A Preface to Sartre

By Dominick LaCapra

Perhaps the leading Western intellectual of his time, Jean-Paul Sartre has written highly influential works in an awesomely diverse number of subject areas: philosophy, literature, biography, autobiography, and the theory of history. This concise and lucidly written book discusses Sartre's contributions in all of these fields.

Making imaginative use of the insights of some of the most important contemporary French thinkers (notably Jacques Derrida), Dominick LaCapra seeks to bring about an active confrontation between Sartre and his critics in terms that transcend the opposition, so often discussed, between existentialism and structuralism. Referring wherever appropriate to important events in Sartre's life, he illuminates such difficult works as Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and places Sartre in relation to the traditions that he has explicitly rejected. Professor LaCapra also offers close and sensitive interpretations of Nausea, of the autobiography, The Words, and of Sartre's biographical studies of Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert.

"I envision intellectual history," writes LaCapra, "as a critical, informed, and stimulating conversation with the past through the medium of the texts of major thinkers. Who else in our recent past is a more fascinating interlocutor than Sartre?"

A Preface to Sartre will be welcomed by philosophers, literary critics, and historians of modern Western culture. It is also an ideal book for the informed reader who seeks an understanding of Sartre's works and the issues they raise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501705205

Book preview

Introduction

Introduction. Obscene word.

Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas

M. CONTAT: In other words, to contest you, one must reject you en bloc?

SARTRE: I believe that this is necessary and besides that’s the way it is with most philosophers. . . .

M. CONTAT: And if it were a question [of self-criticism], what would you say?

SARTRE: In general it would always be a question of not having gone to the end of my radicalism. I naturally committed in my life a vast number of mistakes, but the bottom line [le fond de l’affaire] is that each time I made a mistake, it is because I was not radical enough.

Situations X, Interview of 1975

It is not hard to see how the history of ideas differs from political, social, or institutional history. It focuses on men’s ideas, on the inner world of thought, whereas they dwell largely in the external world of action.

Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought

Intellectual history has often followed one of three models in investigating ideas, or consciousness. These are, broadly speaking, the internal history of ideas, referring to formal structures and purely intellectual traditions; the external social or cultural history of ideas; and an attempt to reconcile these two approaches in accordance with some notion of dialectical synthesis. Other critics are increasingly contesting these models, and through my analysis of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, I further examine the claim that these are inclusive and exhaustive definitions of the field. By aligning intellectual history with a critical history and theory of texts, I hope to further a shift in our perspective on the way one does intellectual history.

More specifically, I would like to provide an active interpretation of texts through which particular readings may be related to a general critical perspective in an open and self-critical process of mutual refinement and testing. Sustained attention will be paid to the way in which a text is made and to the way in which, through its own procedures, it internalizes or represses certain contexts. I take a critical approach to the inside/outside dichotomy and its application to the relation between a text and its contexts. The text is never without context. And the context is itself a text of sorts. The interesting question is that of the precise way in which the text relates to its various contexts and vice versa. At least in the modern period, the writings of important figures such as Sartre tend to have a markedly critical or contestatory relation to the dominant sociocultural context and, in however divided or inadequate a way, demand a significantly different society and culture. For their writings are often the scene of broken dialogues that, in their most forceful moments, point to the need for fuller dialogue in modern life.

I attempt to indicate certain ways in which a rethinking of the dialectical model may be necessary. But I especially resist one popular approach to intellectual history—what may be termed a relatively weak synthesis of internal and external methods. In this approach, a synoptic content analysis of essential ideas, forms of consciousness, or world views is combined in the same narrative with references to events or developments in the life of the individual and society. This approach tacks between ideas and events in a seemingly unified story modeled uncritically upon the most traditional kind of narrative history. It gives rise at worst to a quasi-journalistic and relatively superficial type of intellectual history. And, even at its best, the traditional narrative of men and ideas threatens to domesticate or neutralize potentially disconcerting texts. Whatever is uncanny or even revolutionary in textual praxis is leveled off in a highly readable but diverting mode of introducing readers to the text. Indeed, domestication is at least one possible function of the familiar demand that texts be placed squarely in their own times or that social history, geared to the investigation of the dominant culture, provide the models of explanation for the reading of texts. What escapes in this way of doing intellectual history is the complex work (or play) of the text and whatever it may disclose, including at times elements critical of one’s own assumptions about the nature of interpretation and of history.

The relatively close reading of texts attempted here does not identify intellectual history with traditional explication de texte. Nor does it advocate a formalism fixated on the presumably pure internal structure and workings of texts. Although the following pages do center intellectual history on texts, they simultaneously define the text in a way that is critical of a conception of the text in terms of formal purity. A writer may strive for purity in his writings, as does Sartre himself on one important level of his thought. But this desire is contested and displaced by heterogeneous and disseminating tendencies in the text itself. A text has no pure and virginal inside that may find sanctuary in formalistic interpretation. Its inside is always already contaminated by an outside—the outside of internal self­questioning, other texts, and the text of life. Nor does the putative intention of the writer unproblematically govern what the text does, especially when the intention is a retrospective one provided by a self-reading or self-commentary. At best, one may set up a relationship between the more or less plausible account of intentions (or what the writer meant to say) and what the text may plausibly be argued to do or to disclose—and this relationship may be one or another form of difference (such as tension, contradiction, supplementarity, lack of communication).

Historians are, I think, always confronted with the problem of how to approach or use texts. For all historians, the text is the given. Reality is an inference—often a shaky one, always a problematic one. It is becoming more difficult, even for practitioners of the craft resistant to theory, to confide in an epistemology of documentary realism that presents the text as a simple transparency representing reality and requiring, not interpretation, but merely a literal reading. Even more important is the growing realization that a cognitively responsible and self-critical historiography cannot rest content with approaches to problems that resist complex models of interpretation. One can neither simply believe nor structure a study such that the revelation of some piece of biographical or other contextual information marks the bottom line where all questions come to an end. The relationship between text and context does not admit of oversimplified, reductionist solutions.

I would draw a distinction (but not mark a dichotomy) between treating an artifact as a document and treating it as a text. To approach the artifacts of intellectual history as documents making literal statements about the times or the life of the author is to engage in an enterprise of limited and dubious value. At worst, one makes the artifacts redundant. At best, one reduces them to a merely suggestive status or to the position of second-class citizens in the world of historical scholarship. When these artifacts are conceived as sources for facts and hypotheses about the author’s life or as tableaux providing a concrete sense of how life is lived in a given period, whatever one derives from them must be checked against more objective documents to corroborate one’s conclusions. If one’s conclusions cannot be checked against other documentary sources, the putative facts or insights are not naturalized; they must remain merely suggestive aliens in the historical mind. The overall danger of a predominantly documentary approach is that it reduces artifacts to objects adapted to a narrowly positivistic perspective on history. From this perspective, literature and philosophy tend to lose their point. And the problem of the text is avoided. Whatever is valuable in the documentary approach itself may become more valuable if questions are posed in a different way.

One might suggest that texts available to the historian fall on a spectrum ranging from relative poverty to relative richness. Tax rolls, marriage contracts, bureaucratic reports, diplomatic correspondence, and even the memoirs of businessmen or other men of action tend to be relatively poor texts. The writings of someone like Sartre are relatively rich, although controversial, texts. The crucial problem is how to read them. There is at least something dubious in the attempt to center a reading of rich texts on models of reality inferred—at times on the basis of unexamined assumptions (for example, about total history)—from a narrowly documentary reading of relatively poor texts. Reversing the procedure may have some value, using the reading of relatively rich texts to render more intricate and perhaps more realistic our inferential reconstructions of past reality. To the extent that it is feasible (given the nature of certain documentary sources), this reversal of perspectives might provide an initial basis for a more fruitful exchange between intellectual historians and those engaged in the extremely important projects of writing social history and individual biography.

The reading, or interpretation, of an individual’s life or a society’s structure is often as intricate a problem as the reading and interpretation of the most complicated written text. This study focuses on Sartre’s written texts and poses the problem of context largely in terms of its relevance for the reading of these texts. But it attempts to do so in a way that suggests the complementarity and supplementarity of perspectives on written texts and on the text of life. One of Sartre’s most fascinating texts is his life. Facets of it appear in the pages that follow with reference to specific problems of interpretation. I do not undertake a full-scale investigation of the interaction between the text of writing and the text of life, although such an investigation may be seen as the horizon of the form of inquiry I attempt. An aspect of research into the life must be the realization of the need for a convincing understanding of the written texts in all their subtlety; otherwise, one may end up illustrating only one’s own desire for totalizing explanations. In addition, the relationship between written text and life must explicitly be seen as a problem. I attempt to cast doubt upon the belief that an idea of identity or comprehensive unity may be taken as the guide to interpreting this relationship. At least in the case of major figures, there is, I think, always a tense interplay between unifying and disseminating movements, involving more or less self­conscious forms of non-identity, self-contestation, and dissonance. The text is the scene of this interplay. In his writing, a person may place his life in question (or vice versa). Indeed, the turn to the life never simplifies issues for the interpreter: it supplements the written texts with a lived text that is itself reconstructed from other texts. If the putative lived text is as difficult to decipher as the most intricate written text, one further complicates the problem of eliciting some overall structure or pattern of development.

Sartre is an especially challenging object of study for the approach to intellectual history exemplified by this critical preface, for he has himself attempted to develop a totalizing, dialectical model of intelligibility in the investigation of thought, society, and individual life.¹ In so doing, he has explicitly rejected a theory of the text on the lines suggested above. In an interview, Sartre declared: "I am completely opposed to the idea of the text. . . . For example, I have just read [Mikhail] Bakhtin on Dostoevsky and I do not see what the new formalism—semiotics—adds to the old one. On the whole, what I reproach these studies for is that they lead to nothing: they do not encircle [elles n’enserrent pas] their object; they are forms of knowledge that dissipate themselves" (S. X, pp. 106, 109-10). The approach to Sartre’s own texts here is inspired, in a relatively reserved and limited way, by the notion of deconstructive reading elaborated by Jacques Derrida (who is himself—but for very different reasons—critical of semiotics). And the question addressed to Sartre here is whether the attitude toward the text expressed in this quotation indicates that he is not being radical enough: for the very notion of understanding in the passage is one geared to the mastery, if not the domination, of the object. And the larger question raised by it is whether a logic of domination—which Sartre criticizes in others—is central to the forms of analytic rationality that Sartre both employs and contests as well as to the totalizing dialectic he more and more explicitly espouses. What escapes theoretical recognition by Sartre is what escapes the grasp of his analytic oppositions and dialectical project. What also threatens to escape him is the possibility that his own thought is reappropriated by the very traditions or institutions he explicitly rejects.

Consciousness itself may be seen on the analogy of the text. And the situation with which consciousness begins, or the larger text in which it is always already inscribed, is tradition. Sartre’s ultraphenomenological view of consciousness as an empty spontaneity inhibits him from explicitly posing as a problem the relation of consciousness and of his own discourse about it to tradition and institutions in the largest sense. Sartre centers philosophy on man, and he centers man on consciousness, freedom, and a certain conception of praxis. On the inert foundation of the brute existent (in-itself, thing, matter), man in his consciousness and freedom defines the meaning of the situation through his intentional projects. However empty and internally problematic consciousness (or freedom) may be for Sartre, it is presented in perhaps the dominant tendency of his thought as pure and homogeneous within itself, split off from the other with which it seeks an impossible reconciliation, and devoid of any internal alterity that might impair its translucent spontaneity. The other is at first outside and has no meaning. But, given the necessity that freedom be situated in a contingent situation, freedom must fall into the world through bad faith or alienation and confront the problem of counterfinality. This notion of an internally pure intentional consciousness as the basis of free praxis that generates meaning and value is repeated in different guises throughout Sartre’s thought, for example, in his later Marxist phase as the supposedly translucent praxis of the organic individual.

Sartre’s notion of consciousness as an empty spontaneity is plausible to the extent that the text of tradition has, or is made to have, blanks and discontinuities in its discourse. This is always the case, even with the most solid traditions. (Tradition, as used in this study, may be defined on the analogy of the text as a problematic unitary concept designating a series of displacements over time that raise the question of the relationship between continuity and discontinuity.) But the problem of tradition has perhaps become especially forceful in what we term the modern period. It has been most explicitly formulated in the notion of the death of God or absence of center. Sartre’s interpretation of consciousness becomes increasingly plausible to the extent that the absence of center becomes generalized as a problem and to the extent that the text of tradition is erased, leaving relatively empty or exhausted forms and more or less random contents. Sartre, I think, assumes this condition of tradition as the cultural context for his thought. But the fact that this assumption remains implicit or is repressed by the phenomenological belief that he is going to the things themselves makes Sartre’s writing the scene of relatively blind internal contestation. Sartre writes a hidden history of the exhaustion of traditional forms whose ghostlike presence threatens to repossess his own thought. In this respect, his thought is perhaps symptomatic of all modern thought. But his failure to make the centering and decentering interplay of tradition and critique an explicit theme of reflection blinds him to the form of the history he is writing and impairs his ability to situate the tensions of his own thought in a self-critical manner. Sartre does not systematically explore the possibility that the only original, spontaneous, or naive experience to resist mystification is one that is derived from a disciplined and self­conscious critique of traditions in the effort to eliminate what is abusive and to revitalize or transform what is valid in them.

A sign of Sartre’s difficulties is the status in his thought of language and of institutions in general. Certain of his views on these matters will be discussed at some length in the course of this study, but a few constants in his approach to language may be noted in an introductory manner. Although he has written a great deal about language, Sartre in his principal works never focuses directly and in a sustained way on the problem of language as a topic of philosophical reflection. His discussion of language is always attendant upon the investigation of some other problem, and it often has a marginal or even ancillary status. Nor does Sartre see language as a microcosm of the question of the nature and the role of institutions in society. His largely instrumentalist perspective on the problem of language is of a piece with his approach to tradition and the text. A critical focus on language would necessarily raise questions about the terms on which Sartre would like to center thought and life. Consciousnes sand man would, for example, be situated as terms in a more general field that cannot be oriented around them in an uncontested or absolute fashion. A more open reckoning with the critique of language in its more modern forms would not only create difficulties for Sartre’s attempt to organize all problems—for example, that of meaning or signification—around a term or opposition taken as absolute master of the field and ultimate origin of all perspectives. It would also constrain Sartre to engage in self-critical reflection about his own use of language in the effort to master problems. What is almost invariably left in the dark or repressed by Sartre is the intercourse between structure and play in his own use of language. Sartre has always insisted that philosophical language is based on the univocal usage of terms. In a recent interview, he has asserted that philosophy differs from science in that the usage of a term may vary from place to place in a philosophical text, and that the overall communication of philosophy may not be univocal. But he still insists on a clear divide between literature and philosophy, for in philosophy each usage of a term in the same place must be univocal and each sentence must have only one meaning (S. X, pp. 137-38). This view would seem to condemn philosophy to blind and unthematized inconsistency, or even to self-contradiction, in the sustained use of language in discourse. Sartre’s intention is apparently to keep philosophy, as a primary voice, pure of the dangers of ambiguity, multivalent meaning, and figurative usage, which more recently he has been willing to admit in the literary use of prose. The price paid for this intention is equivocation and a relatively unexamined internal self­contestation in his writings. He defines himself into a position where he is unable to elucidate—and perhaps exercise some measure of critical control over—the interplay between the totalizing and unifying desire of philosophy proper (or proper philosophy) and disseminating tendencies related to the role of self-questioning, ambivalence, and the use of metaphor. His philosophy does not—and perhaps cannot—conform to his own criterion of proper usage. And his belief in this criterion prevents him from exploring more fully both the disabling and the enabling aspects of the interaction among various uses of language in a given text. It is even conceivable that a certain approach to language—precisely the one Sartre explicitly resists—might provide an intimation and even a regional exemplification of the possibility Sartre cannot imagine: a way in which institutions might be structured and yet allow if not encourage contestation, freedom, and play.

Sartre’s best-known critics in France over the years—Derrida, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty to a certain extent, and perhaps even Camus—have attempted in various ways to develop such an approach. This group is of course heterogeneous enough even if one excludes Merleau-Ponty and Camus. But one may perhaps hazard some tentative generalizations explicitly oriented to the argument developed here. An initial way of broaching the problem is to relate Sartre and certain of his critics to a common set of philosophical antecedents or reference points—Hegel, Husserl, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.²

Sartre’s own relation to Hegel and Husserl is relatively clear. To schematize drastically, one might say that Sartre follows Hegel until the final idealistic Aufhebung, which brings absolute knowledge and the ultimate reconciliation of opposites, although he accepts even this as an impossible desire that onto logically characterizes man. He believes that Marx critically transformed or dialectically overcame Hegel’s dialectic by rejecting Geist and making concrete men the subjects and agents of history. Sartre’s critique of Husserl’s notions of a transcendental ego and the phenomenological reduction—a critique not free of problematic elements—is attended by an even more basic retention of the intentionality of consciousness, a notion that has always remained essential to Sartre’s understanding of man as freedom in a situation. Sartre’s relation to Marx and Freud is more difficult to characterize, even on the level of scandalously oversimplified categorizations. He rejects the positivistic and deterministic interpretations of Marxism in Engels and later theorists, even though he is aware of the ways in which Marx, especially in his later works, may have invited them. Yet his own existential Marxism—which centers history and its dialectical explication upon the role of free, conscious agents—itself depends upon a Hegelian and humanistic reading of Marx. He resists the elements in Marx that have been elaborated by his own critics in France. These elements decenter man in the historical process, allow for the distinction between alterity and alienation, introduce repetition into history, interpret freedom not as pure and total but as always already situated, and construe the situation as more than the resultant of free projects and counterfinalities. In other words, they place in question the philosophical foundation that Sartre tried to lay for Marxism in the Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Sartre has always rejected Freud’s notion of the unconscious as either deterministic cause or interpretive myth. In his later works, Sartre makes freer use of Freudian language as he attempts a dialectical reconciliation of existential psychoanalysis and Marxism. Nevertheless, he always explicitly resists the most interesting sense of Freud’s notion of the unconscious as it has been interpreted by theorists like Derrida and, to a certain extent, Lacan. In this sense, the unconscious introduces alterity into the self in a manner that undermines the belief in an inviolate or pure sanctuary of total freedom or consciousness. The unconscious is not another text present beneath the text of consciousness and potentially open to unmasking and full reap­propriation by the ego or consciousness in quest of identity. It is radically other, yet not simply separate from the consciousness that it decenters and whose appropriative grasp it resists and continually defers. It is the different and the differing play within the same text as consciousness—the play of ambivalence, which a philosophical consciousness, devoted to univocal meaning and self-possession, would repress. In this sense, the unconscious (or whatever term may be substituted for it) provides the theoretical basis for the interminability of analysis and the openness of any system of interpretation. Sartre’s refusal to admit the unconscious or some analogue of it in his own thought is one reason why his explicit affirmation of an open dialectical system is theoretically unfounded and depends for its acceptance upon ontological fiat.

Sartre’s relation to Heidegger and Nietzsche is perhaps even more problematic than his relation to Marx and Freud. Especially in his early work, Sartre borrows certain terms and themes from Heidegger—being-in-the-world, temporality, the conditions of historicity, among others. (Comments in the Critique suggest that Sartre has not given a careful reading to Heidegger’s later works.) In Being and Nothingness, as we shall see, Sartre translates Dasein as human reality and proceeds to center human reality on consciousness. Despite his admission that the humanistic interpretation of Dasein was in certain ways plausible within the context of Being and Time, Heidegger has attempted to show why this interpretation is misleading. Sartre has made only scattered references to Nietzsche and has never undertaken an extended discussion of his understanding of Nietzsche's work. Nor has he indicated an awareness of the way in which Nietzsche’s critique of traditional assumptions and his affirmation of play, laughter, and destructive-regenerative ambivalence may be seen to place in question the dominant motifs of Sartre’s own conception of philosophy. In general, I think that Sartre’s use and abuse of Heidegger and Nietzsche display in extreme form something present in virtually all of his readings, notably including those in his existential biographies: his readings tend to be selective, one-way appropriations that do not recognize the other as having a voice, especially in respects that might generate radical doubts about his own framework of interpretation.

Sartre’s critics in France are in no sense invariably right and Sartre is not invariably wrong. His criticisms of a certain kind of structuralism, for example, are pointed in so far as he argues that one must account for history and human agency other than in terms of synchronic structures, epistemological breaks, and the reduction of the human being to a purely passive cipher of impersonal processes. But these criticisms do not confront the views of his opponents on repetition, alterity, play, supplementarity, decentering and regeneration of the center as a function or a fiction. On one level, Sartre’s critics explicitly attempt to develop pointless approaches to the text (and to history) that radically contest teleological and totalizing interpretations. But there is a point to this pointlessness.