Reading the transcript of Sartre’s Rome lecture – along with the discussion that followed it – confronts us with an alternative which, while undecidable, opens up multiple interpretations. For it is on the one hand the record of an event, the encounter between the Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, already involved in his work on Flaubert, and a number of important Italian Marxists, many of them members of the Italian Communist Party, at the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1961. This is then an interaction of great historical interest: documenting Sartre’s approach to the Communist Party fully as much as his approach to Marxism itself – the Italian Party being a good deal more hospitable to such an exchange of views than the French one – and also testifying to the vitality and the variety of philosophical commitments of the Italian Marxism of this period.
But the text is also a philosophical statement, or series of statements, betraying the continuity between Being and Nothingness and the Critique, and the Hegelian affinities of the latter, but also shedding interesting light on Sartre’s position on subjectivity and his evident insistence on the non-subjectivist—and non-idealist—nature of his thinking. Meanwhile, the debate that followed also elicited significant interventions by major Italian thinkers, from Enzo Paci and Cesare Luporini to Galvano Della Volpe and Lucio Colletti. Unsurprisingly, the exchanges often turn on very familiar themes in the history of Marxist polemics: most notably the distinction between historical and dialectical materialisms – or in other words, between a Kantian or Viconian position on what human knowledge can achieve and a materialist philosophy which affirms the dialectic of nature itself. Sartre will be both reserved and conciliatory on this matter, often seen as the fundamental sticking-point in any opposition between Western or non-Communist Marxism and the more ‘orthodox’ kind. He allows that some laws of nature may be discovered that are dialectical, but draws back from any affirmation of a single dialectic of Nature as such; and also politely asks whether the hotly contested word ‘reflexion’ – Widerspiegelung, or the ‘reflexion theory of knowledge’ – might not tactically be replaced by something less controversial like ‘adequation’.
There is then an inclusive engagement over the idea of contradiction (this will be a particularly significant issue in Colletti’s thought); a rather emphatic insistence on Sartre’s part on the lack of any ethical dimension or theory of value in Marxist philosophy; and a rather wilful diversion of the discussion into the area of art and aesthetics, in which Sartre offers the case of Madame Bovary as a fundamental exhibit of the way in which the significant work of art has dimensions which are simultaneously subjective and objective; while Della Volpe draws extended attention to the problems of poetic language as such. The ‘debate’ then amicably concludes with agreement on the need for a ‘critical Communism’ – an expression Balibar will revive some thirty years later, with a small c and a quite different meaning.
It is a coincidence which reminds us that, whichever perspective we adopt in our approach to this text – as a historical event or a philosophical statement – we cannot but add a third one, namely our positions as readers some fifty years after the fact, in a situation in which both politics and philosophy have undergone radical transformations, and in which our reception of this debate must itself face an alternative: namely whether to read it relatively neutrally, for its interest as an event in the intellectual history of the past, or to interrogate it for its relevance in the current environment, where Marxist theory has returned to an emphasis on the more purely economic issues of crisis theory and the structure of a globalised late capitalism, while philosophy has either passed into a more post-individualist, linguistic or metaphysical problematic – with the work of a Deleuze or a Badiou, or even the Lacanians – or has returned to Kantian questions with a vengeance.
For all of these contemporary tendencies, Sartre has several red flags to wave. The very emphasis of the debate on subjectivity – at least according to its initial intentions and programme – will reawaken all the post-existential and Althusserian hostility to the various phenomenological conceptions of experience. The vocabulary of ‘totalisation’ developed in the Critique of Dialectical Reason will arouse now perhaps ancient or dormant repudiations of notions of totality as such, despite the fact that Sartre’s term was meant to substitute a process and an activity for this inert and substantified noun; and without any particularly scandalised awareness of its continuing use, in only slightly modified form, in the Deleuzian trinity of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Finally, Sartre’s belated deployment of the term ‘freedom’ may well awaken more purely philosophical critiques of this notion, less as an exceedingly stringent account of the dilemmas of the for-itself, than as a well-nigh Kantian barrier to that collective ethics he here demands, but which never really overcame the abstraction of the categorical imperative, something of which his occasional use of the word ‘humanism’ also reminds us, in this post-Khrushchevian and post-Stalinist Marxist theoretical discussion.
The Italian interlocutors do not seize upon what seems to me the fundamental weakness of this moment of Sartre’s thought: what I venture to call its ‘monadic’ tendency, what Althusser denounced, in Hegel and others – who no doubt also included Lukács and even the tutelary deity of this gathering, namely Gramsci himself – as the fallacy of an ‘expressive’ totality, the notion that within a given particular the whole of a social or historical moment is somehow included, and might be available to hermeneutic exploration and display, as Sartre tried to do in his biographical works, or ‘existential psychoanalyses’. This view presupposes what he calls incarnation: ‘which means that each individual is, in a certain fashion, the total representation of his/her epoch’ – a social being ‘lives the whole social order from his/her point of view’. It is true that he adds the words ‘an individual, whoever it is, or a group, or some sort of assembly, is an incarnation of the total society’, which might lead us on to those discussions of class and class consciousness only fleetingly touched on in the opening debate. This biographical perspective of Sartre’s final project has been described as something like the ultimate revenge of his starting point, in the individual cogito and in a description of phenomenological experience; yet paradoxically, Heidegger’s Being and Time, resolutely avoiding Cartesian or humanist language, seems to end up in the same blind alley, which determines his famous Kehre.
I have raised this issue not to launch a philosophical critique of Sartre, but rather to point out how different our philosophical discussions and preoccupations are today, where, in the multiple institutionalised environments of late capitalism and globalisation, the existential choices of this or that individual and the biographical adventures of this or that freedom seem to have become of very limited interest indeed. Even in the field of some properly Marxist research, the concept of ideology has fallen into disrepute, and the relationship of the individual to class and to class consciousness takes second place to the problem of classes themselves: whether they still exist and how they might be called upon to act if they do. Yet it was precisely to the analysis of group and class dynamics that the Critique of Dialectical Reason summoned us and devoted its most productive energies.
As to whether we can expect a Sartre ‘revival’ to challenge the ongoing and often vacuous invocation of Heidegger one still finds everywhere in contemporary thought, I can testify that younger readers are still electrified by the descriptions of Being and Nothingness and readily acknowledge the phenomenological and philosophical truth of its accounts of freedom; yet its terminology no longer seems to generate the fresh problems the institution of philosophy demands of its solutions. Instead, it seems to be the first Sartre, of the Transcendence of the Ego, which has again achieved philosophical actuality, in its insistence on the impersonality of consciousness and its displacement of the ‘self’ and of personal identity: this short essay indeed may be said to have heralded that structuralist and post-structuralist ‘death of the subject’ which is still very much with us today.
Meanwhile, the later Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason compellingly raises the inverse problem, namely that of the ‘identity’ of groups and collectives in a biological situation where ‘collective consciousness’ is clearly an unacceptable concept. Those pages of the Critique, therefore, in which Sartre contrasts the small-group dynamics of guerrilla or nomadic units with the serial alienation of larger public-opinion-type collectives, still have an unparalleled urgency, both political and philosophical, today. How these two features of Sartre’s thought then are related is one of the important lessons the Rome lecture holds for us.
Terminology is still the surest thread to guide us through the labyrinth of philosophical development, provided we interrogate it both ways: what dilemmas does the new terminology allow us to exclude or to neutralise, and what unique insights does the new formulation blur or occlude? Both Sartre and Heidegger meant firmly to avoid the illusions of subjectification: Heidegger did it by strenuously banning the language of consciousness and of personification; Sartre, the other way round, by insisting so strongly on the language of consciousness that the personalised languages of identity and the self could find no place in his formulations. Sartre’s new language of totalisation is then a kind of assimilation of the so-called ‘pragmatic Heidegger’: it develops the notion of consciousness as a project both by enlarging it, to include the Heideggerian conception of world, and worldness and ‘worlding’, and by describing the ways in which my ongoing temporality draws everything around itself into a Zuhandenheit – a tool-like ‘readiness to hand’ – quite different from the older static and contemplative epistemological philosophies of objects and their purely knowable presence (Vorhandenheit).
But for contemporary thought, for which difference is more congenial than identity, the term ‘totalisation’ seemed to place a premium on unification; whereas we want our subjects to be multiple and heterogeneous, and prefer incommensurable subject-positions to any of those perspectives of unification – even in perpetual process – from which some ultimately reunified subject or self might arise. Today’s readers will therefore be relieved to know that Sartre here insists – and it is perhaps the most striking moment of the whole discussion – that subjectivity is an evanescent phenomenon: a moment and not a structure or an essence, and indeed a moment that almost at once loses itself in objectivity again, in the world and in action in it. But this insistence comes at a different and perhaps no less onerous price, namely that of Hegelianism.
For the language of the Critique in which Sartre couches his description of ‘subjectivity’ – all the while refusing this term and reminding us of Hegel’s own warning about the deleterious effect of the existence of two separate words for subject and object – is nonetheless a profoundly Hegelian one, in which we exteriorise or externalise ourselves and then ‘return’ back into the self in order to prepare a new exteriorisation. This is the omnipresent Hegelian process of objectivisation, from which the young Marx famously sought to distinguish its negative form in ‘alienation’, the way in which we make ourselves other to ourselves. ‘Praxis’, a word reinvented by Count Cieszkowski only some ten years after Hegel’s death, is no doubt the Sartrean version of this Hegelian (and Goethean) Tätigkeit, or perpetual activity, which in Marx will become an ethic of production in the human rather than the industrial-capitalist sense.
In any case, this dialectic of the inside and the outside, of the transformation of the world which then returns on the self, transforming it in its turn, is by now a familiar trope or figure. What is modern and un-Hegelian in Sartre’s exposition of it here is his emphasis on language, and the way in which language objectifies interiority, transforming its inwardness into something external which then in turn transforms its starting point in wordless subjectivity. This dialectic is now baptised reification (Sartre had already coined the rather barbarous term chosification in Being and Nothingness); and his examples – drawn from personal or everyday life and already rather novelistic – show why abstract or universalising theories of action and ethics are congenial to this novelist-philosopher. They also insist on language itself as a form of reification, for good or ill: Count Mosca’s famous anxiety about the word ‘love’ demonstrates one way in which naming can suddenly transform everything. But characterological reification – the worker who discovers he is an anti-Semite, Leiris’s inveterate crystallisations of his own rebellious and anarchistic inclinations – these bring the Sartrean dialectic of language much closer to psychoanalysis than his philosophical repudiation of a concept of the Unconscious would seem to imply. Indeed, the substitution for an entity named the Unconscious – something which makes for philosophical trouble for Freud, and which Lacan is obliged ingeniously to rewrite – of the past, as a kind of non-knowledge, sedimented in the body and not reducible only to some linguistically definable concept such as memory, may well have been more productive for Sartre, particularly in developing the insights of his biographies.
This is the point at which class appears and in which one would have thought the most productive dialogue with the Italian Marxists might have been pursued – alas, it was not. For Sartre’s emphasis here is not on class struggle itself, as the inevitable conflict between social groups, and eventually between those two fundamental social groups which are the masters and the producers. Rather, it is with the historical forms of class consciousness within a given group that Sartre is concerned here, and how the externalisation of subjectivity in the shape of a specific kind of technology returns on the practitioners of that technology to form their own specific type of consciousness, which then in its turn returns into the social world of class conflict to play a specific kind of role. The example is the moment in which the class consciousness of skilled workers is threatened by a technology that no longer requires their skills and transforms the ‘proletariat’ into a mass of unskilled labour with a very different attitude towards work, politics and class struggle as such.
This is surely, for Marxists, the most interesting and subtle lesson in the Sartrean analysis of subjectivity today, where wholly new kinds of technology and labour have transformed our social life and seem to have left the older categories of social and political analysis behind them. For today, it is not particularly the notion of class struggle that needs reviving: we see it inescapably everywhere around us. What we need is some renewed awareness of what class consciousness itself is and how it functions. The Sartre of these early 1960s lectures has significant things to tell us about that.