrain" is far from upsettinl! the entire French landscape to which I am referring; because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of "style"; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural. (135)

The passage on the Sartrean strategy seems to criticize the strategy for its naivete almost before it is set out. And yet, let us keep in mind that Derrida all the same refers to the strategy as a form of deconstruction. At the same time, he detects a certain naivete in the Heideggerian strategy as well: "ceaselessly confirming, consolidating, relifting [meaning to continually put back on a pedestal?], at an al­ ways more certain depth, that which one allegedly deconstructs" (my emphasis). The more, in other words, that Heidegger deconstructs Western ontotheology, the more he aids in its retrenchment. Indeed, the criticism of Heidegger here might be more severe than that of Sartre. Even if, Derrida argues, the attempt to brntally plate oneself outside, to affirm an absolute break and difference, is impossible, this in no way negates the necessity for a change of terrain. It seems to me that, in both his ontology and his sense of the practical necessity, Derrida is very close

Chapter 5

)6

to Sartre here. If anything, the impossibility of placing oneself "outside" is what

necessitates the attempt to do so. And, the change of terrain, which I believe I am reading correctly as the change of the social terrain, the social arrangement, ab­

solutely depends on such attempts to reach an outside that perhaps cannot "fi­ nally" or "absolutely" be reached . But Derrida and Sartre also remain some distance apart here. Perhaps one can legitimately speak of a political space for Sartre in the text of Derrida but not the other way around. In the remainder of this essay I will sketch out the reasoning

for this claim.

Why is there no space, political or otherwise, for Derrida in the text of Sartre? To answer this question we must look at the framework that Sartre sets out in the

Critique of Dialectical Reason, especially the second volume. Despite the trans­

formations of his project as he moved toward Marxism, it can be plausibly argued that an essentially Cartesian kernel remains in Sartre's conception of autonomy. The great benefit of this conception, for S artre, is that it allows, and perhaps we should say demands, a place for the particularity and specificity of concrete human beings. Though it is most likely overreaching, and certainly provocative, we might venture the hypothesis that at least part of the project of

Critique vol­ Flaubert study: to explain the specificity of a particular person. In the case of the second Critique the person in question is

ume 2 is not different from that of the

Stalin. Sartre wants a form of explanation that will understand Stalin both as a

creation or expression of social and historical forces , and as a concrete individual who was responsible for his actions. Responsibility remains a prime concern for Sartre, but so does contingency. Stalin is, in some large and definite measure (though never entirely) responsible for "Stalinism," but this is not to say that ei­ ther Stalin or the form of socialism that he played the leading role in construct­ ing was the product of ironclad necessity. (After all, Sartre even argues that class struggle, as the form of development of human history, is itself a contingency.) Without this contingency, this indeterminancy, any attempted radical project, the change of terrain, would be condemned to endless repetition, because it is clear that the capitalist world will never be willing to leave the socialist experiment to its own devices . (The repetition will end, one would think, when capitalism, in its drive to make sure that no alternative social order is possible, simply destroys human life on this planet .) As Ronald Aronson argues, in constructing a social theory that incorporates an extreme form of individual autonomy and responsibility, "here more than any­ where in his

oeuvre Sartre directly and unflinchingly approaches the master prob­

lem of the passage from Descartes to Marx, from cogito to society, from individ­ ual praxis to collective membership"

(Sartre 's Second Critique, 42). Frankly, my

feelings about this project are conflicted . On one level I think the project is fan­ tastic, which is to say impossible. The passage from Descartes to Marx can be carried out only by maintaining a paradigm of consciousness that is riddled with philosophical and political problems . Habermas's arguments concerning the par-

The political space of Sartre in the text of Derrida

77

adigm of consciousness and sUbjectivity in Hegel and Marx, as developed exten­ sively in his Theory of Communicative Action and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, are persuasive. Habennas recommends a shift to the paradigm of intersubjectivity. To put it bluntly, the meeting place of Descartes and Marx is not Kant and intersubjectivity. This is, Habennas points out, the fault of Hegel and Marx, who also work out of the paradigm of Cartesian SUbjectivity. Cartesian Marxism and Kantian intersubjectivity may come ever so close, but they remain parallel lines that never meet. Derrida, like Habennas, represents a development of Kant's critical philosophy, and thus a disruption of the philosophical frame­ work of Sartre's project. (Though beyond the scope of this essay, an additional piece of this puzzle is that intersubjectivity in Kant and Habennas . becomes intertextuality in Derrida.) How could it be, then, that despite what has just been said, there is a political space for Sartre in the text of Derrida? There is a space because autonomy, re­ sponsibility, and contingency can be rethought. Indeed, they must be rethought. In one respect (and even if this is a gross simplification), what Sartre and Derrida have in common is the fact that Althusser comes between them. Despite the many positive contributions of Althusser's structural Marxism, there seems to be no place in it for the ethical, the place of responsibility. It is that ethical moment that is opened by Derrida's philosophy, the space which, while never fully 0utside of context, is never absolutely detennined by context, either. Perhaps it can be said that Derrida is a "poststructuralist" in this specific sense (otherwise, I rarely find this tenn helpful when discussing Derrida's work) . If we were to develop this picture further, however, we would find more bridges between Sartre and Derrida. Peter Caws, Christina Howells , and Steve Martinot, among others, have shown that there is plenty of structuralism and post­ structuralism in Sartre's later work and that, among other things, Sartre was plenty aware of arguments about the linguisticality of consciousness . And then there is the "Jewish connection" (which I develop. regarding Sartre in Chapter 2 and regarding Derrida in my Matrix and line). Sartre's attempted passage from Descartes to Marx is in one sense impossible: what Sartre wants to maintain as a tension breaks down on the level of philo­ sophical coherence. But just at the point of this breakdown Sartre locates his cri-. tique of analytical reason. And there are very good reasons for following the project from just that point: the modem human project in political life is to move from the solitude of the Cartesian ego, including in the ways that it expresses it­ self in seriality and what Simone Weil calls "blind collectivity," to sociality and the polis. That ego is itself a contingent creation, but one that Sartre never lets go of. In his conception, the Cartesian ego is what truly opens up the human project, what makes the project, as fundamental responsibility, possible. What wO\lld Sartre say to the possibility of embracing that responsibility while trans­ fonning our conception of autonomy? I would hope that he would be open to this Derridean project. But at the same time, I hope to see an opening , more and

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more , for the political space of Sartre in the text of Derrida in the rethinking of

the Sartrean political project, the extension of it, the concretization of it-in

short, a Derridean rethinking of the Critique project with the intent of radical so­ cial transformation . This rethinking will take us from Descartes to Marx, to be sure , but finally to Kant.

6 Elections: Still a trap for fools? Revisiting Sartre's 1 973 essay

The people who grinned themselves to death, smiled so hard, they failed to take a breath. -The Housemartins At a time that many of his friends and associates thought was preciseiy inappro­ priate, Sartre published an essay arguing against participation in national elec­

tions . Beginning with his title, which does not include the question mark that is a

part of my title, the essay was almost pure provocation: "Elections: A trap for fools." The time was 1 973, when many progressives and left-liberals in France were hoping for the electoral victory of the "Left Unity" coalition of Socialists

(PSF) and Communists (PCF) . Among those who expressed sharp disagreement

with Sartre's position were Simone de Beauvoir and many of the group responsi­

ble for producing Les Temps Modemes (where the essay was published) . This was

also a time of great involvement by Sartre in one of the radical trends that arose

during and in the aftermath of the Events of May-June 1 968, namely Maoism.

Not surprisingly, Sartre remained committed, as always , to an internationalist, an­

ticolonialist, and anti-imperialist perspective. (It is useful, in this respect, to read the, essay on elections in the context of the other "political essays" presented in

the second half of Life/Situations: "The Burgos Trial," which concerns the trial of some Basque separatists, "The Maoists in France," and "Justice and the State.")

At a time when much of what calls itself politically progressive or Left in Eu­

rope · and the United States is very much involved in electoral participation and strategies, Sartre's argument concerning elections deserves reconsideration. Al­

though I personally accept many of the commonly heard criticisms of elections , including what I think is the basic truth in the old saying, "Don't vote, it only en­

courages them," my primary aim here will be to set out the terms of Sartre's ar­ gument and to assess whether it is a

good argument. In the assessment, I will con­

sider whether Sartre's argument was a good one in the specific context in which

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he offered it, and whether the argument has a more general application to the question of electoral politics in any advanced capitalist country. In