Existential Marxism in postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser

Existential Marxism in Postwar France CONTENTS Frontmatter Preface Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Ch...

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Existential Marxism in Postwar France

CONTENTS Frontmatter Preface Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Bibliography Index

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contents

Contents _________________________________________________________

One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine

Preface The Hegel Renaissance: Toward a Philosophical Anthropology The Re-Discovery of Marx and the Concept of Alienation The Early Sartre: The Existentialist Concept of Freedom The Attack on Sartre: 1944-1948 Existentialists in Motion: 1950-1956 The Arguments Group: Existentialized Marxists Sartre's Critique: Marxian Existentialism Existential Marxism and Structuralism Epilogue: Intellectuals and May, 1968 Bibliography Index

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vii 3 36 72 109 161 209 264 306 361 399

Existential Marxism in Postwar

Existential Marxism in Postwar France From Sartre to Althusser

Mark Poster

Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

Copyright 1975 by Princeton University Press All Rights Reserved Parts of this book have appeared in the following journals: an early version of parts of Chapter 1 appeared as "The Hegel Renaissance," Telos, 16 ( Summer 1973), 109-127; an early version of parts of Chapter 8 appeared as "Althusser on History Without Man," Politi cal Theory, Vol. 2, No. 4 (November 1974), 393-409. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book This book has been composed in Linotype Caledonia Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/frontmatter.html (1 of 2) [11/12/2007 23:15:24]

Existential Marxism in Postwar

For My Father

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Preface _______________________________________________________ My purpose in this study has been to trace the relationship of Marxism and existentialism as the dominant theme in recent French social thought. My thesis is that the two doctrines converged in Sartre and 'in the Arguments group, establishing the beginnings of a social theory of the New Left. Starting from the period right after World War II, when Marxism and existentialism were competing doctrines, I have described the movement of Sartre and his circle toward Marxism and the movement of Marxists away from Stalinism. By the mid-1960s there had been various attempts at a synthetic existential Marxism, all of which should be seen as tentative beginnings that might result in a major new social theory. In the final chapter, I test the new theory by using it to help us comprehend the events of MayJune, 1968. Existential Marxism emerges as a social theory suited to comprehend the conditions and the contradictions of advanced industrial society, to articulate the situation of various groups in this society, and to provide a new kind of theory for the human sciences that sees the scientist not as value-free or objective but as implicated in the object of his knowledge. Existential Marxism might thus be considered both as the "ideology" of an emerging radical coalition and as a theoretical advance in its own right. My disciplinary orientation is that of the history of ideas which describes changing intellectual patterns with more concern for the relation of ideas to society than for the vii

Preface logical consistency of the ideas themselves. Hence I have not attempted a systematic exposition of New Left social theory, but have restricted myself, with minor exceptions, to articulating the theories of the French. It will be clear to the reader that I am sympathetic to the effort of the existential Marxists, although I am not committed to any particular version of their thinking. I adhere to their commitment to a radical restructuring of relations and institutions in advanced industrial society, and I am especially convinced of the value of their efforts to redefine the nature of the human sciences. My study of their positions has challenged me to consider the limitations of intellectual history, but I have not deviated very far, in this work, from its traditional methodological boundaries. Finally, it is my hope that the study of the theoretical advances of the French will be of value to all those concerned about the present state of social theory in the human sciences and to all those in the United States who are beginning to confront their situation on a theoretical level. I have been able to profit from the work of other scholars of recent French social theory. H. S. Hughes, The Obstructed Path (1968) covers the period from 1930 to 1960, ranging over the entire landscape of social thought. Walter Odajnyk, Marxism and Existentialism (1965) analyzes philosophically the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/preface.html (1 of 3) [11/12/2007 23:15:25]

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relations of Stalinist Marxism and Sartre's early positions. George Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France (1966) illuminates Marxism at the level of political theory. Arnold Metzger, Existentialismus und Sozialismus: der Dialog des Zeitalters (1968) interrogates the two doctrines by looking at the German traditions of Martin Heidegger and Lebensphilosophie. Raymond Aron, Marxism and the Existentialists (1969) treats the French scene, and I have dealt with his views as part of my narrative. It should be stated that my study treats the convergence of Marxism and existentialism as both possible and necessary, whereas previous accounts have been either suspicious or hostile. Hence this study attempts to revise viii

Preface the current image of this period of French social theory from one of an obstructed path to one that accounts for openings into new directions. Instead of characterizing the period through the impasses and dead ends of Camus, Teilhard de Chardin, and others, as does Hughes, we will see that it was a period of profound reorientation and vitality in social theory. For purposes of a provisional statement to help the reader orient himself as he proceeds, existential Marxism may be defined very loosely as follows: a non-Leninist Marxism that conceptualizes advanced industrial society in a way that points toward the possible elimination of its alienating structures; that looks to all the relations of daily life, not simply to relations of production, to make society intelligible; that picks up from existentialism the effort to capture human beings in the moment of their active creation of their world, in their subjectivity; and, finally, that rejects the attempt to have a closed theory complete within itself. A fellowship from the University of California made it possible for me to visit Paris and speak with many French theorists. I want to note my thanks for their kind help and for their putting up with my French, such as it is. I spoke with the following people: Kostas Axelos, Jean Baudrillard, Bernard Besnier, Michel-Antoine Burnier, Cornélius Castoriadis, Michel Contat, Dominique Desanti, Jean-Marie Domenach, Joseph Gabel, Richard Gombin, André Gorz, Claude Lefort, Edgar Morin, Stanley Pullberg, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. I want to mention also the colleagues and friends who argued with me about this study, who read parts of the manuscript and who gave me their criticisms and suggestions: Robert Anchor, Paul Breines, David Carroll, Peter Clecak, Jack Diggins, Alexander Gelley, Martin Jay, Frederic Jameson, James Miller, David Schalk, Jeremy Shapiro, Ricky Sherover, Shierry Weber, and Hayden White. In particular I want to thank Dick Howard for the enormous help be has freely given to me in working over ix

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Preface the manuscript. Also, Jacqueline Doyle worked tirelessly to put me in touch with materials beyond the limited resources of Orange County. Finally, my family lived with me the ups and downs of this study and receive my thanks for their support and patience. Laguna Beach, California

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I Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

One ________________________________________________________ The Hegel Renaissance: Toward a Philosophical Anthropology

1. Hegel in France The sudden prominence of Hegel among French intellectuals after World War II signified a break with traditions of thought. French intellectuals had paid little attention to Hegel when be dominated German thought in the 1830s and 1840s. Even a thinker like Auguste Comte, with his grand vision of the total development of mankind that in many ways paralleled Hegel's, remained ignorant of his counterpart to the east.[1] The utter absence of interest in Hegel by academic philosophers as well as by intellectuals was reported as late as 1931 by Alexandre Koyré, a historian of philosophy and of science. Unlike Germany, England, and Italy, France had no Hegelian schools, not one recognized disciple of Hegel, and of course few serious students of Hegel in French universities.[2] Only "offbeat" intellectuals like André Breton's surrealists and a circle of young 1. Frank Manuel, Prophets of Paris (N.Y., 1965) 287. 2. Alexandre Koyré, "Rapports sur l'état des études h,égéliennes en France," Revue d'histoire de la philosophie, 5:2 (April-June, 1931) 147. This judgment of the lack of the teaching of Hegel in French universities until 1940 is also stated by Mikel Dufrenne, the important phenomenologist, in "Actualité de Hegel," Esprit, 16:148 (Sept., 1948) 396. The exception that confirms the rule would be Lucien Herr, who taught Hegel at the Ecole Normale as far back as the pre-1914 period. Cf. Jean Duvignaud, "France: the Neo-Marxists," in L. Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (N.Y., 1962) 314; and that H. Lefebvre and N. Gutermann had published selected translations in 1939 as Morceaux choisis de Hegel (Paris, 1939).

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Marxists in the 1920s paid tribute to the German dialectician. Among the reasons suggested by Koyré for the lack of interest in Hegel were the obscurity of Hegel's writing, the strength of Cartesian and Kantian philosophical traditions, Hegel's Protestantism, but, above all, the incredulity of the French toward Hegel's "strict identity of logical synthesis and historical becoming." [3] On the contrary for French rationalists, history was separate from reason or logic, which was eternal, outside time. If this was the situation, how can we account for the abrupt turn to Hegel in the 1940s? In the eyes of many converts to Hegel, the catastrophic defeat of France in 1940 had discredited liberalbourgeois intellectual and political traditions, leaving the nation in a conceptual vacuum. The only moral force left in France, on the eve of the Liberation, came from the Resistance movement, which had been dominated by politically progressive groups. In the estimate of Henri Lefebvre, after the Liberation, there was no longer bourgeois thought calling itself such."[4] The experience of the war and the Resistance "transformed the basic givens of intellectual life in France: the themes of reflection, the problems, concepts, and attitudes."[5] After 1944, there was a longing for basic renewal, social, political, and intellectual. With a combined socialist and Communist vote reaching a majority, intellectuals harbored the dream of imminent and radical social transformation. During the hopeful but finally disillusioning post-war years, the "decisive philosophical event" was the discovery of the Hegelian dialectics There were thus direct links between the collapse of the old bourgeois world, the expectations of socialism, and the emergence of interest in Hegel. 3. Koyre, op. cit., 150. The quotation is from Leon Brunschvicg, Le Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (Paris, 1927) Vol. 1, 397. 4Henri Lefebvre, "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," Les Temps Modernes, 13:137-138 (July-Aug., 1957) 110111. 5 Ibid.., 106. 6 Ibid., 114.

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The Hegel Renaissance The rebirth of interest in Hegel was directed primarily at The Phenomenology of Spirit[7] and to a somewhat lesser degree at Hegel's early essays. Intellectuals of most traditions-Catholics, Marxists, existentialists, phenomenologists and academic philosophers-read and debated Hegel, immersing themselves in a system of thought that was foreign to established assumptions. The assimilation of the Phenomenology was particularly the point of departure for the confrontation of Marxism and existentialism. The reading of Hegel, it was felt, could dissolve the long-standing conflict between idealists and materialists and could initiate a totally fresh direction of investigation. The study of the introduction of Hegel into France forms a prologue to the eventual formation of a new intellectual synthesis. The task of bringing the Phenomenology to a broad audience, of demonstrating the power and insight of this book, fell to two men: Alexandre Kojève, a Russian emigré, and Jean Hyppolite. By http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter1.html (2 of 26) [11/12/2007 23:15:33]

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themselves, these two philosophers translated Hegel, lectured on Hegel, and published lengthy commentaries on the Phenomenology, bringing to light and confronting the public with a new way of thinking and of seeing the world. Many important developments in French thought since then derived, directly or indirectly, from the unsettling and reshuffling of French consciousness inspired by the Hegel renaissance. The study of the Phenomenology by Kojève and Hyppolite was an intellectual source for the renewal of Marxism, for Sartre's existentialism, and perhaps even for the structuralism of the 1960s. [8] The profound effect of the Phenomenology resounded in varied tones in the diverse corners of French intellectual life. Yet everyone agreed that Hegel, although himself an idealist, provided a means of criticizing certain aspects of 7. Henri Niel, "L'interpretation de Hegel," Critique, 18 (Nov., 1947) 427. 8. Cf. The structuralist, Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self, trans. A. Wilden (Baltimore, 1968) 192-196, 218-219, 306, 308. These references are to Wilden's discussion of the influence of Kojève's study of Hegel on Lacan.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism idealism. The idealist tendency to make concepts atemporal was the chief defect for which the French found an antidote in Hegel. The Phenomenology's emphasis on the historicity of reason and conversely the rationality of history was the source of its relevance. Now Catholics could escape Thomism, Marxists oppose Stalinism, and existentialists combat neo-Kantianism. The arid forms of rationalism in academic philosophy appeared feeble compared with Hegel's philosophy of alienation in history, his dialectic, his phenomenology of consciousness. Perhaps Hegel held the key to unlock the riddles of the dualisms of subject and object, of what is and what ought to be, of history and ontology, of the individual and society, of science and-humanism, of knowledge and action. Such, for example, was the sanguine attitude of Merleau-Ponty: "All the great philosophical ideas of the past century had their beginnings in Hegel: the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis; it was he who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason which remains the task of our century.[9] Hegel's Phenomenology was also used to combat the recent conservatism of European social thought in the first three decades of the century. The scientific study of society seemed to demonstrate that it was in the nature of things that democracy was an unattainable ideal, that social order required elites, coercive organizations, and irrational ideologies. Social theory in the hands of Durkheim, Pareto, Weber, and Michels had uncovered irrationalities in modern society that tended to dim all hopes for radical democratization.[10] Pareto drew attention to the force of irrational emotions in political affairs


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and to the inexorable 9. Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, Ill.., 1964) 63. Throughout this study, translations are my own, except where the title is given in English. Also, all emphases are in the original, except where otherwise indicated. 10. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought: 1890-1930 (N. Y., 1958).

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The Hegel Renaissance "circulation of elites" which did not effect the strength of oppressive authority; Durkheim concluded that anomie, or moral disorientation, was the result of the influence of corrosive rationalism, the division of labor, and the demise of traditional village communities; Weber gloomily prophesied a spiritless, routinized, disenchanted world emerging paradoxically from the "rationalization" of social institutions and social action.[11] These social theorists divorced science from the practice of overcoming the ills they uncovered.[12] For them, history was irrational; social conflicts could not be settled through rational discussion since men acted blindly or irrationally. French intellectuals saw in Hegel an answer to the conservatism of these ideas. Marxists and existentialists read the Phenomenology as a critique of the notion that reason and history were antithetical. The error of the social scientists lay in their methodology and theory of knowledge. Their idealism situated the knower outside the field of knowledge, outside history. Merleau-Ponty complained that "Durkheim treats the social as a reality external to the individual and entrusts it with explaining everything that is presented to the individual as what he has to become."[13] This way of seeing society as something outside the individual was common to Weber and Pareto as well. It fails to comprehend the individual from within a network of interpenetrating interactions and ends in privileging the individual, on the one hand, and justifying social coercion, on the other. Distant from the field of historical action, hidden behind the screen of reason, the social theorist could in history and reason beyond it. As the French 11. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston, 1968) 201-226, for a penetrating critique of Max Weber's category of rationalization, arriving at similar conclusions. 12. J. Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber, trans. M. Ilford (N.Y., 1969) 85. 13. Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill., 1964) 89.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism read him, Hegel taught that if reason or the theorist were seen within history, the object of his study would not be a remote, "irrational" Other, but would become interiorized and reveal its deeper rationality.[14] The fact of hierarchies and irrational norms, from the Hegelian perspective, would appear as historical distortions within the possibility of human perfectibility, not as immutable. Institutions and ideas that resulted from unforeseen, unintended social action would appear open to reason and to change. Contradictions in the field of social reality would appear in their proper interrelatedness, not in dissociated opposition. Hegel insisted on the connection of each particular to the totality, on the interdependence of apparently distinct fields of social experience.[15] What was contradictory to idealist rationality became intelligible to the historical dialectic of Hegel's reason. This theme was prominent in the controversial reading of Hegel by Kojève.

2. Kojève: From Masters and Slaves to Free Workers Alexandre Kojève, recently a high official in the Common Market, established a small but very distinguished Hegel cult at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where he lectured on the Phenomenology from 1933 to 1939. Some of the luminaries of French intellectual life regularly attended Kojève's classes on Hegel. Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, R. P. Fessard, Raymond Queneau, Jean Desanti, Georges Bataille, and Jacques Lacan, leading liberals, existentialists, Catholics, novelists, communists, surrealists, and structuralists eagerly initiated themselves into the new mode of thought. It was even said that Jean-Paul Sartre himself was enrolled, although his attendance at the classes was 14. Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de 1'esprit de Hegel (Paris, 1946) i, 26. Hereafter cited as Genèse. 15. Henri Lefebvre, "Marxisme et sociologie," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 4:3 (1948) 56.

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The Hegel Renaissance not recalled. Some literary wits, especially cold-war liberals and Communist Party Marxists, were quick to satirize the force and influence of Kojève's lectures on his students. For example, Jean Desanti, who later "matured" to Stalinist ideology, sought to erase from his past his interest in Kojève's Hegel: We were, at that time [1936], young Communist students. For many of us, Marxism remained somewhat external and undigested. Certainly, we read Marx and Engels. But we went toward them as toward masters of the past, keeping our distance intellectually in http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter1.html (5 of 26) [11/12/2007 23:15:33]

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relation to their work. . . . This is why at the same time that I was repelled by the lectures of Alexandre Kojève, who stifled my old rationalist education, I found myself also disquieted and attracted. Finding a new mystery in Reason, I broke the "theological" authority it had until then in my eyes. It seemed to me that viewing Reason in the new way made it more human. And since I was under the influence of Leon Brunschvicg, debating the interior difficulties of Kantianism, I did not delay in gradually moving toward the "philosophies of existence," thinking to escape through them both the aridity and the contradictions of "vulgar" rationalism. . . .[16] Although Desanti did not accept Kojève's version of Hegel, he acknowledged that the lectures did help him in overcoming the "official philosophy" of Kantian rationalism. Still more critical of Kojève was the liberal Aimé Patri. In his eyes, this Hegel craze was only too successful in promoting a vague and unsalutary Teutonic radicalism: Kojève is the unknown Superior whose dogma is revered, often unawares, by that important subdivision of the animal kingdom of the spirit" in the contemporary world--the progressivist intellectuals. In the years preceding the second world war in France, the transmission was effected by means of oral initiation to a group of persons who in turn took the responsibility of instructing others, and so on . . . From 16. "Hegel, est-il le père de l'existentialisme," La Nouvelle critique 54-56, p. 92.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism that time on we have breathed Kojève's teaching with the air of the times .[17] The Kojève class on Hegel might have remained an interesting but obscure moment in French intellectual history except for the publication, in 1947, of the student notebooks, collected and edited by Raymond Quéneau. The notebooks appeared together with an article by Kojève on the master-slave relation, as well as some of his own lecture notes, under the title Introduction à la lecture de Hegel: Leçons sur la phénoménologie de 1'esprit.[18] The book went through multiple editions and appeared in English, in an abridged form, in 1969. For Kojève, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit was the answer to liberal-bourgeois metaphysics and politics. The questions "Who is man?" "How did man become social?" "What are the possibilities of man's development within society?" were answered by Hegel in a revolutionary way. Liberal-bourgeois thought, from Locke to J. S. Mill, established the nature of man abstractly, by comprehending him outside and before society. In the liberal tradition, an ahistorical static human species rationally http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter1.html (6 of 26) [11/12/2007 23:15:33]

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calculates its advantages, in perfect bourgeois fashion, and constitutes society out of its harmonious consensus. Distorting history into a self-justifying mythology of bourgeois society, the liberal erases the complex development of humanity, leaving only its bourgeois form, and projects it onto the past. The rational bourgeois emerges like Minerva, fully mature, and all other shapes and forms of humanity are eliminated. Only the bourgeois, single17. Cited by Allan Bloom in his introduction to Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojève, trans. J. Nichols (N.Y., 1969) vii. 18. Kojève published very little himself. Among his scanty publications was a review of Henri Niel's book on the concept of mediation in Hegel. "Hegel, Marx et le Christianisme," Critique 3 and 4 (1947-1948) 339-366.

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The Hegel Renaissance mindedly himself by preserving and aggrandizing his property is truly human.[19] In Kojève's reading of Hegel, the concepts of liberalism were adamantly denied and the basis for Marx's concept class struggle was laid.[20] The Phenomenology, in Kojève's hands, centered on a philosophical anthropology, on the self-development of man, on his self-recognition, and on his historical and temporal nature: all this is founded in the dialectic of the master and the slave. The first "moment" of human reality, man's first structure of consciousness, is mere contemplation, simple awareness of the object, the outward thrust of consciousness toward the thing, toward exteriority, without selfconsciousness. This structure of consciousness includes sensation, perception, and primitive consciousness. The human subject is as yet not constituted; passive contemplation was insufficient for Hegel to constitute self-consciousness. Only desire, the awareness of a lack within the subject, compelled man to the recognition of his own reality, hurtling him into the drama of history, the story of the humanization of man and nature.[21] Desire had first to become not desire of an object but desire of desire, in other words, desire for the recognition of specifically human reality. In short, for human desire to emerge, the individual had need of another individual to recognize his desire and give it homage as human reality. Thus the momentous act that constituted man as a human species, required an interaction among men. ". . . Real and true man is the result of his interaction with others. . . ."[22] Man is thus social and also historical from the beginning. 19. Cf. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (N.Y., 1964). 20. Cf. Dick Howard, "On Deforming Marx," Science and Society, 33:3 (Summer-Fall, 1969) 358-65. 21. Alexander Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. by R. Quéneau (Paris, 1947) 8-13. In English, Bloom edition, op. cit., 3-7. This edition omits much of the politically interesting material from the mid-1930s. 22. ibid., 21: in English, 15.


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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism The recognition of human desire was impossible without a struggle to the death between men.[23] In order for men to recognize each other's humanity, they have to be willing to risk the loss of their physical lives. Only when men struggled among themselves for prestige-not for self-preservation and not for property-was the desire to be human recognized as such. Hence the first interactions among men were wars of prestige. Hegel had here interlinked, in one unified moment, the birth of man with that of history and society. Throughout the Phenomenology, man, history, and society were bound up with each other. There was no abstract individual here, no isolated Robinson Crusoe through whom the specific attributes of the bourgeoisie could be projected and sanctified as the eternal nature of man. To Kojève, Hegel ended once and for all the mistake of regarding one's own tribe, one's own nation, one's own class as the image of all mankind. Yet there was a certain danger of glorifying violence in Kojève's account of the struggle to the death. He came close, in places, to ontologizing this moment of the Phenomenology and veering toward fascism. The implications of the master-slave conflict are still greater. The struggle to the death for prestige could not, paradoxically, really end in death. Death would simply end the relation of recognition and man would slide regressively back into animality. The struggle had to be consummated by the establishment of permanent relations between the combatants: the victor became the Master or autonomous consciousness and the vanquished, the one who refused to risk himself in the struggle, became the Slave or dependent consciousness. A human society was constituted of masters and slaves, of aristocrats and peasant-serfs, of rulers and ruled: this was a harsh society with no trace of the fairytale of a felicitous and consensual social contract. But again, human development was not left petrified in a hierarchical society since history continued to unfold dialectically. 23. Ibid., 15: in English, 8.

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The Hegel Renaissance Relationships between masters and slaves are internal bonds in which the consciousness of each is shaped by the other. The master and the slave were not social atoms, the one being "better off" and in a position of dominance, the other "worse off" and dependent. In any relationship involving domination the humanity of both the ruler and the ruled has been mutilated and distorted. The master was actually http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter1.html (8 of 26) [11/12/2007 23:15:33]

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dependent on the slave for his status as master; both in the general society and in the eyes of the slave, the master was recognized as such only because be controlled slaves. What is worse, the master could not achieve the recognition he originally fought for in this relationship because be was recognized only by a slave, by someone be regards as sub-human. In Kojève's words, the master was in an "existential impasse." He needed an autonomous person to recognize his desire as human, but instead of free recognition, he received only the servile, dependent recognition of the slave.[24] The irony in Hegel's dialectic -of master and slave comes from his insight that it was the slave who moves humanity toward a higher level of self-realization, a notion to which Marx was deeply indebted in developing his concept of the proletariat as the emancipator of mankind. In the society of masters and slaves, the master is locked into a position in which his humanity can neither be recognized nor satisfied. The slave is not satisfied with his position either, being oppressed and exploited by the master. Unlike the master, however, the slave receives no prestige from his lot and is ready for "change, transcendence, transformation, education."[25] The slave is the secret of change in history and his desire for freedom from oppression is the ground of man's becoming more human. "The complete, absolutely free man, definitely and completely satisfied by what be is, the man who is perfected and completed in and by this satisfaction, will be the Slave who has 'overcome" his Slavery. If idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress. History is the history 24. Ibid., 25: in English, 19. 25. Ibid., 27: in English, 22.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism of the working Slave ."[26] Undoubtedly Kojève has here colored Hegel with his own Marxism, making him more the advocate of the working class than be might have liked. But Kojève has done no more than elaborate the concept of the slave that Marx himself found clearly enough in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. In the total terror of the master's rule, the slave discovers his humanity as something denied and rejected. In his desire to overcome this lack, be has to undergo a process of selftransformation that prepares him for freedom, and the key to the education of the slave is work. The slave produced and the master consumed. The slave labored without gratification, while the master's slightest whim was fulfilled without effort. The slave was compelled to delay and to sublimate his desires. The worker thus became civilized or bourgeois, learning to control and direct his desires and in the process achieving control over nature. Subjectively, the working slave learned to marshal and concentrate his energies toward ends that be himself defined, while objectively he created products that confirmed his internal aims and submitted nature to his control.[27] Kojève's commentary reads:


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The working Consciousness thereby attains a contemplation of autonomous given-being such that it contemplates itself in it. The product of work is the worker's production. It is the realization of his project, of his idea . . . it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as man . . . it is only by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality; by working, he is incarnated" Spirit, he is historical "World," be is objectivized" History.[28] Kojève did not, however, account for the uniqueness of the Proletariat, in the Marxist sense, in his notion of the master-slave relation. 26. Ibid., 26; in English, 20. 27. Ibid., 29; in English, 24. 28. Ibid., 30; in English, 25.

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The Hegel Renaissance In the history of European thought, Hegel's concept of work was an important turning-point,[29] one that Marx would develop further. Aristocratic Greek philosophy, most notably in Aristotle, had denigrated work as an activity worthy only of unfree men. Generally speaking, the Christian Churches, although attributing some value to human labor, placed work in the context of the fallen world as mans harsh penance for original sin.[30] Later, Calvin's Reformed Church looked to success in work for signs of grace, without allowing it an intrinsic value. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ascetic spirit of liberalism contrasted laboring humanity favorably with an idle, parasitic nobility. The chief exponent of economic liberalism, Adam Smith, whom Hegel read, found in work the key to the wellbeing of nations. Work became a moral good for many enlightened intellectuals. Still, for the radical wing of the philosophes, the revaluation of work derived most from its instrumental, external results, not from the process itself. Work was rational activity that benefited society, controlled nature, and brought prosperity to the individual. -Hegel took the liberal notion further by investing work with the central quality of man's development: a free consciousness. Not in the accumulation of money, not in technical discoveries that brought "progress," but in the creation of an object, was the essence of man, his selfdetermination, expressed and objectively realized. Work overcame the Slave's fear, confronting him with a world that was open to his reason, giving him confidence in his capacity for freedom, in his ability to realize his powers of thought. In Kojève's words, "Man achieves his true autonomy, his authentic freedom, only after passing through Slavery, after surmounting the fear of death by work performed in the service of another."[31] In sum, Kojève taught his French 29. Cf. Pierre Naville, De l'Aliénation à la jouissance (Paris, 1957) 9-58. 30. Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (N.Y., 1960) 1,000. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter1.html (10 of 26) [11/12/2007 23:15:33]

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31. Kojeve, op. cit., 32; in English, 27.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism students in the 1930s that Hegel had developed a revolutionary social theory 32 in which the working class played a central role in the Aufhebung (the dialectical overcoming) of authoritarian society into free society, and that workers were the "absolute negation" of the world of the masters.[33] At the same time, Kojève subsumed the separate stages of consciousness of the Phenomenology under the master-slave relationship.[34] The dialectic of man's self-transformation was tinted throughout Kojève's account by the subjective process of recognition. Each moment of becoming did not stand equal to the others but was seen essentially as a further development of the struggle for recognition. In this way, Kojève was able to put in relief those aspects of Hegel's thought that led to Marxism and existentialism. We have already noted that the struggle for recognition was a source for Marx's concept of the historical role of the proletariat. Similarly, the Kierkegaardian sense of subjectivity was highlighted in Kojève's account of the master-slave relation. In addition, Kojève was able to assert that Heidegger's concept of man as a being-in-the-world was also fundamental to the Phenomenology. Kojève's theme of the struggle for recognition also suited the antimetaphysical tendency of French Marxists and existentialists. Both Marxists and existentialists could learn from Kojève's reading of Hegel that it was not necessary to posit, at the beginning of thought, a concept that captured the full presence of being because reality unfolded in time.[35] 32. The influence of Kojève was so widespread in all fields of human studies that it is pointless to make specific references. Nevertheless, here is an example from a Sartrean literary historian, Serge Dubrovsky in Corneille et la dialectique du héros (Paris, 1963): "Hegel, for the first time in the history of philosophy, had made a systematic study of relation with the other and given it a fundamental importance . . . (92). Cf. also 502ff for Dubrovsky's attempt to use the dialectic of the master and the slave to analyze Corneille's heroes. 33. Ibid., 33; in English, 29. 34. Niel, op. cit., 431. 35. Koj6ve, op. cit., 162; in English, 32.

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The process of man's becoming was identified with a dialectic moving from the finite of the given to the infinite of possibility and back from the infinite to a new finitude.[36] In each epoch of history, all views were partial and incomplete. Hence time was an open unfolding of possibilities in which each moment was both absolute and relative; absolute in relation to itself and relative in relation to the past and the future. Since Aristotelian, Cartesian, and Kantian notions of a static absolute were discarded, the problems of freedom and determinism, knowledge and being, essence and existence were all placed on a new footing. What is more, the nature and significance of history shifted from the sphere of accident and relativity to one of reason: for Kojève, the historical dialectic enabled Hegel to have true selfcomprehension: Hegel was the only one to understand himself as this whole, to give a correct and complete answer to the Cartesian question, "What am I?" By understanding himself through the understanding of the totality of the anthropogenetic historical process, which ends with Napoleon and his contemporaries, and by understanding this process through his understanding of himself, Hegel caused the completed whole of the universal real process to penetrate into his individual consciousness, and then be penetrated this consciousness. Thus this consciousness became just as total, as universal, as the process that it revealed by understanding itself; and this fully self-conscious consciousness is absolute knowledge. . . . [emphasis added] [37] One of the implications of Kojève's theme of recognition (which was very influential in the development of existential Marxism) was that Hegel's Phenomenology established a new philosophical anthropology. Hegel demonstrated that reason was not an eternal archetype but a changing structure of consciousness which was constituted through man's positing himself in the world and then comprehending that position. The argu36. Ibid., 364-365; in English, 130-132. 37. Ibid., 164-165; in English, 35.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism ment, raised by Marxists and later by structuralists, was that to the degree that man's self-awareness was distorted throughout most of history, the structures of his reality, and indeed of reality itself, could not be fixed through a study of human consciousness. At any point in time, one should look instead at the exterior structures of nature or society to find "man"; more radically, there was no such center of reality, properly speaking, as man, self, or consciousness. To Kojève, Hegel was able to escape these apparently anti-humanist conclusions by minimizing the significance of nature or external reality. Thus Hegel's philosophical anthropology as presented by Kojève remained in question throughout the postwar years.


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What is more, Kojève's -discussion of other sections of the Phenomenology contained tendencies more compatible with Heideggerian irrationalism than with Marx and Sartre.

3. Hyppolite: The Unhappy Consciousness Perhaps even more than to Kojève, credit for the task of bringing Hegel to the French public should go to Jean Hyppolite. A professor at the Sorbonne and then at the College de France, Hyppolite began writing articles on Hegel in the late 1930s after teaching himself - German by studying the Phenomenology. He then published the first complete translation of the all-important Phenomenology of Spirit, between 1939 and 1941, which has become the standard text in France. After World War II, Hyppolite continued to publish important commentaries on Hegel, beginning in 1947 with the Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de 1'esprit de Hegel. This work appeared simultaneously with Kojève's Introduction and was quickly established as a major study. In 1948 be published the short Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel; in 1952, Logique et existence: essai sur la Logique de Hegel; and finally in 1955, Etudes sur Marx et Hegel, a collection of 18

The Hegel Renaissance articles. These books all went through multiple editions. In addition, Hyppolite taught Hegel to many of the thinkers who began to dominate French intellectual life in the late 1960s, among them Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida. Bearing all this in mind, one must conclude that Hyppolite's interpretation of Hegel was a major influence on the Hegel renaissance. Within the corpus of Hegel's works, Hyppolite directed his students to the Phenomenology, not only in his translation and commentary, but even in his work on Hegel's logic. Subtitled "an essay on Hegel's logic," the book Logique et existence struck French readers as simply a further discussion of the Phenomenology rather than as an explication of Hegel's Science of Logic.[38] Hyppolite taught the French to look to the Phenomenology with its magisterial unfolding of the historical shapes of human consciousness for the secret of a new philosophical anthropology. [39] a. Self-Discovery and History In a small book on the social and historical thought of Hegel, Hyppolite disclosed the motive for the sudden surge of interest in Hegel among the French: For the French, Hegel's vision of the world . . . is indispensable to know. According to Hegel, history and reason interpenetrate one another. The absolute, without the forms it http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter1.html (13 of 26) [11/12/2007 23:15:33]

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takes necessarily in history, would be "solitude without life," and it is with 38. Cf., for example, the first chapter, "L'Ineffable," Logique et existence (Paris, 1952) 7-26. 39. Cf. Jean Lacroix, Marxisme, existentialisme, personnalisme: presence de l'éternité dans le temps (Paris, 1949) 62-63. Cf. also, Logique et existence, 231-239. Hyppolite ultimately denies that Hegel put forth a new anthropology, but earlier he was ambivalent on this point. First, be stressed that the subject of Phenomenology was conscience de soi," not man-a somewhat sophistic distinction. Hegel's followers could legitimately differ on emphasizing man (as Feuerbach and Marx did) or the Absolute. Was history the history of self-consciousness or was it the history of the Absolute? Hyppolite leaned toward the latter interpretation but acknowledged an ambiguity in Hegel.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism history that we must reconcile ourselves. Freedom is precisely this reconciliation. Hegelian freedom, we have insisted here, transcends the individual and his private life; it is a reconciliation of man with his destiny, and history is the expression of this destiny. Our philosophers have thought about freedom in an entirely different way. From Descartes to Bergson, our philosophy is a refusal of history: rather it is dualist, looking for freedom in a reflection of the subject on himself.[40] In other words, the French philosophical tradition in large part located the center of the self in autonomous reflection, outside society, outside history, outside one's own daily experience. Now, after the war had overturned the certainties of daily life, French intellectuals were compelled to seek a philosophy that related intimate experience of the self to external, worldly phenomena. Speaking about her situation in 1945, Simone de Beauvoir turned to Hegel, as Hyppolite urged. "We had discovered the reality and weight of history; now we were wondering about its meaning. Quéneau, who had been initiated into Hegelianism by Kojève, thought that one day all individuals would be reconciled in the triumphant unity of Spirit." [41] The French reading of Hegel demanded a total, sharp break with the weakened tradition of Cartesian rationalism. Only within the purity of reason could the Cartesian spin out, in analytic succession, clear and distinct ideas. But the war had opened the inner sanctum of consciousness to the opacity and density of the outer world. The turn toward Hegel was one of the paths that the French took to break with their past. Unlike Kojève's lectures, Hyppolite's commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit attempted to render the meaning of the text with as little intrusion of the author as 40. Jean Hyppolite, Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel (Paris, 1968) 123. First edition, 1948. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter1.html (14 of 26) [11/12/2007 23:15:33]

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4l. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. R. Howard (N.Y., 1964) 34.

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The Hegel Renaissance possible.[42] Restraining his personal preferences, Hyppolite slowly and methodically traced the dialectic of consciousness from simple awareness of the object to absolute knowledge, leaving unresolved difficulties where the text was unclear, hesitating to force the part into a whole based on some favorite thesis. Hyppolite's reading of Hegel became the text for a whole generation of intellectuals who were satisfied to find in it more of Hegel than of Hyppolite. Nevertheless, the meaning of- the Phenomenology as a whole had to be clarified at the outset. In Hyppolite's rendering, the Phenomenology was not to be taken as a world history,[43] but as Hegel's "voyage of discovery." Similar in function to Descartes' Discourse on Method, it revealed bow Hegel formed his thought.[44] The different stages of consciousness described by Hegel did not fit into any pattern of world history; rather, they made intelligible to Hegel his own spiritual development. The movement of consciousness, for example, from the master-slave relation to stoicism, skepticism and the unhappy consciousness was intelligible, in the first instance, in terms of Hegel's own education or Bildung. The Phenomenology, to Hyppolite, resembled closely Rousseau's book on education (Emile) in which the individual proceeded through stages toward the complete development of his capacities.[45] Although the Phenomenology proceeded according to the inner necessity of Hegel's personal growth, Hyppolite's Hegel did not view his own development as completely unique but as part of the development of humanity. Hegel's self-comprehension was, at the same time, the self-comprehension of the age, and he could only comprehend himself as part of his age, as part of the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon.[46] Hence history entered into the Phenomenology as a necessary aspect of the individual's 42. Mikel Dufrenne, op. cit., 397 argues this same distinction between the commentaries of Kojève and Hyppolite. 43. Hyppolite was at times ambiguous and contradictory on this point. At one point be referred to the Phenomenology as "the true concrete history of human consciousness." Genèse, 214. 44. Genèse, 50. Cf. also 55. 45. Ibid., 43. 46. Ibid., 50.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism inner self-knowledge. History and reason were not opposites but mutually dependent. For this reason, Hegel began, not as Descartes did, with a statement of self-evident, certain, absolute truth, but with recounting for himself and for his time all forms of consciousness that were each deeply distorted, "erroneous," uncertain, and relative. In Hyppolite's formulation: "Hegel tries to overcome the subjectobject dualism of Kant by beginning not with absolute knowledge but with the phenomenal, natural consciousness."[47] The beginning and the end of reflection was for Hegel the process of self-discovery through the history of consciousness. In addition, Hegel introduced history into the Phenomenology through continuous allusions to previous philosophies and world outlooks. The stages of consciousness were labeled with the names of past philosophies, like stoicism and skepticism, and references were made, more or less overtly, to Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, Kant's moral philosophy, Schiller's aesthetics, among others. This practice, Hyppolite argued, misled readers into finding a direct parallel between the stages of consciousness and history when they were logical more than historical. The historical references were necessary for Hegel because the process of the individual's self-discovery had to recount previous efforts: The primary intention of the Phenomenology, as revealed in the Introduction, is the rise of empirical consciousness to absolute knowledge. . . . But this raising of empirical consciousness to absolute knowledge is only possible if one discovers in it the necessary stages of its ascension; these stages are still in it, and it is necessary only to descend into the interiority of memory by an operation like the Platonic reminiscence. The individual, in effect, child of his time, possesses in himself the entire substance of the spirit of his time. He needs only appropriate it, render it present again. . . .[48] 47. ibid., 12. 48. ibid., 42.

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The Hegel Renaissance Yet Hyppolite left a residual ambiguity in his account: if there was not a purely historical succession of forms of consciousness, then each must be possible at any given time. Skepticism, for example, would be more than a Hellenistic form of consciousness. In that case, Hegel's concrete dialectic in which each stage followed from its predecessor was inadequate. b. From Substance to Subject


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If the Phenomenology was not a world history, there was still a specific meaning in the movement of consciousness from sense certainty to absolute knowledge. Hyppolite understood this as the change from "substance to subject,"[49] in Hegel's famous phrase. Reality and man were first conceived as "thing," as substance, as in-itself; human consciousness understood both itself and the world as a series of fixed, hypostasized qualities. Without self-reflection, humanity recognized itself only as a thing among things; spirit was substance. The difficult, tragic story of mankind narrated the gradual "humanization of the in-itself." Hegel's "philosophy is a philosophy that conceives substance as subject, being as self. . . . Its being is the movement by which it poses itself as other than itself in order to become itself."[50] The dialectic is the law of the movement from substance to subject. The change from one level or structure of consciousness to another is not a flat, external juxtaposition of two different things. The dialectic does not resemble an external succession of qualities or styles, say Renaissance, Baroque, Classic, Romantic. It is an internal, series of self-transformations. The dialectic captures human reality as moments of its development: ". . . one of the most profound traits of Hegelian speculation [was] to introduce life and becoming into thought itself . . . to make mobile the determinations of thought-that is, to think dialectically.[51] 49. Ibid., 82. 50. Ibid., 147. 51. Ibid., 128.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism In Hyppolite's reading, the most dangerous problem for man was that he had to become an object of his own knowledge in order to be himself. Man had to pose himself, to externalize himself, to separate himself from himself, to negate himself, to alienate himself in order first to know himself and then to become himself. To become conscious of his own reality, man had to see himself as Other; and this is possible only in a community. "It is human history, the community of self-consciousness in their mutual relations, which confers on action its consistency and its reality."[52] Only by becoming "for-another" could man become "for-himself." The individual needed to deny the given immediacy of his consciousness, negate it, throw himself into the world of natural things and other men in order to return to himself with self-knowledge. The apparently straightforward project of being oneself required a long series of detours and negations through which human reality finally constitutes itself. With Hegel's concept of the dialectic, the French were compelled to recognize that the intimate, private structures of the self were a shared, communal reality. The clearest example of the dramatic challenge that the reading of Hegel posed to the French stemmed from the denial of solipsistic individualism in the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter1.html (17 of 26) [11/12/2007 23:15:33]

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Phenomenology.[53] Bourgeois thought normally teetered on the edge of solipsism, defining the center of the self as an individualist, cognitive capacity in which relations with other people were always secondary. As in competitive market relations, the thought and even the existence of the other person was always problematical. One could never be sure of what the other person thought, felt, or experienced. The stable foundations of reality were therefore locked up in the consciousness of isolated individuals. To Hegel, however, regardless of whether one attained intimate certainty of the other's mind or not, the other was needed 52. Ibid., 491. 53. Logique et existence, op. cit., 16.

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The Hegel Renaissance for the constitution of the self. Hyppolite explained it this way: just as the life of an individuality can only be fulfilled by finding itself in another individuality, so the desire that constitutes the self can only exist if it is for itself an object of another desire. Thus the desire of life becomes the desire of another desire, or rather, in view of the necessary reciprocity of the phenomenon, human desire is always desire of the desire of another. Thus, in human love, desire appears to the self as the desire of the desire of another. The self needs to be beheld by the Other.[54] The final emergence of man as subject did not, however, cancel out all tension from human existence since the fundamental structure of consciousness included the moment of alienation.[55] Hyppolite translated Hegel's Entfremdung as estrangement or alienation, defining it as "the strangeness of the objectification."[56] Because self-consciousness always required self-objectification, alienation was an ontological quality of the human condition. Regardless of the historical circumstances, man had to see himself from the outside, and this was the source of alienation. In the center of consciousness, the split within the self was accompanied by feelings of "anguish" and "anxiety."[57] Although Hegel transcended the dualism of Descartes and Kant, a residual duality remained. Hyppolite insisted that Hegel's absolute subject was a "unity of unity and difference," an unstable synthesis of the particular and the universal called "the authentic individual" which incorporated alienation as an essential moment. [58] 54. Jean Hyppolite, Etudes sur Marx et Hegel (Paris, 1955), trans. by J. O'Neill as Studies on Marx and Hegel (N.Y., 1969) 162. Cf. also Genèse, 154. 55. As, for example, in Hegel's treatment of Diderot in the Phenomenology. 56. Genèse, 374. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter1.html (18 of 26) [11/12/2007 23:15:33]

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57. Ibid., 23 and 145. 58. Ibid., 38. 25

I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism c. The Unhappy Consciousness With this vision of humanity burdened with alienation, Hyppolite was naturally led to exaggerate the stage of becoming that Hegel called the unhappy consciousness. just as Kojève found the master-slave relationship the pivotal shape of consciousness in the Phenomenology, Hyppolite exalted the unhappy consciousness as "the fundamental theme of the Phenomenology."[59] Emerging from the blind alleys and pitfalls of stoicism and skepticism, the unhappy consciousness represented the moment when man finally recognized the absolute but experienced it as a place beyond humanity. In the most general terms, the unhappy consciousness was the dualist vision: "Consciousness of life is a separation of life itself, an opposing reflection . . . it is knowledge that the true is absent and finds itself rejected on the side of nothingness."[60] Hyppolite stretched the unhappy consciousness across the vast majority of the history of Western culture. The Jews were "the unhappy people of history" because their absolute god, Yahweh, was an unattainable other.[61] Similarly, the subjectivity of the Christian Middle Ages as well as the Romantic sensibility suffered the unhappy consciousness, yearning for a beyond that forever escaped them.[62] In an earlier pivotal book on Hegel, Jean Wahl, a mystical existentialist, had already argued that the unhappy consciousness pervaded the whole history of man as the moment when the synthesis of any epoch broke down into a dualism.[63] Using the unhappy consciousness in this way, Wahl went on to make Hegel a Christian theologian, or a Kierkegaardian, who explained the human condition as the sad awareness of finitude over against the infinity of God.[64] 59. Ibid., 184. Cf. also Studies, 172. 60. Genèse, 184. 61. Ibid., 185. 62. Ibid., 198. 63. Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris, 1929) 124. 64. Ibid., 51.

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Although he also saw the unhappy consciousness as prominent in the Phenomenology, Hyppolite tried to wrest Hegel from the theologians by refusing to see him as a "mystic." Wahl's thesis would leave Hegel in the grip of Christian dualism where the only point of contact between man and the absolute was a mystical union of souls. On the contrary, Hyppolite explicated the Phenomenology as a statement of humanism, in which man incorporated the spirit of God as a human spirit much in the manner of Feuerbach's anthropologism. Man recognized God as a human projection, but-and here is where Hyppolite differed from Feuerbach-as a necessary projection since man needed to separate himself from himself in order to become himself. Hence an element of transcendence remained as a residual source of man's self-recognition, but it was no longer the Christian God. In fact, Hyppolite discerned in Feuerbach's atheistic reduction of God to man merely another evidence of the unhappy consciousness: "But if Hegel appears to incline toward humanism, he rejects this complete reduction of God to man. He maintains always a certain necessary transcendence of man. The great sadness of man-a form of Unhappy Consciousness-is to be reduced to himself alone, to have absorbed the divine in himself."[65] Hyppolite concluded that Hegel took an equivocal position between mysticism and humanism. Hyppolite characterized Hegel's dilemma as the tension between a phenomenological and ontological philosophy: [66] was Hegel merely describing the transformation of consciousness in history or was he reducing history to the development of being; was he historicizing logic or imposing logic upon history? The Communist theorist, Roger Garaudy, concluded that Hegel's mystifying idealism resulted from his attempt to account for the "necessity of the bourgeois revolution" of 1789 while at the same time "justifying it as the achievement of history." [67] For Hyppolite, however, this opposition 65. Genèse, 524. 66. Ibid., 59. 67. Ibid., 203n.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism between history and reason, or between phenomenology and logic, missed Hegel's achievement. The philosopher's "absolute knowledge" was itself a historically new epoch that went beyond the contradictions of the French Revolution. What Hegel achieved at the end of the Phenomenology was at once logical and historical: the beginning of a new stage of consciousness that would unfold in time. According to one's temperament, Hegel might be criticized equally for having constructed a logomachy in which every event of history is reduced to a play of logical opposites or for having contaminated his logic with the accidents of history. But either reproach implies a neglect of what is truly original in Hegel's work as one of the greatest attempts to relate the singular and the universal which in ordinary consciousness are juxtaposed


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without reconciliation .[68] Hyppolite stressed the unity of the contradiction: that absolute knowledge was both the development of reason in history and the first unfolding of the ultimate logical structure of being. d. Work and Self-Consciousness As well as to the Phenomenology of Spirit, French interest in Hegel in the late 1940s turned to the early writings from the Bern (1793-1796), Frankfurt (1797-1800), and Jena (1801 -1807) periods. Of Hegel's varied concerns during these years, the French paid special attention to two: the idea of Christ as mediator and the critique of the liberal notion of work. Once again the French found in these ideas further examples of the dialectical relation of reason and history as well as the ground of a new philosophical anthropology. Catholics, of course, were most interested in the meaning Hegel ascribed to Christ. In his early writings Hegel returned to Lessing's notion of religion as the moral education 68. Studies, 36. Cf. also, Logique et existence, 231-247.

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The Hegel Renaissance of humanity;[69] be defined Judaism through Abraham's rejection of the world and his elevation of God as the transcendental otherness of man. With Christ, however, God the absolute appeared to the disciples as partly human. Christ mediated finite man and infinite God and be did so in time.[70] The absolute appeared to Christians for the first time as human and as temporal. This notion of Christianity played a central role for Catholics with personalist and existentialist bents in rejecting the purely transcendent and atemporal concept of God, making possible some degree of reconciliation between them and Marxists.[71] More important to us than Hegel's early concept of Christ was the discovery, in his lecture notes of the Jena period, of his criticism of the organization of work under capitalism. Hyppolite, for one, drew the attention of Marxists to Hegel's remarkable comprehension of the dehumanizing tendencies of a nascent industrial and market economy.[72] Hegel had read the founding work of liberal political economy, Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations before writing the Phenomenology. The results of this reading were evident in the notebooks of the period known as the Jenenser Realphilosophie.[73] In them, Hegel sketched early versions of his system of logic, of nature, and, most significantly, of the phenomenology of consciousness. In the section on consciousness, Hegel spelled out an extended critique of Smith.[74] Hegel focussed on the distorting effects of bourgeois http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter1.html (21 of 26) [11/12/2007 23:15:33]

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society (civil society in Smith; bürgerliche gesellschaft in Hegel) in its tendency to privatize consciousness: "As 69. G. Lessing, Theological Writings (Stanford, 1968). 70. Cf. Henri Niel, De la Médiation dans la philosophic de Hegel (Paris, 1945), 109. 7l. Cf. Franz Gregoire, Aux Sources de la pensée de Marx: Hegel, Feuerbach (Louvain, 1947). 72. Cf. also, Pierre Naville, op. cit. 73. Edited by Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1967). First edition, 1930 74. Ibid., 225-242. In Hyppolite's commentary, cf. Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel, op. cit.,116-121.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism citizens of this state, individuals are private persons who have as their purpose their own interests. . . . "[75] Acting in the marketplace and in the family only to augment his private interests, the bourgeois particularized his existence, downgrading the social nature of his role. Society then constituted itself beyond the individual, forcing his existence to become contingent. Society acted upon him as a "natural necessity," a blind force, giving his business affairs an "abstract" character.[76] In capitalist society work lost its intrinsic value, and became machinelike: "through the abstract character of his work, man becomes more mechanical, more indifferent, less spiritual."[77] Hyppolite's discussion of Hegel's critique of Smith is worth quoting at some length because it depicts graphically the way the French saw Hegel as the source of a renewed Marxism: The individual "can work more," but, as Hegel says, "the value of his work begins to diminish." Nevertheless be is pushed to lengthen his hours of work, or to increase the intensity of his labor, in order to produce more, to be able to produce the means of subsistence. After a variable lapse of time, this progress is canceled and the individual is thrown back to his previous level of life. "Labor is then a commodity that is worth less." Here one sees how Hegel goes beyond Adam Smith, announcing the iron law of wages and in a sense anticipating Marx's analysis. He perceives all the consequences of the division of labor. Because of the abstract nature of labor, it becomes more and more mechanical, more and more absurd. Of course, the stick is replaced by the tool and the tool yields to the machine, which is man's craft over nature, bending its blind forces to human purposes. It reveals the in-itself of nature through the for-itself of man. In his study of work and the machine, Hegel develops a new conception of finality and of theology in general. But man's cleverness with regard to nature has repercussions for the


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individual man: in practice, it transforms intelligent and integral labor into a stupefying and partial labor, "formal and in75. Ibid., 118. 76. Ibid., 119. 77. Ibid.

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The Hegel Renaissance human." The humanization of nature results in the dehumanization of the laborer. Finally, the movement of production and distribution as a system leads to "the restless search for machines and new markets, without any limit." We may say that as early as 1805 Hegel had envisaged the process of production for production's sake of which Ricardo spoke and which Marx described . . . . [78] Although Marx had no knowledge of these manuscripts they demonstrated to Hyppolite and the French an essential continuity of direction in Hegel's dialectic of consciousness and Marx's later social theory. Hegel did more, however, than indicate the contradictions of the division of labor and their alienating effect on work. In these same manuscripts be formulated the outlines of something like Marx's concept of the Proletariat. With the appearance of new, more mechanized industries, the individual worker totally lost control over the work process. Hegel perceived that the capitalist economy prevented the creation of free workers; instead it generated -a new form of slavery. The outcome of capitalist industrialization was the condemnation of a whole "class of men to factory and manufacturing work, work that was completely trivial, unhealthy, and without security, ending the need for skill and personal capacity."[80] Not only did the new society alienate labor; it also increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Contrary to the expectations of Adam Smith and liberalism in general, the free-enterprise economy did not end the inequities of feudal privilege and did not establish a society with the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Bourgeois society gave rise to a new contradiction, a new form of inequality: "This inequality of wealth and poverty created the greatest rending of the 78. Studies, 79-80. Quotation marks indicate Hyppolite's references to Hegel's words. 79. Ibid., 80. 80. Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel, op cit., 120. This quote is Hegel's, transcribed by Hyppolite from the Realphilosophie.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism social will, internal revolt and hatred."[81] Although Hegel here presented the capitalist world of the post revolutionary epoch as oppressive and contradictory, be did not always maintain this radical posture in his later works, not even in the Phenomenology of 1807, where the critique of work in bourgeois society was somewhat muted. Hyppolite noted the change in Hegel's social theory only partly. He did take note of the conservative nature of Hegel's late work on politics, the Philosophy of Right, where hierarchical corporations were celebrated as true intermediaries between the individual and the state too often Hyppolite reduced Hegel's social theory to that found in the Jenenser Realphilosophie, where Hegel, as in the following passage, was made to sound like a Marxist before Marx. "Society is . . . a communal effort, a transaction of each and all, the object itself; but in this object the individual becomes alien to himself. This alienation, which Hegel identifies with objectification or the externalization of man through his labor, is a new concept which . . .enables Hegel to raise the human problem in all its complexity."[83] Yet this radical Hegel was just what was needed, for the French, to stimulate a rethinking of the Marxist dialectic. 4. Hegel, Marx, and Sartre The study of the introduction of Hegel's Phenomenology into France in the postwar years raises the curtain on the major themes of French social thought through the 1960s. Only the widespread influence of the Phenomenology in redirecting the concerns of French intellectuals can explain, 81. Ibid. Again, these are Hegel's words. 82. Ibid., 121. It has been reported that manuscripts of the Philosophy of Right have been uncovered, showing that Hegel censored his own radical positions. This could end the argument over his conservatism. Der Spiegel (March 26, 1973) 144-145. For a similar viewpoint cf. Eric Weil, Hegel et 1'état (Paris, 1950). 83. Studies, 79.

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The Hegel Renaissance at the level of ideas themselves, the importance and interrelationship of Marxism and existentialism. Historically, both Marxism and existentialism were born in the heyday of Hegel's prominence, in the 1840s.[84] As a young man, Karl Marx, with his doctorate in philosophy from Berlin University, was a member of a Hegelian philosophical club. Traces of Marx's Hegelianism appeared most notably in two


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of his studies from the 1840s, both devoted to a critique of Hegel: one on the Philosophy of Right; the other on the Phenomenology.[85] Similarly, the first modern existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard, defined his own philosophical position through a study and criticism of Hegel. This connection is often forgotten because these traditions rose to prominence only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Hegel's thought had, with few exceptions, faded into obscurity. The common origins of both traditions were lost from sight as they appeared on the intellectual horizon from almost opposite directions. In post-war France, the two important commentators on the Phenomenology, Kojève and Hyppolite, were steeped, in varying degrees, in both Marxism and existentialism and colored their presentations of Hegel with their own preconceptions. Koiève had been swayed to existentialism through Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927); Hyppolite came to it primarily through Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943). Every page of their commentaries on the Phenomenology was loaded with existentialist concepts like anxiety, human reality (Dasein, étre-1à), the situation, becoming, the project. Hyppolite gave as Hegel's definition of man the word-for-word description used by Sartre in Being and Nothingness: "Man is the being who is not what he is, and is what he is not."[86] Kojève 84. Cf. Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (N.Y., 1967), 237-247. 85. L. Easton and K. Guddat, eds. and trans., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (N.Y., 1967), "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State," 1843, 151-202; and "Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and Philosophy in General," 314-337. 86. Logique et existence, 240; also cited in Genèse.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism was accused of existentializing Hegel and Hyppolite explicitly posited "a close connection between Hegel and contemporary existentialism."[88] Both Hyppolite and Kojève treated the various stages of consciousness in the Phenomenology as "forms of existing." In his outline of the Phenomenology appended to his commentary, Kojève labeled a long section "Concrete Existential Attitudes." In fact, one of the difficulties in understanding both commentators rests on determining whether the connections between Hegel and existentialism emerged from studying Hegel, or whether the existentialism of the commentators distorted their understanding of Hegel. By the same token, Kojève and Hyppolite had affinities with Marxism and discovered Marxist ideas in Hegel. Kojève was rebuked for this "error" by Aimé Patri: "M. Kojève is . . . the first . . . to have attempted to constitute the intellectual ménage à trois of Hegel, Marx and Heidegger which has since that time been such a success."[89] The well-known account of the master-slave relation by Kojève, as we have seen, probably went beyond Hegel's intentions in depicting the revolutionary nature of the


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slave. For his part, Hyppolite devoted many articles to the careful definition of the relationship of Hegel and Marx, finally collected as Studies in Marx and Hegel. In this book, Hyppolite summarized in the following way the whole question of the trinity: Hegel, Marx, and existentialism. Starting from the Christian teaching which gathers Humanity in the living God, Hegel had sketched a philosophy which in effect finally reduced nature, religion, and the State, respectively, to the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of Right. Kierkegaard and Marx, each in his own way, showed the existential emptiness of this contemplative reduction. But where one went back upon philosophy to religion, to an existential concept of religious man, the other pushed the critique of religion on into the critique of the social foundations of religion and of philosophy itself, which Marx called a 87. Desanti, op. cit., 93. 88. Genèse, 16. 89. Quoted by Allan Bloom, op. cit., vii.

34 The Hegel Renaissance "spoof of idealism." [90] To clarify adequately even the main outlines of the interrelations between Hegel, Marx and existentialism would require a separate volume. We will present Marx and Sartre separately at first, preparing the ground for the subsequent dialogue, which was hostile in the beginning but ended in significant mutual influence. By the end of the period, in 1968, Marxism and existentialism were approaching a synthetic "existential Marxism." Thus the central theme in my presentation of French social thought since World War II was Hegel's protean insight of the dialectic of reason and history. The Marxists focused on the transitory aspect of social institutions, on their collectively human source, and on the intellectual's position within history; the existentialists stressed the temporal nature of consciousness and reason, the subjective, individual experience of being in time. Both, however, used Hegel to break through the hegemony of idealism. 90. Studies, 101.

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Two ____________________________________________________________ The Re-Discovery of Marx and the Concept of Alienation

1. Stalinism and the French Communist Party Marxism was slow in coming to France. The intellectual competitors of Marxism, Blanqui's Jacobinism and Proudhon's syndicalism, dominated the French worker's movements well into the twentieth century. Early importations of Marx's thought by Guèsde and Jaurès failed to evoke a wide interest in the theoretical texts of socialism. Between 1929 and 1934 a first group of intellectuals was constituted to study and propagate Marxism. The group consisted of Georges Politzer, Henri Lefebvre, Norbert Gutermann, Georges Friedmann, Pierre Morhange, and Paul Nizan. Closely allied to the Communist Party, this group concerned itself with refuting the dominant philosophical traditions of Cartesian rationalism and Bergsonian vitalism. A second group, clustered around the journal La Pensée, revue du rationalisme moderne, was led by prominent scientists who were Communist Party members: Paul Langevin, Marcel Prenant, Frederic Joliot-Curie, and Henri Wallon.[1] Founded in 1939, La Pensée was openly positivist, limiting "dialectical materialism" to a method of research. Leaning heavily on the French Encyclopedist tradition, it advertised Marxism as the only philosophy com1. For an extensive discussion of the thought of the early French Marxists, of Politzer, Wallon, Langevin, and Jacques Solomon, see Roger Garaudy, Perspectives de l'homme (Paris, 1969) 270-303. For the CP intellectuals, cf. Claude Roy, Nous (Paris, 1972).

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The Re-Discovery of Marx patible with scientific rationalism.[2] Both groups of French Marxists, without an economist among them, wanted to have communism bask in the radiant prestige of the progress of natural science. Politzer, recognized by many as the most brilliant of the early Marxists, proclaimed that "materialism is no more than the scientific understanding of the universe,"[3] essentially a "continuation" of the materialism of Diderot and the eighteenth century.[4] This positivist Marxism continued to predominate in the thought of the younger generation of Communist Party theorists after the Liberation. Writing in 1946, at the height of the power of the Communist Party, resulting from its leadership in the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter2.html (1 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:15:42]

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Resistance, Roger Garaudy safely delineated Marxism as scientific, moral, and French.[5] The image of Marxism drawn by CP apologists like Garaudy was not of an open, critical theory that could lead to strategies for smashing oppressive institutions, but of a respectable, elevated, very French, philosophical doctrine. The celebrated leader of the FCP at this time, Maurice Thorez, could say nothing better of Marxism than that it was a "proven, scientific theory,"[6] in the line of "potent minds" that stretched "from Rabelais to Helvétius, from Diderot to Victor Hugo, from Zola to Anatole France."[7] Two factors determined the fate of French Marxism through the 1940s: the political context of Stalin's International and the belated introduction of the corpus of Marx's writings. No more striking instance of the influence of politics on intellectuals can be named than the power Josef Stalin exercised over French Marxists from the mid-1930s until the mid-1950s. The primary task of Marxist intellectuals was to defend the Soviet Union, 2. George Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France (N.Y., 1966) 153. 3. Principes élémentaire de philosophie (Paris, 1970), 21. 4. Ibid., 22. 5. "Les Sources françaises du marxisme-léninisme," Cahiers du Communisme, 23:12 (Dec., 1946) 1120-1133. Also "Le communisme et la morale," 8-9 (June-July, 1945) 54ff. 6. Fils du peuple (Paris, 1970) 344. 7. Ibid., 360.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism to twist Marxism into a theory that explained Soviet society and demonstrated its superiority over capitalism. This situation was even more constraining because Stalin used the European Parties to suit the needs of Soviet interests so that French Marxists were compelled to argue the revolutionary role of the French Party when, in fact, Stalin was dictating a conservative role for it.[8] In the years immediately after World War II, at a time of revolutionary fervor in France, Moscow embraced De Gaulle and the CP had to restrain its militants in favor of Stalin's policy of stability in Europe. Marxists could not escape the understandable dilemma of supporting Russian socialism, a palpable reality, and at the same time wanting to revolutionize French capitalism.[9] The Soviet Union was simply the homeland of socialism for intellectuals, who, enchanted by its spell, invested in it all the dreams of an emancipated humanity.10 After 1947 with the outbreak of the Cold War, the emergence of the Zhdanovist doctrine of the two camps and the exclusion of the CP from the government, it became very difficult for Party intellectuals to write critically. Unless one were prepared to fall into the camp of the Americans with their anti-Communism-and very few French intellectuals were-Marxism had to be identified with Russian socialism without qualification.


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The relation of intellectuals to the Party is difficult to understand. The explanation by 8. David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals (N.Y., 1964) 164. For a general discussion of the French CP during this period see Alfred J. Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party: 1941-1947 (N.Y., 1962). 9. Tbe Communist jean Desanti tried to explain this situation in "Sur les intellectuals et le communisme," La Nouvelle critique, 76-77 (June-Aug., 1956) 93-102 and 90-101. For an unsympathetic and typically antiCommunist, cold-warrior explanation see Jules Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, trans. by J. Dégras and R. Ress (London, 1953), originally published in 1949. 10. For an example of this argument by a CP intellectual that indicates the incredible force of Stalinism see, Edgar Morin, Autocritique (Paris, 1959) 137-147.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx sociological reasons, such as the disparity between working-class or peasant Party leaders and bourgeois intellectuals, fails to recognize the power of Stalinist Russia over the intellectuals and their willing submission to diamat (dialectical materialism).[11] On the other hand the Party was led by the politicians, and the role of intellectuals was entirely subordinate. To the degree that the praxis of the Party was guided by theory it was the theory of Stalin, who was considered the true interpreter of Marx and Lenin. Yet the attitude of the Party toward intellectuals did vary in the post-war years. At times, usually when the Party was courting intellectuals, published works were not carefully scrutinized for orthodoxy and some degree of open debate was possible. In the main, for CP intellectuals it was not possible to apply Marx's ideas to the concrete history and direction of Western European societies. It took several decades before Marxism could be extricated from its identification with the Soviet Union, before the Soviet Union itself could be analyzed critically. In addition to being constrained by the necessity of apologizing for Stalin's "socialism in one country," Marxists were hamstrung by the philosophical pretentions of Stalin. In the CP, Marxism was presented as a finished philosophy, known as diamat, consisting of seven theses, three principles and four traits, and Communist intellectuals were encouraged simply to repeat and apply these "truths."[12] Under the aegis of Russia's philosopher-king, Marxism became a closed system of ideas. French Trotskyists, like Pierre Naville, who were critical of Stalin's Russia, were themselves 11. This is a common error of historians and political scientists. See, for example, Richard Johnson, The French Communist Party vs. the Students (New Haven, 1972) 4. 12. Roger Garaudy, "Les manuscrits de 1844 de Karl Marx," Cahiers du Communisme, 39 (March, 1963) 120. For examples of diamat from the French, see R. Garaudy, La Théorie matérialiste de la connaissance (1953);


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Guy Besse and Maurice Caveing, Principes élémentaires de philosophie.

39 I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism wedded to the idea that the October Revolution was the realization of Marx's proletarian revolutions.[13] French Marxists dutifully imitated Stalin's formulation of diamat.[14] Revolutionary theory was schematized into two parts: dialectical materialism, a phrase never used by Marx, and historical materialism. The dialectic emerged as a metaphysical postulate about objective, exterior reality. Materialism signified that "matter is primary," that mind is secondary . . . since it is a reflection of matter."[15] The two principles combined-precisely how was left unclear-constituted the "philosophy" of Marxism, from which historical materialism, the method of understanding society and providing a guide for the praxis of the proletariat, was derived. Historical materialism meant little more than economism: the economic base determined the political, legal and ideological superstructures in a unilinear, mechanical manner. (Stalin's placing language in between the two would be an exception to this reductionism.) Since the relative autonomy and the reciprocal influence of the superstructure were denied, historical materialism ended in an abstract analysis of the economy along with a characterization of man as homo economicus. Historical materialism limited Marxists either to empty hopes of a catastrophic upheaval or to collaborating with the Fourth Republic and De Gaulle for economic, tradeunionist benefits. This Marxism could be seen as an ideology serving the defensive interests of Stalin's authoritarian state, which felt itself beleaguered by imperialist capitalism. Divorced from the popular base, the state was systematically modernizing Russia, and, in its dualism and the materialism own way, diamat reflected 13. In this early period only Karl Korsch in Marxism and Philosophy, trans. F. Halliday (London, 1970), originally published in 1923, seriously attempted a Marxist analysis of Marx. The CP intellectual, Georges Cogniot, was still finding the USSR as "the embodiment of democracy" in 1968, Karl Marx, notre contemporaine (Paris, 1968) 162. 14. Cf. Joseph Stalin, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism," in Leninism: Selected Writings (N.Y., 1942) 406433. 15. Ibid., 413.

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Most intellectuals gradually saw that Marxism in its Stalinist form would never be a revolutionary theory in Europe. In the West, a critical theory would have to account for the development of capitalism since 1900-oligopolistic concentration, the state's entry into the market, advanced technology leading toward automation, the transformation of the work force toward increasingly skilled mental labor, the direct manipulation of needs through advertising, the pacification of the traditional proletariat, and the transformation of the areas of gratification from work to consumption and leisure. Faced with these profound transformations, French Communist intellectuals could only incant the tenets that applied in mid-nineteenth-century Europe: capitalism would collapse by itself, the workers were subject to increasing pauperization, manual laborers were the only human beings capable of a socialist revolution (ouvrièrisme), a hierarchical Leninist party alone could lead the revolution, the revolution would be an apocalyptic transformation of the world on the model of 1789 and 1917.[16] Leftist intellectuals accepted CP Marxism only as an expedient under Cold War conditions in which even bourgeois liberties were jeopardized by latent or overt fascist tendencies. Equally significant for understanding the slow development of an open Marxism in France was the absence of most of the texts of Marxism.[17] In the nineteenth century, only Capital, The Communist Manifesto and Marx's politico historical writings were translated into French.[18] The Molitor translations began in 1927 with Marx's doctoral dissertation 16. Lichtheim, op. cit., 53-63. 17. For the introduction of socialist texts into France see Alexandre Zévaès, De l'introduction du marxisme en France (Paris, 1947) and Maximilien Rubel, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Karl Marx (Paris, 1956). 18. Zévaès, op. cit., 185-190.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism and The Holy Family. The German Ideology and the all-important Paris Manuscripts of 1844, known in France as Economie politique et philosophie did not appear until 1937 and even then it was ignored until after the Liberation.[19] The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right appeared a little earlier in 1935, but the Grundrisse, which showed the continuity of Marx's thought from the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital was not published in French until 1967. The important works of Lenin and Engels were slow in coming: Materialism and Empiriocriticism in 1928, the Notebooks on Hegel in 1938, and Engels' Dialectic of Nature in 1957. The most important of these texts were not even available in German: The 1844 Manuscripts and German Ideology became available in 1932; the Grundrisse in 1939. Clearly, for political and textual reasons, which were interconnected, no real reading of Marx was possible in France until after the Second World War.


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2. Lukacs and Goldmann When French social theorists began, after World War II, re-reading Marx, particularly the young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, and reformulating Marxism around the pivotal idea of alienation, they discovered a Marxist tradition spiritually close to themselves. This tradition, which Merleau-Ponty called "Western Marxism," bad spoken earlier in the twentieth century against a direction of Marxism that was very similar to Stalinism. 19. Many of the commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts complained about the omissions and errors in the Molitor translation. For one thing, it came from the Landshut and Mayer edition of 1932, which had deep flaws (Rubel, op. cit., 120). Molitor left out much of the all-important section on "alienated labor." The first adequate translation was Emile Bottigelli's, published by Editions Sociales, a CP house, in 1962. There was one earlier appearance in French of parts of the 1844 Manuscripts. Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Gutermann, of the "philosophies" group, published sections of it in their journal Revue Marxiste, No. 1, in the mid-1920s. They also reprinted tiny sections of it in Karl Marx, morceaux choisis (Paris, 1934). However, in the 1940s and 1950s these publications were totally ignored.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx The Western Marxists rejected positivism, a view of dialectical materialism fashioned after the sciences of nature, as well as economism. Apparently Marxism had a tendency to become distorted in this specific direction, a tendency that has yet to be explained adequately. The Western Marxists were primarily Germans who wrote their revisions of Marx in the 1920s and early 1930s. The group includes Ernst Bloch, whose Geist der Utopie of 1918 emphasized the futurist, utopian element in Marxism; the Hungarian Georg Lukacs, whose Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein of 1923 foreshadowed the discussion of the concept of alienation; Karl Korsch, whose Marxismus und Philosophie of 1923 was an early attempt to bring Marxist criticism to the Marxist movement itself; and Herbert Marcuse, whose Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit of 1932 took some of its impulses from the existentialism of Martin Heidegger. Marcuse later joined the Frankfurt School Marxists (Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, et al.), whose project of developing a "critical theory of society" was the basis of the Western Marxist tradition. Mention was also made by the French of the Italian theorist and organizer, Antonio Gramsci, whose idea of bourgeois hegemony underscored the need to refute bourgeois ideology and develop a Marxist culture, pointing to the importance of the "superstructure."[20] In their efforts to rethink the basic questions of Marxism, many of the Western Marxists, to a greater or lesser extent, relied on some form of existentialism,[21] with its concern with the human subject, its http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter2.html (6 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:15:42]

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concept of freedom, and, above all, the primacy it gave to time or historicity as the ground of human reality. Marcuse, for example, had a 20. Cf., for example, Georges Cottier, "Le Néomarxisme d'Antonio Gramsci," in Du Romantisme au marxisme (Paris, 1961) 207-226. 21. Paul Breines suggested this point to me. A similar argument is made by Walter Kaufman in his introduction to Richard Schacht, Alienation (N.Y., 1971) xviii.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism student of Heidegger. More relevant for the French was the existentialist component in the Marxism of Georg Lukacs. Lukacs was a student of Max Weber and Georg Simmel, and even in his early literary works took Simmel's notion of human alienation and gave it a Marxist twist.[22] Lukacs was contemplating, during this early period, a study of the first great existentialist Søren Kierkegaard and be acknowledged the impact the Danish philosopher made on him.[23] Once Lukacs was exiled in the Soviet Union, be conformed to the orthodoxy of Marxist-Leninism and publicly renounced his earlier work. With History and Class Consciousness under the cloud of a Russian ban, Lukacs' public denials about his past were always received with some skepticism in the West, a skepticism partly confirmed by Lukacs' endorsement of a German republication of History and Class Consciousness in 1967 and the appearance in 1948 of his Der Jünge Hegel which be had been quietly working on while in the Soviet Union. The final section of the book was on the suppressed topic of alienation. Although Lukacs' reputation was somewhat tarnished by his public Stalinism, be remained the leading Marxist philosopher and literary critic in the eyes of many French thinkers. His existential Marxism was transmitted to France by Lucien Goldmann, most notably in Kant and Recherches dialectiques (1959), and placed at the center of Western Marxism by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Aventures de la dialectique (1955). Although History and Class Consciousness was not translated into French until 1960,[24] it was a most important influence on the direction of French Marxism after the Liberation. In the 1967 preface, Lukacs acknowledged that his book History and Class 22. Andrew Arato, "Lukacs' Path to Marxism: 1910-1923," Telos, 7 (Spring, 1971) 130. 23. History and Class Consciousness, trans. by R. Livingstone (London, 1971) ix. 24. Histoire et conscience de classe, trans. by Axelos and Bois (Paris, 1960). Lukacs also commented on the importance of the 1844 Manuscripts during the French debate in "Les manuscrits de 1844 et la formation du marxisme," La Nouvelle critique (June, 1955) 31-47.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx Consciousness was the "first since Marx to treat alienation as the central critical category, " [25] a remarkable accomplishment because the 1844 Manuscripts, in which alienation appeared as the ground of Marxism, had not yet been discovered. In the 1923 volume, Lukacs shifted the focus of Marxism away from the positivist study of "external" nature and society, which it had become in the hands of the later Engels, the "revisionist" Eduard Bernstein and the "orthodox" Karl Kautsky, toward a study of "the dialectical relation between the subject and the object."[26] Lukacs criticized Engels' influential AntiDuhring for using the "methods of the natural sciences," which "reduces phenomena to their purely quantitative essence."[27] To Lukacs, Marx's dialectics, with its heavy debt to Hegel, it relates isolated facts to the totality." Marxism united theory and practice so that "man himself" is understood as "the objective foundation of the historical dialectic?"[29] Lukacs thereby rejected the "determinism" of diamat and restored man as the subject of history.[30] The Marxist analysis of capitalism could no longer remain merely the study of the economic base, but now centered on social relations. Elaborating on the fetishism chapter of volume one of Capital, Lukacs defined life under capitalism through the concept of reification (Verdinglichung) by which human interactions were conceived and experienced as relationships between things. Using the definition Marx gave for alienation, Lukacs described reification as man's own activity, his own labor, becomes something objective and independent of him, something that controls him by virtue of an autonomy alien to man . . . Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being. . . . Subjectively . . . a man's activity becomes estranged from himself; 25. Op. cit., xxii. 26. Ibid., 3.27 Ibid., 5. 28. Ibid., 16. 29. Ibid., 189. 30. Ibid., 194.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism it turns into a commodity?"[31] Furthermore, the "mechanized rationalization" of the economy (Weber's http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter2.html (8 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:15:42]

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notion) inhibited human freedom; the capitalist conquest of nature became the capitalist control of man, as " . . . calculability must embrace every aspect of life." [32] The main thesis of History and Class Consciousness, was the need not so much to destroy the private ownership of the means of production, as to end alienation. Reification is, then, the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society. It can be overcome only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions for the total development. . . . What is crucial here is that there should be an aspiration to totality . . . . [33] Marxism now led to the comprehension of "the reified structure of existence," to the interactions of everyday life.[34] Lukacs still looked to the proletariat as the vehicle of this revolution because they, unlike the bourgeoisie, had a class consciousness that "aspired to totality." Beyond the bourgeois "standpoint of the individual," the proletariat by its place in the social structure could grasp the "truth" of the totality.[35] Of course, the actual proletariat did no such thing. With the ebbing of the proletariat's revolutionary momentum throughout Europe after 1920, Lukacs was forced into the position of distinguishing between empirical, working-class consciousness and an ideal working class that grasped the totality. He developed a concept of an "ascribed" or "imputed" proletarian consciousness in which the proletariat saw itself subjectively exactly as it objectively existed in the structure of capitalism. Ironically, this form of Western Marxism was but 31. Ibid., 87. 32. Ibid., 89-91. 33. Ibid., 197-198. 34. Ibid., 148. 35. Ibid., 28, 52, 69 and 163.

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Lukacs, in sum, articulated a libertarian, existential Marxism that spoke of communism as the realization "authentic humanity" and man's "total personality,"[36] that saw society as a "totality" of reciprocal, mediated levels,[37] that depicted capitalism as an alienated, reified world, and that pointed to the human subject as the ground of history. "Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming that belongs to him."[38] History and Class Consciousness was quickly labeled a "deviation" by the Marxist papacy in Moscow. The leading Russian theoretician, Bukharin, berated the book for its "relapses into the old Hegelianism,[39] and Zinoviev, a politician who in this case breached the division of labor-branded it "ultra-leftism." Lukacs himself, in 1967, faulted his work for the error of "subjectivism," since it failed to enunciate the "ontological objectivity of nature," and because it equated alienation (Entfremdung) with objectification (Vergegenständlichung)...[40] The link between Lukacs and the French was in great measure forged by Lucien Goldmann. A pupil of Lukacs, Goldmann used the dialectic in concrete studies, demonstrating its powers as a method of research. His studies of Kant (1952), Pascal (1956), Racine (1956), and Malraux (1964) related, in Lukacsian fashion, their "visions of the world" to the social context without reducing their thought to a reflection of econo36. Ibid., 136 and 319. 37. Ibid., 162ff . 38. Ibid., 204. 39. Cited in George Licbtheim, George Lukacs (N.Y., 1970) 54. 40. Op. cit., xvii and xxiv. For a recent critical estimate of History and Class Consciousness, cf. Gareth Stedman Jones, "The Marxism of the Early Lukacs: an Evaluation," New Left Review, 70 (Nov.-Dec., 1971) 2764.

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Neither Idealism Nor Materialism mic structures. He generalized his method in Les sciences humaines et la philosophie (1952), pointing out that only the dialectic could make literary and philosophical works truly intelligible, by revealing their importance in relation to human problems of a given epoch. Academics were urged to study the Marxist dialectic as a better way of examining their own fields. Goldmann's transmission of his teacher's concept of reification to France aided the development of existential Marxism. Reification in capitalist society "masked the role of spiritual and psychic reality in the social relations between men, giving them the appearance of the natural attributes of things. . . ." [41] Thus the passivity of consciousness in economic relations, which orthodox Marxism made into a general http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter2.html (10 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:15:42]

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social law, was specific to capitalism and was a consequence of its distortion of man.[42] The theoretical significance for Marxism of Goldmann's concept of reification was that it unveiled the interdependence of the superstructure and base, showing just how economic interactions mutilated consciousness and permitting a true evaluation of the autonomy and active role of consciousness.[43] Further, it led to an awareness of the importance of psychology for Marxism which Goldmann tried to develop through the use of Piaget's developmental psychology.[44] Our main interest in Goldmann rests with his presentation of Lukacs to the French as an existential Marxist. In his 1950 article on Lukacs, Goldmann argued that Lukacs' book The Soul and Its Forms (1910) was "an important stage in the birth of modern existential philosophy."[45] A two-edged sword, existentialism reflected the decline of the bourgeoisie but also made for a return "to the concrete problems of living men."[46] Existentialism represented a positive theoretical advance, important for Marxists, since it cut through the reification of the subject in bourgeois thought. For this reason, Lukacs 41. Recherches dialectique (Paris, 1959) 78. 42. Ibid., 79. 43. Ibid., 67. 44. Ibid., 118-128. 45. Ibid., 247. 46. Ibid., 248.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx was interested in Kierkegaard. Goldmann also said that Heidegger, in Being and Time, was deeply indebted to Lukacs.[47] With no acknowledgment on Heidegger's part, the German existentialist developed his thought with large help from a Marxist, a reversal of the usual pattern of filiation. What Goldmann failed to recount was that Lukacs' own concept of reification, in turn, owed much to Bergson, who had had great influence in Hungary during Lukacs' youth.[48] Bergson, who was so important to Sartre in Being and Nothingness, disputed rationalism and presented consciousness in its flowing, temporal qualities.[49] Regardless of who took from whom, Goldmann attempted to work out an existential Marxism through a synthesis of Lukacs and Heidegger.[50] 3. The 1844 Manuscripts After World War II, the Communist Party of France was shaken by a threat it could not have anticipated. The CPF bad dealt, in its fashion, with numerous enemies in its short history: Trotskyists, Socialists, liberals, fascists, conservatives, Catholics, monarchists, all sorts of intellectuals, academics, and journalists who derived fame or pleasure from polemicizing against Marx. Attacks were launched


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against Marx's character, against his philosophy, against his religious background, against his politics. He was heartless, cruel, dogmatic, lecherous, ruthless, totalitarian, a determinist who threatened human freedom and culture, a violent, barbaric romantic, a utopian dreamer, etc., etc. CP intellectuals looked with some disdain at these petty bourgeois red-baiters, remaining unshaken in their faith. But now, after 1945, something more sinister was happening: in47. Ibid., 265 and Immanuel Kant, trans. R. Black (London, 1971) 25. 48. Joseph Gabel, La Fausse conscience (Paris, 1962) 16. 49. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. Pogson (N.Y., 1960). 50. This attempt is most fully presented in L. Goldmann, Lukacs et Heidegger, intro. by Y. Ishaghpour (Paris, 1973).

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism tellectuals of every conceivable stripe were proclaiming allegiance to Marx's thought, or, at the very least, paying homage to the power and fertility of his ideas. To the same extent that the French reading public was fascinated by existentialism, Marx's ideas triumphantly paraded through Paris to enthusiastic approval. To the chagrin of CP theorists, petty bourgeois intellectuals had successfully advertised Marxism as a philosophy of alienation. France was astir with chatter about alienation,[51] bandying the name of Karl Marx in a manner entirely unsatisfactory to the official Marxists of the CP. Taken completely off balance, CP intellectuals, apart from a few ineffective rejoinders, simply ignored the question of alienation until the early 1960s.[52] Then, with the thaw of Stalinism, they tacked the concept of alienation onto their own Marxism without altering 52. To give some sense of the scope and force of concern I will merely list chronologically and selectively, giving the general orientation of the author, works that recast Marxism in the mold of the idea of alienation; in 1945, Pierre Bigo, a Catholic, Marxisme et humanisme; in 1945, Luc Sommerhausen, L'Humanisme agissant de Karl Marx; in 1947, Henri Lefebvre, a CP member expelled in 1956, Marx et la liberté, pour connaître la pensée de Karl Marx, and Emile Baas, a Christian, L'Humanisme marxiste: essai d'analyse critique; in 1948, M. Rubel, Pages de K. Marx: Pour une éthique socialiste, Henri Lefebvre, Le Marxisme as well as two prominent journals devoting special issues to the young Marx, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, an academic sociological organ, and "Marxisme ouvert contre marxisme scolastique," of Esprit, a Catholic personalist publication edited by Emmanuel Mounier; in 1949, Jean Lacroix, a personalist, Marxisme, existentialisme, personnalisme; in 1950, Henri Bartoli, an economist, La Doctrine économique et social de Karl Marx; in 1956, Jean-Yves Calvez, a Jesuit, La Pensée de Karl Marx; in 1957, Maximilien Rubel, a "marxologist," Karl Marx: essai de biographie intellectuelle and Guy Caire, in a thesis, L'Aliénation dans les oeuvres de jeunesse de Karl Marx (Aix-enProvence); in 1959, Lucien Goldmann, a Lukacsian literary critic, Recherches dialectiques, Georges Cottier, a Catholic, LíAthéisme du jeune Marx, and Roger Garaudy, who left the CP in 1968, Perspectives de l'homme; and, in 1961, Kostas Axelos, an independent Marxist philosopher, Marx, penseur de la technique: de I'aliénation de http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter2.html (12 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:15:42]

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l'homme à la conquête du monde. 52. Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France (N.Y., 1966) 82.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx their politics or their general world picture.[53] Not until the mid 1960s, after two decades of neglect, did some official Communists, following Louis Althusser, mount a serious campaign to criticize and dampen the charismatic force of the concept of alienation. A peculiar aspect of this rediscovery of Marx was the prominent role played by Catholics: Sommerhausen, Bigo, Calvez, and Cottier. Their interest in Marx began during the Resistance. Many French Catholics were embarrassed by the Pope's relations with the Vichy government. Interest in Marx grew also from the worker-priest movement, beginning in 1944, in which priests found themselves in a Marxist milieu.[54] Hence the studies of Marx's writings by the Catholics were an attempt to test the possibility of a reconciliation. On the Marxist side, no overture was made until Garaudy's books of the early 1960s. We may now turn to the French discussion of the 1844 Manuscripts. Since the 1844 Manuscripts are by now so well known, it will not be necessary to present a detailed analysis of them in these pages. Instead we can proceed directly to the French criticisms of Marx's concept of alienation. 4. The Objections of the French French commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts saw in Marx's idea of alienation the basis for generating a new Marxism that could be reconciled with their own, not always Marxist, positions. Humanists discovered a "humanist" Marxism, moralists an "ethical" Marxism and Catholics a Christian Marxism. At the very least, Marxism was no longer simply identifiable with Soviet Marxism, or Marxist-Leninism. [55] This fundamental rethinking of Marx's writings was not, however, without its criticisms of Marx's philoso53. Cf., for example, Georges Cogniot, Karl Marx, notre contemporaine (Paris, 1968) 32-34. 54. Interview with Jean-Marie Domenach in Paris, September 10, 1973. 55. Lichtheim, op. cit., 81.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism phy of alienation. In a few cases these criticisms concluded in the total rejection of the position of the young Marx, and in most they led to new directions for Marxist thought and action. A discussion of the alleged weaknesses of Marx's philosophy will bring out the tender spots in Marxism around which the debate between Marxism and existentialism flourished. a. Economic Reductionism Marxism had long been attacked for its supposed reductionism. The well-known Preface to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859 could be quoted to show that Marx minimized or totally eliminated the force of the "superstructure" in history, that is, politics, law, religion, philosophy, and art. As Marx put it, In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. [56] This "mechanical Materialism," this "economic determinism," can be traced through the Marxist tradition from Plekhanov, to Kautsky and Bernstein, and to Lenin and Stalin. In reply, Western Marxists refer to Marx's political writings, like The Civil War in France and especially The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in order to show that Marx was cognizant of the autonomy and complexity of politics; they can refer to the Hegelian and 56. Trans. by S. W. Ryazanskaya (N.Y. 1970) 20-21.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx dialectical origins of Marxism which viewed society as a totality of levels in reciprocal interaction, http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter2.html (14 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:15:42]

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without unilinear causes and effects; finally, they can refer to Engels' often-quoted "Letter to Joseph Bloch" in which the relative autonomy of the superstructure was affirmed.[57] Only "ultimately" or "in the last instance" did the economy determine the superstructure concludes Engels. The same controversy re-emerged in France after 1945 in relation to the 1844 Manuscripts. In the Phenomenology, Hegel had connected alienation with self-consciousness; there was an alienation of consciousness when it objectified itself. Marx had refused to attribute alienation to this "natural" process, saving alienation for those moments only when the objectification was "lost." He then argued that work activity was the source of alienation and that the other functions of man, politics, religion, and so forth, were secondary elaborations of alienated labor. This implied that abolishing economic alienation would be the precondition for the end of other alienations and that no alienation could be overcome until work was humanized. It implied that non-economic social structures had no legitimacy. With the abolition of alienated labor the state would wither, religion would vanish; would art and philosophy also disappear? Of all the commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts, the Catholic philosopher Jean Calvez most fully developed the arguments against Marx's stress on labor.[58] Relentlessly Calvez dissected Marx's concept of alienated labor, arguing that it oversimplified the possibility of liberation. Calvez's critique was typical in that it forced Marx's concept of alienation to explain questions that Marx answered only weakly. From the 1844 Manuscripts Calvez probed Marx's thought to see if it offered "a coherent 57. Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis Feuer (N.Y., 1959) 397-398. 58. Op. cit., 326-332 and 597-628.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism conception of the world,"[59] rather than an analysis of specific phenomena. Marx's concept of economic alienation could then be shown to fail to account fully for other modes of alienation, like psychological alienation."[60] Marx had developed an analysis of economic alienation, which Calvez accepted, and had outlined the links of this alienation with other aspects of social alienation. Clearly this focus on labor was a limitation of Marx's method, but a limitation is not necessarily a cause for rejection since all theories have limits in scope. By asking Marx's concept of alienation to explain every instance of alienation Calvez easily demonstrated that Marxism was not "complete." Calvez rejected Marx where be might have called for new concepts to be integrated into Marxism. In this way, be could accuse Marx of "reducing" all alienation to economic alienation.[61] A Catholic, Calvez presented his argument against economic reductionism, at bottom, because this


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allowed him to raise the question of Marx's "naturalism" or atheism.[62] For Marx, alienation could be completely overcome, and man could become fully human without help from God, from a transcendent absolute. The dangerous conclusion, for Calvez, of Marx's concept of alienated labor was that man was the subject of history, that transcendence was eliminated from human reality, and that the absolute was immanent.[63] To Calvez, without God man could not distinguish human reality from natural reality and, as the whole development of Marxism indicated, history would be understood to follow the same blind, unconscious movement that characterized nature.[64] In opposition to Calvez and other Catholic writers, Marxist commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts founded "economic" alienation on "human" alienation. Henri Lefebvre, a CP 59. Ibid., 596. 60. Bigo, op. cit., 214. 61. Op. cit., 327. 62. Ibid., 618-621. 63. Ibid., 623; cf. also, Bigo, op. cit., 151. 64. Ibid., 330-332. Cf. also Baas, L'Humanisme marxiste (Paris, 1947) 92-93.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx member always suspect to the leadership, Maximilien Rubel, an independent social theorist, and Kostas Axelos, a Marxist philosopher, all tried to answer the charge of economic determinism. For Rubel, Marx discovered his "ethical vocation" while in Paris in 1844, founding a new "ethic" with his doctrine of the "total man."[65] Rubel confirmed that economic alienation was the base upon which rested "all other alienations of man," but economic alienation itself rested on Marx's it ethic," which be defined as the imperative to end alienation, to appropriate man's "universal being."[66] What Calvez and indeed the orthodox Stalinists forgot was that "Marx did not create and had no intention of creating a new system of political economy. . . . Now that we have come to know the unpublished works, we can no longer misconceive the true nature of Marxism."[67] The great achievement of Marx for Rubel was to bring to the study of political economy his questionable ethical conception of alienation.[68] Rather than "economic" determinism, Marxism was a "human" determinism which provided the framework for a new "sociology" with an "ethic" and a "true practice."[69] Basic to the idea of alienation was not the power of the economy over politics and religion, but the power of man to realize his humanity. The feverish excitement over the reading of the young Marx in France grew, to a large degree, from the revelation of this "humanist passion" in Marx, rooted in an anthropological theory of man as "conscious, free, activity."[70] For Rubel, Marxism was now a coupling of scientific sociology and salvational ethics. Rubel forgot that ethical action came from autonomous individuals, whereas Marx's notion of praxis referred to


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65. Karl Marx: essai de biographie intellectuelle (Paris, 1956) 114 and 12 1. 66. Ibid., 138. 67. Ibid., 444. 68. Ibid., 126. 69. Ibid., 13, 135 and 445. 70. Luc Sommerhausen, L'Humanisme agissant de Karl Marx (Paris, 1946) xiii and 27.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism groups without originating a concept of group ethics. Lefebvre, by far the best interpreter of Marx in France, broadly supported Rubel's sociological and ethical picture of Marx.[71] The primary critical principle of Marxism, for Lefebvre, which he found most clearly enunciated in the 1844 Manuscripts, was the concept of "total man." This concept was in direct contradiction with "economic man" of bourgeois society, which was the real base for all notions of economic determinism.[72] The concept of total man refuted all partial views of man (Christian man and economic man). "What is the total man? Not physical, physiological, psychological, historical, economic or social exclusively or unilaterally; it is all of these and more, especially the sum of these elements or aspects; it is their unity, their totality their becoming. Marxism, for Lefebvre, made no attempt to "reduce" religion to economics; it allowed the alienated character of religion to be comprehended as a distorting expression of alienated social relations. It was the special character of religious myths to have their own force, their own power, their own alienating effects. Lefebvre explained how one form of alienation, fetishism, could attain such prominence as it had in history: Fetishism properly so called only appeared when abstractions escaped the control of the thought and will of man. Thus commercial value and money are only in themselves quantitative abstractions: abstract expressions of social, human relations; but these abstractions materialize, intervene as entities in social life and in history, and end by dominating instead of being dominated. The natural and objective process then takes on a new meaning. The history of money, of capital is only in one sense the history of an abstraction . . . [74] 71. Le Marxisme, "Que sais je" series (Paris, 1948) 20 and 53. 72. Le Matérialisme dialectique (Paris, 1940), trans. by J. Sturrock as Dialectical Materialism (London, 1968) 157. 73. Le Marxisme, op. cit., 112. 74. Ibid., 71.


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The Re-Discovery of Marx Furthermore, Marx's naturalism did not lead to "economism," as both Catholic and -Stalinist interpretations of Marx asserted, but to an awareness of the human foundation of nature through man's historical struggle against nature.[75] Alienation in the economic structure did not linearly "determine"' alienation in other structures, but all were reciprocally interrelated within the movement of the historical totality.[76] When "causal determinisms" appeared in history they were themselves human "productions" and indicated the sectors man did not control.[77] Fundamentally, history was the introduction of human finality, human purposes, replacing chance and causal determinism in society and nature. To Lefebvre, the humanization of society and nature was at the same time the humanization of man: the conscious, human control of society and nature accompanied, mutatis mutandis, the coming into consciousness of human potentials. Thus, far from being a determinist philosophy, "Marxism is a practical philosophy of freedom. " [78] In contrast to Lefebvre and Rubel, Axelos was unwilling to wipe out in one stroke all the difficulties of the primacy of the economy in Marx's concept of alienation. He was worried that Marx at times seemed to "identify the totality of relations of production with the totality of society, thus identifying a 'part' with a 'whole.' "[79] Nevertheless, Axelos rejected the contention of Calvez and others that Marx's concept of alienation collapsed all the levels of society to the economy. Behind economic alienation and economic man lay human alienation and the total man. "At the heart of all the various dimensions of alienation (economic, political, ideological) is situated human alienation properly so called, alienation of human being . . . .It is this man that Marxist humanism 75. Ibid., 63. 76. Le Marxisme, op. cit., 68 and Dialectical Materialism, op. cit., 145-148. 77. Dialectical Materialism, op. cit., 136. 78. Introduction aux morceaux choisis de Karl Marx (Paris, 1934) 12. 79. Marx, penseur de la technique (Paris, 1961) 79.

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1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism wishes to disalienate."[8]0 By recalling the human genesis of alienation, Marxism comprehended social structures in a non-positivist, critical manner. It did not invoke the economy as a http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter2.html (18 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:15:42]

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metaphysical cause of everything else, but revealed how noneconomic levels of alienation were possible. For Axelos, ideological or religious alienation arose under conditions of an "under-developed technology." Without techniques to ameliorate the noxious effects of nature, helplessly vulnerable to the least variation in natural conditions, mankind surrounded itself with mythologies that bore the taint of its weaknesses.[81] Axelos, nonetheless, admitted a dilemma in Marx's concept of alienation that was also the core of the existentialists' reservations. Marx denied all assertions of an original golden age before alienation, affirming the alienated character of all previous history. Since all historic social formations were alienated and alienating, man was not the conscious subject of history but the unconscious, stumbling maker of his past. The actual character of human experience was blindness, so that social structures tended to have the quality of natural forces and human subjectivity, in practice, took an entirely secondary place.[82] In effect, then, history happened without man; at best, man was its secret, its hidden, obscured force, not its overt creator. b. The End of History Equally disturbing to some commentators on Marx's concept of alienation was his apparent conviction that with the abolition of alienation through the triumph of communism, history would come to an end. Marxism became self-contradictory, these critics maintained, when it prophesied a total turnabout in human affairs: from the tragic darkness of alienation, man was seen emerging in full brilliance with all his potentialities realized at the end of time. The eschatological quality that Marxism always bore was only intensified, not at all clarified, by the "naïve" hopes presented in 80. Ibid., 124. Cf. also 91 and 130. 81. Ibid., 152 and 157. 82. Ibid., 80.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts.[83] Instead of toning down the strident Prometheanism of Marxism, the young Marx only made matters worse. Assuming the abolition of private property and alienated labor, would history end, would all other alienations disappear as well? When philosophy was realized, as Marx put it, would there be no more philosophy? Again, Jean-Yves Calvez was the most comprehensive critic in revealing the lofty, misguided pretentions of Marx's concept of the end of history. He was impatient with Marx's prognostications.


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After following Marx's careful and illuminating examination of the complex mediations of man, nature, and society, in which he unfolded convincingly level upon level of alienation, in which every construction of man was shown to be partial and incomplete-after all this we were expected to believe that in one thrust all imperfections would be swept off the earth.[84] Even the sympathetic personalist, Jean Lacroix, could not abide Marx's vision in which the temporal dialectic, which moved only by internal contradiction, would be arrested in some end of history.[85] How could Marx, a dialectician, Calvez queried, possibly maintain a state in which alienation was permanently ended? [86] Reflecting his displeasure with Soviet communism, Calvez would not allow the simple solution that the proletariat, suffering from alienated labor, would turn against their oppression, eliminate it at its source, and carry mankind to the threshold of a de-alienated world. The class struggle might well end in a dictatorship of the proletariat, and, as Stalinist Russia demonstrated, this short transitional phase on the road to pure communism had "its own complexity," its own political struggles. There was nothing to convince Calvez that the proletariat in power would not behave exactly like previous 83. Bartoli, op. cit., 403. 84. Op. cit., 526. 85. Op. cit., 47. 86. Op. cit., 528. 59

I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism ruling classes and erect a state apparatus that would alienate political power as efficiently if not more so, than in the past.[87] In fact, Bigo, another Catholic, contended, there was a necessary connection between Marx's notion of the end of history and the "totalitarianism" of Bolshevik Russia.[88] Calvez warned his readers that the nonsense" of the end of history must be extracted from Marxism before Catholics could profitably synthesize the two doctrines. Marx's expectation that religion would vanish with the onset of a classless society was ultimately rooted in his "unverified" projection into "the future experience of the total man. [89] Even those commentators less encumbered by religious presuppositions than Calvez and Bigo had reservations about Marx's futurology. Given the failure of the proletariat to vindicate Marx's dreams, François Chatelet, for instance, cautioned against the dialectic of alienation in which "temporal unhappiness" contained its own internal remedy.[90] In the eyes of Axelos, this visionary strain in Marx, could only be understood as "Jewish prophetism." [91] Reflecting his anti-technological, Heideggerian proclivities,


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87. Ibid., 522. Both Bigo, op. cit., 215 and Axelos, op. cit., 283 and 101 spoke of man's "will to power" as independent of economic alienation. They here returned to abstract arguments about "human nature": "But does not this forget a fundamental element of human psychology: the will to power" (Bigo, op. cit., 214). Put in this way, the argument is a mystification. The Marxist reply is that where one cannot identify a specific social structure leading to a specific alienation, the question of the human nature of the phenomenon must remain open and not become an ideological obstacle to eliminating those social structures which are known to be alienating. Lefebvre's answer to the alleged universality of the will to power is the best: "Marx was not an egalitarian; he recognized the fact of different capacities and the need for command in industry. Alienation did not come from this but from the fixing of directing functions. The functions become controlled by ruling classes and the state is formed which separates itself from other functions" (Le Marxisme, op. cit.,92-93). 88. Bigo, op. cit., 151-157. 89. Ibid., 553. Cf. also Bartoli, op. cit., 386. 90. Cited in Caire, op. cit., 116. 91. Op. cit., 74 and 217.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx Axelos found alienation "more basic to history" than Marx thought. Against Marx's prediction of a "happy end" to history be forecast a residual continuing alienation originating from "modern technical machinery." [92] Communism might well abolish some aspects of alienated labor but "where Marx becomes truly difficult to go along with is where he speaks of the suppression of the division of labor." [93] Axelos dismissed Marx's Fourierist dream of people laboring at diversified tasks in flagrant violation of the division of labor as "touching in its idyllic naivete." Since "the gigantic and universal development of productive technique ends in a reality much more problematical than . . . hunting, fishing and criticizing, according to one's pleasure and time." [94] What Axelos perceived behind Marx's vision of the end of history was a new metaphysics. Only the metaphysical value Marx attributed to "technique" allowed him to envision the end of alienation through the perfection of technique. "Prolonging all Western metaphysics . . . Marx wants to transcend radically philosophy as the search for truth, as thought, theory and knowledge . . . it is the productivity of men which makes nature and totality being and becoming for man. . . . The human collectivity . . . as the foundation of a planetary technique, becomes the producer of all that is." [95] It would not be enough for man to reappropriate his creative labor in order for history to end in his total mastery of nature. The arguments against Axelos and Calvez that substantiated Marx's notion of the end of alienation underscored the ahistorical position of the skeptics. From the standpoint of the Communists Desanti and http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter2.html (21 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:15:42]

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Lefebvre, the critics of the theory of the end of alienation spoke from a position of the contemplative philosopher who was not oriented toward praxis.[96] Indeed, Axelos explicitly proclaimed his contemplative stance, wishing only to

92. Ibid., 122. 93. Ibid., 231. 94. Ibid., 232. 95. Ibid., 223. 96. Desanti, cited in Caire, op. cit., 117 and Lefebvre, Pour connaître la pensée de Karl Marx (Paris, 1947) 80.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism present Marx's thought as a philosophy." [97] Quite necessarily, if one made Marxism a pure philosophy, it would have all the characteristic faults of previous philosophy, what Axelos called its "metaphysical" character, its tendency to privilege one aspect of reality over the rest. But, argued Lefebvre, Marx's privileging of technique derived from the actual situation during the industrial revolution. Only from within contemporary developments did Marx voice his critical concept of alienation. In the practice of technology the prospect of ending work and, to the degree that history was the history of work, of ending history was posited historically. Marx argued that the alienating form in which industrialization developed would have to be abolished before the human potential for selfdetermination could be realized. To the extent that previous history suppressed this potential, that "history" would be ended if the suppression were ended.[98] The famous passage where Marx spoke of Communism as the riddle of history solved does not imply the end of all contradictions" or human woes. In Lefebvreís words: The organization of the human community will not put an end to history, but rather to man's "pre-history," his "natural history," before be became fully differentiated from the animals. It will inaugurate the era of an authentic humanity, in which man will control his own destiny and try at last to resolve the specifically human problems: those of happiness, knowledge, love and death. He will have been freed from the conditions that made these problems insoluble.[99] The question of the end of alienation has as its corollary the question of the origin of alienation. Although Marx spoke of the end of alienation he refused to attempt, in the 1844 Manuscripts, to search for its remote beginnings. Catholic critics, like Calvez, were 97. Op. cit., 9. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter2.html (22 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:15:42]

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98. Lefebvre, Le Marxisme, op. cit., 44. 99. Dialectical Materialism, op. cit., 162-163.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx disturbed by this because their own mode of thinking was inured to concepts of absolute beginnings, i.e., God's creation of the world. For Marx, however, the question of the origin of the world, like that of the origin of alienation, was false and nondialectical. In an amusing passage, Marx beckoned the philosopher of the beginnings of things to recall that in order to think the beginning one bad to abstract from all existing phenomena, which put one in the somewhat awkward position of hypothesizing one's own non-existence: If you ask about the creation of nature and man, you thus abstract from man and nature. You assert them as non-existent and yet want me to prove them to you as existing. I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to maintain your abstraction, be consistent and if you think of man and nature as nonexistent, think of yourself as non-existent as you too are nature and man. Do not think, do not question me, for as soon as you think and question, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man makes no sense. Or are you such an egoist that you assert everything as nothing and yet want yourself to exist.[100] In dialectical thinking, within the concrete totality of becoming and oriented toward future action, questions of genesis lost their urgency. When Marx did turn to questions of origin, as in the German Ideology,[101] he spoke of origins as premises, necessary to organize a presentation only. But if we have no knowledge of a past, non-alienated social structure, how can we be sure that we know what alienation is? If we cannot isolate alienation from the social structure, hold it constant, how can we test it as a dependent or independent variable in specific historical contexts? Marx's answer to this question derived from his rejection of positivism and its corollary, analytical reasoning. Dialectical procedure aimed not to 100. Easton and Guddat, op. cit., 313-314. 101. Ibid., 408ff. 63


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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism "isolate" phenomena and then "test" them, but to grasp them within history, to comprehend their mediations and relations within the totality. Certainly [102] did not derive from scientific procedures, but ultimately only from action; [103] the concept of alienation provided Marx with a critical tool that could specify the concrete structures of society which caused men to lose power over their own existences. To some French Marxists, the idea of alienation did not yield the absolute knowledge of idealism or the probable knowledge of positivism; rather it revealed the nature of the world in such a way that -men and women could make the world and themselves more human. C. Homo Economicus The third major objection to the idea of alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts was again one that had troubled Marxism from its inception. Even if one granted that economic alienation was not reductive and that the "end of history" was not an eschatological mythic paradise, Marx was still open to the charge that his anthropology, his concept of man, reduced human value to economic value, human interactions to instrumental or technical interactions,[104] human experience to work experience. Some commentators, notably Axelos, insisted that there was an ambiguity in the historical task of human emancipation as posed by Marx. Marx's "romantic," expansive vision of the new man who developed all sides of his personality remained in contradic102. Cf. Jean T. Desanti, "Le jeune Marx et la métaphysique," Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 52 (1947) 382ff. 103. Cf. "Theses on Feuerbach," in Easton and Guddat, op. cit., 401: "The question whether human thinking can reach objective truth is not a question of theory but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, actuality and power, this sidedness of his thinking. The dispute about the actuality or non-actuality of thinking-thinking isolated from practice-is a purely scholastic question." Marx's emphasis. 104. The newest theorist of the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, continues to make these claims. Cf. Toward a Rational Society trans. by J. Shapiro (Boston, 1970) 114-120.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx tion with his "positivism," his "admiration for technical progress." [105] Because liberation depended above all else on the development of the technology, Marx reduced human subjectivity to "productive" subjectivity.[106] "Modern technique" was the secret motor force driving history toward communism, toward a "planetary technique," a prospect that reduced all values to technical values, creativity to http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter2.html (24 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:15:42]

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productivity, leaving Marxism with but one thought, technology. [107] The fear of technology in Axelos' commentary on the 1844 Manuscripts rested on the assumption that mankind could not at the same time build an automated technology that would liberate man from toil while discovering the springs of non-economic creativity. In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx had dismissed the political economist's image of homo economicus by asserting that "beauty" was the principle of human production, by depicting Communist man as a fully integrated, all-round, somewhat Hellenic species, not as a utilitarian petty-bourgeois shopkeeper. Still, for Axelos, the very project of technical development, and the value Marx did indeed place on it, evoked a nightmare of soulless technicians and organization men. Against Rubel who saw Communist society as the "renaissance of the archaic rural commune," Axelos envisioned only a sterile, bland, technical wasteland.[108] Marx made his position clear about economic man in 1843 in his essay "On the Jewish Question." [109] The egoism of economic man was dissected as a false consciousness, striving for autonomy, thinking itself free when in fact it was shaped and distorted by the laws of the market, by the split between public life and private life, and by the fetishism of money. To economic man the structures of society appeared as natural facts 105. Op. cit., 81. 106. Ibid., 299. 107. Ibid., 264-299. 108. Ibid., 67. 109. Easton and Guddat, op. cit., 216-248.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism and he conceived his own pursuit for gain as "rational" when in fact his pecuniary behavior constrained and fragmented his consciousness. None of this reasoning was particularly original; Hegel bad made similar arguments in the Phenomenology, in the sections on utilitarianism and "noble and base consciousness," to which Marx referred explicitly in the 1844 Manuscripts. It must not be forgotten that Marx defined his positions on labor and the self in terms of the Hegelian tradition; from the outset be was opposed to the "homo economicus" of English and French political economy. The discussion in the 1844 Manuscripts of human value and labor was framed as a modification of Hegel's position. Marx argued that Hegel was correct in the importance he placed on labor in the dialectic of consciousness, but that be conceived labor and the product of labor only in their abstract" sense as the "thought of the product." On the positive side, "The great thing in Hegel's Phenomenology and its final result? is simply that Hegel . . . grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man,


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authentic because actual, as the result of his own work." [110] Marx wanted to define man as an "objective" being whose self-realization was possible only through the process of objectification, of work. To Marx, the value of work did not reduce itself to that of the product but inhered in the human value of self-realization. Man creates himself in the process of work. [Man] creates and establishes only objects because [he] is established through objects, because [be] is fundamentally part of nature. In the act of establishing, this objective being does not therefore descend from its "pure activity" to the creation of the object, but its objective product merely confirms its objective activity, its activity as that of an objective, natural being.[111] All human activity, even thinking, was a kind of labor in the sense that it involved the objectification of the self. To Marx labor characterized human activity better than 110. Ibid., 321. 111. Ibid., 325.

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The Re-Discovery of Marx Hegel's notion of consciousness because it rooted man in nature, centered attention on his sensuous reality, and thus grasped humanity "concretely." Every one of man's activities included the exercise of some capacity or the recognition of some need as well as a relation to an external phenomenon. The mode in which man connected his needs and capacities to the world defined the structure of society. Marx altered Hegel's notion of self-realization by including the dialectic of self-consciousness within the wider dialectic of labor. He called this position "naturalism or humanism," as against "idealism and materialism." If concrete man in contemporary society was actually homo economicus, that was a specific realization of man open to criticism. To Lefebvre and others, nothing could be further from Marx's intention than reducing human value to the value of the products of the proletariat, of reducing the self to the bourgeois self, and of reducing human interactions to the reified instrumental relations of market society. To them, Marx's concept of labor grasped labor as "man's act of self-creation."[112] Man was not reduced to a "tool-making animal," but "tool-making" was viewed as a human process, however distorted its historical forms, as deeply human as praying or philosophizing. 5. Two Marxes or One With the significance of Marx's idea of alienation for a critical comprehension of contemporary society


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established, the commentators faced a question that was new, at least in its importance, in the Marxist tradition. With the appearance in French of the 1844 Manuscripts, as well as The Holy Family and the German Ideology, the nature of Marxism appeared entirely changed. One could now more easily rethink all of Marx's writings, down to Capital, in the light of the idea of alienation. But it could also be argu112. Ibid., 332.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism ed, as the Communist Party did in the late 1940s and 1950s and the structuralists did in the 1960s, that the idea of alienation was only central to Marx's youthful, pre-communist, Hegelian period, that the "mature" Marx of the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s rid himself completely of his early "romanticism." In this case, there were two Karl Marxes, not one; a scientific, revolutionary, Old Marx the founder of socialism, and a philosophical, confused Young Marx, lost in the maze of Hegelian speculation and romantic inspiration. The question of the two Marxes was shaped to some degree by the political situation in post-Liberation France. The mood in France was one of great expectations for social reconstitution mingled with fears of a bi-polar world dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, in which France, and even all Europe, would be overshadowed and forgotten. It was urgent, for the Left, to articulate a direction for France that everyone, from Christian democrats and socialists to the CP, could approve. To Jean Lacroix, writing in Esprit in May, 1945, France needed a new definition of socialism that would be an "integral humanism. "The role of France is to be the nation of reconciliation between Soviet planism minus dictatorship and Anglo-Saxon democracy less capitalism. [113] The "old socialism" would have to be "transcended." [114] In this political context, the idea of alienation could provide a pivot for debate. But the, French had not yet related the idea of alienation to the concepts of worker selfmanagement, the new working class, and advanced technological society. More immediately, the unity of the Left disintegrated shortly after 1944, largely because of the centripetal pulls of the U.S. and the U. S.S.R. As the Communist Party took on an increasingly defensive posture, a Marxist theory centering on the idea of alienation looked more like an anti-Communist threat to the Soviet Union than the source for a new Popular Front. In this way the concept of alienation became a political question in itself, with Communists favoring an Old Marx 113. "Socialisme humaniste?" Esprit, 6 (May, 1945) 864. 114. Ibid., 863.


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The Re-Discovery of Marx shorn of the idea of alienation, and anti-Communists ("humanists") preferring an exclusively Young Marx who dealt with "man" and not with "economics." Almost unanimously the commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts, from the Communist Lefebvre to the Catholic Calvez, took the position that there was but one Marx and that the concept of alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts was the fulcrum of all Marx's thought. For Calvez, "it was impossible to separate the young Marx from the old"; [115] for Bigo, the idea of alienation was at the base of all Marx's works, even Capital;[116] for Hyppolite, the 1844 Manuscripts contained perhaps the meaning and foundation of his entire philosophy . . . "; [117] Cornu called them a "decisive turning-point in the development of Marx's thought;"[118] for Rubel, the "ethic" of the 1844 Manuscripts was that of Capital; [119] in the words of Axelos, the 1844 Manuscripts were "the touchstone of Marxian thought"; [120] for Roger Garaudy, they were "the act of birth of Marxism" [121] and "there was no rupture between the mature works and the youthful, critical reflections . . ."; [122] for Georges Gurvitch, they "defined for the first time his complete sociological and philosophical position." [113] Hegelianism too was seen not as something incidental to Marx, something he forgot later on. The commentators recognized that the concept of alienation received serious philosophical consideration first in Hegel's Phenomenology and that it was, after all, Hegel who developed the dialectic, which Marx admittedly transformed but was still in115. Op. cit., 316. 116. Op. cit., 139 and xxxix. 117. Studies in Marx and Hegel, op. cit., 128. 118. Marx et Engels: Marx à Paris (Paris, 1963) in, 172. 119. Op. cit., 138. 120. Op. cit., 28. 121. "A propos des Manuscrits de 1844," Cahiers du Communisme, 39 (March, 1963) 108. 122. Perspectives de l'homme (Paris, 1969) 4th edition, 269. 123. "La Sociologie de jeune Marx," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 4:3 (1948) 19.

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debted to. The arguments over the precise connection between Hegel and Marx were extremely intricate. Oversimplified, the filiation looked like this: Marx rethought Hegel's Phenomenology in composing the 1844 Manuscripts and used Hegel's Science of Logic in structuring Capital.[124] Although Marx's last youthful work was generally accepted as the German Ideology of 1846, the "materialized" Hegelian problematic continued to inspire Marx throughout his writings. Only after the role of the 1844 Manuscripts was fixed in French thinking did the study of the Grundrisse of 1857-1858 demonstrate Marx's continuing, "mature" dependence on Hegel.[125] In sum, the 1844 Manuscripts left the French with a new Marx for whom history moved on several levels simultaneously: the "forces of production" were progressively developed with the inner contradiction of private ownership and socialization; the "relations of production" engendered the contradictions of the class struggle; but underlying the whole drama of human history was the increasing alienation of human powers that dialectically prepared the ground for emancipation, for a humanization of man, in which nature was to be transfigured in a higher symbiosis of man and nature. It was this Marx who became the center of the debate with existentialists and who was later exported from France to Eastern Europe, especially to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and in a psychologized form, to the United States. Even with the concept of alienation, Marxism contained in any problems. The concept of alienation itself remained abstract in the 1844 Manuscripts and would have to be applied to the specific conjuncture of the mid-twentieth century. Also, Marx's epistemology, in which theory depended praxis, was undeveloped and did not explain 124. Caire, op. cit., 128 and cf. Dick Howard, The Development of the Marxian Dialectic (Carbondale, 1972). 125. Cf. Martin Nicolaus, "The Unknown Marx," New Left Review, 48 (March-April, 1968).

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The Re-Discovery of Marx the relative autonomy of theory such that it could distinguish between science and ideology. Further, the concept of alienation relied heavily on a philosophical anthropology that came very close to the abstract anthropology of bourgeois thought. For existentialists, even the revised Marxism did not account for the immediate experience of alienation, for the interiority of men in an alienated world. Above all, Marxism did not account for the apparent lack of a revolutionary working class in the West. Since Marxism was theoretically dependent on the praxis of the working class, this absence was exceedingly embarrassing, to say the least.


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Three ____________________________________________________________ The Early Sartre: The Existentialist Concept of Freedom

I. The Question of Sartre's Radicalism A continental sensation in the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism was advertised by Sartre as a new form of humanism actually more progressive than Marxism. Most commentators have not agreed with Sartre's self-interpretation. They have seen in Sartre's thought subjectivism, nihilism, and, most commonly, a reliance on Descartes that precluded any association with socialist politics or radical social theory. In this interpretation, Sartre is no more than an extreme individualist, trapped in a morose world-view in which "bell is other people" and "man is a useless passion." An irrationalist who flirted with the "absurd," Sartre could not represent the oppressed masses in their plight. To these anti-Sartreans there is something almost obscene in the self-absorption of the existentialist. Nothing could be further from the struggles of the proletariat and from the social determinism of the Marxist view of history than Sartre's narcissistic philosophy of anxiety. In the face of these attacks, Sartre acknowledged regret over the lecture that popularized existentialism as a form of humanism. Yet be did not retract his radical posture. Instead, be spent much of his time after the 1940s trying to articulate the radical implications be saw in Being and Nothingness. In this chapter, I will take Sartre at his word and test the possibilities of his early philosophy as a radical social theory. 72

The Early Sartre I shall argue both that Being and Nothingness does provide a concept of freedom adequate for a renewed Marxism, one that portended a new stage of consciousness with radically democratic needs and desires very much like those of the New Left of the 1960s, and yet that it remained, at specific points, still rooted in the individualist problematic. In the evaluation of Being and Nothingness matters are often raised that in other cases would be considered extraneous. Sartre's concepts are made to bear the burden of his life and of the public response to his thought. It is therefore necessary to point out some ambiguities in certain widespread http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (1 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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convictions about him. The vogue that Sartre's thought stirred up in the Paris of the 1940s is often held against him. He is asked to explain the appeal of his thought to groups not known for their moral purity or philosophical acumen. Ex-Vichyites, youngsters from the bourgeoisie, the fast crowd who spent their time idly in cabarets, the outcasts of society-these motley followers of existentialism found in the new doctrine justifications for their despair, for their capricious and disreputable lives. Those without hope felt encouraged by existentialism to assert that there was nothing to hope for anyway. To raise the eyebrows of philosophers further, there was the uncritical naivete', the unseriousness with which many Parisians adopted existentialism. An intellectual vulgarity characterized the spread of existentialism; Sartre became fashionable in the worst sense of the word. One could just as easily look at the same facts from an opposite point of view. Sartre's thought, offering a new picture of what it meant "to be," stimulated discussion well beyond the confines of the academic classroom and philosophical journals. Existentialism challenged ordinary people to reexamine their lives and their commitments. Sartre was successful at bridging the gap between philosophy and society. His concepts were argued in cafes, parties, at breakfast tables, and in subways, not only in Paris, but in New York, in London, indeed, throughout advanced industrial 73

I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism society.[1] Here was a thinker who captured the concerns of ordinary people, a feat which can be totally discounted only at the risk of elitism. People wanted to know about existentialism. Signs of existentialism were sought everywhere--in movies, in styles of dress, in manners of speech.[2] Some important thinkers did find value in the new craze. In the words of the Catholic theologian, Etienne Gilson, during the height of Sartre's fame, It is often said that contemporary existentialism owes its success to the whim of a passing fashion. I do not think so. For the first time in quite a while, philosophy has decided to speak of serious matters and, to tell the truth, there would be good reason to despair if the general public had not noticed.[3] It is true that very few self-styled existentialists read or understood Being and Nothingness, turning instead to the more accessible plays and novels, especially to 1. Sartre, of course, was not the first existentialist and not the first to create a stir with his books. Heidegger's Being and Time of 1927 had a similar if not as widespread response. Sartre's dependence on previous existentialists, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, especially, cannot be discussed here. There are countless books which have done this already. Nor can I discuss the other major http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (2 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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French existentialist, Gabriel Marcel. Since I am concerned with one theme in French intellectual history-the relationship of Marxism and existentialism-I must, of necessity, present a somewhat truncated view of French existentialism. I will try to indicate, in footnotes, points of contact between Sartre and Marcel where they are relevant. In addition to reasons of space, I feel confident in limiting the discussion to Sartre because his view of freedom was the most extensive of all, and, of course, because it was be who has attempted most rigorously to reconcile existentialism with Marxism. In addition, it is my opinion that Being and Nothingness is the best and most comprehensive single presentation of the existentialist position, more so than Heidegger's Being and Time, or Marcel's Mystery of Being. I do not pretend, however, that this essay on Sartre is in any sense a complete treatment of existentialism. 2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstance, trans. R. Howard (N.Y., 1964) 141-142. 3. L'Etre et 1'essence (Paris, 1948) 297-298.

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The Early Sartre Nausea. Yet the same could be said of Capital and of the Summa Theologica. The fact is that interest in existentialism went beyond the reactionary bourgeoisie and the fashion-followers. The other commonplace of Sartre lore concerns his life. Reasoning ad hominem, conventional wisdom holds that the existentialist vision is blurred by the smoke and whiskey of the cafe', that his imagination never departed from the limitations of his petty-bourgeois background and life-style. It is true that during the 1930s, when Being and Nothingness was worked out, [4] Sartre was an apolitical littérateur: he did not vote; he attended demonstrations only infrequently and then never sang or shouted slogans; he considered the political tracts of others as "pointless propaganda." [5] He was convinced that literary work was an end in itself, more than enough to fill a life with dignity. The image of the young Sartre in Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography tends to confirm the worst: . . . we were convinced that we had a thorough grip on reality. . . . And yet our life, like that of all petit bourgeois intellectuals, was in fact mainly characterized by its lack of reality. . . . Like every bourgeois, we were sheltered from want; like every civil servant, we were guaranteed against insecurity. Furthermore, we had no children, no families, no responsibilities: we were like elves. There was no intelligible connection between the work we did (which was on whole enjoyable and not in the least exhausting) and the money we got for it, which seemed to lack all proper substance. Since we bad no position to keep up, we spent it in a capricious fashion. . . . [this was] the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (3 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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truth about our economic position, which we contrived to ignore; we flourished, in fact, like lilies in the field, and circumstances fostered our illusions.[6] 4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. P. Green (London, 1963) 106-107. 5. Michel-Antoine Burnier, Choice of Action: French Existentialists on the Political Front Line, trans. by B. Murchland (N.Y., 1968) 5-6. Originally, Les Existentialists et la politique (Paris, 1966). 6. De Beauvoir, op. cit., 288.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism This description was written in 1960 when Sartre and De Beauvoir were Leftists, struggling with the Algerian crisis. It was colored by a sense of guilt toward its author's own past. Yet the social and economic circumstances of the existentialists could be viewed as part of the emerging service sector of advanced society, of the new working class. They experimented with their social relations in a manner foreign to the petty bourgeoisie. Never marrying, they further challenged the bourgeois sexual code: they took in a third person, Olga Kosakiewicz. In De Beauvoir's words, "we thought that human relations are to be perpetually invented, that a priori no form is privileged, none impossible?" [7] Although these arrangements cannot be identified with socialist politics, at least they indicate a selfconscious refusal of conventional mores. Sartre's intellectual life was also not simply that of a bourgeois literary figure. Through his friend Paul Nizan, Sartre was acquainted with Communist politics as far back as the late 1920s. He also had contact with Trotskyists in the 1930s through Colette Audry who was a high-school friend and confidant of Simone de Beauvoir. Furthermore, as a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he was dissatisfied with the leading philosophers, Brunschvicg and Alain, who were steeped in the idealism of Descartes and Kant. To Sartre and De Beauvoir, their professors' thought was part of the liberal Weltanschauung and it had to be rejected: At the Sorbonne, my professors systematically ignored Hegel and Marx; in a big book on "the progress of consciousness in the Occident, " Brunschvicg had devoted a bare three pages to Marx, whom he placed on the same level as one of the obscurest reactionary thinkers. He was teaching us about the history of scientific thought, but no one was 7. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les Ecrits de Sartre, chronologie, bibliographie commentée (Paris, 1970) 26. This extremely helpful and complete bibliographical study is one of the few solid achievements in Sartre scholarship. It includes pieces by Sartre that were hitherto unpublished or difficult to come by.


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The Early Sartre teaching us about the adventure of humanity. The incomprehensible uproar going on in the world . . . was not worthy of the philosopher's attention . . [8] The inadequacy of French idealism in grasping world issues, its separation of reason from history, led Sartre to search for new ways of thinking, a search that led eventually to Hegel and Marx. But first Sartre came upon phenomenology and existentialism. In 1933-34, years of political and economic crisis, he took up residence at the French Institute in Berlin to study Husserl and Heidegger. During his initiation into existentialism, Sartre was growing more and more concerned about politics and society. At first, during his school years, he and his circle romantically mocked "bourgeois law and order." [9] In 1929, he described himself as in total opposition to "society as then constituted," convinced that the "secret truth of History" was nothing but the concept of "radical freedom" that he was developing." [10] Recalling the mid-1930s, De Beauvoir wrote: "According to us there was only one way of preventing general madness, and that was by the overthrow of the ruling class. . . . our most passionately held conviction [was] that freedom is an inexhaustible source of discovery, and every time we give it room to develop, mankind is enriched as a result."[11] It was during the war, however, while he was writing Being and Nothingness, that Sartre's political commitment hardened. Around 1940, in De Beauvoir's account, Sartre was thinking a good deal about the postwar period; be had firmly made up his mind to hold aloof from politics no longer. His new morality was based on the notion of "authenticity," and he was determined to make a practical application of it to himself. It 8. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. J. Kirkup (N.Y., 1959) 243. 9. Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit., 356. 10. Simone de Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 18. 11 Ibid.,110.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism required every man to shoulder the responsibility of his situation in life; and the only way in which he could do so was to transcend that situation by engaging upon some course of action. Any other attitude was mere bad faith, a masquerade based upon insincerity. It will be clear that a radical change had taken place in him . . . . [12] Sartre's effort to reconcile his existentialism with politics, his thought and his life, reason and history, began not, as is often said, in mid-career but during the period in which Being and Nothingness was written. During the war, Sartre's politics moved steadily leftward. As early as 1941, in the aborted revolutionary group Sartre organized to resist the Nazis, he encapsulated his position as socialisme et liberté," [13] a non-authoritarian socialism that advocated a deeper freedom for the individual than that offered in either bourgeois or Soviet society. Twenty years later the metamorphosis of his political philosophy still did not lose the original seed: liberté became existentialism by 1943, and socialisme became Marxism by 1957. Eliding the conjunction, the final transformation might read, by 1968, existential Marxism. As we follow Sartre's writings through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the central theme will be his effort to synthesize philosophy and politics, existential freedom and Marxist community. This digression into his life supports rather than refutes a reading of Being and Nothingness that looks to it for a radical social theory. Thus Sartre's freedom in the 1930s was not simply the privatized individualism of the petty bourgeois, nor the glamorous estheticism of the bohemian intellectual, nor the masochistic despairing Weltschmerz of the romantic rebel. It might more aptly be characterized as the slowly developing freedom of a new kind of radicalism typical of the New Left, The habitue' of the Café de Flore and the Café des Deux Magots was the same man who signed the Letter of the 121 in opposition to the Algerian War, who later 12. Ibid., 342. 13. Ibid., 396-397.

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The Early Sartre refused the Nobel Literature Prize, and who offered the cover of his worldwide prestige to editors of a Maoist periodical. Sartre's isolated quest for freedom in the 1930s might best be viewed as anticipating the experience of a future generation that would take shape only in the 1960s, rejecting the manners and


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methods both of romantic individualists and of Communist Party militants, in search of a theory of the self and a theory of politics appropriate to humanize advanced technological society. In this sense, the concept of freedom in Being and Nothingness can take its place in the history of the New Left. 2. Freedom to Create One's Self Ironically, Sartre presented his doctrine of radical freedom precisely at the worst moment of Europe's time of troubles. The capitalist world had endured two world wars, the depression, and fascism. An Enlightenment faith in the harmony of science and morality, of technology and freedom had worn very thin. Social theorists were ready to dismiss the heroic notion that men could shape their destiny, that freedom was possible. But here was Sartre in the occupied Paris of 1943: "Human freedom precedes essence in man and makes it possible; the essence of human being is suspended in his freedom. What we call freedom is impossible to distinguish from the being of 'human reality.' Man does not exist first in order to be free subsequently; there is no difference between the being of man and his being-free."[14] Sartre placed freedom at the center of human existence, not as a special, privileged state of being that one earned or developed through arduous self-discipline or lacerating self-control. It was not something characteristic of men rather than women, of the mature rather than the young, of the sober rather than the whimsical. It was not an "essence" of man in the 14. Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (N.Y., 1966) 30.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism sense that it could be distinguished from his appearance, from his normal, everyday existence. Freedom was not an essence [15] hiding behind the manifest structure of human reality, a primary quality that must be unveiled beneath more perceptible secondary qualities. Freedom was not available only to an elite because it possessed some special quality, whether it was reason or the prerogatives of birth. For Sartre, freedom was radically democratic since it enveloped every human being at every moment of existence. In Being and Nothingness the everydayness of freedom manifested itself in Sartre's compelling, almost novelistic examples. A person goes to a café expecting to meet his friend; an affianced woman looks through a window and is frightened because the man she sees arouses her; a man looking through a keyhole is seen by someone else and feels shame; a woman on a date responds to sexual overtures by her escort; a man hiking up a mountain decides to rest. In the most ordinary experiences of life, the ultimate question of the human condition, man's freedom, is posed. Later, in 1952, in his book on Jean Genet, Sartre applied traditional philosophical categories to the examination of Genet's life, demonstrating even more graphically that the profound questions of freedom and of one's


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identity are not the exclusive problems of the professor of philosophy but characteristic of man at each moment of his life."[16] The commonality of freedom in Sartre's thought suggested a new historical subject, a subject that was not content to be free in signing a labor contract but unfree in his work, but one who on the contrary might demand self-determination in experiences where liberal society prohibited it. Sartre derived his doctrine of freedom from a phenomenological description of being.[17] Treating reality as a phenomenon, as something that appears, the phenomen15. For Sartre's discussion of his anti-essentialism, see The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (N.Y., 1957). 16. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 14. 17. In Being and Nothingness Sartre carefully traces his ideas in relation to Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. I have excluded these filiations from my exposition because they would

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The Early Sartre ologist describes the structures of appearance.[18] Thereby the subjective reality of consciousness is accorded objective status, unlike the scientist's epistemology, where only the exterior world is regarded as real. Sartre's phenomenology accepted the reality of the human subject and moved within it without losing its grip on the exterior world. His attraction to Husserl's phenomenology came also from its tendency to pursue the reality of the everyday and the ordinary. Raymond Aron, a liberal social philosopher and companion of Sartre, introduced him to phenomenology over an apricot cocktail in a nightclub:" 'You see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!' Sartre turned pale with emotion at this. Here was just the thing he had been longing to achieve for years. . . ."[19] take it too far away from the problem of existentialism and Marxism. A purely philosophical treatment of this would require an elaborate discussion of Husserl's phenomenology and Heidegger's existentialism as compared with Sartre. In addition, Sartre's debts and differences with Hegel might serve to clarify his relation to Marx, as two divergent Hegelianisms. Perhaps less justifiably, I have chosen to avoid this path also. As a study in intellectual history, as opposed to one in the history of philosophy, this work would become too complex if the Hegel problem were placed in prominence. On the relation of Sartre to Hegel's Phenomenology, cf. George Kline, "The Existentialist Rediscovery of Hegel and Marx," in Mary Warnock, ed., Sartre (N.Y., 1971) 284-314. As for phenomenology, it was an autonomous movement of no little importance in France after 1945. But, again, to investigate the French phenomenologists, or to treat Sartre in terms of that current, would obscure the line I am trying to trace and extend the length of this study far too much. Merleau-Ponty is treated in Chapter 5 and Paul Ricoeur enters the discussion in relation to structuralism. But that is as far as I take it. For Sartre's relation to http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (8 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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Hegel see, Klaus Hartmann, Sartre's Ontology: A Study of Being and Nothingness in the Light of Hegel's Logic, trans. from German (Evanston, 1966) and Georg Lasson, "Introduction to Hegel," Phenomenology of Spirit (Leipzig, 1921) LXXXI-CXVI for Hegel's use of the term "phenomenology." 18. Being and Nothingness, liii-lvii. 19. Simone de Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 112.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism From a phenomenological examination of being, Sartre discovered two qualities of reality: being and nothingness, the in-itself and the for-itself. Being was full, complete, opaque; nothingness was empty, a lack. Being-in-itself was it is; [20] being-for-itself was not what it is. Being-for-itself was consciousness. Things appeared to the phenomenologist as full, complete, as being just what it is; but consciousness was not like things. "Consciousness is consciousness of something. This means that transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself." [21] Sartre made use of Husserl's insight that consciousness is always intending, or pointing toward something else, always connected with something else that is "outside" itself. Looking back at this consciousness while it is intending, Sartre found that the structure of consciousness itself was a lack, a flight toward what it was not. Thus, Sartre's definition of consciousness or human reality was this: "consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself." [22] The consequences for Sartre of this difficult axiom were immense. Human reality was comprehensible only as freedom. Since consciousness was a "nothing" it was not determined in any way by its being. Consciousness was in the world, like everything else, except that its content, its concrete existence, was not defined by its structure. Consciousness always went beyond what it was, always transcended what it was, fixing and positioning itself in the world. [23] Consciousness existed, therefore, before it had any particular attributes--before, that is, it had an essence. It was openness itself, a kind of infinity. Furthermore, value or meaning emerged out of the concrete, specific relationships of this consciousness with this world. [24] As a man threw his consciousness into the world, meanings appeared for him, 20. Being and Nothingness, lxxxix. 21. Ibid., lxxiii. 22. Ibid., 1xxiv. 23. Ibid., 1xi. 24. Ibid., 115.


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The Early Sartre and it was out of his freedom to relate himself to this or to that that his values took shape. . . . my freedom is the unique foundation of values and . . . nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable. My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while itself without foundation. [25] Since men were not closed, fixed things like the in-itself, like a table, for instance, anxiety accompanied experience because of the dizzying creativity of every moment. What we are is the complete result of what we have made ourselves. In the familiar formula of existentialism, existence precedes essence. Freedom, for Sartre, was as complete as it could possibly be: we were free to constitute our own selves. ". . . freedom, which manifests itself through anxiety, is characterized by a constantly renewed obligation to remake the Self which designates free being. . . ." [26] The emphasis in Sartre's concept of man fell on the enormous openness to make our own self. What was specific to man, as distinct from the animals, was this freedom to shape and to construct human being. Sartre's lesson seemed to be that the evolution of man, individually and collective]', was in the bands of man himself, and was not the determination of a fortuitous, blind law of nature. This concept of freedom might enable Marxism to account for the possibility of communism as defined in the 1844 Manuscripts, although it was not yet adequate for a radical social theory. Yet under the cover of the phenomenological method Sartre erased the specificity and historicity of freedom, universalizing it as a natural aspect of the human condition. For every individual and in every social circumstance anxiety accompanied freedom. Showing the influence of Hegel's unhappy consciousness, Sartrean man suffered a final 25. Ibid., 46. 26. Ibid., 42.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism rupture between himself and the world. However, the unhappy consciousness in Hegel was one moment http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (10 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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and stage, logical and historical, of the development of spirit, while in Sartre anxiety was a fixed attribute of human freedom. Sartre's notion of anxiety hypostasized the truth that the freedom of selfdetermination was a troubled freedom in a world which knew everyday the sickening fact of torture, where murder was as common as the daily newspaper, where the colonial wars of capitalism and the barbarism of Nazism were vulnerable only to the weak sting of Sartre's words. In 1947, making a dramatic about-face barely five years after the appearance of Being and Nothingness, Sartre had second thoughts about the universality of anxiety, viewing it instead as a specific experience of his social class. "Ourselves bourgeois, we have known bourgeois anxiety." [27] Although Sartre's notion of anxiety may have universalized his class experience, it also captured a truth about contemporary society. There was a correspondence between Sartre' s feeling of anxiety in freedom and the hostility toward authentic freedom in bourgeois social structures. The individual was not encouraged to question completely his own possibilities for self-transformation. Capitalist morality urged him to calculate his self-interest according to the external standards of property accumulation. And furthermore, the lack of community in capitalist societies, the atomization of individual experience, and the competitive nature of social relations presented added obstacles to Sartrean freedom. To be free toward oneself meant to present oneself fully to the other person; but relations in modern society discouraged the treatment of the other as an end in himself. Because Sartre in 1943 did not present his own concept of freedom in relation to an historical situation, much of the specificity of his ideas was lost and anxiety was paired with freedom for eternity, as in a morality play. 27. What Is Literature?, trans. B. Frechtman (N.Y., 1966) 174.

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The Early Sartre The coupling of freedom and anxiety associated and synthesized two antagonistic intellectual traditions in an unusual and difficult blend that was typical of Sartre's thought. The first was the sanguine, Promethean tradition of the eighteenth-century philosophes and the nineteenth-century utopian communists, which was radically humanistic. The other was the tragic, conservative view of man's fate going back to Pascal that evoked the inherent contradictions of the human condition, man's flaws and his weaknesses. Sartre's concept of freedom fit into and even extended the first position; in defiance of all superior authorities, of all official wisdoms, man was a radical negativity whose business it was to make himself totally and without limitation. Always a threat to the status quo, human freedom was, however, never an easy resolution of man's difficulties, never an untroubled heaven, never a utopia, without conflict and strife. Particularly in his freedom, man was confronted by the freakishness of his existences thinking reed in Pascal, half angel and half beast in Pope, a "useless passion" in Sartre. By the Promethean extension of man's freedom to the furthest limit, Sartre discovered the Pascalian absurd. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (11 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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Without a superior reality, a myth, to license and legitimize freedom, it floated in anxiety, a scandal to itself and to all things. "Man is a being who is what be is not and is not what be is." The dizzying dialectic of Sartre's argumentation proceeded from his wanting to hold onto both ends of his insight; to keep his concept of freedom without becoming a simplistic optimist who dissolved all human travail in a single sweep; to preserve the ambivalence and anxiety of the human condition without a skeptical conservatism which required the great lie of the, Grand Inquisitor, of God. In this way, Sartre's concept of freedom troubled both camps: the dogmatic Marxists whose humanism required the acceptance of Stalin's trials and labor camps; the modest Catholics and liberals whose pluralism justified the existence of imperialism, poverty, and exploitation. In adopting the extreme positions of both intellectual traditions Sartre 85

I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism attempted to find a "third way," a path that would maintain man's powers of self-determination, and keep open the possibilities inherent in advanced technology, but that would not overlook the embarrassing and unpleasant contradictions of the human condition. Sartre sought to humanize anxiety, to comprehend anxiety as the necessary awareness of our own illegitimacy, our own nothingness amidst being. Intentional consciousness, flinging itself at being, foisting value into the world, could not escape from the "scissiparity" of its existence, from the truth that it and it alone brought forth value and could bring forth completely different value. What Sartre's notion of freedom did not account for, however, was the absence of authentic freedom in the world around him, the lack of the explicit project of freedom by actual subjects. In short, a confusion exists between Sartre's phenomenological description of human reality as free and the "unfree" mode in which human reality inhabited its freedom. This contradiction is at the heart of the inadequacies of Being and Nothingness as a social theory. We will examine its shortcomings through Sartre's concepts of bad faith, the Other, and the Situation. 3. Bad Faith: Freedom in Relations with Oneself It is necessary to put Sartre's concept of bad faith in historical perspective. At least since the Enlightenment, major intellectual movements have given answers to the question of the origin and nature of the distortion of human reality. Some account has invariably been presented of man's imperfection, normally with a view toward overcoming it. In broad outline, the history of the concepts of imperfection has moved toward fundamental levels of human experience, both individual and social. At war against priests and despots, the philosophes, in the eighteenth century, traced the source of human distortion to the altar of God's ministers and to the arbitrary power of magistrates and princes. Opposed to irrationality in any form, the radical wing of En-


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The Early Sartre lightenment found its enemies in the mystification of religious experience and in the lack of social equality. To Voltaire, Diderot, d'Holbach, and Helvétius, unreason was the ultimate cause of man's discontents. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and other socialists analyzed modes of social interaction, concluding that alienation and exploitation were at the bottom of man's suffering. Finally, the family, the sacrosanct agent of civilization, was revealed by Freud in the early twentieth century as the nest of yet another human woe, neurosis or a fixating form of emotional repression. These doctrines were indices of society's self-consciousness from which heuristic comparisons could be made. They all-for example, irrationality, alienation and neurosis--have a common characteristic of unconsciousness, each deflecting man, in its distinct way, from full self-knowledge. In addition, they all imply that man, unlike the animals, is not fully developed, is not totally human. Sartre's concept of bad faith falls directly into this line of inquiry. Sartre outlined a notion of man's imperfection in terms of the failure to be free, the failure to be authentic. Bad faith, the opposite of authenticity, "posits not merely an ideal of knowing but an ideal of being; it proposes for us an absolute equivalence of being with itself as a prototype of being. In this sense it is necessary that we make ourselves what we are." [28] Bad faith was a refusal of being and thereby an attempt "to constitute myself as being what I am not." [29] Like a waiter in a cafe', whose ritualistic movements reveal that be is a waiter in the way a table is a table, a person in bad faith is in flight from his own freedom, in flight from his ability to choose not to be a "waiter." Bad faith consists in the ontological sin of consciousness making itself into a thing"?the ambiguity necessary for bad faith comes 28. Being and Nothingness, 7. 29. Ibid., 81.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism from the fact that I affirm here that I am my transcendence in the mode of being a thing." [30] Much like alienation it confounds the different realms of human reality and thing reality. In a second graphic


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example, Sartre describes a bourgeois woman on a date who places herself in bad faith when she refuses to make a choice, when she refuses to exercise her freedom. Her escort places his hand on hers, pointing to his desire to make love to her. Unwilling to commit herself to this possibility or even to deny it, she dissociates herself from her hand, reducing it to a thing, without removing it, while at the same time etherealizing the situation through talk of sublime matters. [31] When faced with the exigency of making a choice, a person in bad faith refuses to choose. Still, of course, there is a choice because human reality can never completely be thing-reality, although it is a mutilated choice since it denies the possibility of choice while making one. As it was presented in Being and Nothingness, the concept of bad faith contained many ambiguities. It allowed Sartre to reduce imperfection to the subject; it was always the individual who placed himself in bad faith. One could argue that the waiter could not be human or respond freely to his customers since that would risk the operation of the cafe or, more pragmatically, his job or his tip. Or again, that the woman was reduced to a sex object by her companion, a fact that prevented her from making an authentic choice in relation to his intentions. However, Sartre was not convinced by these proofs of the efficacy of external compulsions. His argument was rather that regardless of outside constraints the individual must still choose and it was possible that he choose authentically. The skeptic might grant Sartre's conclusion that we are the source of our own imperfection but still argue that throughout the hundreds of pages in Being and Nothingness there were no examples of authentic freedom. In the countless situations Sartre presented, in the rich variety of experience he examined, it was always a matter of 30. Ibid., 69. 31. Ibid., 67.

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The Early Sartre Bad faith. Only once in seven hundred and fifty pages did be even mention authenticity, and even then only in a footnote: If it is indifferent whether one is in good or in bad faith, because bad faith reapprehends good faith and slides to the very origin of the project of good faith, that does not mean that we can not radically escape bad faith. But this supposes a self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted. This self-recovery we shall call authenticity, the description of which has no place here. [32]


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If freedom did indeed define consciousness, how was it possible that it was so absent from human experience? Why was it so difficult for human beings to be human beings? If Sartre's analysis of the self was correct and the freedom to be was the core of human reality, could it be the case that some dimension of the, phenomenological description had been omitted? We shall see that Sartre came to reconcile his concept of freedom with the pervasive reality of bad faith only through long bitter years of debate with French Marxists. In Being and Nothingness the reconciliation was prevented by his overemphasis on the individual as the field of analysis, by his residual commitment to the cogito,[33] by his intense concern to refute determinism, and finally by his underemphasis of the Situation, of the mediations between the individual and the world. It could be said that the entire intellectual journey of Sartre between 1943 and 1968 concerned his desire to preserve the concept of freedom, and still account for the actual distortion of man in society. 4. The Situation With the concept of bad faith, Sartre indicated that individuals took flight from their freedom in relations with themselves. With the concept of the situation, Sartre went on 32. Ibid., 86. 33. Ibid., 536.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism to maintain that freedom in relations with others and with things appeared to be limited but in fact remained absolute. Recalling that man is a being rooted in the world, Sartre affirmed that the "world" was part of freedom, that freedom existed and was possible only in the world. The individual was not isolated but was outside, in the street, in direct contact with the world and open to it.[34] The existentialist's rejection of the dualism of self and world was radical: . . . the resistance which freedom reveals in [brute things], far from being a danger to freedom, results only in enabling it to arise as freedom. There can be a free for-itself only as engaged in a resisting world. Outside of this engagement the notions of freedom, of determinism, of necessity lose all meaning. [35] Sartre explicitly rejected the position that men were somehow truly free only in the intimacy and privacy http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (15 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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of their thoughts and feelings, only in their subjectivity, as well as its corollary that once they were in contact with other people and with things their freedom was debased and corrupted. A dramatic shift of perspective was at stake here. Existentialist man did not seek his freest and purest moments in privileged contact with some special extraordinary reality like the Idea, or God, or The Privacy of One's Own Mind. For existentialism, as indeed for Marxism, authentic freedom was located in the space of everyday life, in the world, among things and men. It is necessary to contrast Sartre's position with Descartes' in order to grasp its full implications. By celebrating the ego of the individual as the privileged realm of reality, the Cartesian cogito was admirably suited to the needs of the rising bourgeois, heroically building a world market, competing against other men, and conquering nature, all the 34. Jean Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism, trans. F. Williams and S. Maron (N.Y., 1949) 16. 35. Being and Nothingness, 591.

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The Early Sartre while accumulating vital resources for the first phase of "the industrial revolution." Philosophical and moral doctrines that legitimized "individualism" in effect validated and confirmed acquisitive man in his Promethean effort to separate himself from the rest of the world, from its temptations and pleasures, only to manipulate it better for his own ends. Existentialism, on the other hand, proclaimed a noninstrumental concept of the world in which the situation was considered not something to control, not a technical problem, but an arena in which to be. Hence Sartre denied totally the "common-sense" view, "the formula" that "to be free . . . means 'to obtain what one wished' but rather 'by oneself to determine oneself to wish' (in the broad sense of choosing). In other words, success is not important to freedom."[36] In some ways similar to its conception in the culture of the young of the 1960s, freedom for Sartre was not a victory over others and over things, a tribute to self-discipline and cunning. On the contrary, it was the realization of authenticity, the emergence of men as men and things as things. The situation, facticity, the given, as it was alternately termed by Sartre, could never "determine," "coerce," 'erase," the freedom of the individual. "No factual state whatever it may be (the political and economic structure of society, the psychological 'state,' etc.) is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. . . . No factual state can determine consciousness to apprehend it as a négatité or as a lack." [37] Determinism in any form, whether as the "economic base" of official Marxism or as the libido of orthodox Freudians, was not an explanation of action to Sartre, because it was always the individual who had to choose the course of action and prior to that the meaning of the situation. Reality must first be interpreted, must be given value, must be organized into http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (16 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 532.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism an intelligible totality, must be made the object of an intention, before action was possible. Since "freedom is originally a relation to the given"[38] both the given and freedom, the outside and the inside, society and the individual were in a reciprocal, mutually reinforcing, dialectical tension, in which neither could overcome or "determine" the other. Yet Sartre's concept of the situation did not fully overcome a dualism of self and world. a. Freedom in Relations with Others In 1943., with Being and Nothingness, Sartre did not develop a concept of interpersonal relations that fit in with his broader notions of freedom and the situation. [39] Relations with others in a given situation remained peripheral to the individual's consciousness. Full of unresolved difficulties, the treatment of the Other in Being and Nothingness was a mirror of Sartre's incomplete emergence from the dualistic world of the cogito. Beginning his analysis well enough in a new direction, Sartre dismissed solipsism: the existence of "other minds," was not problematic. He asserted decisively the importance of the other for consciousness; "the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me." [40] Before long, however, Sartre was back on "the reef of solipsism" himself. In "the look" of the other, the individual was revealed to himself as fundamentally a "being-forothers."[41] Hence the question of the existence of other minds was false. "At 38. Ibid., 595. 39. See, for example, Jean Wahl's opinion in Philosophies of Existence, trans. F. Lory (N.Y., 1969) 80. "Sartre seems to imply, when he speaks of love and communication in Being and Nothingness, that communication is always awkward or abortive.... The reason for this, according to Sartre, is that what we really want is to possess the other in his freedom, and this is something of a contradiction. ... The question may be asked whether Sartre considers satisfactory communication impossible also in the world of authenticity or whether he confines it to the world of unauthenticity." 40. Being and Nothingness, 272. 41. Ibid., 310ff.


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The Early Sartre the origin of the problem of the existence of others, there is a fundamental presupposition: others are the Other, that is the self which is not myself." [42] Far from being this remote Other whose existence could be placed in question, the other person, for Sartre, was ontologically bound to my consciousness. Yet the examples Sartre gave of being-for-others were all taken from bourgeois experience [43] where the individual encountered the other as a threat to himself-the feeling of shame, the person caught looking through a keyhole in embarrassment, the person seen by another idly strolling in a public park: "I am in a public park. Not far away there is a lawn and along the edge of that lawn there are benches. A man passes by those benches. I see this man; I apprehend him as an object and at the same time as a man. What does this signify? What do I mean when I assert that this object is a man?" [44] Like that of two merchants trading in a marketplace, Sartre's meeting with the other in the park was cold, inhibited, restrained, and uncomfortable. He was open enough to the other to know and recognize him as a subject, with an intentional consciousness of his own, not simply as another object like the bench. Yet the meeting was strained, formal and arms-length distance was preserved. Still Sartre did not view these relations as instrumental, in which the other was a thing to be controlled and manipulated, precisely because the other was free to reduce him to an object. . . . the person is presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other. This meant that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other. [45] 42. Ibid., 282. 43. Ibid., 311. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 319 and also see The Reprieve, trans. E. Sutton (N.Y., 1960) 151-152.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism Hobbesian aggressiveness colored relations with others in Being and Nothingness in the same icy shades found on the canvas of bourgeois society. The fact that the other was also free translated itself into a http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (18 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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threat rather than into an occasion for mutual recognition. "In short, in order to maintain before me the Other's freedom which is looking at me, I identify myself totally with my being-looked-at. To be other to oneself . . . is the primary value of my relations with the Other."[46] All relations with others, just because each was totally free, became, for Sartre, relations of conflict. Love itself was no more than a sado-masochistic combat with each lover hoping to possess the other, stripping him or her of freedom. [47] That love could be a common affirmation of freedom was inconceivable to Sartre. The lover inevitably sought to prevent the loved one from not loving him, from freely rejecting him. Yet these "concrete relations with others" described by Sartre could be interpreted as expressions of alienated interactions in which love could not set the tone because all relations derived from the competitive marketplace. The most he could affirm in his dispute with solipsism was that being-for-others was a fundamental (ontological) structure of consciousness in a social field where actual interactions, beingwith-others, were threatening conflicts. The freedom of the individual was safeguarded in relations with others only at this cost. When Sartre came to consider the actual interactions of "being-with-others," of "being-with-others," of Mitsein,[48] he could only grant them a "psychological," epiphenomenal mode of existence. Although "being-for-others," a structure of consciousness of each individual, was accorded the full dignity of "ontological" status, real relations with others, the actual interactions between two or more human beings was considered by Sartre decisively less real. Here the cogito was operant again, limit46. Ibid., 446. 47. Ibid., 447. 48. The concept of Mitsein was developed by Heidegger in Being and Time, where it is regarded as a structure of Dasein. 94

The Early Sartre ing the existential description of the situation to a pullulation of atoms, to a peg-board where the pegs were real but the relations of each peg to another were not. Reality was drawn back into each individual peg as the society of peg relations, full intersubjectivity, was refused. Elaborating his concept of being-with-other, Sartre distinguished between the "Us-object" and the "Wesubject," in which the former represented thing-like interactions and the latter represented reciprocal interactions. Being-for-others, our sense of being an object in front of the other's gaze, remained the "foundation" of being-with-others in both cases. [49] Descending to the proletariat to find his major example of being-with-others in the mode of the Us-object, Sartre depicted the class consciousness of factory workers as the solidarity of the oppressed.[50] In addition to two workers, a third individual, the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (19 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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boss, was needed to establish this relationship; he reduced all the workers to objects with his "look." The capitalist dehumanized the workers and made it likely that each would find his own oppression mirrored in the other worker. And, since the "third" was always needed to allow mutual recognition by two individuals, humanity could not unify itself without a god, the ultimate "third."[51] In the second case, the "We-subject," which resembled Marx's notion of Communist social relations, the unity of the group was experienced more as the product of the group than from the third. It was "the experience of a common transcendence [i.e., a project] directed toward a unique end" but "of which I am only an ephemeral particularization; I insert myself into the great human stream . . ." [52]--for example, by entering a subway station. Sartre insisted that the unity of projects in the We-subject did not constitute a human community. "It in no way corresponds to a real unification 49. Being and Nothingness, 507. 50. Ibid., 513-517. 51. Ibid., 517 52, Ibid., 519.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism of the for-itselfs under consideration." [53] Repeating himself several times for emphasis, he maintained that the We-subject is "psychological," not ontological: . . . whereas in the experience of being-for-others the upsurge of a dimension of real and concrete being is the condition of the very experience, the experience of the We-subject is a pure psychological, subjective event in a single consciousness; it corresponds to an inner modification of the structure of this consciousness but does not appear as the foundation of a concrete ontological relation with others and does not realize any Mitsein. It is a question only of feeling myself in the midst of others.[54] In giving the reasons for the unimportance of the We-subject, Sartre emasculated the character of the Situation so markedly that the concept lost much of its meaning. First, he regarded this structure of relationships as too "unstable" to provide a foundation for an ontological status: " . . . it depends on particular organizations in the midst of the world and it disappears with those organizations."[55] His example of producers and consumers," in which people were brought into relationships in such a remote way that their being-with-one-another had a transient and "undifferentiated character," expressed the alienation of capitalist society in a way that universalized it. With Sartre's concept of being-with-others there could be no comprehension of social organizations, their lawful development, their structured character, or the possibility of changing them. The inauthenticity of the world was hypostasized and


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rendered unintelligible. When Sartre gave recognition to the fact that modes of interaction "depend on particular organizations in the midst of the world" he was forced to reduce 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 520. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 518.

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The Early Sartre the significance of those interactions because the reality of the individual connected to others through organizations depended on something outside himself. To preserve the total freedom of the individual Sartre diminished the significance of his relations with others. The internal contradiction in Sartre's position here is blatant because he had already pronounced that the individual was a "being-in-theworld." He simply could not hold together the dyad individual-world when be wrote Being and Nothingness. Sartre's second argument against the "ontological" status of the We-subject was that it was anonymous and impersonal since it was mediated by objects and institutions: the subway, the exit sign, the hammer. Just as it was transient and unstable, the We-subject fell short of a full, personal interaction through its mass character. The rigidity of the "rules for using" things eliminated "free inventiveness." [57] The hammer indicated in its size and shape the way it was to be used; the exit sign determined the meaning of passing through the doorway. Since the historicity of these relationships was absent from Sartre's analysis the question could not arise whether they were an inexorable, fixed correlate of technology or only a requirement of the capitalist and bureaucratic organization of society. Throughout the discussion of the We-subject, which was often vague and confused, the strongest reason Sartre gave for the devaluation of this experience was that We-subject relations were social. He adamantly refused to lend significance to the historical structure of social relations, perhaps from an undefined fear that this would impinge on the total freedom of the individual: The [Us-object] is the revelation of a dimension of real existence and corresponds to a simple enrichment of the original proof of the for-others. The [We-subject] is a psychological experience realized by an historical man immersed in a working universe and in a society of definite economic type. It reveals nothing particular; it is a purely subjective Erlebnis. [58]


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57. Ibid., 521. 58. Ibid., 525.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism In this passage, reason and history were antithetical. "Historical man" in a society of a "definite economic type" could signify "nothing particular" and was "purely subjective." This astonishing judgment by a man who endured the agony of war and who thought himself suddenly most free in a German detention camp [59] became the dominant question in Sartre's thought after 1945, climaxed by the monumental study of historical and social relations in Critique de la raison dialectique in 1960 as well as in studies of Jean Genet (1952) and Gustave Flaubert (1966-1972). In Being and Nothingness, the cavalier exorcising of history and society distorted the concrete nature of the Situation, rendering it remote, indeterminate, and impersonal. In his effort to delimit the new structure of the self in terms of authentic freedom, Sartre regressed to a Cartesian individualism in which the Situation, although dubbed necessary, appeared inessential and gratuitous. Ultimately, the Other presented itself as a "dilemma": . . one must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended by him. The essence of the relations between consciousnesses is not the Mitsein: it is conflict." [60] b. Freedom in Relations with Things Similar difficulties beset Sartre's account of authentic freedom in relations with things. The second aspect of the Situation, "things" could be either possessed or played with. In each case Sartre presented the "appropriation of things" ideologically, leaving the impression that the contemporary manner of relating to things was natural to man. Sartre began the discussion of man's relations with things with a concept of desire, in some ways like Hegel's, which rejected all determinist explanations in favor of radical freedom.[61] Man chose his modes of existing in relation to things, expressing his 59. Situations, III (Paris, 1949) 11-13. 60. Being and Nothingness, 525. 61. Ibid., 692.

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The Early Sartre desire to be and his lack of being. Shorn of the mediations of society and history, Sartre's concept of desire, unlike Marx's concept of need, located the individual in his relations with things in terms of a totally free project of being-in-the-world. [62] There was no objective, external limitation to desire, which shows once more the one-sidedness of Sartre's grasp of freedom. Desire led to three general modes of relationships with things: doing (faire, also making), having, and being. [63] "Sartre quickly conflated doing with having, leaving a complex dialectic of having and being, in which be wanted to show the primacy of being, itself founded on freedom. Yet the concrete descriptions upon which he rested his case led him to present having as primary. Since men were for the most part in bad faith they chose to possess and to lose themselves in their possessions. To begin with, Sartre's understanding of the possession of things was fetishistic, confusing ownership with a proximate, sensory relation with things. "If I desire this picture, it means that I desire to buy it, to appropriate it for myself." [6]4 The desire for the picture was not a desire for seeing it or enjoying it, but for making it one's property. Possession turned into bad faith for Sartre when the individual, once owning the object, attained an intimacy with it that allowed him to lose himself in it, to take on himself the qualities of the in-itself, of the things, and flee from the "negativity" of consciousness. Thus the person was possessed by the thing as much as the thing was possessed by the person. Moreover, for Sartre, this relationship of possession was not specific to a certain society in a certain period of its development. Society did not affect our relations to things in the least: "Of course we could try to define ownership as a social function. But first of all, although society confers in fact the right to possess according to certain 62. Ibid., 693. 63. Ibid., 706. 64. Ibid.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism rules, it does not follow that it creates the relation of appropriation. At the very most it makes it legal."[65] Recalling the enormous value placed on private property in bourgeois society, Sartre continued, "If ownership is to be elevated to the rank of the sacred, it must first of all exist as a relation spontaneously established between the for-itself and the concrete in-itself." [66] The "spontaneous relation" was a deep "internal bond" between the individual and the object which rested on the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter3.html (23 of 28) [11/12/2007 23:15:50]

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existential structure "mine." This relation was not open to modification by men; thus there could be no significant alteration in the structures of possession under a future Communist society in which private ownership would be abolished. If we can imagine the future existence of a more just collective organization, where individual possession will cease to be protected and sanctified at least within certain limitsthis does not mean that the appropriative tie will cease to exist; it can remain indeed by virtue of a private relation of men to things.[67] In possession, the thing took on the quality of being-mine, and the individual became "possessed" by the thing: If the possessor and the possessed are united by an internal relation based on the insufficiency of being in the for-itself, we must try to determine the nature and the meaning of the dyad which they form. In fact the internal relation is synthetic and effects the unification of the possessor and the possessed. This means that the possessor and the possessed constitute ideally a unique reality . . . the desire of a particular object is not the simple desire of this object; it is the desire to be united with the object in an internal relation, in the mode of constituting with it the unity "possessor-possessed." The desire to have is at bottom reducible to the desire to be related to a certain object in a certain relation of being."[68] Typically Sartre intensified the reality of daily experience, showing the depth of the ordinary. However, in doing so, he obscured two distinct relations of men and things: 65. Ibid., 718. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 718-719. 68. Ibid., 721.

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The Early Sartre the authentic one in which the thing remains the thing and the man, the man; and the alienated one, the relation in bad faith, where the deep interpenetration of men and things becomes a confusion of the two, where the boundary becomes lost and the thing appears to be the creator, the active agent in the relation and the man becomes the object, the passive consumer of the thing.


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This confusion became marked in Sartre's discussion of money. Money mediated the relation of men and things, affording the individual the power to have: Money represents my strength. . . . But to me it appears as a creative force: to buy an object is a symbolic act which amounts to creating the object. That is why money is synonymous with power, not only because it is in fact capable of procuring for us what we desire, but especially because it represents the effectiveness of my desire as such. . . . Money suppresses the technical connection of subject and object and renders the desire immediately operative, like the magic wishes of fairy tales.[69] As opposed to Sartre's notion of money as the "effectiveness of desire," Marx's Jewish Question had shown how money distorts and alienates human desire, becoming an end in itself. With his concept of money, Sartre displayed his failure to conceptualize contemporary social relations, and in the end "being" was completely confused with "having." The critical power of Sartre's concept of freedom faded away as things constituted the being of the individual. Bourgeois, acquisitive man became Man as such: "Thus to the extent that I appear to myself as creating objects by the sole relation of appropriation, these objects are myself. The pen and the pipe, the clothing, the desk, the house--are myself. The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have. " [70] The discussion in Marx of the capacity of the market to reduce use 69. Ibid., 722-723. 70. Ibid., 724.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism value to exchange value and being to having corresponds to Sartre's description of man as being what be has, except that for Marx it was indicative of alienation. Surely, to be what one has, in relation to Sartre's concept of freedom, must indicate bad faith, but since this was not stated in Being and Nothingness, it appeared that "I am what I have" denoted an authentic relation of men and things. The relation of having did, nevertheless, constitute a project of being, affecting the entire relation of the individual to the world. At bottom, the desire to have was the desire to be-in-the-world through having the world. "To appropriate this object is then to appropriate the world symbolically." [71] And in Sartre's universalizing formulation, the consumer of bourgeois society becomes Man. "To-be-in-theworld is to form the project of possessing the world," [72] clearly a fantasy of acquisitive man, but one that Sartre ascribed to every person. Losing oneself in the capitalist's dream of owning the entire world was not, for Sartre, the sole way of relating to things. One could also play with things.


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In the activity of play, Sartre described a relation between men and things in which things were allowed to remain things and men maintained their ontological status as free projects of being. "As soon as a man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom, a freedom, by the way, which could just as well be his anguish, then his activity is play."[73] The "serious attitude" of bad faith, giving priority to the object over the subject, vanished in play as the individual granted his subjectivity its appropriate power, whimsically and lightly experiencing his relations to things (for example, on the ski slope) as internal bonds projected by his consciousness. Without losing himself in the object, without regarding the object as the creative source of enjoyment, the player glided authentically through objects, permitting them to emerge as they were while re71. Ibid., 730. 72. Ibid., 732. 73. Ibid., 711.

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The Early Sartre lishing the bonds with things he had created. In addition to play, art and science were activities of appropriation in Being and Nothingness, in which the world of things was related to by consciousness as an in-itself.[74] Of course, play, art, and science required release from the necessities of production and consumption; they required time beyond the struggle with nature and the subsistence of the body. In order for play, art, and science to be the general modes of relations with things, a social order beyond scarcity was necessary. But in Being and Nothingness, Sartre did not yet confront this problem. His concept of play uncovered the world as a creation of the subject and outlined a relation between men and things in which men were not alienated and things were not fetishes. But this authentic freedom in relations with things was presented as a project of an individual, not of a society. The examination of the concept of freedom in Being and Nothingness disclosed the ambivalence and hesitation of Sartre's position. His emphasis on anxiety as the tone of freedom typified the despair of living in bourgeois civilization at the time of its "crisis." In many ways, too, the existentialist concept of freedom remained rooted in the Cartesian cogito. And Sartre's description of the Situation, regarding the relation both of men and other men and of men and things, severely attenuated the significance of the world in relation to the individual. On the other hand, his concept of freedom suggested the possibility of a new post-bourgeois structure of consciousness that called on each individual authentically to construct his self, expressing systematically the central assertion of Hegel, that substance is subject. [75] The existentialist's concept of freedom precluded any attempt to find an external support for human freedom in a superior reality, as well as any attempt to prejudice freedom in favor of one aspect of


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74. Ibid., 717. 75. G. F. W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (N.Y., 1967) 80.

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I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism human reality. The thesis that man was free to construct himself and his world would become, for Sartre, the basis for his contribution to Marxism: human reality understood as freedom was the condition for the possibility of Communism or the end of alienated labor. Finally, although Sartre undervalued the influence of society on the individual and failed to lay the basis for comprehending society, he did bind the individual to the world ontologically. Yet the actual convergence of Marxism and existentialism was a product of two decades of acrimonious debates, the twenty years following the appearance of Being and Nothingness. In these first three chapters, I have deliberately avoided any attempt systematically to compare Marx and Sartre, allowing Marxism and existentialism to emerge as separate doctrines in the years after 1945, which is the way things happened. Instead, I have emphasized the intellectual rupture with previous social theory brought about by Hegel's concept of reason in history, Marx's concept of alienation, and Sartre's concept of freedom. Nevertheless, some affinities between Marxism and existentialism may tentatively be abstracted as guideposts for the narrative of the actual debate, if only so that we do not lose our way in the free-swinging polemic which often sharpened oppositions and obscured similarities. Both Marxism and existentialism began by rethinking the early Hegel of the Phenomenology, and both minimized the idealist Hegel of the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia. Both accepted Hegel's early attempt to define human reality as unfolding in time, as an essentially temporal phenomenon. Consequently, Marxism and existentialism posit the primacy of life over thought. In Sartre, "existence precedes essence," and in Marx, "consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness."[76] Furthermore, both asserted the interdependence of thought and action; in Marx the 76. Easton and Guddat, op. cit., 415.

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concept of praxis united theory and action, and in Sartre "doing" and "being" were interrelated. Both rejected the ideal of the autonomy of the individual by going back to Hegel's concept of recognition; Marx defined man as his social interactions, and for Sartre "being-for-others," and the "look" constituted primary dimensions of the self, although Sartre did not go far enough in this direction. Also, both defined freedom as a positive self-realization and as the primary telos of human reality, unlike liberalism and idealism, which saw freedom either as an absence of restrictions on the self or as the mere exercise of pure reason. Finally, both viewed reality as a dialectical totality in which all parts were interconnected. The priority of one sector over another was relative for both; the economy or labor for Marx and intentional consciousness for Sartre. Thereby, both refused to privilege any aspect of reality, to use isolating, analytical reason as the primary manner of thinking, and turned instead to a dialectical description of the structures of the real. In sum, there was a very large basis of agreement about fundamental principles that could be the starting point for fruitful discussions. There were also deep antagonisms between Being and Nothingness and the 1844 Manuscripts. The concept of freedom in Sartre was profoundly subjectivist and appeared to lead to the very un-Marxist direction of an ethical theory. By the same token, the concept of alienation in Marx was strongly objectivist, totally subordinating the manner in which an individual experienced his alienating activity to the comprehension of the alienating relations in themselves. The strongest affinity between the two positions, as they were seen in France during the 1940s and 1950s, came also from their similar claims as humanisms. On this vague, extremely general level, both Marx and Sartre appeared to many as parallel if not complementary. Nevertheless, a synthetic existential Marxism was in no sense obvious in the post-war years. It remained something to be achieved. 105


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II Stalinism and the Existentialists: 1944-1957

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_________________________________________________________ The Attack on Sartre: 1944-1948

1. The Attack Begins Contacts between Marxism and existentialism began when Sartre joined the Resistance. In direct touch with Marxists as a member of the Comité National des Ecrivains during the Occupation, he discussed his philosophy with them on many occasions. Shortly after the Liberation, he was asked by the Communist paper Action to respond to criticisms of his existentialism that began appearing in Action and other Leftist journals. In his reply Sartre tendered the first overtures to a reconciliation of his ideas with Marxism. He stressed two points: first, that both philosophies espoused freedom, claiming that man was "master of his own destiny," and, second, that both were philosophies of action in which thought was "a project and a commitment." [1] Existentialism was not a quietistic pessimism of anxiety and despair, as many misconstrued it, but an "optimism," "a humanist philosophy of action, of effort, of combat, of solidarity. . . . Far from being a "delight in the morose," it presented man in a de virile anxiety [2] that did not bide the grandeur, the infinitude, the Prometheanism of the human situation. In his brief defense, Sartre pointed to the revolutionary climate of the Occupation as the cradle of existentialism in contravention to the widespread belief that it arose from the anomie of a petty-bourgeois intellectual. 1. "A Propos de l'existentialisme, mise au point," Action, 17 (Dec. 29, 1944) 11. 2. Ibid.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists In an abrupt departure from the Resistance spirit of unity, Communist intellectuals in late 1944 began viciously attacking Sartre. Everything and everyone associated with Sartre was open for criticism: existentialism, Les Temps Modernes, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and, to a lesser degree, http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (1 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty who had close Communist friends (Courtade, Hervé, and Desanti). Henri Lefebvre began with a stinging rebuke of Sartre's article in Action. To Lefebvre, Sartre's existentialism had nothing to do with Marxism, but was part of the "war machine" against Communism, an effort to enchant and mystify the youth of France, like old Socrates, with its "pathological narcissistic consciousness." [3] For a short time, however, the CP remained strangely ambivalent toward Sartre. A few years later Sartre recalled his relations with the CP in the mid-1940s with some bitterness.[4 ]After he was rebuked by Lefebvre and others, another Communist and ex-student of his, Jean Kanapa, told him that Being and Nothingness was indeed compatible with Marxism.[5] Thinking now that the Communists were not against him, Sartre accepted an invitation to visit with Maublanc, a Communist, only to find himself attacked again, this time by Mougin. One month Sartre was writing for the Communist papers Action and Les Lettres Françaises; the next month he was their chief object of scorn. Sartre was bewildered: the Communists kept making overtures to him but with the first contact they would recoil and spring at him, the way a cat sadistically plays with an insect. Privately they were friendly; publicly, bellicose. In the next few years, the same scenario was repeated twice, once after Sartre had criticized both De Gaulle's RPF and the CP during a radio broadcast. He was then visited by a Communist who asked him 3. "Existentialisme et Marxisme: réponse à une mise au point," Action, 40 (June 8, 1945) 8. 4. For an account of this episode, see De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 44. 5. Entretiens sur la politique (Paris, 1949) 71-72.

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The Attack on Sartre to "initiate a unification on the Left," a pet idea of Hervé, the editor of Action. No sooner was this said than Action blasted Sartre's radio speech as "traitorous." [6] Though Sartre viewed the behavior of the Communists as unmerciful and bizarre, they might well have been hoping that he join the Party. The counterpoint of initiative and attack in fact may have followed Sartre's refusals to become one of them. At any rate, Sartre's first posture as a Marxist outside the Party was unsuccessful. After 1944 he moved away from the Communists until 1950 when he tried once again, this time with more success, to maintain a position of both allegiance and independence. The attitude of the CP had political motives. Sartre's thought was not simply at odds with Marxism; it was dangerous to the Party. After the Liberation, the Communists were reformulating their political strategy and the loose unity on the Left had to be tightened. All doubtful elements in the broad coalition would have to be eliminated. Also, existentialism was associated with religious belief in Jaspers and Marcel, and, far worse, with fascism itself through Heidegger. Bedfellows of this reactionary stripe could not be welcomed in the Communist camp. Furthermore, Sartre's broad following among the youth http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (2 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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of France was disturbing to the Communists. Youth seemed more enamored of existentialism than of the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. [7] Finally, the Communists had a more compelling reason to rebuke existentialism so strenuously. Many of the younger Party intellectuals were attracted to Sartre's thought, especially to his concept of engagement. [8] The existentialist had breathed life into the Marxist concept of the relation of theory and practice, highlighting the dramatic, personal qualities of engagement in a manner that corresponded to the experience of those who participated in the Resistance. Existentialism actually provoked a sharp split within the Party which 6. Ibid., 75-76. 7. De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 43, 130. 8. Edgar Morin, Autocritique (Paris, 1959) 83-86.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists made the public condemnation of Sartre particularly exigent. Hervé, Courtade, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Dominique Desanti, and many other young intellectuals who had joined the Party during the Resistance were open to Sartre's argument that existentialism and Marxism were compatible. [9] These new Communists had come from the same bourgeois background as Sartre and had never worked in a factory; they attended the same schools and rebelled against an education that included neither Marx nor Nietzsche nor Freud. During the Resistance their anti-fascist heroism fit in well with communist strategy. With the enemy now defeated, the joyous if arduous fraternity of war was suppressed by the Party in favor of rigid hierarchy and intellectual conformism. And with this the emerging association of existentialism and Marxism was abruptly cut short. The birth of existential Marxism was delayed by the exigencies of Stalinist politics. 2. Being and Nothingness under Fire For these tactical reasons France's leading Marxists would join a united front against Sartre's existentialism from 1945 to 1950. There would be no intellectual dialogue between Marxism and existentialism on the Communists' side, only unrelenting warfare against the latest form of bourgeois ideology. Communists wrote full studies of Being and Nothingness to show its anti-progressive, idealist nature: Henri Lefebvre, L'Existentialisme in 1946; Henri Mougin, La Sainte famille existentialiste in 1947; Jean Kanapa, L'Existentialisme n'est pas un humanisme in 1947; and Georges Lukacs, Existentialisme ou marxisme? in 1948, a book that was important in the French debate.[10] 9. Dominique Desanti, Les Staliniens: une experience politique, 1944-1956 (Paris, 1975) 5, 22. 10. For additional critiques of Being and Nothingness by CP intellectuals, see: G. Mounin, "Position de


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l'existentialisme," Les Cahiers

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The Attack on Sartre While the existentialists of Sartre's circle were feverishly learning Marxism and hesitantly making syntheses of their thought with that of the Communists, the latter were condemning existentialism outright. a. A Double Idealism When Henri Mougin died in 1946, his comrade Jean Kanapa polished up his manuscript on existentialism, some of which had appeared in journals, and published it in 1947. Mougin traced the history of twentieth-century French idealism through Bergson, Blondel, Hamelin, Brunschvicg, and Alain, showing that Sartre's existentialism was merely an effort to resolve its contradictions. With analytic rigor and in great detail Mougin unstitched Sartre's ontology in Being and Nothingness, shaking out a tawdry, idealist garment. Unlike the other Communist critics of Being and Nothingness, Mougin's tone was sober and restrained. Although his picture of existentialism as bourgeois idealism matched with the others, he went to some pains to penetrate the text of Being and Nothingness to prove his assertions. In Mougin's view, French idealism had reached an impasse; it could not account philosophically for the phenomena of time, history, and action, but shifted back and forth between an objective and a subjective metaphysics of mind.[11] The "maneuvers" of existentialism overcame this difficulty only by haphazardly confusing the two positions. A phenomenologist, Sartre wished to do away with the dualism of reality and appearance by positing a monism of appearance. The object was fully there in its appearance, but it could be grasped only sequentially, never all at once. To Mougin this was where Sartre fell into another dualism, this time a dualism of the infinite fullness of d'action, 2 (May, 1946); Pierre Hervé, "Conscience et connaissance," Les Cahiers d'action, 2 (May, 1946); V. Leduc, Les Marxisme est-il dépasse? (Paris, 1946); R. Garaudy, Le Communisme et la morale (Paris, 1947). 11. La Sainte famille existentialiste (Paris, 1947) 40.

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the appearance and the finite perception of consciousness.[12] When Sartre asserted the total presence of the object, objective idealism was stressed over the subjective idealism of perceiving consciousness. Much worse for Mougin was Sartre's ontological grounding of this one-dimensional reality. He divided reality into pour-soi (human reality) and en-soi (being), defining pour-soi from the point of view of subjective idealism as intentional consciousness and en-soi from that of objective idealism where essence preceded existence, where objects, unlike men, were given in their essence. Against other commentaries on Being and Nothingness, Mougin argued that Sartre did not, with his ontology, resolve the dualism of idealism and materialism because his ontology never grasped materialism at all. In the ontology of existentialism, the pour-soi came first so that the definition of being never allowed it an independent existence apart from man. [13] Being, for example as nature, only appeared to man in its essences; by itself it had no real status. The situation for consciousness was one of anxiety and ennui.[14] In a "double idealism" the subject was lost, moving from its own nothingness to the solidity of being which in turn was only established by himself. No wonder then, Mougin commented, that Sartre ended in religious reaction: the subject strove, although in vain, to become simultaneously a pour-soi and an en-soi, a synthetic God who alone could resolve the contradictions of double idealism.[15] For Mougin, there could be no rapprochement between Marxism and this latest version of idealism. In his polemic, however, Mougin forgot the Marxist need for a theory of consciousness and subjectivity. His rejection of Sartre's existentialism left Marxism with the travesty of the Stalinist reflex theory of mind. On the other hand, Sartre would later take up Mougin's criticism, modifying the 12. Ibid., 123ff. 13. Ibid., 118. 14. Ibid., 131. 15. Ibid., 139 and 147. 114

The Attack on Sartre duality of in-itself and for-itself and taking matter more seriously into account. b. An Excremental Philosophy Lefebvre's critique of Being and Nothingness was the earliest and the most interesting. In rigorous Marxist fashion, Lefebvre set out to unveil the social roots of existentialism, to prove its unacceptable liaisons with a decadent bourgeoisie. Only "the moral decomposition of the so-called higher classes" explained how a "tiny group of stars and snobs" could evoke such a fuss.[16] Moreover, this fashionable http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (5 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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literary-philosophical fad was not even original. To dampen the enthusiasm over existentialism, Lefebvre wrote an extended history of the Philosophies group of the mid-1920s, of which he was a member, demonstrating that the group's move toward Marxism began with an unhealthy, adolescent It existentialism." When he was only a youth of twenty, Lefebvre wrote a "philosophy of consciousness," which appeared in a short-lived journal, Philosophies, in 1924 badly abridged by the leader of the group, Pierre Morhange. [17] The "boring," "abstract," "esoteric" existentialism of the 1940s was only a repetition of the original existentialism of Henri Lefebvre.[18] In one stroke Lefebvre gave himself credit as the first existentialist, relegating Sartre to the position of a mere latecomer, and presented a selfcriticism in which existentialism was exposed as juvenile. At that time Lefebvre was studying under Leon Brunschvicg and was bent, with youthful passion, on destroying the established philosophy of rationalist idealism. Lefebvre remembered his rebellion as an impotent but partly correct effort toward a concrete philosophy of the subject. He was deflected from coming around to the scientific way of thinking to dialectical materialism, because of his "neurotic' situation as 16. L'Existentialisme (Paris, 1946) 13. 17. Ibid., 26. 18. E. Mounier reminded Lefebvre of his own mixture of Marxism and existentialism in a review of L'Existentialisme in Esprit. "De l'existentialisme à nos conditions d'existence," Esprit 16:141 (Jan., 1948) 144145.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists a bourgeois intellectual. His existentialism, like Sartre's, could be understood as a "neurosis of interiority, a schizophrenia," caused by "the bourgeois intellectual's world with its privatized consciousness, its abstract culture, its isolation, its disdain for the practical, its separation from life, its mediocre and vague social position."[19] After psychologizing existentialism, Lefebvre painted a picture of the bohemian youth of romantic intellectuals. George Politzer, Norbert Gutermann, Paul Nizan, [20] himself, and others who later became the first important group of Marxist theorists in France, lived in poorly lit, overcrowded flats, voraciously assimilating French thought and culture. Rebellious, iconoclastic, with a passion for life, they were determined to rid themselves of an obsolete rationalist past and strike out in new directions. Indiscriminately exploring all forms of "irrationalism," they made alliances with André Breton's surrealists around "the project of a unified revolutionary center. " [21] Looking back from 1945, Lefebvre could see only the futility of his youth, not its truth in the Hegelian sense of Bildung. Existentialism past and present was no more than a mental regression and a psychological infantilism. Only reason is virile."[22] Wearing the mask of a rational, mature


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intellectual who convinced himself that his work was "virile" and masculine, like that of a proletarian, Lefebvre dismissed all existentialism, especially Sartre's, as "magical." The individualist existentialist indulged in subjectivity, projecting himself onto the world in the manner of primitives. The basic concepts of existentialism were not rational ideas that demarcated regions of internal and external reality, but magical, evocative images: 19. L'Existentialisme, 20-21. 20. W. F. Redfern, Paul Nizan (Princeton, 1972) 12-20 depicts the life of this group. 21. L'Existentialisme, 33. 22. Ibid., 81. 23. Le Marxisme, op. cit., 11.

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The Attack on Sartre Complex and higher relations with the world-implying objective knowledge and effective power-are eliminated to the profit of immediate relations, simplified and transposed anthropomorphically into a pseudo-knowledge. This is magic. Magical thought regresses to the level of spontaneous magic; but for the "modern" thinker, who is no longer "spontaneous" in this sense, there is a morbidity, a neurotic element in it with infantile regression. Thus Sartre tells his tales. It is the magic and metaphysics of shit.[24] From the ouvriériste perspective of this Communist intellectual who introjected the masculinity of the manual laborer, Sartre symptomized the discontents of society without being able to comprehend them in a way that could lead to destroying their causes. "In the queer existence described by Sartre, anxiety, vertigo, fascination, the need to destroy, etc., become sources of truth. Wishing to transcend narcissism, Sartre slowly reestablishes the pathology of narcissistic consciousness." [25] Existentialism ended in narcissism, in a self-indulgent, romantic protest that led nowhere. With Sartre appearing as a hero of the Resistance, with his claim that existentialism was a humanism, with his overtures toward Marxism, Lefebvre felt that it was necessary to render existentialism repulsive in the eyes of the progressive elements of France. No tactics were too low to be used in this struggle. Lefebvre unintentionally revealed his male chauvinism by characterizing Sartre's thought as feminine, repeatedly damning it as passive and emotional. Hence far from being a statement of "humanism, Nausea became a manifesto of the pederast. [26] Existentialist writings depicted exceptional and inhuman situations: points of rupture of the monad, paroxysms of consciousness. Hu24. L'Existentialisme, 82. Garaudy, for his part, was not less offensive. "Every class has the literature it deserves. The upper bourgeoisie in decay delights in the erotic obsessions of a Henry Miller or the intellectual


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fornications of Jean-Paul Sartre." Literature of the Graveyard, trans., J. Bernstein (N.Y., 1948) 61. Garaudy's puritanism, blushing modestly at existentialist literature, was part of his effort to associate Communism with morality. (Cf. Le Communisme et la morale (Paris, 1947). 25. L'Existentialisme, 227-228. 26. Ibid., 221.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists man life is reduced to such morbid states." [27] When Lefebvre did treat the philosophical content of existentialism, his statements were more balanced; indeed, a certain ambivalence broke through his aggressive armor. As with Marxism, Sartre strove to overcome the dualism of idealism and materialism, although he achieved only a "bastard compromise." His intentions were admirable, only he did not go far enough. It is not a matter of reproaching Sartre for his evolution toward humanism; far from it. His error is at bottom an inadequacy of philosophical rigor. Sartre wants to position himself within a bastard compromise between the philosophy of inhumanism and the new affirmation of the human. . . . For those who propose to liquidate on all levels the gang of Hitlerites, it appears inadmissible to live on a bastard compromise between the Heideggerian "style" and that of total humanism.[28] Lefebvre's ambivalence stemmed from his agreement with Sartre's criticism of positivism or scientism, but he parted company with the existentialist when he espoused "irrationalism," and therefore promoted political reaction. Complete irrationalism, Lefebvre feared, exalted ignorance and led to fideism. Only reason, which was ultimately scientific, and not chatter about commitment provided a basis for liberating action. Avoiding positivism meant adopting "dialectical reason" as opposed to "abstract rationalism." The specific, irreconcilable difference between existentialism and Marxism could be reduced to their attitudes toward science: The essential difference between dialectical materialism and existentialism resides in the attitude toward science. . . . Dialectical materialism saves reason because it makes it concrete without suppressing it and reestablished its double dignity as a means and an end, instrument and truth. It integrates the irrational with 27. Ibid., 228. 28. Ibid., 224-225.


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The Attack on Sartre Reason. . . . The irrational-action and practice, the multiple contradictions of life and thought-become the content, the ground of concrete Reason . . . . [29] But surely this was precisely the intention of existentialism, an intellectual goal that originated with Hegel-the restoration of subjectivity and praxis to their proper places in an intellectual ambiance that excluded them in favor of scientific objectivism. Lefebvre was in a quandary because he was one of the few Marxists who could articulate a concept of reason that was not merely another positivism. Although the scientists who directed the Communist journal La Pensée celebrated the predictive, scientific quality of Marxism, Lefebvre had to refute an existentialism that could help define the limitations of positivism. The true point of divergence between the two doctrines was only touched on by Lefebvre: Marxism viewed man primarily but not exclusively as collectively related to nature, hence the emphasis on the economy; existentialism, in the first instance, probed man's relation to himself, his subjectivity. These positions were philosophically complementary, but this fact would become clear only when each doctrine moved toward a focus on man's relations with others. Each doctrine had great potentials of illuminating different sides of human interactions; Marxism the objective and existentialism the subjective. With official Marxism lost in a philosophy of nature, and Being and Nothingness dramatically portraying the dilemmas of individuality, reconciliation was out of the question. Lefebvre was willing to recognize the important contribution of existentialism in defining "certain internal, spiritual conflicts" of the individual in bourgeois society. The rub was that it was now necessary for Marxism to present a theory of consciousness, and the unmentionable difficulty was that Stalinism prevented it. Lefebvre understood that society would not be changed the time had come when 29. Ibid., 249.

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II. Stalinism aid the Existentialists except by a self-conscious revolutionary class. The inhibitions and blocks to this self-consciousness were central to the problems of Marxism and in this area the existentialists had stolen the Marxist thunder. The problem of the consciousness of the proletariat had arisen and existentialists were http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (9 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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developing a method to study consciousness while Marxists languished in the study of external social structures. It was necessary to present clearly the human side of historical becoming-precisely how man was to change himself in the process of liberation. A modified Sartreanism might grasp the structures of man's self-negation, when viewed as part of the revolution. In fact, Lefebvre clearly stated the question in these terms: Dialectical materialism "transcends" all theories that tend to identify consciousness and being, by showing how, why and to what extent conscious being (man) is not conscious Of his being, of nature and of his nature, of his social products, of his possibilities . . . . when one studies the humble beginnings of "conscious being" one must put the emphasis on being. Through the wanderings of thought and history, a dialectical reversal slowly occurs and the emphasis must be put on consciousness . . . Marxism represents the critical and decisive point of this reversal.[30] Yet Marxism was weakest in specifying the contours of the "thought" side of the theory-praxis dyad, while existentialism was strong in determining how the individual chose or lived his freedom. Paradoxically, both doctrines ascribed to Hegel's anthropology, in which man made himself while making reality, but this vital center of both schools was not developed by Lefebvre. His affirmation of the primacy of consciousness in the present was fine, but it was totally denied by current trends of Marxist thought. All Lefebvre could do was show how the existentialists' concepts of despair and anxiety were correct descriptions of internal conflicts under capitalism but were falsely 30. Ibid., 252.

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The Attack on Sartre understood as part of a fictional human condition. When the individual discovers in himself insoluble Contradictions and when he does not know them (by situating them in a knowledge of human reality) he falls into anxiety and despair. But certain "visible" contradictions can appear insoluble because history advances slowly, very slowly, from the perspective of the individual. Then the individual, who wants a solution for and against everything, and an immediate one, "hic et nunc"-this is his dramahe then creates a pseudo-solution.[31]


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Failing to take history into account, Sartre invented the pseudo-solution" of the total freedom of the individual. The role of society and the Other in the life of the individual could not be accounted for by Sartre's thought. Resolving individual conflicts on an individual level, the existentialist in Being and Nothingness could not find reason in history, and descended into an irrationalism in which one "choice" was as good as another. [32] Lefebvre's final verdict was that of Pravda: Sartre's philosophy spoke for a "decadent class," and was not in harmony with the goals of Marxism.[31] c. A Philosophy of Fetishes A third critique of Sartre's Being and Nothingness came from Georg Lukacs, dean of European Marxists. Shortly after returning from his exile in Moscow to his native Hungary, Lukacs wrote Existentialisme ou marxisme? (1948), his first book to appear in French. It was written for the Hungarian CP, as proof of his orthodoxy. Sartre's writings had become important and dangerous enough to the Communists for them to have their foremost theorist write against them. And that Lukacs did. The bulk of Existentialisme 31. Ibid., 255. 32. In La Conscience malheureuse Lefebvre gives an interesting account of an earlier existential Marxist, Benjamin Fondane, who never resolved the contradictions between Heidegger and Marx. Ibid., 248. 33. D. Zaslavaski, "On Existentialism," reprinted in Les Temps Moderne,s, 2:20 (May, 1957) 1531-1536 and Lefebvre, op. cit., 72, 84.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists ou marxisme? was directed against Sartre, with shorter sections on Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir. In a final chapter, Lukacs moved on to some of the theoretical problems of Leninism. With the important voice of Lukacs bellowing out against existentialism, many young CP intellectuals, like J.-T. Desanti, who had strong interests in the new philosophy, were persuaded to follow obediently the Stalinist line and put aside their copies of Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In this book Lukacs placed existentialism in the history of bourgeois thought and society. Faced with the crisis of bourgeois society in its imperialist stage, non-Marxist philosophers groped to represent this crisis as a critique of bourgeois culture. [34] Without a revolutionary perspective they necessarily fell into irrationalism since they described the discontents of bourgeois society as universal dilemmas of man. For Lukacs, existentialism typified "bourgeois intelligence" in its attempt to define the freedom of the individual in a purely formal and empty way, a trait that he claimed went back to Descartes and


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Kant. Hence the existentialist search for a "third way," beyond a rationalist idealism which no longer made sense and a revolutionary materialism which was inimical to bourgeois philosophy. In fact, Lukacs complained, there was no "third way": either there is the primacy of existence (materialism) or the primacy of consciousness (idealism). Because idealism could be maintained only in "untroubled times," intellectuals were led beyond it without being able to resolve its difficulties. Existentialisme ou marxisme?, one of Lukacs' worst books, was a document of the cold war. Beginning in 1948, the Communist parties of Europe had Zhdanovism foisted upon them by mother Russia. The political theory of two camps locked in mortal combat, with no middle ground, no neutral space, was echoed intellectually in the position that 34. Existentialisme ou marxisme? trans. by E. Kelemen (Paris, 1948) 2nd ed. 1961. In the second edition, Lukacs reaffirmed his position against existentialism without any modification, 18-19.

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all thought was either idealism or materialism, either a pack of bourgeois lies or a revolutionary weapon. Crudely opportunist, reducing thought to politics, Zhdanovism limited philosophy to pigeonholing ideas in either one or the other category. Regardless of Lukacs' sympathy for any of Sartre's ideas, existentialism would have to be condemned to the "ash can" of history. Lukacs did not, however, completely dismiss Sartre's existentialism. Like his own History and Class Consciousness, as well as his efforts at a Marxist aesthetic, Sartre's concept of freedom had the merit of revealing the importance of the individual's decision, which bourgeois determinism and vulgar Marxism habitually underestimate. All social activity is composed of individual acts-and the influence exercised by material conditions, however important they may be, are only realized as Engels said "in the last instance." This means that at the moment of making a decision the individual always finds himself confronted by a certain degree of freedom . . . . [36] Lukacs recognized the affinity between his own attempt to include subjectivity in Marxism and Sartre's existentialism. Agreement ended here because Sartre had turned to phenomenology instead of to Marxism as a general methodological context for his philosophy of freedom.


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Sartre's absolute freedom was the "abstract, undifferentiated freedom of intellectuals" who wanted simply to say no to fascism." Hence his popularity with liberals who had carried out an internal protest against Hitler or who took part in the Resistance without really becoming Marxists. To Lukacs, only within Marxism could the concept of freedom become concrete since the daily struggles against capitalism in all its forms engendered an awareness of historical possibilities. Conversely, for Sartre, man was always free to choose but his choice was "arbitrary, irrational, and uncontrollable." Be35. Henri Lefebvre, "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," 13:137-138 Les Temps Modernes (July-Aug., 1957) 117. 36. Existentialisme ou marxisme? 105.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists cause the direction of choice was without historical and social context, the choice had to be nihilistic. The meaning of the choice returned only to the individual and was without impact on others. Slipping dangerously close to solipsism, Sartre denies the necessity of historical change as well as history itself, both on the social and on the individual levels. Having asserted that the choice is divorced from the past, he denies the real relations that unite the individual to society; he envisions a world separate from the objective relations that surround man and the human relations lie does see are those of isolated individuals. The fatalist and mechanical notion of freedom built on this base must lose all its meaning.[37] With the phenomenological method limiting Sartre's perspective to that of individual consciousness, Being and Nothingness ended in "the defense of the individual." [38] Lukacs was able to show, in much the same way as I have done in chapter 3, that Sartre's residual reliance on the cogito led him to attenuate the reality of others, of society and of history, in the individual's quest for authenticity. The intersubjectivity of social relations and the externalized structures of society simply could not be accounted for in Sartre's thought. In Lukacs' words, "The most profound effect that I can exercise on the other would consist only in creating a situation for him: that could not constitute, only in creating a situation for him: that could not constitute, on my part, an intervention in his freedom. Paradoxically, Sartre's absolute freedom became a very limited freedom indeed since the individual did not have the freedom to influence others, to participate in the building of the social world, to shape history. 37. Ibid., 106. 38. Ibid., 108. For a similar critique, cf. H. Marcuse, "Remarks on J. P. Sartre's Being and Nothingness,"


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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 8:3 (March, 1948). 39. Ibid., 129.

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The Attack on Sartre Unlike the intellectual hatchet men of the French Communist Party, Garaudy and Kanapa, Lukacs did not resort to damning Sartre as a fascist. He did maintain that Sartre had misunderstood Marxism and that his existentialism was without value for Marxists, assuming of course that by Marxism one meant Lukacs' Marxism and the Marxism which included the idea of alienation and not the Marxism of Stalin. In the years that followed this early exchange between Sartre and Lukacs, the latter remained convinced that existentialism made "fetishes" of the structures of consciousness. [40] Sartre, on the contrary, was to incorporate many of the criticisms made by Lukacs so that by 1960 one could speak of his thought as an "existential Marxism." In 1948, however, Sartre responded to Lukacs' book with furious polemical hostility; he did not yet see the weaknesses of his position in Being and Nothingness. 3. Sartre Responds a. Existentialist Humanism against Materialist Marxism With the unrestrained polemics against Sartre from the Communists multiplying day by day, Sartre felt called upon to defend himself and his ideas. His response came in a lecture in 1945 called "Existentialism is a Humanism,"' and in an article in Les Temps Modernes of 1946 entitled "Materialism and Revolution."[41] In these ripostes Sartre advertised his own existentialism as a true humanism, the only suitable philosophy for a liberating politics, over against the -Marxism of the French Communist Party, which was 40. Ibid., 9. See also Lukacs, et al., "Deux philosophies de 1'europe, La Nef, 3:24 (Nov., 1946) 87-98 for his critique of Jaspers. 41. For another interesting document of the debate in these years see Colette Audry, ed., Pour et contre l'existentialisme: grand débat avec ... (Paris, 1948). The defenders of existentialism were three young writers for Les Temps Modernes, F. Jeanson, J. B. Pontalis, and J. Pouillon. Sartre was criticized from a rationalist position by J. Benda, a Left Christian position by E. Mounier, and a Marxist position by R. Vailland. Audry defended Sartre's plays against attacks from the Right-wing press.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists a dehumanizing materialism. He proposed naively that the CP substitute existentialism for its own diamat. It was at this point in the controversy between Marxism and existentialism that the two camps were most sharply opposed and that the Communist criticisms of Being and Nothingness were most poignant. It was also at this point that Sartre was attacked by the Trotskyists because his lecture attacked Naville. Sartre's response to the Communists was based, in general, on a defense of his concept of radical freedom as a needed ingredient in revolutionary theory: ". . . the basic idea of existentialism is that even in the most crushing situations, the most difficult circumstances, man is free. Man is never powerless except when he is persuaded that he is and the responsibility of man is immense because he becomes what he decides to be. " [42] Time and again, through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Sartre returned to his basic theme that Marxism lacked a doctrine of revolutionary subjectivity. In 1950, for example, Sartre praised Tito and berated Marxism on this count: the force of objective circumstances and the contradictions of objectivism itself had led the leaders of Yugoslavia in spite of themselves to revalorize subjectivity: but this revaluation in its turn demands a theoretical revision: Marxism must be rethought; man must be rethought." [43] Existential Marxism would be just such a rethinking. In the popularizing lecture of 1945 (later repudiated), Sartre took up in turn the assaults on his thought from Catholics and from Marxists, arguing in each case that his existentialism alone was a humanistic doctrine. Against the Marxist contention that Being and Nothingness failed to account for the relation of the individual to others, to society and to history, Sartre replied only by regressing to Cartesianism. Sartre would not join a revolutionary group unless it did not impinge on his freedom and this was pos42. J. P. Sartre, in C. Audry, ed., Pour et contre 1'existentialisme (Paris, 1948) 188. 43. J. P. Sartre, Préface to Louis Dalmas, Le Communisme Yougoslave (Paris, 1950) xvii.

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The Attack on Sartre sible only "in the unity of a party or group which I can more or less control. . . ."[44] He could not "count on men whom I do not know. . . ." Even after the experience of the Resistance and the German POW camps Sartre was still the atomized bourgeois who regarded dependence on others as a loss of freedom. The Communist critiques of his concept of the situation were all too true: the existential individual, for all his being-in-the-world, was still a petty bourgeois with no understanding of comradely solidarity. Sartre had shrunk from renouncing intellectual independence, a price the CP demanded of its thinkers. Sartre nevertheless insisted that thought proceeded from action, that commitment came first for the


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existentialist. Even so, it was a stoical commitment that was taken "without hope." He was convinced of the primacy of acting in the world only with the undertone that the world was still a Fall, albeit a necessary one, from the purity of the Self. His existentialism was lost in the murky ground somewhere between the rejection of idealism and the full acceptance of man as a being-in-the-world. What was worse, he justified his reluctant espousal of action on Cartesian grounds. To establish a "humanism" it was necessary to take "subjectivity" as the "point of departure," and the most self-evident "truth" for the subject was still Descartes' "I think, therefore, l am." The cogito was an "absolute truth" for the individual, one that was democratically open to everyone and that alone was "compatible with the dignity of man." Any other position-and Sartre meant the materialism of the CP-implied a "determinism" that reduced man to an object." Sartre had regressed badly into the old dualism: "Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world."[45] 44. Sartre, "Existentialism Is a Humanism," trans. Mairet in W. Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre (N.Y., 1966) 299. 45. Ibid., 303.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists Sartre did not, of course, adhere to Cartesianism systematically; if he had, the whole purpose of Being and Nothingness, placing life before thought, would be abandoned. But his method of extricating himself from idealism consisted of sophistries that avoided the real questions. His "I think," as opposed to that of Descartes and Kant, was somehow "in the presence of the other" and self-discovery was magically "also the discovery of all others." Yet it would be difficult to concede, as Sartre claimed, that this cogito as being-for-others was in fact a world of "inter-subjectivity." And when Sartre answered the Communist charge that the existentialist choice was empty and amoral with the slippery proposition that "in committing myself, I also commit the whole of humanity" [45] he satisfied no one. After all, Nazis and Marxists both made commitments. The Communists raised their eyebrows still higher when he gave "the construction of a work of art" as his example of "the moral choice." Picasso created Guernica for the revolution; but what of Céline? In "Existentialism is a Humanism" Sartre repeated the themes of Being and Nothingness, but they somehow sounded different in the post-Resistance political context. The repetition: "What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every man realizes himself in realizing a type of humanity?" [47] Then the added note that altered the connotation: "We cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done, which left the reader with a sense of confusion and a lack of direction. While the CP was organizing the workers, with a busy program for revolution, the existentialist's openness of possibilities emerged as irresolute incoherence. And while Frenchmen gathered around programs for social renovation, the existentialist's call to action resounded as a dissonant cry of despair. Sartre's answer to Lenin's "what is to be done?" was lame. The http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (16 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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Communists gloated over 46. Ibid., 305. For attempts at an existential morality cf. F. Jeanson, Le Problème moral et la pensée de Sartre (Paris, 1965) 1st ed., 1948. 47. Ibid., 304. 48. Ibid., 306.

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The Attack on Sartre "Existentialism is a Humanism," which was so weak that even Jean Kanapa's polemical tract had little difficulty in showing that "existentialism is not a humanism." [49] In 1946, with "Materialism and Revolution," Sartre switched from a posture of defense to one of attack, showing, first, the philosophical errors of Stalinism and, second, the postulates of a philosophy that would be truly revolutionary, like his own existentialism. He regarded Marxism as the philosophy of Stalin in Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism.[50] As a philosophy, materialism stripped man of his subjectivity, presented the natural and human worlds as a single world of objects, argued the causal and metaphysical priority of matter over mind, and depicted a determinist view of man in history. With these metaphysical and "positivist" principles, materialism falsely based itself on a dialectic of nature that transcribed the laws of inert matter onto human reality. Paradoxically, this dogmatic philosophy of materialism became a "naive idealism" since the materialist's principles were for him certain, absolute truths. With great subtlety Sartre exposed all the vicious circles of Stalinist reasoning. Taking materialism finally as a "human attitude" he deftly characterized its bad faith: "I should define it as the subjectivity of those who are ashamed of their subjectivity." [51] The materialists-Lefebvre, Garaudy and the Trotskyist Naville-expected a person to "choose freely and lucidly" a "doctrine that destroys thought." Regarding thought as determined 49. L'Existentialisme n'est pas un humanisme (Paris, 1947). Kanapa's trumpeting was the loudest, most jarring, and least interesting of the official Marxist's. Merely repeating the arguments of Mougin and Lefebvre, he had the most damaging stories to tell of the degeneracy of existentialists. His little book on the "cafe revolutionaries" was so ferocious in tone that one wonders what in the world was going on among the CP leadership to encourage Kanapa. 50. J. P. Sartre, "Materialism and Revolution, in Literary and Philosophical Essays (N.Y., 1967) 212. 51. Ibid., 315.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists by matter, they nevertheless required the voluntary adoption of their ideas. This materialism was "a monster, an elusive Proteus, a large, vague contradictory semblance." [52] Though Sartre's barbs were on target, he defended himself on the basis of a principle the Communists would not accept: the independence of thought. Materialism, a barbarous doctrine, still attracted Sartre, for it was, after all, the doctrine of what he thought was the only liberating force in France. I know that man has no salvation other than the liberation of the working class; I know this before being a materialist and from a plain inspection of the facts. I know that our intellectual interest lies with the proletariat. Is that a reason for me to demand of my thinking, which has led me to this point, that it destroy itself? Is that a reason for me to force it henceforth to abandon its criteria, to think in contradictions, to be torn between incompatible theses, to lose even the clear consciousness of itself, to launch forth blindly in a giddy flight that leads to faith? [53] 52. Ibid., 321. For a critique of "Materialism and Revolution" from a Marxist humanist, see Dionys Mascolo, Le Communisme: révolution et communication, ou la dialectique des valeurs et des besoins (Paris, 1953) 375-406. Mascolo left the CP, and his book reflects the trends of Hegelian Marxism and the reading of the 1844 Manuscripts. Nevertheless he did not accept Sartre's criticism of materialism. In a word, he claimed that Sartre was not speaking of true Marxism, but only that of a few CP intellectuals. Real materialism for him was the dialectic of needs that he outlined in his book, which was revolutionary. He granted, however, that Sartre's articles contained "the only interesting errors that have appeared for quite a while on the subject" (405). For the response of official Marxists to "Materialism and Revolution," see the controversy between R. Garaudy and E. Mounier: Garaudy, "Impuissance et malfaisance du spiritualisme politique," Cahiers du Communisme, 23:3 (March, 1946) 212-223; E. Mounier, "Autour du communisme," Esprit, 14:122 (May, 1946) 855-857; and Garaudy, "Le Communisme et la liberté," Cahiers du Communisme, 23:8 (Aug., 1946) 706-720. Sartre's attempt to show that French Marxism, at least that of the Communist intellectuals, was incompatible with the socialist revolution because their theory made no allowance for the freedom necessary to make the revolution and the freedom of the future socialist world, deeply ruffled the equanimity of Garaudy and the others. 53. "Materialism and Revolution," op. cit., 221.

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Communist philosophy is a travesty; Communist politics are progressive. Although these premises are debatable, the conclusion is unavoidable: the Communist Party must adopt Sartre's existentialism. In the futility of this hope lay all of the ambiguities of Sartre's thought and action. The variations on the theme of Sartre's attraction-repulsion toward the FCP constitute the leitmotiv running through his thought. The second part of "Materialism and Revolution" called upon Marxists to accept the primacy of subjectivity: "We shall call revolutionary the party or the person in the party whose acts intentionally to prepare such a revolution." [54] Men are free in their situation and "anyone can become a revolutionary," even a capitalist like Engels. Sartre was now willing to define the "situation" more specifically than in Being and Nothingness, much in the way the Marxist did: society was capitalist and it divided men and women into bourgeois and proletarian classes; capitalism was oppressive and it called for revolutionary action. The radical freedom of 1943 was not withdrawn one inch: "This possibility of rising above a situation in order to get a perspective on it . . . is precisely that which we call freedom. No materialism of any kind can ever explain it." [55], Sartre demanded that revolutionary thought stress man's transcendence, since it alone brought "man's fate into question," demanding "a total explanation of the human condition," just as Sartre outlined it in Being and Nothingness. By intending to make a revolution man pointed toward the future as possibility and confronted himself authentically as a free being. By 1946 a rival image of Marx was present in France, the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, a Marx whom the Communist Party ignored. Sartre proclaimed the compatibility of his thought with that of the young Marx, though be regretted his "unfortunate meeting with Engels," 56 and could not understand why this Marx labeled 54. Ibid., 224. 55. Ibid., 235-236. 56. Ibid. 248n and 245n.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists his philosophy a materialism." The existentialist accepted the bifurcation of Marx into a young, "good" Marx and an old, "bad" Marx without seeking the unity of his thought, and manifested a certain reluctance to come to grips with capitalism as an economic system. In this way, Sartre left himself open to the charge, probably correct in 1946, that he was not well versed in Marxism. He also avoided the ticklish problem that capitalism behaved as an external movement of things, as an autonomous system. Sartre wanted the Communists to accept his philosophy of consciousness because it alone did not distort the basic " contingency" of existence. The materialists, on the other hand, fell into a determinist concept


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of society that mirrored American Taylorism and behaviorism which was in essence a conservative legitimation of the given social order. At bottom, the materialists were in bad faith, like Roger Garaudy when staunchly proclaimed, "I am a Communist without anxiety." [57] And Sartre's reply, . . . our Garaudys are afraid. What they seek in Communism is not liberation, but a reenforcement of discipline; there is nothing they fear so much as freedom; if they have renounced the a priori values of the class from which they come, it is in order to find a priori elements in scientific knowledge and paths already marked out in history. There are no risks and no anxiety; everything is sure and certain; the results are guaranteed.[58] Sartre posed embarrassing but crucial questions to the materialists: what kind of men are they forming?" The philosophy of the Communist Party, with its hierarchical Organization, did not foster the selfdetermination of each worker-revolutionary consciousness-but choked the worker's freedom in a mythical doctrine and a bureaucratic apparatus. Urging his philosophy of the human subject on Marxists who refused to listen, Sartre faced a grim situation. The ridicule he endured during the 1940s 57. Literature of the Graveyard, op. cit., 56. 58. "Materialism and Revolution," op. cit., 249.

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The Attack on Sartre and 1950s because of his attempt to revitalize Marxism should not lead us to overlook his wisdom. Indeed, by the 1960s the most official of official Marxists were taking up Sartre's advice from 1946. In a review of Lucien Sève's book of 1969, Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité, the Marxist Maurice Caveing noted the truth of Sartre's criticism. "On the most general level the lacunae that Sartre found in Marxism, the lack of a theory of the person, remains a fact of fundamental importance. Even if it is necessary to reject the subjectivist terms in which Sartre formulates the question, one must recognize that it is pertinent. . . ." [59] "Materialism and Revolution," written in a milieu of the Cold War, could easily be taken as support for the capitalist enemy. After 1948, Sartre would not again raise such a strident voice against the CP for fear of aiding the other camp. Faced with the exigencies of the political situation he would curb his own thought. Yet in 1946 he accused the materialists of just this contradiction. They gave up "truth" for politics, something he would not countenance. Sartre was to learn, the hard way, that there was no easy assumption of the harmony of truth and revolution when thought was immersed in the world, when it was in a "situation," when a dialectic of reason and history prevailed. In his 1946 article, the most penetrating criticism the CP received in these years, Sartre presented many http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (20 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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arguments that the materialists could not answer. But he had in no sense provided them with an alternative. His own existentialism went only part of the distance toward integrating a concept of "free" consciousness with a concept of social interactions, and even more, a dialectic of consciousness with a concept of nature. What "Materialism and Revolution" did achieve, however, was the recognition that Being and Nothingness was in many respects inadequate and his direction for the future was mapped out. In the following passage, Sartre sketched positions that he himself had not 59. Maurice Caveing, "Le Marxisme et la personnalité humaine," in Psychologie et marxisme (Paris, 1971) 198.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists yet worked out: A revolutionary philosophy ought to account for the plurality of freedoms and show how each one can be an object for the other while being, at the same time, a freedom for itself. Only this double character of freedom and objectivity can explain the complex notions of oppression, conflict, failure and violence. For one never oppresses anything but a freedom, but one cannot oppress it unless it lends itself in some way to this oppression, unless, that is, it presents the appearance of a thing to the Other. The revolutionary movement and its plan- which is to make society pass through the violence of one state in which liberties are alienated to another state based on their mutual recognition-is to be understood in these terms.[60] Here was the germ of a social theory that Sartre did not elaborate until 1960 in Critique de la raison dialectique. The double perspectives of freedom and objectivity and, second, the complicity of the subject in his own alienation, became primary concepts in the later work. b. Literature and Marxism Until World War II, Sartre identified himself primarily as a writer. The value of literature was absolute, an end in itself, a calling that raised one above time, a way of perceiving human affairs that was outside history. Now history had intruded itself upon the writer; Sartre had fought, been captured, and interned; he had joined the Resistance. With the war over, the question of resuming an old life or beginning a new one had to be faced. He opted for change. His first step was to originate, with his friends, a journal, Les Temps Modernes, that would speak to the new situation of the writer who could no longer write in eternity, who had decided on action, who was "engaged." [61] In the introductory article of Les http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (21 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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60. "Materialism and Revolution," op. cit., 251. 61. For a review of the founding of Les Temps Modernes see E. Mounier, "Le message des 'Temps Modemes' et le néo-stoicisme," Esprit, 13 (Dec., 1945) 957-963. The original editorial

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The Attack on Sartre Temps Modernes and in a series of pieces in 1947 (which was in answer to the criticism of the first article) collected as What Is Literature? Sartre began the process of deconstructing his identity, of finding a new way of writing within history. He sought a Hegelian "concrete universal" that would embody the absolute in the relative. "But what makes our position original, I believe, is that the war and the occupation, by precipitating us into a world in a state of tension, perforce made us rediscover the absolute at the heart of relativity itself." [62] Acknowledging his past as a preoccupation with "literary idealism," as a writer who had espoused a "privileged subjectivity," Sartre made a painful leap in the direction of active commitment in the world. But how far could he go? What could literature do in an age of revolution? Sartre perceived the tasks of the writer to be the confrontation of the reader with his world, as "the reconciliation of the author and the reader. . . ." [63] Writers had to be "Jansenists" who dwell upon "extreme situations," like Pascal, revealing "the density of being" in the reality of everyday life. The writer, in other words, sharpened the conflicts of the lived world, manifesting the ordinary as the metaphysical, as the drama of absolute freedom. Literature could evoke the "human condition" in its "concrete totality": it forced back upon the experienced world the ultimate possibilities of man to "make history." In the process, literature became a model of man's capacity to create, group of Les Temps Modernes was an unstable compound: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, De Beauvoir, R. Aron, M. Leiris, A. Ollivier, J. Paulhan, among others. The only point of unity among these writers was the Resistance and anti-fascism. Splits and hostilities developed very soon, with Aron, for example, going to Le Figaro, a very conservative anti-Communist paper, in 1946. Ollivier in the same year went over to the Gaullist R.P.F. 62. What Is Literature? op. cit., 148. For an excellent study of Sartre's theater cf. Pierre Verstraeten, Violence et éthique (Paris, 1972). 63. Ibid., 159.

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drawing into question and "challenging the alienation of work," presenting man as "creative action." From the interior world of Roquentin in Nausea Sartre moved to the historical world of Mathieu Delarue in The Age of Reason. The contemplative anxiety of the former became the freedom in action of the latter." . . . . the literature of exis [passivity] must be abandoned to inaugurate that of praxis." [64] The question of an audience, a constituency for this literature of praxis, remained and Sartre's answers to it only underscored the ambiguities of his situation in post-war France. The proletariat would not read novels, a bourgeois literary form, and the anxiety of the existentialist writer was, Sartre admitted, completely bourgeois. He weakly suggested that his audience was the petty bourgeoisie, the group from which he came, whose situation he knew and could capture. This European bourgeoisie was in crisis, its power lost to "non-European" and "non-bourgeois" giants, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Sartre's discomfort stemmed from the limitation of his audience to the petty bourgeoisie while he adopted the Marxist position and granted "without hesitation that the fate of literature is bound up with that of the working class. " [65] The "situation of the writer in 1947" was not bright. Out of a vague, inchoate melange of "bourgeois, intellectuals, teachers, and non-communist workers," the non-revolutionary, despised classes, Sartre would, using the new media, forge a weapon of change. At the same time, the stranglehold of the CP over the workers had to be challenged without aiding the capitalists. For the writer, the situation was this: . . . we must at the same time teach one group [the bourgeoisie] that the reign of ends cannot be realized without revolution and the other group [the CP] that revolution is conceivable only if it prepares the reign of ends. It is this perpetual tension-if we can keep it up which will realize the unity of our public. In short, we must militate in our writings, in favor of the freedom of the person and the socialist revolution. It has often been claimed 64. Ibid., 165. 65. Ibid., 175.

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The Attack on Sartre that they are not reconcilable. It is our job to show tirelessly that they imply each other. [66] At this time, Sartre was the most popular writer in France, probably in all of Europe, who nevertheless http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (23 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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had no audience. The most talked of, celebrated, and emulated lumière, acclaimed throughout the bourgeois press, wanted his readers not to talk of him over cocktails, not to study the nuances of his imagery and irony, but to act, to change the world. If Sartre took upon himself the heavy task of mediating between two groups neither of which satisfied him in their present form, he had by no means arrived at an adequate synthesis of the opposites. He was still, after all, a writer who thought literature was "an absolute end." He advocated "the freedom of the person" along with a poorly defined "socialist revolution." Did the socialist revolution mean Stalinism? There had never been a socialist revolution in a bourgeois society; why should one occur now in France? Because Sartre would create a "unity" of his public? Was literature to become an organizing force by itself? If he could not magically invoke a unified public on his own, who would help him: what organizations would work with him? None had come forward. Sartre, the isolated bourgeois litterateur, was assuming for himself the role of revolutionary leader, and, more significantly, assuming for literature, for the individualist, atomized activity of reading, the mantle of social change. And yet there was something to it, something that echoed a century of hesitant alliances between romanticism and socialism, something that foreshadowed the unstable synthesis in 1968 of a cultural revolution and a New Left socialism, a new consciousness and a new social structure. The end of alienation, the destruction of the realm of means for a kingdom of ends had to be an integral part of the dismantling of 66. Ibid., 191.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists private property. There were many precursors going back to Rousseau, to Shelley's poet as legislator, to Goethe's utopia of free workers at the end of Faust, and down to the surrealists. One might even say that no revolution in the West would be possible until romanticism and socialism were unified in theory and in practice. Sartre's effort to combine art and politics in What Is Literature? paralleled to some extent the surrealists' project of a previous generation. In the 1920s, assorted painters, poets, novelists, and intellectuals gathered around André Breton, discovering the revolutionary culture of "automatic writing," a dreamlike imagination that spontaneously generated art. Fervently hostile to the bourgeoisie, the surrealists offered a new revolutionary culture that would harass the bourgeois psyche, with its cadavers and its boisterous épater le bourgeois, with its strident irreverence and adolescent jokes. [67] In the series of Manifestos of Surrealism, Breton offered a revolutionary sensibility to the Communists and was


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dismayed when he applied for membership in the CP only to be questioned about steel production in Italy. Interestingly enough, many of those associated with the surrealist group-Aragon, Naville, Eluard, Friedmann-later became leading Marxist intellectuals, even Communists or Trotskyists, who had nothing but scorn for the "follies" of their youth. Breton was also for a time aligned with Trotsky. Much of Sartre's hostility to surrealism [68] came perhaps as much from an emotional distaste as from philosophical differences. Yet like the earlier literary movement, Sartre aspired to synthesize a revolutionary culture and sensibility with the workers' movement. In 1947, Naville and Friedmann could see more of their own past in Sartre's 67. The "philosophies" group (Politzer, Lefebvre, Nizan, et al.) in the 1920s was close to the surrealists. Nizan's critique of idealist philosophy, The Watchdogs, trans. by Fittingoff (N.Y., 1971), could be viewed equally as a Marxist or vaguely surrealist-existentialist critique of the established philosophical order. 68. What Is Literature? op. cit., 118-136.

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The Attack on Sartre existentialism than Sartre was comfortable in admitting. In sum, Sartre had great difficulty translating the philosophical affinities of existentialism with Marxism into a revolutionary literary practice. Tellingly, he did not return to this theme very often after 1947, switching rather to direct political action or to the philosophical knots of an existential social philosophy. Although he continued to write plays and stories, he deemphasized the problem of a revolutionary aesthetic at least until his study of Flaubert. c. Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire Brusquely rejected by the Communist Party, Sartre was without political direction just when he had decided on the necessity of political action. Les Temps Modernes, which published anti-imperalist and anti-capitalist articles in the post-war years, was not enough. During the war he wet his political feet in the abortive Socialisme et liberté, with Merleau-Ponty and De Beauvoir. Their lack of experience and the Communists' non-cooperation ended the organization after it had barely begun.[69] From 1943 until the Liberation, Sartre participated in the Comité National des Ecrivains, a resistance group led by Communists. Now in 1948 Sartre entered the world of politics once again by joining, as a founding member, the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire. The R.D.R., immediately spurned by the CP as an agent of Wall Street, was led by writers and activists of the non-Communist Left.[70] Its most prominent figure, David Rousset, was a Jewish ex-Trotskyist who had been in Nazi camps. In the beat of the Cold War, when the Communists had been ousted from the French government, the R.D.R., with


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its organ La Gauche, sought to activate both the non-committed middle-class Left and as many 69. M. Burnier, Choice of Action, trans. Murchland (N.Y., 1969) 10-11. 70. See ibid., 54-66 for a good account of the RDR.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists workers as possible around a program of democracy, anti-Stalinism, and peace.[71] The goals of the R.D. R. were to de-bureaucratize the CP, regenerating its revolutionary will, and to shift French politics in general away from both camps, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., toward a "third way." Neutralism would save France, and all Europe, from a secondary role in world politics as a satellite of either major power. It would also stimulate revolutionary change within France toward a genuine, non-Stalinist socialism. Sartre had at last discovered a political vehicle that he thought could resolve his contradictory positions: existentialism and Marxism, the writer and the activist, philosophical idealism and political materialism, isolated petty bourgeois and philosopher of engagement. Merleau-Ponty also joined but with less sanguine expectations than Sartre.[72] In the end, Merleau-Ponty's lack of enthusiasm was vindicated as the R.D.R. moved more and more toward a purely anti-Communist position, inimical to both existentialists, finally collapsing without achieving any of its goals in June, 1949. Sartre's flirtation with politics in the R.D.R. marked an important phase in his effort to unite his thought with his action. With the disbanding of the R.D.R. he would not attain this degree of synthetic identity until the events of May, 1968. For twenty years he would be at the mercy of the CP, the only significant force on the Left. Since the CP would never fulfill Sartre's hopes for it, his posture during these years as a sympathetic outsider was at best awkward and at worst comical. He was in desperate need of a nonCommunist left that could in some sense pass as an existential subject of history, as an agent of change toward socialism that did not refute his radical concept of freedom. 71. Sartre, Rousset, and Rosenthal, Entretiens sur la politique (Paris, 1949) 19-20. Printed first in Les Temps Modernes in 1948. 72. Albert Rabil, Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (N.Y., 1967) 105. See also Sartre, "MerleauPonty," Situations (N.Y., 1969) 180-181, where Sartre recounted his experience with the RDR; R. Toulement, L'Essence de la société selon Husserl (Paris, 1962) and Dick Howard "Ambiguous Radicalism," in G. Gillan, ed., Horizons of the Flesh (Carbondale, 1973) 143-159.

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The Attack on Sartre Only then could Sartre's philosophy have some reference to the "situation," to the actual social world. With the demise of the R.D.R., and with his refusal to consider the Trotskyists or the Socialists, Sartre's politics consisted of an increasingly byzantine effort to locate some feeble trace of existentialism in the Marxist-Leninism of the French CP, some hint of an authentic, liberating vanguard in a repressively Stalinist political apparatus. The revelations of the Moscow Trials of 1938-1939 and the Soviet Labor Camps in the late 1940s, the Korean War in the early 1950s, the waning of proletarian militancy in the aborted strikes of 1952, the invasion of Hungary in 1956 --- with each of these events proving that the revolution had been betrayed or was at best faltering in the Soviet Union, Sartre felt compelled either to renew his allegiance to the Marxism of the CP or retreat into his prewar literary isolation. Thus, the 1948-1949 R.D.R. was the one time that he could commit himself to a political action in Europe that appeared to resemble his own views. In 1948 Sartre engaged in dialogues with David Rousset and Gerard Rosenthal, published as Entretiens sur la politique, which went through at least twenty editions by 1949. In this book, a manifesto for the R. D.R., Sartre reversed his anti-Marxism of "Materialism and Revolution" and set out to synthesize Marxism and existentialism in relation to a living political movement. Now he could assert that the old conflict between the individual and society was dépassé, that idealism and materialism were reconciled at last in a movement that embodied a "third way": ". . . the old conflict between individualism and society is one that RDR members take as transcended . . . our aim is the integration of the free individual in a society conceived as the unity of the free activities of individuals." [73] Unlike the CP, the political direction of the R.D.R. would be determined from below, in the local cells, where everyone would actively participate in decision-making. R.D.R. chapters would be laboratories in which workers would exper73. Entretiens sur la politique,, op. cit., 40.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists ience and develop leadership capacities, thereby generating the new, free subjects of history. The R.D. R. would be a true Marxist organization because the class struggle would be accompanied concretely by the "emancipation of the proletariat." The distant goals of socialism, of worker control and management of the enterprise, would be fostered by the democracy within R.D.R. groups, so that the external overthrow of capitalist ownership would be harmonized with internal, revolutionary consciousness. A t last a humanist Marxism was being joined with an organization of existential subjects. Sartre http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (27 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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appropriated the new Marxism, with its concept of alienation, as the central focus of the R.D.R.'s critique of capitalism. The aim of the R.D.R. was "liberation" from alienation, or true communism.

. . . man, as Marx said, is in a state of alienation; that is, he does not possess his own destiny, his own life, his own work; the ideas he has are not formed directly by him. . . . We desire concurrently to deliver him on the ideological level of his mystifications that prejudice the democratic exercise of his freedom and on the social level, of all forms of exploitation that make him an alienated man.[74] The R.D.R. adopted the humanist Marx who affirmed man's capacity to comprehend and shape his own history, his own situation" as Sartre translated into the language of Being and Nothingness. Marxism and existentialism moved a giant step closer. This Marxism recognized the role of the subject in making history, and this existentialism finally found real situations, situations that linked individuals by something more than the "look," situations in which the free subject made his choices. For Sartre the R.D.R. had to destroy not only the social structures of capitalism, but 74. Ibid., 39.

142 The Attack on Sartre also, as Lukacs and Gramsci had understood, the bourgeois ideology internalized by the working class. Real democracy, real anti-authoritarianism, had to include a critique of Cartesian idealism along the lines of existentialism. The "culture" of capitalism, in the broadest sense, its "education," had to be conquered by a new revolutionary culture that would be assimilated by the revolutionary groups in the movement itself. Here Sartre was anticipating the themes of the New Left of the 1960s; his existentialism was becoming political: "It is evident that the rejection of the principle of authority by the masses themselves and the exercise of a constant auto-critique as well as a critique directed against institutions and politics, implies that greater and greater social groups have access to culture. . . ." [75] In a state of intellectual rapture, with all the antinomies of his life apparently being vaporized, Sartre expansively ushered in the reign of "concrete liberty." Every aspect of the practice of the R.D.R. members overcame the dualisms of liberalism and idealism. Talk and debate lost its abstract character; real needs were expressed in the activity of the R.D.R. groups, needs that were not fashioned in isolated thought, but in active political groups that pointed toward their realization. The needs of R.D.R. members were not "blind and empty," not rational propositions unrelated to action; rather they emerged from within political action: "In a word, concrete thought is the thought of a group of producers or consumers, who start from the necessities and demands of production in the firm of which they are a part


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and of consumption in the area of their needs and of their purchasing power. Such thought cannot be false."[76] Remarkably Hegelian, Sartre here witnessed the birth of a new subject, a thinker engaged in politics, bringing forth a new relation of subject and object, a dialectical relationship that was the basis of a new epistemology in which all thought was true! The flaw in idealism was not philosophical but practical: in the new democratic and socialist practice, intellectual questions became questions about changing the world. Ab75. Ibid., 139-140. 76. Ibid., 106.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists stract criteria of the true and the false were transcended. Finally, the theory of the R.D.R. would be nothing less than existential Marxism. Sartre must have watched his dreams evaporate with heavy sadness: the Communists attacked; membership climbed only slowly; the leadership became anti-Communist, not neutralist. He was reduced to silence; worse, he presented no adequate critique of his adventure in the R.D.R. and at a later date he attributed the fiasco to his political inexperience. He complained bitterly that he had been used by Rousset for anti-Communist ends which he had never approved. From the historian's perspective, the weakness of R.D.R. politics stemmed more from French social and economic conditions than from the weakness of its leadership, from Sartre's ideas about it, or from the Cold War international context. Sartre's hopes for a politics of existential Marxism required the development of a more technological society, a post-scarcity economy and a new working class whose alienation was worse than its material misery or exploitation. Such a social base would emerge or at least begin to emerge only in the 1960s, after De Gaulle instituted a partial dirigisme, a technocratic politics that favored advanced, third industrial-revolution sectors over the Malthusian, conservative capitalists and the petty bourgeoisie with its inefficiently small-scale enterprises. Only then might a new working class become the vanguard of revolution, unlocking the traditional working class from the immobilist politics of the CP. 4. Merleau-Ponty's Existential Marxism Sartre was cognizant of his political naiveté. If he could not learn from CP intellectuals, he might listen to his own political editor and friend, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He generously acknowledged his deep indebtedness to Merleau-Ponty for 144


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The Attack on Sartre showing him how politics and metaphysics were not antithetical but interrelated.[77] In Les Temps Modernes it was Merleau-Ponty, well to the left of Sartre through the 1940s, who wrote the political articles, and it was Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception and Humanism and Terror who wrestled with the social and historical soft spots of existentialism. In pursuing the debate between the existentialists and the Marxists, we must follow the thinking of Merleau-Ponty through the 1940s and then watch Sartre painfully redirect his thought during the early 1950s. The movement of the existentialists toward Marxism is best illuminated from within the dialogue between Sartre and MerleauPonty. Enigmatic and withdrawn, Merleau-Ponty was not personally close to Sartre even through their war-time associations and their long years together at Les Temps Modernes. Nevertheless, the biographies of the two men were remarkably parallel: both were petty bourgeois, both attended the Ecole Normale, both joined Socialisme et liberté, both were existentialists, both heard Kojève's lectures on Hegel, both stood on the Left. Within these mutual commitments, however, they moved in opposite directions. From the Liberation until 1950, Merleau-Ponty was close to the Communists, while Sartre was not. In 1950, their positions intersected and diverged, with Merleau-Ponty moving away from Marxism and Sartre closer to it. By 1955 Merleau-Ponty was no longer engaged in Marxist politics and thought, while Sartre was just preparing for a period of almost exclusive concern with Marxist theory. In fact, after 1955, with Merleau-Ponty totally removed from the debate between existentialism and Marxism, Sartre took up where his friend left off, drastically recasting his earlier existentialism. At the moment of MerleauPonty's untimely death in 1961, Sartre had just completed the most extensive study of Marxism' by an existentialist, the Critique de la raison dialectique. But during the earlier period, in the 1940s, it was Merleau-Ponty who most clearly saw the need for a revision 77. "Merleau-Ponty," Situations, op. cit., 176.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists of existentialism. His thought at that time was a two-pronged effort to reshape existentialism in accordance with Marxist doctrine and to loosen the rigidities of French Marxism in line with existentialist thought. His hope was to build a new intellectual edifice somewhere between the two. Hence, we must examine first Merleau-Ponty's revision of existentialism, then his critique of Marxism. After that, we will follow, in another chapter, Sartre's tortured wanderings to find the position abandoned by Merleau-Ponty and build the synthetic structure of existential Marxism barely begun by his friend. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (30 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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a. Merleau-Ponty's Concept of Freedom Merleau-Ponty's effort to move between Sartre's existentialism and the Stalinist Marxism of the CP may be examined first in his concept of existential freedom in The Phenomenology of Perception of 1945. Appearing two years after Being and Nothingness, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology, his major work, was a contribution to existentialism very much in the spirit of Sartre's book, diverging from it, however, at crucial points where Sartre's dualist ontology of in-itself and for-itself rendered a social philosophy impossible. In his review of Being and Nothingness for Les Temps Modernes, Merleau-Ponty complained that "the antithesis of my view of myself and another's view of myself and the antithesis of the for-itself and the in-itself often seem to be alternatives instead of being described as the living bond and communication between one term and the other." [78] In general, he applauded Sartre's book[79] and was loyally a Sartrean at least until Les 78. Sense and Non-Sense, op. cit., 72. 79. Merleau-Ponty at this time ascribed to the basic positions of Sartre's existentialism in Being and Nothingness. In no sense could his chapter on freedom in The Phenomenology of Perception be construed as a rejection of Sartre. As evidence we can mention Merleau-Ponty's defense of existentialism during an international conference in 1945 at which Lukacs began to berate all existentialists as a reflection of l'Homme privé. Merleau-Ponty, et al., "Deux philosophies de Europe: Marxisme-existentialisme," La Nef, 3:24 (Nov., 1946) 87-98.

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The Attack on Sartre Aventures de la dialectique of 1955. Nevertheless, he deplored the absence of a social philosophy in Sartre and strove to remedy the lack with new existentialist categories. In a spirit of critical sympathy be outlined the tasks remaining for existentialism: We must analyze involvement, the moment when the subjective and objective conditions of history become bound together, how class exists before becoming aware of itself-in short, the status of the social and the phenomenon of co-existence. L'Etre et le néant does not yet offer this social theory, but it does pose the problem of the reciprocal relations between consciousness and the social world as vigorously as possible by refusing to admit of freedom outside of a situation and by making the subject in no sense a reflection . . . but a "reflecting reflection" in accordance with Marxism.[80] Sartre had conquered idealism, but not quite far enough.


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To complete the project of existentialism, The Phenomenology of Perception shifted the weight of analysis from the extremes of being and nothingness, the self and the world, subject and object, to the space in between: the intersubjective space of perception and the body. Returning to Husserl's concept of intentionality, in which a bond connected the perceiving subject and the intended object, MerleauPonty positioned himself within this bond, this ambiguous space, this inter-world. Instead of focusing his thought on the two ends of the dyad, to show their interrelation, as Sartre did, he began from the middle of the bond itself. For Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology in this sense had been practiced not only by Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological school, but also by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.[81] Most importantly, it could unite and transcend idealism and materialism. Before Merleau-Ponty, Sartre had treated the question of the body in a long section 80. Sense and Non-Sense, op. cit., 81. 81. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London, 1962) viii.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists of Being and Nothingness where he denied the Cartesian dualism of body and mind, the empiricists' "sense data" theory which reduced the body to a passive machine for processing information, and the ubiquitous tendency in the social sciences, especially psychology, of regarding the body as an inert thing. Granting the similar intentions of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, we can say that it was the latter, in his Phenomenology, who went further in presenting the active side of the body in experience, boldly affirming the carnality of the body, and, above all, verifying the presence of the body to others as a positive aspect of interactions and not, as in Sartre's account, as an embarrassing encroachment on the privacy of the Self. More than Sartre, Merleau-Ponty held up the body as the fulcrum of being-in-theworld, facilitating a reconciliation with Marx's concept of the "sensuousness" of human action. Merleau-Ponty sought to clarify precisely the ambiguity of the subject situated in an intersubjective world, whose being was equally defined by himself and by the world. Not only did the individual inject meaning into the world, but the world injected meaning into the individual, so that the individual was immediately social. Defined both by others and by himself, he was out there in the world, perceiving and being perceived through his body. There are two senses, and two only, of the word "exiseî: one exists as a thing or else one exists as a consciousness. The experience of our own body, on the other hand, reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existing. . . . The experience of one's own body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other . . . . [82]


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For Merleau-Ponty "the body is not an object," not a passive thing as in Descartes and Locke, but an active subject. In the act of communication, the body expressed meaning; it was part of the act of speaking, so that communication "is mutual confirmation of my82. Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., 198.

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The Attack on Sartre self and others." Hegel's Phenomenology resonated again in French thought.[83] The ambiguity of the perceiving-perceived body was dialectical and not dualist. My view of myself was no more real than the other's view of me, but both together, the unity of the differences, constitute my self. The individual was not a simple unity but a synthetic unity that included the world as much as it did the ego. The Phenomenology of Perception accounted especially well for the miscomprehension of this ambiguous reality: it was easy to see how the self could detach itself, privilege itself, seek autonomy within itself, but thereby reify itself as a thinking thing. To capture the ambiguity of the intersubjective self one had to allow for uncertainty and relativity in one's identity. The final chapter of The Phenomenology of Perception summarized and revised Sartre's concept of freedom in light of Merleau-Ponty's concept of ambiguity. Like Sartre, he rejected all concepts of freedom that derived from both idealist freedom and materialist determinism. [84] However, Sartre's concept of freedom did not go nearly far enough in situating the subject, because it did not place it in the ambiguous space between the intention and the intended object " . . . if the slave displays freedom as much by living in fear as by breaking his chains, then it cannot be held that there is such a thing as free action. . . . " [85] Merleau Ponty thus confirmed the Marxists' criticism that Sartre was a nihilist. The situation had to be specified more than Sartre had done by adding weight to historical and social reality. Being-with-others had to become the central structure of freedom, not a mere psychological epiphenomenon as in Being and Nothingness. 83. Ibid., 185. 84. Ibid., 434-435. Merleau-Ponty diverged most from Sartre in his posthumous, L'Visible et l'invisible, ed. C. Lefort (Paris, 1964) 75-141. This was mostly written in 1959 and only a single reference (p. 312) refers to Sartre's Critique, where, as we shall see, many of the weaknesses of Being and Nothingness are overcome. 85. Ibid., 437.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists Before an adequate account of freedom could be given: Merleau-Ponty felt it necessary to refute the Stalinists. Elaborating on hints in Sartre's thought and following Lukacs closely, Merleau-Ponty reminded the Stalinists that revolutionary class consciousness was a matter of subjectivity, not of objective conditions: . . . I am never in my heart of hearts a worker or a bourgeois, but a consciousness which freely evaluates itself as a middle class or proletarian consciousness. And, indeed, it is never the case that my objective position in the production process is sufficient to awaken class consciousness. . . . Revolt is, then, not the outcome of objective conditions, but it is rather the decision taken by the worker to will revolution that makes a proletarian of him. The evaluation of the present operates through one's free project for the future.[86] In this revision of Lukacs' concept of ascribed consciousness, existential Marxism asserted that the worker was first human and only secondly a proletarian, adding to the concept of the objective structure of the working class the human, subjective component. If dialectical materialism did not provide an understanding of history neither did Sartre. His concept of freedom comprehended only individual decisions, not group decisions: ". . . we must therefore find a phenomenological basis for statistical thought." [87] The way in which groups coalesced through the mutuality and intersubjectivity of projects; the way in which "social space begins to acquire a magnetic field . . . ," [88] drawing people together around common aims-these were the central tasks of existential Marxism and these became Sartre's purposes in 1960 with his Critique. Merleau-Ponty's attempted existential Marxism in 1945 opened the path. Existentially, revolution looked like this: 86. Ibid., 442-443. 87. Ibid., 442. 88. Ibid., 445.

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The Attack on Sartre At every pressure felt from any quarter of the social horizon, the process of regrouping becomes clearly discernible beyond ideologies and various occupations. Class is coming into being, and we say that a situation is revolutionary when the connection objectively existing between the sections of the proletariat . . . is finally experienced in perception as a common obstacle to the existence of each and every one.[89]


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What Marxism lost in Merleau-Ponty's criticism was precisely its Stalinist dogmatism, for history was no longer an external, reified engine, chugging on inexorably from revolution to revolution toward the highest stage of communism. Now that it included the freedom of the situated subject, it contained "contingency." "Such a philosophy continues to see the revolutionary event as contingent and finds the date of the revolution written on no wall nor in any metaphysical heaven." [90] What the Sartreans lost was equally profound: the image of man freely remaking his life at whim, magically transforming himself apparently without restriction or limit, a conclusion too often drawn from the reading of Being and Nothingness my freedom, though it may have the power to commit me elsewhere, has not the power to transform me instantaneously into what I decide to be." [91] It was just that abstractness in Sartre's concept of freedom ridiculed by Lefebvre and Lukacs that Merleau-Ponty modified. Being and Nothingness left the reader with the impression that history, collective time, was nothing but the sum of individual projects. Strictly speaking, for Sartre, there was a direction to the life of the individual, but no meaning, no pattern, to the life of society. In short, there was no history. MerleauPonty essayed to alter this lack, affirming that there was meaning in history. Again it was the middle ground that Merleau-Ponty 89. Ibid. 90. Sense and Non-Sense, op. cit., 81. 91. Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., 447.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists sought, a place where the individual's freedom was realized in terms of the overall movement of society and where history took on meaning through subjective decisions: there was no "truth of history independent of our projects and evaluations, which are always free . . ." but there was "an average and statistical significance of these projects." [92] Or, in another formulation of the same position: " . . . freedom modifies history only by taking up the meaning which history was offering at the moment in question. . . . "[93] The problem was to specify the valence of the second part of Marx's formula-man makes history, but only according to the conditions in which he finds himself. It was not a matter of curtailing Sartre's concept of freedom, but of filling out its context: "What then becomes of the freedom we spoke about at the outset, if this point of view is taken? I can no longer pretend to be a cipher, and to choose myself continually from the starting point of nothingness at all." 94 Merleau-Ponty wished to add a second level to Sartre's absolute freedom without detracting from its radical quality: "We choose our world and the world chooses us." By adding the second dimension, freedom was "buttressed in being," and what emerged was the full ambiguity of the perceiving-perceived body. Nor was there a question of determining which had more influence, the individual or the world: "The generality of the 'role' and of http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (35 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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the situation comes to the aid of decision, and in this exchange between the situation and the person who takes it up, it is impossible to determine precisely the 'share contributed by the situation' and 'the share contributed by freedom.'" [95] Since "we are involved in the world and with others in an inextricable tangle" [96] we make choices with full existential freedom in and through the world. In sum, The Phenomenology of Perception pioneered the directions existentialism would have to travel if it sought a social-historical philosophy and a reconciliation with Marx92. Ibid., 450. 93. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 453. 96. Ibid., 454. 94. Ibid., 452.

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The Attack on Sartre ism. Merleau-Ponty prepared Sartre's existentialism for confrontation with Marxism by removing the vestiges of Cartesianism. Armed now with definite positions about society and history, the existentialists could at least demand from the Marxists a bearing for their concept of freedom. By venturing to rethink the strong sections of Marxism (its critique of capitalist social structures) and by merging the existentialist idea of consciousness with Marxism, a give and take between the two doctrines would be possible. After educating Sartre, Merleau-Ponty's next task was to speak directly to the Marxists, to force the problematics of existentialism upon them, to encourage them to see where they had strayed from Marx and where Marx needed revision. b. Merleau-Ponty and Marxism: the Search for a Proletariat After The Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty published articles, mostly in Les Temps Modernes, on philosophy, politics, and culture which tentatively probed the possibility of an existential Marxism. Appearing in 1947 (Humanisme et terreur) and in 1948 (Sens et non-sens), these essays developed Sartre's existentialism and argued a humanist Marxism at once critical of the CP and sympathetic to it. In sharpening the, concepts of his double philosophical commitment, Merleau-Ponty was in quest of an existential proletariat that would give to Marxism a sense of subjectivity commensurate with its goal of a free society and to existentialism a sense of historical and social reality. In Humanism and Terror Merleau-Ponty developed an existential Marxist concept of history that could estimate the living hopes of revolution when Soviet society no longer seemed the vanguard of liberation. Arthur Koestler's books on Soviet Communism, Le Zéro et l'infini (translated as Darkness at http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (36 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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Noon) and Le yogi et le commissaire, which were anti-Communist tracts, served Merleau-Ponty as a point of departure. The Soviet bureaucrats' sense of history, seen through Koestler's novel, was one of complete fatal153

II. Stalinism and the Existentialists ism and determinism. Man was no more than a cog in a huge engine of time, irreversibly moving toward the "highest stage of communism." Such a view of the Marxist concept of history was held not only by Koestler the liberal, but also by the intellectuals of the French CP. "But," Merleau-Pontv countered, "who said that history is a clock-work and the individual a wheel? It was not Marx, it was Koestler." [97] History seen as a totally objective determinism, with iron laws that were to be studied scientifically, was a distortion of Marxism. Koestler had raised the question of the fate of the individual in history, showing that Soviet society was amoral because its Marxism left no space for autonomous, moral decisions. In one stroke Koestler supported the bourgeois democracies and condemned socialism, while publicizing the hideous consequences of Marxism. The Moscow Trials, fictionalized in Darkness at Noon, displayed an essential barbarism of socialist society. The spectacle of the revolutionary leader (Rubashov-Bukharin) condemned by the revolution, with the monstrous psychological perversions it revealed, was in itself enough to place a verdict of deep immorality on all socialism. If the verisimilitude of Koestler's novel were sustained, Russia would stand condemned with Nazi Germany while capitalist society would seem the -beacon of freedom. Merleau-Ponty, like Sartre, had witnessed history directly during the Resistance. From the anxiety of this extreme situation, be would interpolate a different view from Koestler's of the Moscow Trials and of history in general. Again, reason and history needed to be interrelated and not juxtaposed as antinomics in Koestler's fashion. The moments of historical action, in the heat of the battle, were marked for Merleau-Ponty by contingency and risk. The individual in an actual historical situation did not find him97. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. J. O'Neill (Boston, 1969) 23. 154

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action without any clear, objective sense of what was right. History was the total opposite of the scientist's laboratory. There was no determinism during the occupation, only the situated perspective of the implicated individual. Freedom and anxiety, as Sartre had stated, characterized historical action, not smug, clinical certainty. In the midst of history, liberal moralities, which judged action as autonomous, individual decisions matched against an eternal standard of justice, seemed abstract and empty. Making a decision to fight Hitler or collaborate with him, to join the revolution or oppose it, or, in Bukharin's case, to advocate forced collectivism or capitalism in the countryside --- in these situations the individual acted on the basis of a future that he could not know: "For we too have lived through one of those moments where history is suspended and institutions that are threatened with extinction demand fundamental decisions from men, where the risk is total because their final outcome depends upon a conjuncture not entirely foreseeable."[98] Merleau-Ponty's conclusion, which scandalized the liberal public, was that in these extreme situations there is no clear distinction between violence and morality, between terror and humanism. Koestler's moral world, "the happy universe of liberalism where one knows what one is doing and where, at least, one always keeps his conscience," [99] was a bourgeois heaven that forgot the brutal colonialism of capitalism. On the contrary, terror and humanism went hand in hand. The liberal, conveniently blind to the violence of his own society, blamed the revolutionary for introducing violence into the world. For Merleau-Ponty, such self-righteousness was outrageous: violence was always there-"all law is violence." But not all forms of violence were beneficent. The premise of Marxism was that violence was justified only if it brought about the conditions that would do away with violence. "If 98. Ibid., xvii. 99. Ibid., xxxvii.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists Marxism is a theory of violence and a justification of Terror, it brings reason out of unreason, and the violence which it legitimates should bear a sign which distinguishes it from regressive forms of violence." [100] The whole question of violence and morality in history turned, for Merleau-Ponty, on the humanism of the proletariat. Would their violence in establishing a classless society be the end of violence? In search of an answer, Merleau-Ponty took Marxism back to Hegel's master-slave relation as the "description of the fundamental relations between men." [101] History was then seen as "essentially a struggle" in which men were basically implicated with each other, affecting each other "beyond . . . deliberate thoughts and decisions down to the very manner of . . . being in the world." [102] In MerleauPonty's concept of history, men became human through acts of violence. Hopefully, the violence of the


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proletariat would further the process of man's becoming human. Everything depended on the truth or falsity of the following hypothesis: "In the name of the proletariat, Marx describes a situation such that those in it, and they alone, have the full experience of the freedom and universality which Marx considered the defining characteristics of man." [103] If history was to contain the possibility of human realization, the proletariat had to live a universal situation such that the violence it endured could be abolished only through the creation of a new society. Merleau-Ponty acknowledged, as Marx did, that the bourgeoisie had aided the process by creating this situation: it had universalized the means of production. But this oppressive dependence had to be felt subjectively as alienation before it could be translated into progressive political action. Only the subjective class consciousness of alienated workers could transform a virtual proletariat into an actual one: ". . . there is an objective premise underlying the Revolution, namely the existence of universal dependence, and a subjective premise, which is the conscious100. Ibid., 98. 101. Ibid., 102. 102. Ibid., 104. 103. Ibid., 113.

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The Attack on Sartre ness of such dependency as alienation." [104] Like Lukacs in 1923, Merleau-Ponty unified the Marxist concept of alienation with the existentialist concept of freedom: the workers must interiorize their "authentic subjectivity," make it their project, and transform their action accordingly. They "must be able to live simultaneously the separation [actual alienated labor] and union [potentially free labor] of individuals." [105] The violent mission of the proletariat was thus the only hope of humanism: "the proletarian by his mode of existence, and as a 'man of universal history' was the inheritor of liberal humanism." [106] Merleau-Ponty's existential Marxism exacerbated the dilemma of his position because he would not identify Soviet socialism as the bearer of the Marxist revolution. Nor, however, could he deny it. With news of the condemnation of Tito and the Czech trials emanating daily from Russia, the Stalinist bureaucracy could in no sense be applauded. But, given the success of the five-year plans, the prospects for Russia were not totally bleak. In the last analysis, Merleau-Ponty could not judge with assurance either for or against. The posture of the intellectual was one of grim stoicism: "Now that the liberating revolution has become problematic, it is imperative to maintain the habit of discussion, criticism, research, and the apparatus of social and political culture. We must preserve liberty while waiting for a fresh historical impulse which may allow us to engage in a popular movement without ambiguity."[107] To official Marxists, like Garaudy, Merleau-Ponty had missed "the objective content and real direction of history," which naturally was a vindication of Stalinism.[108] He was accused by the liberals and the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (39 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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non-Communist Left of contributing to a Russian takeover of France.[109] In fact, he had done neither. Rather, he had begun to develop a theory of the meaning of history 104. Ibid., 115. 105. Ibid., 117.'or, Ibid., 12 106. Ibid., 125. 107. Ibid., xxiii. 108. Mesaventures de I'anti-niarxisme (Paris, 1956) 12. 109. Martinet, "Les Intellectuels et le goût du pouvoir," La Révolution prolétarienne, 303 (May, 1947) 43.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists that stressed the ambiguity of historical direction, the contingency of historical outcomes. The sens of history came not from Stalinist science but from the meanings men implanted through their action. Historical action was filled with existential qualities of anxiety just because nothing was certain; it also contained the existential quality of freedom because it was to be made by men. The scandalous inadequacy of Marxism in accounting for regressions in history was the Pandora's Box that MerleauPonty had jarred open: men were free not to build socialism. Just as Merleau-Ponty transformed mechanical Marxist history into the subjective drama of man's selfcreation, he also modified Sartre's empty project of freedom into the intersubjective freedom of the proletariat. Bukharin, for example, opposed Stalin's policy of collectivization with equally revolutionary intentions. But since historical action implicated the Other, from the perspective of Stalin, Bukharin's intention had a different, anti-revolutionary meaning. Only the future could decide who was right, who the true revolutionary was. Yet in the present, one had to act; someone's policy had to be followed before all the results were in. At the Trials, Bukharin accepted Stalin's policy as "objectively" revolutionary, finding himself guilty. Both had "good" intentions of furthering the revolution; both were in absolute opposition; one had to be sacrificed. What Merleau-Ponty surmised from the tragedy of Bukharin was that actions had double meanings-those of our own and those of the world-and that both are equally real: . . . the true nature of tragedy appears once the same man has understood both that he cannot disavow the objective pattern of his actions, that he is what he is for others in the context of history, and yet that the motive of his actions constitutes a man's worth as he himself experiences it. In this case we no longer have a series of alternations between the inward and the external, subjectivity and objectivity, or judgment and its means but a dialectical relation, that is to say, a contradiction founded in truth, in which


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The Attack on Sartre the same man tries to realize himself on the two levels.[110] Bukharin's self-condemnation was a matter not of totalitarian brainwashing, but of the recognition of this truth. The remnants of the Cartesian cogito that haunted Being and Nothingness were here surpassed: individual action appeared in its full doubleness or ambiguity as completely intertwined in social relations. Humanism and Terror was a document of great importance in France not only because of its contribution to existential Marxism, but because it also expressed the position of many intellectuals within the CP, like Edgar Morin, who were unable openly to debate the questions raised by Koestler because this would reveal their hesitations about Stalin's Russia. Through the 1940s Merleau-Ponty presented these positions to France, especially to the leaders of the proletarian movement, hoping to influence their thinking and, through that, their praxis. His focus on intersubjectivity called for a decreased certainty of the coming of the revolution: it became one possibility and one way of making the past and future intelligible. During this time he accepted the proletarian perspective as uniquely valuable, finding through it some meaning and some non-meaning in history. As the mood in France changed and the chances of social regeneration abated, and as the CP lost its appearance of revolutionary purpose and Soviet Russia lost much of its halo, Merleau-Ponty's proletariat lost its presence on the stage of history.111 He turned increasingly away from Hegel and Marx toward Husserl and the late Heidegger, picturing the inter-world more as a multiplicity of meanings than as a unity. Ambiguity of meaning became more prominent. Contingency, which implied in the 1940s that the revolution might not happen or might take circuitous detours, came to resemble lack of direction, or even the absurdity of historical events. In 1947 his belief in the universality 110. Humanism and Terror, op. cit., 62-63. 111. Rabil, op. cit., 86.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists of the proletariat was won by separating it from the Soviet proletariat. In 1948 the proletariat's conquest of alienation was a mission it had forgotten. In 1949 the universality of the proletariat had simply failed to emerge. By 1955 Merleau-Ponty came to feel that the proletariat was incapable of a socialist http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter4.html (41 of 42) [11/12/2007 23:16:02]

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revolution and all hopes vanished.[112] In sum, although he was crucial in bringing existentialism closer to Marxism, his last years saw him retreat from this problematic situation and move toward a phenomenology concerned more with the ambiguity of social significations than with revolutionary practice. 112. Ibid., 113. 160


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Five _________________________________________________________ Existentialists in Motion: 1950-1956

1. Sartre Finds the Proletariat: 1950-1954 a. In Defense of Bolshevism During the 1950s politics played a dominant role in the thought of the existentialists. The news of the existence of labor camps in the Soviet Union and the Korean War in 1950, the arrest of FCP leadership during a protest against General Ridgway in 1952, the Henri Martin affair in 1953, Dienbienpbu in 1954, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, De Gaulle and the Algerian question in the late 1950s and early 1960s--these events were carefully scrutinized by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty for hints of the vitality of the French proletariat and the CP. It was a tense time, with continuous acrimony between Marxists and existentialists and also within the existentialist camp. Along with others Merleau-Ponty left Les Temps Modernes, and his relations with Sartre were severed, to be renewed later but on much cooler terms. There was the split between Sartre and Camus which was never repaired. There were innumerable positionings and replies, open letters and responses, even responses to responses. Sartre endured public controversies with Camus, Claude Lefort, Pierre Naville, Roger Garaudy, and others. This was a long decade for Sartre, emotionally exasperating, philosophically inconclusive, and politically confused. In these years be had finally committed himself, the writer was engage', while Merleau-Ponty's commitment waned. The tone of intellec161

II. Stalinism and the Existentialists tual changed from the 1940s, when the glow of political unity on the Left still lingered, when hopes were high for an intellectual integration of Marx and existentialism. The sense of historical direction that was so strong among intellectuals in France in the 1940s crumbled into chaotic, contradictory fragments in the 1950s. Yet, below the surface, Hegel's Phenomenology, the 1844 Manuscripts, and the early Sartre, now an integral part of the intellectuals' mental baggage, were having their effect and were soon to emerge in Sartre's Critique and in the writings of the Arguments group as synthetic, existential Marxisms. Among the existentialists, thought was stifled by a failure to look beyond daily politics. So strongly were they against the distortions of contemplative idealism that the immediate turns of events assumed a http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (1 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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disproportionately large place in their minds. They were convinced that reason could be found in history, and insisted on making sense of the course of events minute by minute even though the inscriptions before them could not be deciphered unambiguously. Capitalism was not disintegrating, Soviet socialism was not generating the New Man, revolutionary impetus could not be found in the West but in the Colonial world, the working class in industrial society was becoming integrated into the capitalist order. The daily newspaper, that morning prayer of modern man, recorded only the disjunction of history. Could history be slipping completely off its course? Was reason disappearing from human affairs? The contradictions between Marxism old or new--of Das Kapital or of the 1844 Manuscripts--and politics became more and more glaring. What was needed was a socioeconomic analysis of industrial society, and this was not forthcoming until the 1960s with studies of technological society and the new working class. Neither Sartre nor Merleau-Ponty was able to see this in the 1950s. The only time they turned to social and economic questions was in relation to the Soviet Union, whereas France and the capitalist countries in general were comprehended by them only politically. Yet the "infrastruc162

Existentialists in Motion ture" of capitalist societies was undergoing a fundamental transformation in the 1950s which was not always mirrored in the burning issues of politics. Lacking a socioeconomic perspective, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty continually looked to the traditional working class and its political arm, the CP, for signs of a universal subject of history, for a Proletariat. For one brief moment Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were united politically. In January, 1950, they jointly signed an article in Les Temps Modernes on the Soviet labor camps.[1]Wishing to avoid the cheers of the anti-Communists without supporting repressive institutions in the USSR, they admitted the existence of forced labor camps, with a population exceeding ten million. Still the Communist regime could not be condemned because "the USSR is on the whole, situated, in the balance of powers, on the side of those who are struggling against the forms of exploitation known to us. The decadence of Russian Communism does not make the class struggle a myth, 'free enterprise' possible or desirable, or the Marxist criticism in general null and void."[2] The proletariat was still a living force in history, the embodiment of dialectical reason. Within a few months the battle in Korea began and the politics of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty took off in opposite directions.[3] To Merleau-Ponty it appeared that the Soviet Union wanted war and, since "history had definitely perverted its course,"[4] he fell into silence for two years. Conversely, the war stimulated Sartre to deeper political commitment: in a short time be would no longer be a writer on the Left, preserving his independence, wary of aiding capitalism yet critical of the Communists when necessary, hoping to unite the Left around a program of socialism and freedom. Now, on the con-


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1."Les Jours de notre vie," Les Temps Modernes, 5: 51 (Jan., 1950) 1153-1168. 2. Ibid., 269 as trans. in Signs, "The USSR and the Camps." 3. "Merleau-Ponty," in Situations, 191. 4. Ibid., 190.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists trary, he, still standing outside the Party, would polemicize for the Communists. just when MerleauPonty saw the proletariat disappearing from the stage of history, Sartre discovered its presence for the first time, alive and thriving under the aegis of the CP leadership. b. Sartre, a Stalinist? Many Left-wing intellectuals were disillusioned with the Communists as a consequence of the events in 1952 surrounding a protest against General Ridgway. The government of Pinay, anxious to please the Americans, arrested several CP leaders on May 28th, among them Jacques Duclos, in an arbitrary, repressive fashion.[5] Duclos' car radio and chicken dinner were interpreted by the police as espionage equipment: a wireless "to intercept police messages" and a carrier pigeon to fly to Stalin. The Communists responded to the arrests with strikes on June 4th, but the strikes were not strongly backed by the workers. Some intellectuals concluded that the Party no longer inspired the workers' loyalty. It was against this assertion that Sartre wrote. His articles had great impact on both the Communists and the non-Communist Left. [6] Sartre was angered by the cheap gesture of the government at suppressing the Communists. The government's "sordid, childish tricks turned my stomach. . . . An anti-Communist is a rat."[7] It was at this moment that Sartre was won over to the CP. With his political passions running high, he "swore to the bourgeoisie a hatred which would only die with me."[8] When Sartre crossed his political Rubicon, he did so out of moral outrage against the hypocritical bourgeoisie that bad abrogated its own humanism, its own "principles" of "liberty, equality, fraternity," denying basic civil liberties to its citizens. 5. Cf. Alexander Werth, France: 1940-1955 (N.Y., 1966) 575-586. 6. Ibid., 523, 581-584. 7. "Merleau-Ponty," in Situations, 198. 8. Ibid.

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Existentialists in Motion Les Communistes et la paix, written about this affair, was penned "at top speed, with rage in my heart, gaily, tactlessly."[9] The crumbling of the last wall that separated the petty-bourgeois intellectual from the CP had nothing to do with any change on the part of the CP and nothing to do with any change in Sartre's politics or philosophy. What made Sartre a Communist, or as much of a Communist as he would ever be, was moral fervor, feelings of guilt against his own class. The man who until 1950 wanted to constitute a non-Communist Left now ridiculed, with all of his great literary skill, the antiStalinists on the Left. The Communists, for their part, like Jean Kanapa, who heaped no end of scorn on Sartre in 1947, now spoke of his essay as "courageous," "generous" and in essential accord with their position.[10] The Communists and the Peace mollified the deep embarrassment of the CP over the poorly supported strikes. Sartre's theme that the CP remained the genuine representative of the working class struck at the skeptics on the Left who gleefully applauded the apparent apathy of the workers for the Party. Furthermore, with the enormous prestige of Sartre behind the Communists, the government retreated in its prosecution of Duclos and the others.[11] What probably pleased the Communists most about Sartre's July articles in Les Temps Modernes was that they clearly identified the Soviet Union with the cause of peace and the United States with the interests of war. [12] More germane than the political consequences of The Communists and the Peace was the way in which Sartre began to modify his previous existentialism. Writing about the working class, be started to develop the historical and social categories that received full 9. Ibid., 199. 10. Jean Kanapa, "J. P. Sartre, Les Communistes et la paix,." La Nouvelle critique, 39 (Sept.-Oct., 1952) 23-42. 11. Werth, op. cit., 584. The impact of cultural figures on politics in France should not be underestimated. 12. Kanapa, op. cit., 26 and Sartre, The Communists and the Peace, trans. Fletcher and Berk (N.Y., 1968) 16-17.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists elaboration in Critique de la raison dialectique. In the 1952 essay he confronted two questions that altered his 1943 positions and carried him one step closer to an existential Marxism: first, the relation of individual freedom to history, and, second, the different modes of group relations. The freedom of the individual to make himself that Sartre espoused in Being and Nothingness now, after Humanism and Terror and Sense and Non-Sense, [13] became rooted more securely in the historical http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (4 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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situation: "The historical whole determines our powers at any given moment, it prescribes their limits in our field of action and our real future; it conditions our attitude toward the possible and the impossible, the real and the imaginary, what is and what should be time and space." [14] The situation was no longer the passive object of human projects; it had an intentionality of its own; it pointed toward us; it actively shaped our possibilities. Sartre now accommodated Merleau-Ponty's notion of the ambiguous body, both choosing and being chosen. Only in this double unity of acting -and being acted upon did the individual choose. "From there on, we in turn determine our relationship with others, that is to say, the meaning of our life and the value of our death: it is within this framework that our Self finally makes its appearance. . . . "[15] In the situation of the working class, the possibilities of self transformation were indeed bleak. In general, Sartre now saw many mediations between the choice of the individual and its realization; the individual worker could freely choose to abolish his alienation, but this goal might not be achieved for some time, 13. Sartre openly acknowledged his debt to Merleau-Ponty: "It was Humanism and Terror which caused me to make an important decision. . . . It gave me the push I needed to release me from my immobility." In Situations, 8 (Paris, 1972) 124. 14. The Communists and the Peace, op. cit., 80. Sartre's study appeared originally in the following issues of Les Temps Modernes: nos. 81 (July, 1952) 84-85 (Oct.-Nov., 1952) and 101 (April, 1954). The English translation also included Sartre's "Réponse à Lefort , which was printed first in no. 89 (April, 1953). 15. Ibid.

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Existentialists in Motion perhaps not until after he died. Sartre had placed a limitation on the effectiveness of the freedom of the individual, although not on its quality as absolute choice of oneself. In analyzing the working class, the existentialist discovered social obstacles to the fulfillment of authentic freedom. In order to change himself the worker had to change the situation for his entire class; this meant that Sartre had to comprehend the structure of interrelationships that constituted the working class. He came to grasp vaguely the social reality of capitalism. Under capitalism the worker existed as a "mass," "isolated," "abandoned," connected with other workers only "mechanically."[16] Sartre's comprehension of the modes of interactions among the working class was the germ of his later concept of serialization. The hidden truth of capitalist society, however, was that the bourgeoisie was more highly integrated than the proletariat. "The bourgeois is basically integrated; solitude is the game he plays; the worker is basically solitary; politics is his need." [17] Each of the freedoms of capitalist ideology had reference to an "atomized society," in which each individual exercised his right to vote, to speak freely, and so forth, in total isolation. The negative freedom of liberalism rendered ineffective the workers' need to http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (5 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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collectivize the means of production because the bourgeoisie was integrated as a group through its command of the highly structured economic system. Significantly, Sartre's critique of bourgeois democracy was the one argument in The Communists and the Peace that Kanapa, the Communist, dismissed, [18] revealing the attachment of the CP to the Fourth Republic. Sartre's argument that the CP was the vehicle of the workers' transcendence of bourgeois democracy was gainsaid by the CP itself. Sartre's chief insight in 1952 was that in order to overcome capitalism the working 16. Ibid., 125. 17. Ibid., 124 and 3-32. 18. Kanapa, op. cit., 39.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists class had first to overcome its own atomization. Mechanical unity had to become organic unity. What shaped the masses of workers into proletarians was just the organic unity of their collective project to overcome alienation. To the degree that the worker participated in the freedoms of bourgeois society he confirmed his alienation in the mass; [19] when he voted or made a labor contract he supported a mechanical unity with others, he legitimized a social system based on private property. In his situation within capitalist society, the only project the worker could take on that would further his self-realization, his substantial freedom, was that of dismantling the apparatus of social atomization: "The masses are the object of history: they never act by themselves, and every action of the working class requires that they begin by suppressing themselves as masses in order to accede to the elementary forms of collective life."[20] Sartre was now ready to argue for the CP: only through the Party could the worker find a type of unity that transcended atomization. the Party could the worker find a type of unthat transcended atomization. With the concepts of mechanical and organic social interactions Sartre began his meditation on the problem of social classes. The concept of class was, of course, one of the central doctrines of Marx and one that was repeatedly challenged by liberal sociologists. To Marxists, capitalist society was organized in groups based on relationships to the means of production. Liberals answered that social position depended upon a number of status factors, the primary one being income. Because the income of the lower classes was rising in the 1950s, the antagonism between the haves and the have-nots was abating; the class struggle was, in this sense, disappearing. Against the liberal contention, official Marxists piously quoted Marx's law of the progressive pauperization of the working class under capitalism. Until Marxists acknowledged the material success of capitalism they could not begin to refute the liberals. In The Communists and the Peace Sartre argued against both positions. Liberal sociologists like http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (6 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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Gurvitch, Halbwachs, and Sorokin all characterized social classes mech19. Sartre, op. cit., 122. 20. Ibid., 207.

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Existentialists in Motion anically, viewing them as an "identity" of particulars, as a "collection" of thing-like atoms. [21] What these theories failed to express was the "unity" of a class, the vital, interior connection of individuals. Thus, rather than join the debate between liberals and Marxists on the old grounds, the existentialist wanted to show the subjective element of social classes. For Sartre, a social group became a class only when the individuals interiorized a common project and captured their individual identity in the common destiny of the group. It was not enough to list external criteria like income, relation to means of production, or status in order to constitute a historical class. A class was not a collection of things, but a human group that constituted itself, that actively organized itself into a commonality: "It is movement which holds together the separated elements; the class is a system in motion: if it stopped, the individuals would revert to their inertia and to their isolation. This movement, directed, intentional and practical, requires an organization . . . a class organizes itself." [22] Sartre's focus on the dramatic subjectivity of social categories was typical of the existentialists' approach to enriching Marxist social theory. What he did not account for at all in 1952 was the fact that most social interactions did not include a dramatic commonality of projects. Most often, inertia characterized society. The scandalous aspect of Sartre's concept of class was his promotion of the CP to the role of unifier of the "collection" of individual workers. For the workers, the leap from atomization to class unity was effected through the magic of the Party, within which they were "unified" into a class, realizing their subjective, intentional, creative nature. 23 Under the leadership of the Party, the individual worker acted for humanity, Sartre proclaimed, returning to his theme of the universality of the individual project from "Ex21. Ibid., 93. 22. Ibid., 98. 23. Ibid., 128-131.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists ism is a Humanism": "That the proletariat is the carrier of human values is not to be doubted; what it demands for itself it must necessarily claim for all."[24] The identification of the proletariat under the CP with humanity left no room for critically examining the Party's particular acts or decisions. Hence when the CP, in 1956, would support the Russian invasion of Hungary, it would have to be said to be acting in the interests of all men. Furthermore, with this notion of class unity, Sartre denied the Marxist proposition that capitalism unified the workers in the process of production through the division of labor; he asserted instead that unity in the workplace was not sufficient to mold the workers into a class. At best the social aspect of labor was an external condition for class, part of the in-itself that shaped the workers into a passive collectivity. Although Sartre failed to accord the activity of work its rightful prominence, he was admitting the achievement of 20th-century capitalism: its destruction of the day-today solidarity of workers in the factories. Sartre was now significantly qualifying his individualism: the worker could not achieve his goal alone; individually his freedom was impotent because it was a matter of changing the mode of social interactions.[25] Individual, "granular" projects to end alienation had a historical voice only through the politics of the Party. Close to Lenin's view in What is to Be Done? as well as to that of Kautsky, Sartre argued that the worker's interest in higher pay became a political interest connected to the overthrow of capitalism only when the Party struggled against the capitalists. The Party was the working class; it incarnated the agency of the workers as proletarians and through it alone did the workers become the subjects of history, the universal class of Marx. [26] When a worker joined the Party he enacted a mutuality of recognition that transcended solipsism. Here Sartre went beyond his concept of the Other as external 24. Ibid., 154n. 25. Ibid., 127. 26. Ibid., 266.

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Existentialists in Motion beyond his concept of the Other as external threat, as the "look" in Being and Nothingness: . . . what I imitate in my neighbor is not the Other, it is myself become my own object; I do not repeat his act because he did it, but because I, in him, have just done it. In short, I must perceive his situation and his


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needs as my needs in such a manner that his behavior appears to me outside like a project springing forth from my head; the imitator and the imitated are at one and the same time interchangeable and separated, and imitative behavior is the result of a dialectic of identity and of exteriority. . . . [27] Sartre had learned from Merleau-Ponty: only with an interaction could the individual make authentic projects; relating to the Other was not a fall from the grace of individuality but the true unity of reciprocity. The same CP, with the same ideology that Sartre dismissed in 1946 as determinist, was now extolled as the embodiment of the freedom of the working class. It did not matter that the workers did not enthusiastically support the strike of June 4th; their apathy did not change the situation one iota. It was understandable to Sartre that the workers., weighed down, fatigued by the oppression of capitalism, would not rise to their historical task on every occasion. Their fate remained in the bands of the CP, as did the fate of all France. Only two years before, in 1950, Sartre had presented the Stalinist bureaucracy as the destroyer of revolutionary subjectivity. At that time, in his preface to Louis Dalmas' Le Communisme Yougoslave he charged the Stalinists with failing to lead the masses toward liberation. After the revolution, the spontaneous needs of the masses were opposed to the problems of modernization, requiring the leadership to inspire a new subjectivity, a new dedication, for the building of socialism. [28] The Leninist party 27. Ibid., 207-208. 28. J. P. Sartre, Préface in Louis Dalmas, Le Communisme Yougoslave (Paris, 1950) xiv, xvi, xx-xxi, xxv.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists in Russia, led by Stalin, detached itself from the masses, relying instead on the bureaucracy, and used repression rather than education to accomplish its goals. Now, in 1952, Sartre ascribed to the French counterpart of Stalin's Party this same capacity for revolutionary subjectivity. The irony of Sartre's position in The Communists and the Peace was that he had advanced his social philosophy while regressing in his politics. One could argue, as he did in the 1960s, [29] the same social theory without concluding that the CP, as it was then constituted, was the only viable project for the workers. Such a stance was taken by Claude Lefort of Socialisme ou Barbarie, an ex-Trotskyist and a friend of Merleau-Ponty, in his rejoinder to the first two parts of The Communists and the Peace which was printed in Les Temps Modernes in 1953 along with Sartre's reply. Lefort admonished Sartre for reducing the prospects of communism to the Stalinist Party. Stalinism was http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (9 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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bureaucratic; it limited the workers to passivity with its strict discipline and hierarchy. [30] Stalinism "tacitly collaborated with the bourgeoisie," and could not lead the working class to revolution. By adhering to the Stalinist Party, Sartre was forced into the false antithesis of vanguard party versus spontaneity of the workers. [31] When he postulated "the Party as the only subject of praxis," he suppressed the dialectical interaction of work and politics, of the workers and their leadership.[32] His Stalinism compelled him to overlook the true revolutionary dialectic of the workers actively engaged in the making of policies. Consequently Sartre merely elevated the 29. In a conversation with Burnier, Sartre criticized The Communists and the Peace for not raising the question of the internal structure of the Party: " . . . is it possible to conceive of democracy in the Party outside of revolutionary moments? . . . This reflection on the notion of legitimacy is what was lacking in The Communists and the Peace. . . . In France today, the Party itself has become serial." In Contat, op. cit., 275-276. 30. "Le Marxisme et Sartre," Les Temps Modernes, 8:89 (March, 1953) 1556. 31. Ibid., 1561. 32. Ibid., 1568.

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Existentialists in Motion vated the pragmatic success of the Party in retaining the allegiance of a good proportion of the workers into a matter of legitimate principle. In the last analysis his position was a "political empiricism" that justified the unfortunate fact of the Party's success. Sartre's "Réponse à Lefort" hardly extricated him from the predicament. As long as one advocated Stalinism, there was no way out of the dualism of passive, "mechanical" masses of workers in their act of production versus active, "Unified" proletarians politically supporting the CP. Sartre could not refute the charge that be had misconstrued Marx's concept of class by detaching the productive activity of the workers from political action. [33] He would have to show, Lefort maintained, that in the very process of production the workers were not only isolated but unified and mutually dependent, producing socially and cooperatively; that the transcending project of revolution was "chosen" by workers from within this situation; and that the politics developed by the workers was intimately tied to their work context. Since the Stalinist Party ruptured the bond between the productive activity of the workers and their politics, it could not be the authentic "subject" of the proletariat. The Communists and the Peace won Sartre the friendship of the French Communists, a friendship he already enjoyed with Italian Communists. [34] He now shared the platform with Communists at rallies and meetings; Simone de Beauvoir gave exclusive interviews to the Communist press; and Sartre refused permission for an Austrian production of Dirty Hands because it shed a bad light on Communists. After a trip to Russia, he euphorically reported "The freedom to criticize is total in Russia" and "Whatever road France takes must not contradict the way of Russia." [35] From 1952 until http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (10 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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the Hungarian invasion of 1956, the existentialist was comfortably committed. 33. Ibid., 1543. 34. Burnier, op. cit., 87. 35. Ibid., 89.

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2. Merleau-Ponty on Sartre's Dialectical Adventures Merleau-Ponty's skepticism about Marxism only deepened when Sartre aligned himself with the CP. The erstwhile political editor of Les Temps Modernes was chagrined by his friend's newest adventures in politics. Disenchanted now with Marxism and with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty wrote Les Aventures de la dialectique in 1955 to settle his accounts with Communism and to reprimand Sartre for his errors. Chapters on Max, Weber, Lukacs, Lenin, and Trotsky were followed by a long section on Sartre, comprising half the book. "Sartre and Ultra-Bolshevism" was a painstaking refutation of Sartre's discovery of the proletariat in the bosom of the CP. Now, however, the tables were turned, and the Communist intellectuals, in their riposte to Les Aventures de la dialectique, called Les Mèsaventures de l'antimarxisme, defended Sartre against Merleau-Ponty. [36] Les Aventures de la dialectique was important for the development of an existential Marxism because in it Merleau-Ponty specified the inability of Sartre's attempt in The Communists and the Peace to join concepts of history and society with his concept of radical freedom. Merleau-Ponty interpreted The Communists and the Peace as Sartre's attempt to "annex history onto his philosophy of freedom and the other."[37] Carefully, deliberately, Merleau-Ponty took Sartre's concepts from Being and Nothingness and matched them against those in The Communists and the Peace. In each case be demonstrated that Sartre 36. Garaudy, et al., Mèsaventures de l'anti-marxisme (Paris, 1956). Cf. also Henri Lefebvre's review "M. Merleau-Ponty et la philosophie de l'ambiguité," La Pensée 68 (July-August, 1956) 44-58 and 73 (May, 1957) 3752. Catholics and liberals were more favorable to Les Aventures de la dialectique: for a liberal review Jean Ullmo, "Une étape de la pensée politique," Critique, 11:98 (July, 1955) 625-643 and for a Jesuit review, JeanMarie Le Blond, "Le Sens de l'histoire et l'action politique," Etudes (Nov., 1955) 209-219. 37. Les Aventures de la dialectique (Paris, 1955) 216.

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Existentialists in Motion had failed to unite his concept of radical freedom with a Marxist concept of history and society. The chief reason for Sartre's failure was his dualistic ontology: the world was composed of pure consciousness and opaque facts, without the all-important mediations. "The question is if, as Sartre says, there are only men and things, or also the interworld that we call history?"[38] Sartre was still trapped in the Cartesian cogito, viewing historical action as no more than the "action of persons," nothing but a collection of individual "projects."[39] Sartre, le bon cartésien, limited history to a "plurality of subjects, but no intersubjectivity. . . ."[40] When Simone de Beauvoir reviewed Les Aventures de la dialectique for Les Temps Modernes she justifiably took exception to Merleau-Ponty's oversimplification of Sartre's dualism: in fact, Sartre had given some recognition to "that interworld between men and things." [41] The only question was whether Sartre adequately conceptualized the interworld and here Merleau-Ponty was more convincing. When it came to comprehending the action of the proletariat or the relation of the workers to the Party, Sartre resorted to an abstract concept of the free actions of individuals. Relations among workers were no more than the "magic of the look," claimed Merleau-Ponty, haunting Sartre unfairly with Lefebvre's criticism of Being and Nothingness.[42] At bottom, Sartre was stuck in a Cartesian concept of consciousness, vitiating any attempt to account for historical action: Perhaps it is finally the notion of consciousness as pure power to signify, as centrifugal movement without opacity, without inertia, that rejects the signified, history and the social, reducing them to a series of instantaneous sights, subordinating doing to seeing, and 38. Ibid., 269. 39. Ibid., 196, 213. 40. Ibid., 275. 4l. Simone de Beauvoir, "Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-Sartrisme," Les Temps Modernes 10:114-115 (June-July, 1955) 2078. 42. Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., 207.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists and reducing, finally, action to "manifestation" or to "sympathy" . . . [43] Merleau-Ponty reiterated his perennial criticism of Sartre: he did not elucidate the "interworld" of the ambiguous body, the perceived-perceiver, his concept of intentionality remained that of pure http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (12 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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consciousness rather than the "carnal intersubjectivity" that Merleau-Ponty strove to articulate. [44] To Merleau-Ponty, the Marxist side of Sartre's existential Marxism was as poorly developed in The Communists and the Peace as it was in "Materialism and Revolution."[45] Marxism articulated historical totalities at the point of social interactions, revealing capitalist relations as the confusion of men and things. For Marxists, praxis was the effort to overcome this alienation within the burden of these relationships. Sartre, conversely, quickly translated praxis into his old notion of radical freedom [46] in which the CP became the free subject creating revolutionary action from nothing.[47] MerleauPonty gave Sartre no credit for his new concepts of group interaction that distinguished mechanical and organic relations. Instead be perceived a philosophical necessity for Sartre in finding the Party as a pure subject, totally detached from the working class. Since Sartre needed to specify a social agent whose action was free, be was forced to consider the CP as it was then constituted as the vehicle of revolution. Collapsing the Proletariat into the Party was the consequence of Sartre's failure to articulate the mediations between the situation and consciousness. [48] Sartre's "ultra-bolshevism" was explained through his failure to articulate an existential Marxism. Philosophically, Sartre blindly steered a course through the Scylla of replacing Marxist ideas with his own from Being and Nothingness and the Charybdis of adopting the CP's version of Marxism. Either way, he lost.[49] For example, when he considered the 43. Ibid., 267. 44 Signs, op. cit., 173. 45 Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la dialectique, 169. 46 Ibid., 178. 47 Ibid., 138, 145, 188. 48 Ibid., 142, 155. 49 Ibid., 181.

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Existentialists in Motion Party the only source of historical action for the working class, he was simply repeating the CP's view of itself. When he described the working class as completely atomized, he was superimposing on Marxism the dualism of self and other from Being and Nothingness. Each Sartrean worker faced the hostile capitalist world alone as a Cartesian, finding the world a dense, impenetrable Other. For Merleau-Ponty, true Marxism had solved this question by denying that the world was Other. Marx demonstrated that man had penetrated the world completely, ending dualism in practice. For Marx, ". . . man was diffused everywhere, inscribed on all the walls, in all the social mechanisms be had fabricated."[50] Nowhere was man confronted by an absolute Other, by a pure thing or in-itself; everything bore the traces of human action. If, instead of focusing on the isolated worker confronting the world, Sartre had sought the interworld of the worker's relationships he would not have ended with the facile opposition of free http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (13 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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Party versus inert working class. The task of existential Marxism was to add subjectivity to the Marxist notion of social interaction, [51] a task Sartre did not achieve. Merleau-Ponty was far too harsh: Sartre bad begun to underline the reciprocity of individuals in collective projects. Merleau-Ponty's desire to refute Sartre's Stalinism led him to throw out the genuine advances Sartre had made toward a social theory, advances that relied heavily on Merleau-Ponty's previous works. The philosopher of ambiguity was chiefly concerned with reminding Sartre that all had not gone well for Marxism, that the Stalinists were not close to socialism, and the crisis of Marxism could be resolved only by accounting for the "inertia" of history, for the failure of the revolution: "Both the Marxism of the young Marx and the 'Western' Marxism of 1923 [a reference to History and Class Consciousness] lacked the means of expressing the inertia of infrastructures, the resistance of economic and even natural conditions, the binding of 50 Ibid., 192 51 Ibid., 58.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists 'personal relations' in 'things.' "[52] In short, Marxism could not account for regressions in history. By 1960, in the Critique, Sartre hoped to satisfy Merleau-Ponty's objections by elucidating the region of the "practico-inert," the sedimentation of human actions into social structures that lost their human quality and resisted the freedom of individuals and groups. For his own part, Merleau-Ponty had practically given up hope for socialism and freedom. It was necessary to recognize as no one on the Left was willing to do that "the USSR has ceased to be the fatherland of the revolution." [53] Only the development of a non-Communist Left could carry forward the revolution and Merleau-Ponty resigned himself to an "a-communism." Sartre's stance was not viable: "To be a Communist from the outside, to impose on Communism a look which comes from outside and which is not hostile . . . "[54]--this would have no effect because its premise was free, critical thought, a premise denied by the Party. In this predicament the Left would have to rely on the only institution that offered even a "Minimum of opposition and truth," the liberal Parliament. The trauma of Korea still obsessed Merleau-Ponty as be slid deeper and deeper into skepticism. Writing now for L'Express, he pinned his slender hopes on Mendes-France and "La Nouvelle Gauche" of Bourdet and Gilles Martinet, the latter taking a somewhat technocratic attitude toward social change. [55] La Nouvelle Gauche, with its organ France Observateur, was a short-lived attempt in the 1950s to unify men of the Resistance who were either neutralists or anti-colonialists and without a political party. It bad some influence on the Christian Left. From Les Aventures de la dialectique until his death in 1961 the only optimism MerleauPonty would indulge himself was a dream of the contingent reemergence of the Proletariat in the distant


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future: "Perhaps 52 Ibid., 88. 53 Ibid., 299. 54 Ibid., 240. 55 De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 318.

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Existentialists in Motion incredible detours, the proletariat will rediscover its role as the universal class, and will once more take over that universal Marxist criticism which for the moment has no historical impact or bearing." [56] For all his influence on political thought, Merleau-Ponty never found a place in the French political scene. 3. Polemics with Pierre Naville A relatively minor intellectual incident in early 1956 disclosed Sartre's hesitations about the CP at a time when he was closest to it. Pierre Hervé, a Communist who edited Action in the 1940s, published La Révolution et les fétiches in 1956, the first criticism of the Party by one of its members since Stalin's death.[57] He hoped to incite discussion and reform; for his trouble, be was expelled. Sartre reviewed the book in the February, 1956, issue of Les Temps Modernes.[58] He agreed with the Communist reviewer, Guy Besse, who lambasted Hervé's book for its idealism and its reformism, adding that the book should have circulated within the CP to avoid unfavorable publicity from the Right. Sartre charged that the book, though intellectually weak and of dubious political motivation, nonetheless deserved consideration by Hervéís comrades. The fact that the CP refused it an open discussion was indicative of the dogmatism of Communist intellectuals. It disturbed Sartre that "Marxism was arrested in France." [59] As for Hervé, he persisted in his criticism of the CP--along with Pierre Fougeyrollas who later joined the Arguments group--in a short lived periodical, La Nouvelle Réforme. Finally, Hervé joined the Socialist Party. To Sartre, the Communists ascribed to Marxism the powers of making reality intellig56 Signs, op. cit., 8. 57 De Beauvoir, op. cit., 341. 58 "La Réformisme et les fétiches," Les Temps Modernes (Feb., 1956) 1153-1164. 59 Ibid., 1163.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists ible, of comprehending not only society but also the individual. The French Communists, however, had done nothing to carry out this intellectual and cultural project; their minds were closed. Sartre regretted the absence of a "living Marxism," probably thinking that a revolutionary movement without intellectual vitality was doomed, but not saying this for fear of taunts about idealism. He noted that marxisants scholars in many fields, Georges Lefebvre in history, Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, Pierre Francastle in art history, used Marxism profitably without belonging to the CP. Sartre was dismayed: be was an intellectual advocating a Party that discouraged independent thought. Sartre's uneasiness was exacerbated by Pierre Naville, who answered the Les Temps Modernes piece in L'Observateur and then extended his remarks about Sartre in a pamphlet, L'intellectuel communiste: à propos de J.-P. Sartre.[60] Naville had long been a leading theorist in the Trotskyist movement. Before the war he edited La Verité, an official organ of the Fourth International in France. Even after he left that movement, after the war, he remained an important Marxist theorist. Yet his writings often slid into the same mechanical reductionism as that of his enemies in the CP. In this very effective little pamphlet of 1956, Naville caustically drew attention to Sartre's ambiguous stance as a partisan of the CP and as an independent intellectual.[61] To the Trotskyist, the ambiguity was an unstable synthesis that was resolved only in Sartre's "subservience" to the Stalinists. Hervé, Naville pointed out, had criticized the bureaucratic nature of the Party--a favorite Trotskyist charge--but Sartre's equivocations could not go this far. Everything Sartre wrote, especially The Communists and the Peace, ended in an apology for the CP. The ambiguity deepened and became hypocrisy, he continued, once it was realized that Sartre took this position only to gain the confidence of the Stalinist intellectuals so that be could initiate Party reform. Yet his position prevented him from having that effect. 60 (Paris, 1956). 61 Ibid., 9.

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Existentialists in Motion The function of the intellectual, Naville urged, either in the Party or close to it, could only be to criticize the Party, to judge continually the political acts of the Party against its Marxist philosophy. And Sartre, of course, knew this: why else would he guard his independence so scrupulously? Yet Sartre penned nothing but encomiums of the infallible CP. Naville went further, arguing that the corpus of Sartre's writings revealed the same ambiguity that was found in his relations with the CP: as far back as Being and Nothingness Sartre's thought floundered on the relation of "creation and politics": the former was


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"useless" but free, while the latter was "useful" and unfree. Sartre wanted "commitment" but also the role of "witness," of gadfly and critic. [62] His career swung from pole to pole without resolution: from joining the RDR and advocating Titoism to the flirtation with the CP, becoming its watchdog. In the end, Sartre "forbids himself the only task of value-to restore the true function of the intellectual confronting revolutionary tasks." [63] Sartre was a "crypto-Stalinist" who appeared, once the masks were torn away, as nothing more than a confused idealist. "There is a secret relation," Naville hissed, "between the affirmation of unconditional subjectivity and the assurance that whatever happens must happen. This relation is ubiquitous in the idealist tradition . . . "[64] Sartre wanted to have his cake and eat it too: for him, "Marxism is arrested and at the same time, the Communist Party is infallible; charming existential psychoanalysis!"[65] Naville had touched a sensitive nerve; Sartre's reply was a compound of irritation and wounded feelings. [66] The Trotskyist and former Surrealist had indeed uncovered an inner contradiction in Sartre's thought and politics. The importance of the controversy rests with the abrupt shift Sartre took immediately following the polemic: from 1956 on 62 Ibid., 33-34. 63 Ibid., 20. 64 Ibid., 40. 65 Ibid., 57. 66 "Réponse à Pierre Naville," Les Temps Modernes, 11:123 (March-April, 1956) 1510ff.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists he would remain at a distance from the French CP while attempting to reform its bureaucratic nature and critically reexamining Marxist thought. The invasion of Hungary later in 1956 provided him with the occasion for a break. From 1956 until May, 1968, he reconciled himself to the position of an independent intellectual and threw himself fully into the task of regenerating Marxism. In 1957 and 1958 be initiated relations with Polish intellectuals to aid the destruction of Stalinism there.[67] Concurrently he immersed himself in Marxist thought, with the goal of seriously defining its limits, a task that resulted in the Critique of 1960. After 1956 there was a degree of unity to Sartre's thought and politics that he had not found before. Back in 1956, the "Reply to Naville" was the last gesture of Sartre's period of partisanship with the CP, his last Stalinist gasp. The first section of the article, filled with maudlin sentimentality, rebuked Naville for stabbing him in the back. Sartre did not think he deserved the treatment dished out by a companion and friend on the Left who had always enjoyed a welcome in the pages of Les Temps Modernes. He


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posed as the injured innocent who was "irritated" and "hurt." [68] " Naville's article was damned for its impoliteness: "?I always thought that we should maintain between ourselves, even in the liveliest discussions, a tone of courtesy and camaraderie?"[69] Did not Naville see that the arrest of Marxism was "temporary, that the CP deserved sympathy for attempting to remain revolutionary while struggling for reformist demands at a time when the revolution was only a distant possibility . . . [70] There was an amusing irony amidst all this heat: Naville had done to Sartre what Hervé had done to the Communists--given public criticism. Sartre, defending Hervé for opening up discussion, was oblivious to the similar purposes in Naville's pamphlet. Sartre's defensiveness to criticism implied that, although the CP should be brought to 67 Burnier, op. cit., 115-116. 68 "Réponse à Pierre Naville," op. cit., 1521. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 1514.

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Existentialists in Motion task as part of an open atmosphere of serious debate, his own thought was not likewise subject to argument. 4. The Hungarian Invasion: Skepticism or Stoicism Sartre and Merleau-Ponty met at an international conference in Venice in 1956 and found they could work together even with their disagreements about the relation of culture to society. [71] Aware of the distance that divided them, they continued to see one another until Merleau-Ponty's death in 1961. Yet nothing clarifies better the separate paths the existentialists had taken since 1950 than their responses to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Writing for L'Express in November, right after the invasion,, Merleau-Ponty had become a skeptic who engaged in political journalism while maintaining a posture of abstention. His article "On DeStalinization" brought home the verdict that the Russian experience of socialism was a failure. The existing forms of communism no longer evoked special support against the other camp. ". . . the only correct attitude is to see communism relatively as a fact without any special privilege, as an undertaking, preyed upon by its own contradiction. . . . Communism as a universal model, as the future of mankind, has proved abortive."[72] The existentialist was still a humanist, but a skeptical humanist who found little substantiation for his ideas in politics.


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For Sartre too the Hungarian invasion sparked a change, although in a different direction. He now broke completely with his Communist friends. [73] Like Merleau-Ponty, he had been enmeshed in the assumption that Russia was the vehicle of man's hopes, that the Western capitalist nations were its enemy, and that any position not specifically 71 "Rencontre Est-ouest à Venise," Comprendre, 16 (Sept., 1956) 212-216, 219, 247, 263-264, 289-290. 72 "On De-Stalinization," Signs, op. cit., 303. 73 De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 356-360.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists in support of the former redounded to the aid of the latter. The events of October and November, 1956, released Sartre from this web. It was precisely this reasoning on the part of the Communist intellectuals in France that made any evaluation of Soviet policy impossible since it called for the immediate certification of the Party's position. What was now in question was Sartre's stance in The Communists and the Peace that the Party was always right.[74] The Ghost of Stalin presented an extended socio-historical analysis of the Hungarian invasion, the course of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe, and concluded with a judgment about the future of deStalinization and, more importantly, the future politics of the FCP. Sartre practiced his existential Marxist history, often brilliantly, to highlight the convergence of the pressures of the situation with the choices of individuals. Penetrating, lucid,. The Ghost of Stalin recalls other great examples of contemporary history like Marx's studies of 1848, Louis Napoleon, and the Commune of 1871. In Sartre's analysis the Hungarian rebels could not simply be labeled agents of foreign capitalism, as the CP piously incanted. Nor could Russian socialism be flippantly chalked off as a nightmare, a huge mistake, as liberals and even Merleau-Ponty pretended. Sartre imagined that all was not yet lost for the de-Stalinization of Russia because the present contradictions there required democratization as the only available solution.[75] The leadership had to develop faith in the masses and renew its connections with them in the process of creating consumer industries. Sartre did not see that consumer industries, like those in the United States, could be developed from above, undemocratically, through the manipulations of advertising. Still, he was cautious. The 74 "Le Fantôme de Staline," Les Temps Modernes, 129, 130, 131 (Nov., Dec., 1956 and Jan., 1957) trans. as The Ghost of Stalin by Fletcher (N.Y., 1968) 22-23. 75 Ibid., 103.


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Existentialists in Motion success of democracy in Russia was not by any means assured, because in eliminating exploitation the Soviet Union had developed new forms of alienation. [76] The cult of personality and the bureaucracy dialectically reinforced each other, detaching the direction of society from the influence of the masses. Institutions were erected in the bard process of industrialization that had to be dismantled. Where Merleau-Ponty erred in his L'Express article was precisely in taking the stance he bad condemned in Sartre: in standing outside the situation, at a non-existent point of objectivity. Seen from within, the chances of renovation in Russia were not bright, but they were not totally absent either. [77] Despite Stalin, Russia was still socialist. The essential question for Sartre--and this is where his political thinking progressed-was not the Soviet Union and its fate but the French CP and the chances for socialism in France. Regardless of events in Russia, the direction of the Party in France had to be examined separately, and it was to France that Sartre now limited the scope of his influence. "But there is in France a Party . . . . That Party is our business . . . we have all been its fellow travelers; it is on it that we must, that we can effectively act."[78] The only hope for France lay in a "Popular Front" of Socialists and Communists. For this to happen, the CP had to extricate itself from its dependence on the Soviet Union, becoming a truly French party that formulated its goals in terms of the French working class, then "decompressing" its authority by democratizing its bureaucratic structure. Socialists could thereafter seize power without violence through the vote. These conclusions opened up matters immeasurably for Sartre. His politics could now be geared to a socio-historical analysis of France; he could estimate from a distance the direction of the CP, leaving open the possibility of abandoning it at an appropriate moment; above all, with good conscience, he could begin the important job of existent76 Ibid., 115, 70-71. 77 Ibid., 119, Cf. also 6-7. 78 Ibid., 122. 79 Ibid., 140-141.

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ializing Marxism. Immediately after The Ghost of Stalin, Sartre wrote, for a Polish periodical, "Marxism and Existentialism," the first statement of a new project in which he would carefully define the relationship between the two theories, indicating the historical nature and role of existentialism. His old stoicism would now add a decidedly optimistic tinge: although the revolution was not around the corner, the obstructed path could be clearly understood, the obstacles could be named, so that hope for a clear path could be soberly assessed and wholeheartedly attempted. The writer and the activist, the man of culture and the man of politics, were united, committed to a project that was at once liberating and authentic. Politically, the road was opened for Sartre's highly effective protests in favor of the Algerian FLN in the late 1950s and early 1960s; in fact Les Temps Modernes was seized four times in Algeria in 1957. [80] When Sartre took great risks and supported his friend François Jeanson upon his arrest for leading a pro-Algerian group in France, the existentialist had placed himself to the left of the Communists on the Colonial question. Standing with Jeanson, who was considered by many a traitor, Sartre had taken an independent position that aided in revitalizing Marxist politics. Indicative of the new political complexion, it was the SFIO and the CP who were dragging their feet, finally to come round to the initiative of Sartre, who suffered numerous bomb threats by the OAS.[81] What is more, the vanguard position of Sartre's existential Marxism on the Algerian issue came just at the moment when the student movement was consolidating into a New Left. [82] The positions of Les Temps Modernes became the political and theoretical direction of the student movement, even of the UEC, the youth organization of the Communist Party.[83] The New Left student movement looked to Sartre for intellectual leadership, and Les Temps Modernes began to place the students, not the Leninist Party, in 80 Burnier, op. cit., 114. 81 Ibid., 126. 82 R. Johnson, op. cit., 39. 83 Ibid., 49.

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Existentialists in Motion the role of revolutionary vanguard.[84] Leaders of the student movement, Kravetz, Peninou, and Griset, wrote for Les Temps Modernes. The important political strategy developed by André Gorz in Strategy for Labor was worked out during this period with Kravetz and the others. So deep and widespread was Sartre's prestige among radical youth that Garaudy complained to him on behalf of the CP: "you are preventing people from coming to us. . . ." [85] But it was not until May, 1968, that Sartre's existential Marxism would show its full powers of interpreting history. 5. The Confrontation with Liberalism http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (21 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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Some perspective on the prospects of existential Marxism can be gained from the comments of Albert Camus and Raymond Aron, two prominent liberal social theorists. Both had been friends of Sartre, Aron since the years at the Ecole Normale and Camus since the Resistance. Camus was regarded by many as a fellow existentialist and Aron was on the original editorial board of Les Temps Modernes. Both split with Sartre over the question of his pro-Communism. Although it is not in strict chronological sequence, a discussion of liberalism is appropriate here because Camus and Aron maintained a consistent skepticism about existential Marxism throughout the period we have been discussing. The purpose of this section is not to assess the thought of Camus and Aron but to illuminate further Sartre's Marxism. The friendship of Sartre and Camus was broken with much noise and gossip over the publication of L'Homme revolté in 1951. During the trying moments of 1952, François Jeanson wrote a critical review of Camus' book which elicited a hostile letter from the author to Sartre, followed by Sartre's equally nasty reply. When the shouting stopped, 84 Ibid., 39. 85 Michel-Antoine Burnier, Choice of Action, trans. B. Murchland (N.Y., 1968) 168.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists Sartre and Camus were no longer on speaking terms and their animosity continued until Camus' death in 1960. From his earlier books, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus was known as a philosopher of the absurd and was grouped with the existentialists even though he himself denied the intellectual association. In both the novel and the essay, Camus, accepting the death of God, doubted that human life had any meaning. Now, in The Rebel, Camus suggested that human life was given a value by the act of the oppressed in saying "no" to his condition. The irrational upsurge of rebellion, risking the rebel's life, consecrated the value of human existence. The rebel struggled for human dignity, valuing it above life itself. Camus was testing his own moral version of the Marxist identification of the oppressed with the cause of humanity, using a variation of Hegel's master-slave relation without a specific reference to Hegel. After establishing the human value of rebellion, Camus traced the fate of revolution up through the twentieth century. To him contemporary history was an apocalypse of murder: every act led to violent death. In this moral atmosphere of terror the value of rebellion had to be questioned again. Camus concluded that revolution failed to constitute justice, that it degenerated instead into greater and greater http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (22 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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terror. The moral perversion of Marxist revolutions abrogated the initial value of the rebel's great refusal, leading Camus to search for meaning in the moderate ethics of the "Mediterranean spirit." At odds with the metaphysical horror of the human situation in the first part of the book, Camus, at the end, advocated the path of privatized art, a compromise that did not establish a reign of justice but did provide the individual with a way of creating some meaning to his life. The lesson of The Rebel could be taken as an existentialist's refusal of Marxism, a direction opposite from Sartre's. Jeanson's review denigrated The Rebel for not comprehending the historical conditions 188

Existentialists in Motion of revolutions, and for holding them up against an ahistorical, moral standard of justice. [86] Camus' letter to Les Temps Modernes, attacking Sartre, asserted that Jeanson had missed the point of the book and that Les Temps Modernes, under Sartre's direction, refused any criticism of the Soviet Union. In short, Sartre had perverted his philosophy and become a crude ideologue. [87] Sartre's reply was equally venomous and ad hominem, reaffirming however his continued sense of the need to think within history. Defending what we have seen as his Hegelian project of locating reason within history, Sartre reasoned that The Rebel was a moralist's search for eternal values, a liberal retreat from history, a bourgeois humanist's abandonment of social justice for the sake of personal integrity. The "Reply to Albert Camus" in no way furthered his intellectual position; it was rather a reaffirmation of his search for an existential Marxism. Against Camus' Sisyphean meaninglessness, Sartre restated his principle that meaning was found only within history and through engagement. We won't argue whether there are or are not transcendent values to History. We shall simply observe that, if there are any, they are manifested through human actions which are, by definition, historical. And this contradiction is essential to man: he makes himself historical in order to undertake the eternal, and discovers universal values in the concrete action that be undertakes in view of a specific result. If you say that the world is unjust, you have already lost the game. You are already outside, in the act of comparing a world without justice to a justice without content.[89] The exchange between Camus and Sartre presents the typical dilemma of intellectuals in the 1950s: with the Russian revolution losing its liberating force, how could one continue 86 "A. Camus, ou l'âme revoltée," Les Temps Modernes, 79 (June, 1952). 87 "Lettre au Directeur des Temps Modernes," Les Temps Modernes, 82 (August, 1952) 323-333. 88 "Réponse à Albert Camus," Les Temps Modernes, 82 (August, 1952) 334-353, trans. by B. Eisler in


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Situations, op. cit., 54-78. 89 Ibid., 352-353; and in English, 77.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists to accept Marxism? To Sartre, Camus rejected the Russian revolution and consequently all efforts at social transformation; this is just what Sartre wanted to avoid. Although the outlook was bleak, Sartre steadfastly held on to his philosophical convictions: . . . from the moment one makes a choice, all things take on meaning. . . . Because it is within historical action that the understanding of history is given. Does History have a meaning, you ask? Has it an objective? For me, these are questions which have no meaning. Because History, apart from the man who makes it, is only an abstract and static concept, of which it can neither be said that it has an objective, nor that it has not. And the problem is not to know the objective but to give it one.[90] Camus had complained that Marx's eschatology had to be distinguished from Marx's social criticism, that the Marxist philosophy of history stood or fell on the prospects of the millennial "end of history." But for Sartre there could be no hypothetical end of history in Marxism, because, as a Hegelianism, it philosophized only within history. How, then, could one speak of an "end" of history? Marx, on the contrary, spoke of the end of "pre-history," envisioning a qualitative transformation of human existence. Sartre insisted that his own existential concept of freedom could have no meaning apart from the Marxist concept of history: within the situation there was freedom.[91] Still firmly convinced of the fundamental compatibility of existentialism and Marxism, Sartre, in answering Camus, would not yet consider himself a Marxist. [92] Raymond Aron also denied the compatibility of existentialism and Marxism, but with more philosophical clarity and rigor than Camus. About once every ten years Aron felt called upon to denounce the pretended alliance of existentialism and Marxism. First in 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., 343. 92 Ibid., 343n.

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Existentialists in Motion 1946, then in 1955, and finally in 1964, Aron polemicized against "Marxism and existentialism . . . which continue to represent one of the major philosophical tendencies of our age." [93] Granting the importance of the dialogue, Aron nevertheless rejected Marxism, existentialism, and any combination of the two, preferring instead a pluralist pessimism. Much more than Camus, Aron claimed to have had personal participation in both movements: "Beginning with Marxism, I arrived at the tragic existentialism of Max Weber." [94] Raymond Aron's intellectual career presents as confusing a kaleidoscope of positions as Sartre's. In the 1930s Aron was instrumental in the importation of German thought into France, especially the sociology of Max Weber.[95] In the mid-1940s he joined and quickly left Les Temps Modernes, going over to the conservative-liberal paper Le Figaro. With the changing moods of politics, Aron became the leading spokesman of that peculiar Cold War phenomenon, the end-of-ideology" ideology. Ironically, these liberals rebuffed Marx because of his alleged concept of the end of history, while they themselves pronounced an end of major historical change, since capitalism had undone the class struggle. A decade later, Aron was balancing his older liberalism with technocratic thoughts.[96] In his articles on Marxism and existentialism, Aron reviewed the major themes of French intellectual life: the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, the Marxist concept of alienation and the concepts of freedom in the existentialisms of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Aron acknowledged many commonalities in Marxism and existentialism: 93 Marxism and the Existentialists, trans. by H. Weaver and R. Addis (N.Y., 1970) 11. The three articles referred to were collected in this text. Aron's denials of possible reconciliation may be found on pp. 28, 87, and 175-176. 94 Ibid., 3. 95 Cf. Raymond Aron, La Sociologie allemande contemporaine (Paris, 1935) and Essai sur la théorie de l'histoire dans l'allemagne contemporaine:: la philosophie critique de l'histoire (Paris, 1938). 96 Cf. Raymond Aron, An Essay on Freedom, trans. H. Weaver (N.Y., 1970).

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists ". . . thought in situation, discovery and transcendence, unsatisfied consciousness, the historicity of values?" and, in short, a common "anthropology derived from Hegel." [97] More fundamental, for Aron, were the irreconcilable divergences. For Marxism, as opposed to existentialism, work was the human essence, making man's relation to nature primary, while the existentialists saw only an eternal struggle of consciousnesses. Second, for Marx, history was unidirectional and progressive, while it was a "failure" http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (25 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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for existentialists. Unsatisfied with these two objections, Aron invented a third in 1946 which was for him the crux of the matter, his "fundamental theme": "What will always prevent an existentialist from being a Marxist is that revolution will not solve his philosophical problem, that of the dialogue of the individual with the absence of God.?" [98] And in a later formulation: The Marxists and the existentialists come into conflict at the point where the tradition of Kierkegaard cannot be reconciled with that of Hegel: no social or economic regime can ever solve the enigma of history; individual destiny transcends collective life. Individual consciousness always remains alone in the face of the mystery of life and death, however well organized may be the communal exploitation of the planet. The ultimate meaning of the human adventure is not given by the classless society, even if this society is inevitable.[99] Aron phrased these objections more tersely when he said that existential Marxism would require a unification of Sartre's concept of authenticity and the Marxist concept of community. What was impossible for Aron was "an authentic community." [100] 97 Marxism and the Existentialists, op. cit., 31. 98 Ibid., 37. 99 Ibid., 87. 100 Ibid., 83. Aron continues in this vein in Histoire et dialectique de la violence (Paris, 1973), which rejects Sartre's notion that man can be constituted through violence but accepts Sartre otherwise as part of the historicist tradition of Dilthey and Weber.

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Existentialists in Motion We need to look more carefully at this alleged incompatibility. There was some truth in Aron's claim that Sartre's idea of authenticity was not a historical concept. But Being and Nothingness did not present authenticity as a realized fact; bad faith was the dominant structure of consciousness. The existentialist concept of radical freedom was the deep structure of human consciousness that haunted bad faith. Authenticity was no more than a hope for a "radical conversion." Sartre's silence about authenticity could be said to derive from his lack of a concept of historical community. Only with the Marxist concept of community could the concept of authenticity be fully articulated, a telling sign of the mutual dependence of the two doctrines. Aron's second argument for the incompatibility of existentialism and Marxism derived from his view of Sartre. For Aron, Sartre had conceptualized an eternal truth which was formulated with no awareness of history. In Aron's eyes Sartre conceived of the "human condition" as a Pascalian travail of being trapped


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between finitude and the infinite, as a "Mystery of life and death," which was the "ultimate meaning of the human adventure." Aron wanted to burden existentialism with a universal flaw in the constitution of man. Aron made Sartre into far more of a Cartesian than he actually was: "Sartre, in spite of everything, never transcended the Cartesian duality as reinterpreted by Husserl. The Sartrean consciousness is solitary, self-translucid, and alienated in matter, and as a result of uniqueness, each man becomes the enemy of every other." [101] Merleau-Ponty and others had noted the traces of Cartesianism in Sartre's early book; Aron wanted to go further, clothing existentialists with pure rationalism. But this would not do: the existentialists placed human reality in time, in contradiction to Descartes. Like Copernicus, who removed man from the physical center of the galaxy, and like Darwin who removed man's angelic pretentions, existentialism removed a remaining bit of self-flattery--the idea that man could think like God, in and for eternity. 101 Ibid., 9.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists Unfortunately, for Aron, existentialism insisted that reason was not ahistorical, that it was man hic et nunc who thought, not some transcendental ghost in a machine. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, as Aron claimed, "ignore the historical diversities, the slow creations, the unforeseeable accidents, the innumerable variations on the same theme"[102] that characterized human history. But this does not imply that the concept of history itself was contradictory to existentialist thought. What was most curious in Aron's contention of the gap between existentialism and Marxism was that in some places he made note of the similarity of the two in espousing a " subject-object dialectic."[103] Thus at one point Aron ascribed to existentialism the discovery of an eternal truth, as we have seen, while at another point he berated the existentialists for making truth relative to history. The appearance of accuracy in Aron's articles in the 1940s and 1950s came not from the strength of his argument but from the lingering separation between the two camps. The Marxists had still not unchained themselves from Stalinist orthodoxy, and the existentialists bad many loose ends in their social and historical thought. In any case, Aron's liberalism, in Sartre's eyes, was incapable of deciding the matter because of its reliance on an idealist notion of rationality. There was, however, a problem in Marxism and in existentialism that neither group faced concerning the precise nature of the transcendent capacity of reason. The philosophical problem was this: how could reason at the same time be critical of the given and remain within history? The classical Marxist answer was that history was contradictory, containing its own negation, and that scientific reason, as opposed to ideology, had its ground in the negating social class. Somehow the individual identified with the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (27 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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oppressed and was able to reason from a progressive perspective. This line of thought floundered over the question of science: how could a bourgeois like Einstein, who did not identify with the proletariat, achieve scientific results, while Lysenko, his 102 Ibid., 84. 103 Ibid., 79.

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Existentialists in Motion socialist counterpart, reported only absurdities? For Sartre and the existentialists, on the other hand, the transcending nature of reason was grounded in the self-evidence of truth to the situated individual. This answer left open the question of how the individual thinker approached the totality. Clearly, neither group handled the problem satisfactorily. 6. Genet and the Other Sartre's existential biographies constitute a somewhat separate line of his thought which nonetheless is important to the development of his social theory. We must break with chronology again in order to consider the significance of this genre of his writing for existential Marxism. In 1952 Sartre published Saint Genet: comédien et martyr, the second in a series of full-scale studies that began with Baudelaire in 1946 and ended with Flaubert, in which he applied his method of existential psychoanalysis to literary figures. Each was an attempt to capture the unifying project of the individual and follow the dialectic of his becoming. Each grappled with the penetration of the Other, society and history--in sum, of the situation-upon the individual's choice of himself. Sartre handled this question better with each successive study. In his hands, Baudelaire's project was barely articulated in terms of society; with Genet, the Other became a crucial moment of his self-definition; for Flaubert, his relation to the bourgeoisie was fundamental for his project. As Sartre's sense of society and history deepened, his intellectual biographies became rich studies of the relation of the social-historical milieu to the individual.[104] In these biographies social reality illuminated the drama of the individual, and through the life of the individual the social field could be understood as a human product. 104 De Beauvoir, Prime of Life, op. cit., 459.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists Readers of Saint Genet have been astonished by Sartre's virtuosity at portraying an individual life. Genet comes alive with such immediacy, the pages palpitate so humanly with his breath, the complexities of his life are laid bare so lucidly, that the reader is embarrassed by his uninvited intrusion into someone else's privacy. One feels that rarely before has a human being emerged in a book so completely. As we might expect, Sartre's purpose in Saint Genet was to undermine determinist explanations, to exemplify existential freedom and to totalize the comprehension of individual: I have tried to do the following: to indicate the limit of psychoanalytical interpretation and Marxist explanation and to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality; to show this freedom at grips with destiny, crushed at first by its mischances then turning upon them and digesting them little by little . . . . [105] Saint Genet developed the problematic of Being and Nothingness by giving an ontological status to the Other. We can observe in Saint Genet Sartre's initial philosophical project growing, expanding, taking new turns, and preserving its original impulses. There was no coupure, no break in the development of his thought, only a dialectic of growth, return and resynthesis, of statement, dispersal of interests and reunification. Young Genet, an orphan living with peasants, creates himself through internalizing the gaze of the Other. Caught stealing from his benefactors, Genet decided to be a thief. Caught stealing the peasant's property, Genet is an object, an evil thing in the eyes of the other, and this is what he decides to become. From the first decisive choice, Genet's adventure unfolds dialectically-a thief, a homosexual, a poet, a saint, a hero, a traitor, through it all his original project stands and is transformed: to be himself as the Other sees him. 105 Saint Genet, trans. by B. Frechtman (N.Y., 1963) 628.

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Existentialists in Motion Instead of challenging the social taboo that exiles him from masculinity, he prefers to assume it: it is always social misfortune that he insists on; it is always against the Other and the Other's intentions that he has chosen to fight in becoming willfully and defiantly what the Other obliges him to be.[106]


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What gives such poignancy and dignity to Sartre's biography is the existentialist's demystification of everyday life. The existentialist attributes the full force of ontological categories to the life of the individual. Genet creates reality as be submits to the given reality. His personal dialectic is that between being and doing, between "oneself as Other" and "self as oneself," between the "essential which proves inessential" and the "inessential which proves essential," between "fatality" and "will."[107] The classic questions argued by philosophers in the Olympian unreality of pure reason, Genet lives, enacts, and endures personally. Genet's life is enlarged to a full humanness through the philosophical categories, while the philosophical categories prove their worth in becoming concrete. If the everydayness of philosophy in Saint Genet was a carry-over from Being and Nothingness, Sartre's treatment of the dialectic of subject and object, self and other, in 1952 was an essential enrichment of his thought of 1943. Merleau-Ponty, Lefebvre, Lukacs, and others pointed to the inadequacy of Sartre's dualism. In 1952 Sartre turned to the "interworld," in order to explore capitalist society. Marx had shown, from the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital, that, in bourgeois society, relations between men took on the appearance of relations between things. In Saint Genet Sartre accepted the consequences of alienation, but went on to depict how the subject lives the relations that appear to be those between things. 106 Ibid., 320 and cf. R. D. Laing and D. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy (N.Y., 1971) 67-92. 107 Saint Genet, op. cit., 74.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists Man, says Marx, is an object to man. That is true. But it is also true that I am a subject to myself exactly insofar as my fellow man is an object to me. . . . He and I are not homogeneous: we cannot be part of the same whole except in the eyes of a third person who perceives us both as a single object. If we could all be . . . both object and subject for each other and by each other . . . the separations would cease to exist. . . . As for absolute reciprocity, it is concealed by the historical conditions of class and race, by nationalities, by the social hierarchy. . . . Thus we usually live in a state of familiar and unthinking vagueness; we pass unnoticed. In our profession, our family, our party, we are not quite objects and not quite subjects . . . not a moment goes by without your speaking and listening, and whatever you say or hear is what anyone would have said or heard in your place . . . you have no secrets, no mystery and yet, in a certain way, you are alone. And I do not locate this solitude in our private life, which is only a sector of public life. . . . It is everywhere.[108]


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Let us explore this passage in detail. In human interactions there is neither a total separation (man is not simply an object to man) nor a total fusion of subjects (man is not simply a subject to man). Somewhere in between lay the structures of present reality and the potential of non-alienated relationships. Actually, people are both objects and subjects to each other in a way that combines the unity and the separation of each to each. If we think of people purely as objects to one another, we obscure the humanity of the interactions. If we regard relations as purely subjective, we ignore the viscosity of social reality. Marxist community is prevented by historical walls that push people away from each other. The barriers of class, race, and sex position us socially to regard each other as things, while we internalize this situation and, at the same time, experience ourselves as isolated. Both our "private" solitude and our "public" anonymity are the way we live capitalism. 108 Ibid., 634-635.

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Existentialists in Motion In the interworld we are depersonalized things and personalized ghosts without being able lucidly to comprehend this. Sartre leaves open the possibility of transforming the structure of interactions, indicating only that a liberating revolution would preserve and deepen the individuality of the subject while allowing the other to become a separate presence without becoming a thing. At present, to Sartre, the humanizing direction of change is the most difficult option for the individual: he must make himself more of an object, integrate himself more fully in the unsatisfying society by joining a revolutionary group. Normally the individual finds his meaning through both making himself a thing for others and privatizing his subjectivity. But only by making his subjectivity public, by engaging himself fully in the public realm, can be move toward ending alienation. This choice brings to light both our freedom and our evasions of it in bad faith, and hence disturbs us and causes anxiety.[109] Genet, for Sartre, is a "hero" of our age because he made all the "bad" choices of our bourgeois subjectivity and objectivity. He chose to be as the Other saw him in every case. And he escaped the Other only by artistically recreating his choices in his plays and poems, forcing to the consciousness of the bourgeoisie its own bad side. "Genet is we. That is why we must read him." [110] Genet is the condemned monster of bourgeois society, as Bukharin was in Soviet Russia. Both internalized the meaning their self had for society. But Genet presented back to his society the bad side of its own structures: the criminal is defined and created by private property; the homosexual by the prudes. Genet was part of the reified society, but he internalized the side of society that it wanted to forget. The inadequacies of interactions in capitalist society were manifest in what capitalist society labeled evil. The evil implied the good: theft implied private property. The vicious circle was not broken by Genet, only suspended in his art, held up so that it could be observed. 109 Ibid., 639.


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110 Ibid., 644.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists To escape the circle of an isolated objectivity that is too subjective (our private life) and a public subjectivity that is too objective (our work relations and politics) we must become both more subjective, facing ourselves more completely as what we are, and more objective, joining in the social task of reconstruction. If we maintain the hope and firm intention of escaping this alternative, if there is still time to reconcile, with a firm effort, the object and the subject, we must, be it only once and in the realm of the imaginary, achieve this latest solitude which corrodes our acts and thoughts. We spent our time fleeing from the objective into the subjective and from the subjective into objectivity. This game of hide-and-seek will end only when we have the courage to go to the limits of ourselves in both directions at once.[111] To Sartre, Genet achieved the revolutionary purpose of engaged literature in the sense that he presented society with its own choices and their consequences. Genet interiorized the other, subjectivized the objective sphere, then objectivized his new subjectivity in works of art. The time had now come for Sartre to act, and action, liberating action, appeared as a deeper immersion in society. The free choice of facing one's own self and joining the Party, or writing engaged literature, presented revolutionary consciousness and action as commensurate with authenticity. Our becoming more human required that our society become more human. For Sartre, radical freedom could now be actualized only by projects which took a socially revolutionary direction because--and --this is most important-he had integrated the other in the individual's choice of himself. Both materialism and idealism missed the point. Stalinist transformation of social structures, the appropriation of private property, was an inadequate strategy because it forgot that we have internalized private property. Not only must the external, objective structure of private property become 111 Ibid.

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subjective by democratic collective ownership, but the isolated subject, the atomized worker, must become more objective by adopting the revolution as his personal project. Similarly, the idealist gesture of changing our ideas was inadequate because it forgot that we are not isolated atoms but rather diffused in our interactions and that we chose our isolation through the others who look at us as isolated. The subject-object dialectic, in Sartre's hands, strove to preserve both moments of the dyad (we must go "in both directions at once"), envisioning an authentic choice that would open us up to being. In Saint Genet Sartre still had not laid bare the structures of the interworld; he had not yet probed the dead weight of historical structures. What he achieved, in addition to a great study of Genet, was a firmer sense of the other, a more animated outline of the interpenetration of the self and the world, and a more ominous awareness of the depth of our inauthenticity. In totalizing Genet's original project, Sartre uncovered the truth that the whole world was enmeshed in the individual's bad faith. And yet for Sartre Saint Genet remained a work separate from his political involvement. Although I have probed this book for elements of a social theory, that is not the way it was generally read or, indeed, intended. There is clearly a unity of method in Sartre's biographies and political philosophy, a unity that becomes more and more pronounced as we move from Baudelaire to Flaubert. Still, these studies present themselves as personal investigations, remote from social concerns. Perhaps at bottom Sartre always reserved part of himself for art and culture, safe from the noise of politics. One might surmise that only with this anchor in cultural life could be preserve his equilibrium in the intense world of Leftist politics. 7. Socialisme ou Barbarie During the 1950s Sartre identified Marxism exclusively with the Stalinism of the CP. Merleau-Ponty, who was more cogent than Sartre about the theoretical and political 201

II. Stalinism and the Existentialists multiplicity of Marxism, also used Stalinism as the main reference point of his political writings. Yet there was one tiny group of Marxists, those of Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1965), who had struggled since 1946 to separate Marxism from its identification with the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Socialisme ou Barbarie developed Marxism along the lines that I will define as existential Marxism in the next two chapters, although it was hostile toward Sartre and toward most of the other existential Marxists.[112] In reviewing the formation and theoretical development of this extremely important journal, we must stress that they were a very sectarian group who existed in almost total obscurity until the mid-1960s, remaining well outside the arena of debate. The two main figures in Socialisme ou Barbarie, Cornélius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, derived from the Trotskyist movement. A refugee from the Greek Civil War, Castoriadis split from the Fourth http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (33 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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International, rejecting the Trotskyist position that the Stalinist bureaucracy was no more than an accident. To Castoriadis, Soviet socialism was not a mere 'degenerated workers' State," as it was for Trotsky. Instead, Castoriadis, having studied Max Weber, saw that the bureaucracy that had arisen in Russia since 1917 was a new ruling class, an exploiting class which, if anything, was more oppressive than the Western bourgeoisie.[113] A professional economist, Castoriadis had thus begun the most penetrating critique of Marxism available in France. The other thinker we shall mention, Claude Lefort, turned to Trotskyism before the war at the suggestion of his philosophy professor, Merleau-Ponty. Lefort maintained direct contact with factory workers for many years after joining the movement. He met 112 Interview with Claude Lefort in Paris, September 18, 1973. 113 C. Castoriadis, La Société bureaucratique (Paris, 1973) 205-282. This contains some of his articles from Socialisme ou Barbarie, which are all being reprinted. His pseudonyms are Paul Cardan, Pierre Chaulieu, and Jean-Marc Coudray. Lefort's contributions are collected in Eléments d'un théorie de la bureaucratie (Geneva, 1971). Interview with C. Castoriadis in Paris, Sept. 21, 1973.

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Existentialists in Motion Castoriadis in 1946 when the Socialisme ou Barbarie group was formed. Through Lefort, Socialisme ou Barbarie had direct contact with existentialism since he and Merleau-Ponty were close friends. As we have already seen, Lefort published for Les Temps Modernes. Also, there are traces of the influence of Socialisme ou Barbarie on Merleau-Ponty in Les Aventures de la dialectique.[114] Finally, the positions taken by Castoriadis in the last issues of the journal appear to have benefited from a reading of MerleauPonty's last works. From its first critiques of Stalinist bureaucracy, Socialisme ou Barbarie began to radicalize its position by drawing a connection between Stalin's state and Lenin's theory of organization. The theory of the autonomous Party, strictly self-disciplined and standing above the mass of workers, that Lenin developed in What Is to Be Done? in answer to the trade unionism of German social democracy, led directly, for Castoriadis, to Stalin's bureaucracy. [115] In both cases the same contradiction operated: the workers were objectified and seen as passive social elements. With this highly important concept, Castoriadis warned that Marxists must regard the workers as creative participants in the building of socialism. Very much like the existential Marxists, Castoriadis defined socialism as "the conscious organization by men themselves of their life in all domains." [116] Hence Socialisme ou Barbarie turned to the tradition of workers' councils for a concept of a revolutionary form of organization. Later, Castoriadis, again like the existential Marxists, emphasized the critical concepts of workers' selfmanagement and alienation as means of debureaucratizing socialist movements. In the 1960s http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter5.html (34 of 36) [11/12/2007 23:16:12]

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Socialisme ou Barbarie, now joined by younger men like Lyotard and Souyri, began 114 Cf. Les Aventures de la dialectique, 312-313, which quotes Socialisme ou Barbarie (July-Aug., 1952) 10. 115 "Sur le contenu du socialisme," Socialisme ou Barbarie, organe de critique et d'orientation révolutionnaire, 9:22 (July-Sept., 1957) 1-73. 116 Ibid., 9:23 (Jan.-Feb., 1958) 81.

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II. Stalinism and the Existentialists to totalize its conception of revolution. No longer limited to the work-place, socialism, it argued, must transform and democratize all areas of social life, in short, the totality of everyday life.[117] In this rethinking of Marxism, Socialisme ou Barbarie developed its thought precisely along the lines taken by existential Marxists, in a parallel but autonomous manner. The main contradiction for Castoriadis both within Western capitalism and within Russian State capitalism was not simply confined to the means of production but was more precisely within the bureaucratic nature of social relations. Here Marx was often just as guilty as the capitalists. Bureaucracy objectified the working class, viewing it as a thing to be manipulated or, in Marx's analysis, an inert source of value. But workers were not mere things, Castoriadis warned; they were creative sources of action. Bureaucracy actually relied on the conscious nature of the workers, but it could not integrate their creativity into its structure. This was the fatal contradiction that would ultimately cause the collapse of capitalism. In the last issues of the journal Castoriadis extended this critique to liberal and rationalist forms of thought. Borrowing from Merleau-Ponty, he claimed that Western thought was based on a "visual ontology" that objectives and devitalizes its object and hence is an improper tool for theorizing about human affairs.[118] To underline once again a necessary connection between Marxism and existentialism, it should be noted that Castoriadis had made use of an existential phenomenology back in 1948 in order to illuminate the creative, subjective side of the workers' experience. In an article called "Phénoménologie de la conscience prolétarienne," [119] he used Hegelian concepts of in-itself, for-itself, and for-others to expose the oppressiveness of bureaucratic organization. Hence Socialisme ou Barbarie followed a trajectory that took it from a critique of Stalinism and Leninism to a critique of contemporary capitalism, in 117 La Société bureaticratique, 33. 118 Ibid., 50-54. 119 Ibid., 115-130.


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Existentialists in Motion which it approached and anticipated the position of existential Marxism by emphasizing the need for overturning all alienated relationships and for a comprehension of the subjectivity and creativity of the working class. Expectedly, it was difficult through all these years to maintain unity among the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, given its non-Leninist position. In 1958, during the Algerian crisis, Lefort left the journal in a disagreement over the extent of organization necessary to take power. With France in turmoil, the question of a revolutionary overthrow was posed and Lefort took a more anarchistic position than Castoriadis. Lyotard then left in 1963. Yet for all its sectarianism and its purges, Socialisme ou Barbarie was the first French group effectively to criticize Stalin's Russia and to draw theoretical conclusions that led to an existential Marxism. It should not be surprising that the young radicals from Nanterre who ignited the events of May, 1968, had been poring over Socialisme ou Barbarie in the late 1960s.


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III Toward an Existential Marxism: 1957-1968

Six _______________________________________________________ The Arguments Group: Existentialized Marxists

From 1956 to the upheaval of May, 1968, Marxism and existentialism were no longer in direct confrontation. Both movements eased their adversary stance as part of the general change in French intellectual life away from the acrimonious polemicizing of the earlier period. Marxists, existentialists, Christians, and later, structuralists, as well as liberals and academics, were talking and listening to one another. Ideological lines were no longer drawn as sharply as during the Cold War period. Lucien Goldmann could argue that Jean Piaget's psychology was compatible with Marxism; Teilhardian and personalist Christians moved to reconcile themselves with Marxism; Roger Garaudy of the CP was now opening his hand to phenomenologists, existentialists, and even Christians, sincerely initiating dialogue and interchange.[1] The amicable mood of French intellectual life furthered the recognition within Marxism and existentialism that each was incomplete and partial, that each needed to revise its basic concepts, that sectarian purity did not encourage critical thought. Each camp now began with the accomplishments of the 1940s, in an effort to redefine the limits of thought or, better, to reshape the advances of the 1940s into a new type of thought. With this project, the second phase of the encounter between Marxism and existentialism opened. 1. Roger Garaudy, Perspectives de l'homme: existentialisme; pensée catholique, structuralisme, marxisme (Paris, 1959). 209

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Significant changes in the social formation of France also influenced the tenor and concerns of the debate. The Fourth Republic, although politically as unstable as the Third Republic, did manage to lead France out of the economic stagnation of the 1920s and 1930s. The effect of modem dirigisme, state planning, beginning with the Monnet Plan of the 1940s, was to accentuate concentration and technical modernization in industry and retailing [2] the extent that many feared "Americanization." [3] The Fifth Republic, under De Gaulle, continued these domestic trends. To intellectuals, the France of 1960 was qualitatively different from that of 1950. [4] A new France was emerging by 1960 that some called a consumer society, others a post-industrial society (Touraine), others a technological society, still others an affluent society. All were agreed that present and future French capitalism would be drastically different from the familiar nineteenth-century image. With this general consensus, intellectuals had to reframe and to give up many precious intellectual certainties that were now obsolete. 1956 represented the watershed in the development of existential Marxism. The intellectuals who witnessed the Hungarian invasion, as well as the revolt in Poland, without moving to the Right, became the principal forces in developing a Marxism suitable for advanced capitalism. Not only had Sartre made his separation from the CP, but there was a momentary confluence between the major thinkers of Socialisme ou Barbarie and a group of Marxists now expelled from the CP who went on to establish Arguments (Morin and Axelos). Several informal committees were created at this time (the Committee of Intellectuals Against the War in North Africa and the Saint-Just Cir2 Bill Warren, "Capitalist Planning and the State," New Left Review, 72 (March-April, 1972) 23. 3 J. J. Servan-Schreiber, Le Défi américain (Paris, 1967). 4 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (N.Y., 1971) 40.

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The Arguments Group cle) that served as centers for the exchange of ideas and experiences. Hence from 1956 onward there was a continuum of theoretical development that lasted until May, 1968, and perhaps beyond. The enduring unity that had begun in 1956 among those who were to develop existential Marxism can be illustrated by the fact of the collaboration of Castoriadis and Lefort with Morin from Arguments in a book on the events of May, 1968. 1. Arguments In late 1956, a new journal called Arguments appeared.[5] Deeply moved by the prospects of deStalinization and its early failure in Hungary, the directors of the journal, Edgar Morin, Jean Duvignaud, Henri Lefebvre, and Pierre Fougeyrollas, were primarily ex-Communists. Morin, like Duvignaud, had joined the CP during World War II and was expelled in 1951. Fougeyrollas, a Party theorist, was a http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (2 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:24]

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professor of philosophy. Lefebvre was a long-time Communist and a leading Marxist theorist in France. Nothing illustrates better the relative amicability of positions at this time than the journal Arguments. It was originally conceived by Edgar Morin and Roland Barthes on the model of an interdisciplinary and non-sectarian Italian journal.[6] Argomenti in Italy was established by Franco Fortuni, Franco Momigliano, and others from Milan and Turin as a center for open Marxist debate and discussion. The Italian editors invited Morin and Roland Barthes to initiate a journal in France on the same model. They also 5 Studies of the Arguments group are neither numerous nor conclusive. The best is the book-length essay by Louis Soubise, Le Marxisme après Marx, 1956-1965: quatre marxistes dissidents française, preface F. Chatelet (Paris, 1967). Also see Yvon Bourdet, "Le Néo-revisionisme," in Communisme et marxisme (Paris, 1963) 39-78; and Richard Gombin, Les Origines du gauchisme (Paris, 1971) 49-98. Soubise's study is very complete, sympathetic yet critical. Bourdet is sharply negative, from a quasi-Trotskyist perspective. Gombin is favorable, viewing Arguments as the philosophical basis of the New Left. 6 Interview with Edgar Morin in Paris, Sept. 15, 1973.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism made efforts of a similar kind in England and Germany. Arguments invited and received articles from all progressive camps: Soboul, a Stalinist historian; Naville, a Trotskyist; Mascolo and Lefebvre, both ex-Cornmunists; Colette Audry, a Sartrean; Maximilien Rubel, a Marxist humanist; Alain Touraine, a sociologist. Arguments was the only Marxist journal in the period of the late 1950s and early 1960s to avoid sectarianism. It therefore became an important center for an exchange of ideas, for an opening up of Marxism toward new intellectual currents and new social phenomena. If Arguments was theoretically diverse, its leaders had much in common. They were all shaped by participation in the Resistance, joining the Communist Party in the struggle against Nazism. They all left the Party, mostly in the aftermath of the Hungarian invasion, disillusioned and disoriented but unwilling to retreat from radicalism. After 1956 they were for the most part Paris-based academics and remain so today. In tone, the journal expressed the sudden intellectual liberation of men embittered by the constraints of CP discipline. For the first time, these thinkers could freely explore fundamental questions that for too long had been forbidden. Whole issues were devoted to cultural questions that Marxists normally avoided: "The Problem of Love" (Jan.-March, 1961) and "The Problem of Cosmology" (OctoberDecember, 1961). Quite expectedly, there were excesses, romantic posturings about "planetary thought," about thought dans l'ouverture de líouverture, about "post-Marxism," about unrelenting criticism." From the cramped dogmatism of Stalinism, Arguments, intoxicated with its new freedom, went full swing to the opposite pole. Many independent Marxists, like Claude Bourdet, editor of the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (3 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:24]

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Left Wing, L'Observateur,[7] who were in sympathy with the 7 L'Observateur, a bi-weekly with a readership of about only 10,000, played an important role for intellectuals as the only organ for a non-Communist politics. In the early 1960s it was

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The Arguments Group group's anti-Stalinism, were repulsed by its often total iconoclasm.[8] At times, Arguments read like an abstract negation of Stalinism. Caught in a kind of Oedipal rebellion against a severe father, it defined itself ambiguously as both explicitly Marxist-revisionist, implying that it was continuing the Marxist tradition, and as adventurously and brashly beyond Marxism.[9] Nevertheless., the journal dramatically revitalized Marxist thought. Arguments defined its thought as one of "interrogation, questioning, problematic." [10] It asked all the repressed questions about Russian socialism, about the role of the superstructure, about the weaknesses of the Marxist theory of knowledge, about the class structure of advanced capitalist society, about the apparent failure of the Proletariat to carry out its historical mission. When Arguments ceased publication in 1962, its director Kostas Axelos claimed that it had accomplished its purpose.[11] An attitude of critical inquiry had been established within Marxism and, although Arguments completed no new theoretical "system," a new radical framework was taking shape that would provide a basis for the politics of the New Left.[12] What Axelos did not state was that the main thinkers of Arguments were at this time dispersed throughout the globe and there were no younger men on the scene who were considered suitable to take over direction of the periodical. More than the journal, however, it was the collection of books edited and largely written by the Arguments group, that was to have a very substantial impact on French Marxist theory. it was the center for a germinating new left whose radical views on the Algeria and colonial question had little representation in parliament. 8 Bourdet, op. cit., 41-48. 9 Bourdet, op. cit., 68-69 and Axelos, Vers la pensée planétaire (Paris, 1964) 191n-192n. 10 Axelos, ibid. 11 Axelos, ibid. 12 Gombin, op. cit., 54.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism Arguments translated and published the classic works of Western Marxism: Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness and Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy; it brought out the major works of Herbert Marcuse; it published Trotsky, Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital, Edward H. Carr's History of Russia and Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism, all of which challenged fundamental propositions in the conventional wisdom of Stalinism and helped establish a higher level of intellectual debate. Above all, it brought out numerous studies by men of its own group: Axelos, Lefebvre, Chatelet, and Fougeyrollas. Still another important influence of Arguments concerned its integration of "bourgeois" social sciences with Marxism. In the early 1960s, members of Arguments attended classes given by Paul Lazarsfeld, the quantitative sociologist, and other American social scientists whose mathematical sophistication fascinated them. Later on, Pierre Fougeyrollas, Henri Lefebvre, Joseph Gabel, and Georges Lapassade went on to make important contributions in political science and sociology. This also aided in bringing a critical perspective to the new generation of students in social science. Before entering into the discussion of the theory of the Arguments group, I should stress that my use of the term "existentialized Marxists" is not meant to imply a direct adoption of existentialist doctrine on their part. Rather, I intend this title to refer to their appropriation of notions of subjectivity and of the opening of theory toward action that, in a loose sense, can be termed existentialist. 2. Morin, Mascolo, and the CP The intellectual biography of Edgar Morin illustrates the background and direction of the Arguments group. Morin's Autocritique was an autobiographical recounting of an intellectual's life under Stalinism, his expulsion from the Party, and his agonizing reorientation. A style of public self-criticism had developed within the CP as a counter214

The Arguments Group part to the confessions of the Communist leaders at the Moscow Trials. With the mass exodus of intellectuals from the CP in the 1950s, the confession became a new genre of the pilgrim's progress from Stalinist mystification to intellectual liberation, a coherent if twisted perspective on the world, a total explanation that had been coercively sustained by the Party. Stalinism suddenly disintegrated for the intellectual into a pile of sterile, dogmatic sand. Ideas that once were held with passionate intensity now appeared stupid or slightly absurd. Naturally, Morin and the rest foamed with resentment against their Stalinist past, but they did not simply turn into anti-Communists. Instead, they sought to learn an intellectual as well as a moral lesson from their experience; they struggled to interpret their own past as part of history. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (5 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:24]

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A generation younger than Lefebvre, Morin joined the Party during the war, filled with a romantic Marxism and, as his self-analysis disclosed, a martyr complex. Along with Hervé and Courtade, be learned a Hegelian Marxism from a disciple of Lukacs, Georg Szekeres. The Communists learned their Hegel not from Kojève but from a Hungarian Communist. [13] In a loose sense, Morin was always an existential Marxist, never a good Stalinist. He defined his position in the Party, along with that of his friends Dionys Mascolo and Robert Antèlme, as an "existential opposition." [14] With his romantic impulses, his bits of Hegel, his interest in Sartre, Morin lobbied in the Party without success for a recognition of the role of culture. Indeed the superstructure always interested Morin more than the substructure; no sooner was be out of the Party than be published books on the cultural and psychological facets of death and the cinema. Morin's adherence to the Party through the 1940s forms a study in cognitive dissonance: with each event-the Rajk trials, the attack on Tito, etc.--Soviet socialism appeared very different from Morin's concept of it. Yet he managed to hold in balance 13 Autocritique (Paris, 1959) 42. 14 Ibid., 117 and 84.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism the glaring contradiction of reality to his ideas. The Party finally took the initiative and excommunicated him when he published an article in the Trotskyist L'Observateur in 1951. By a torturous process of mental reorganization, Morin moved step by step from orthodoxy to existential Marxism. The first Stalinist postulate to vanish was the metaphysical belief in the future: within official Marxism it was necessary to believe in Russia as the future realization of Communism. All difficulties in the present could be explained away by the dogma that Russia embodied the hopes of mankind for emancipation. Once Morin gave this up, he relished existentialism's focus on the present as a healthy tonic. [15] Without faith in the necessity of the Kingdom to come, the Kingdom of this world could be seen better for what it was. While in the Party, Morin saw himself in bad faith, refusing to accept responsibility for his adherence to Stalinism. His personal morality of fighting for authenticity and justice was in total opposition to his ideology. Morally, he rejected the Stalinist system: ideologically, be rejected his morality.[16] He realized that a Marxist critique of the Soviet Union was urgent, but participation in the Party made all criticism impossible. To accept responsibility for his own views, Morin had to leave the Party and develop his ideas independently. Eventually, Morin completed the dismantling of his official Marxism. Through reading Socialisme ou Barbarie he became critical of the Russian bureaucracy. Then the Proletariat lost its monolithic solidarity in his eyes when French workers evidenced no enthusiasm for http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (6 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:24]

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Polish and Hungarian workers in their demands for worker self-management in 1956. In fact he visited the Polish workers' councils with Lefort and Mascolo. Revolutionary infallibility was no longer an attribute of Russian bureaucrats and French manual laborers. The identification of the empirical working class with the next stage of human realization now collapsed. After several years of personal anguish and difficulty, the ex-Communist began to see history from a new light, in the manner of the Arguments group. The center of his 15 Ibid., 144. 16 Ibid., 152.

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The Arguments Group mental world shifted from the fate of Russian politics and the economic struggles of French workers toward the astonishing new features of advanced capitalist society. A new "planetary" era was already in advanced stages of development, an era that witnessed new contradictions very different from those of Marx's model of England in the nineteenth century. The new contradictions were those of a world of material abundance, security, and comfort, distorted by a "hyperpetty-bourgeois" mentality-what we call the American dream. Material luxury now posed the question "comment vivre?" but the "masses" did not know bow "to enjoy man." Foreshadowing the concepts of play and daily life of the Arguments group, Morin announced the "center of the contradiction": ". . . the petty-bourgeois life of comfort becomes a passive life of play with dreams, pastimes, distractions; the great technical adventure requires an active life of play where man, becoming aware of just this adventure, attempts to live." [17] The existentialist notion of authenticity, and Sartre's concept of play as the highest form of human realization, were beginning to emerge in the thought of the Arguments group. A total reconversion of our culture is needed," Morin urged, in order to realize the potentials of the planetary era. The old problems of capitalism remained and new ones were being added, problems of the psychic life, of culture, modes of alienation that would not magically vanish with the appropriation of the means of production. Hence the timetable for revolution had to be revised: "the prehistory of man is not near its end. . . ." [18] As Marx said, history progressed on its bad side, "barbarism advances along with civilization" as the cunning of reason moved in ever more illegible ways. At present, "We are in the iron age of the planetary era," [19] at the beginning of a vastly different, strange and as yet not fully intelligible world. Still, despair was not the right attitude to take toward the planetary era. A new type of thinking was called for in a new situation, 17 Ibid., 153. 18 Ibid., 231.


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19 Ibid., 234.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism a qualified optimism based on a critical Marxist understanding but also on Freudian insights and insights from other new disciplines. Was Morin still a Marxist? "Yes and no": "Today I think Marxism must be integrated in a more total conception, one that considers man in a biological, psychic and social dialectic, that takes Freud's enormous discovery into account and that retrieves the problem of the relations between the real and the imaginary." [20] Morin inaugurated an "integral revisionism" that presented a "totality" that was "open," that accepted "contradictions" which were "irreducible," like the contradiction between the real and the imaginary. The urgent need was for a new mode of thought that accepted "unlimited revisionism, critique, relativity, contradiction," and that struggled continually against reification. This type of thought was the central project of the Arguments group, but Morin himself did not systematize it.[21] At the end of the Autocritique Morin mythologized his new insights when he insisted that his intellectual departure was no more than a return to ideas he maintained as a fourteen-year-old boy, before he was entranced by Stalinism. This Nietzschean eternal return of the same served to unify his life, preserving the integrity of his personality through the barren Stalinist years and in effect rewriting his own history to suit his current preoccupations. A close friend of Morin, Dionys Mascolo was among the first of the intellectuals to leave the CP after the war. Mascolo played only a minor role in the Arguments group, allowing his name to appear on the editorial board and contributing but one article. Yet Mascolo published a book before the appearance of Arguments that anticipated many of its themes. His book, Le Communisme: révolution et communication, ou la dialectique des valeurs et des besoins, appearing in 1953, rejected Marx's concept of need 20 Ibid., 240 21 Cf. Introduction à une politique de l'homme (Paris, 1965).

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acted according to their material self-interest and that the revolution was inevitable since the obvious self-interest of the workers was to overthrow capitalism. Using the 1844 Manuscripts for support, Mascolo gave a non-utilitarian interpretation of Marx's concept of need, relating it to Hegel's notion of desire in the Phenomenology. The central thesis of Marx, for him, was the theory of needs which represented subjectivity as a "lack," and was the basis of "negativity" in social consciousness. Need pressed the individual toward an awareness of the "impossible,î toward what did not exist, toward "satisfaction." Need was "the material equivalent of the imagination."[22] As Hegel had shown, desire was born from need, leading eventually to the emergence of the need for the satisfaction of the desire of desire, or the satisfaction of the potential for human self-realization. What is more, desire led to action, to the conquest of nature and to social relations, to the communication of desire to others. Need and desire were the active side of subjectivity that existentialists, not Karl Marx, had developed. In this antiStalinist vision, Communism was not simply against exploitation and alienation; it was for human satisfaction. One of the chief faults in Mascolo's thesis was that it did not account for the possibility of false needs or false desires, which was a prominent question in the 1960s. The dialectic of need and desire enabled Mascolo to set a human criterion for social organizations. Men made their own history not only by building social structures but by seeking to gratify desire. Desire separated social institutions from natural phenomena, discriminating between the blindness of nature and human values. As Lukacs said, the economy, a system of tools, was a "second nature." The economy was indeed a second nature because it reproduced the unconsciousness of nature itself within the creations of man. The economy would not become human until it was shorn 22 Le Communisme, 169. 23 Ibid., 242.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism of its naturalness and reflected human desire. History presented a continuous series of distortions of desire in religious myths and ideologies, as men lost the knowledge of the root of desire in need. Hence subjectivity itself took on the qualities of nature and values became commodities that had no direct relation to human need. In this way, Mascolo's concept of desire raised the question of the concept of subjectivity for Marxism that would later be developed by the Arguments group. 3. Beyond Philosophy In the late 1950s and early 1960s the Arguments group published a series of studies that circled loosely around a single problematic: the transcendence of philosophy. Fougeyrollas' Le Marxisme en question (1959), La Philosophie en question (1960), and Contradiction et totalité (1964); Chatelet's La Naissance http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (9 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:24]

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de líhistoire (1962) and Logos et praxis (1962; Axelos' Marx, penseur de la technique (1961) and Vers la pensée planétaire (1964); Lefebvre's Marx, philosophe (1964) and La Métaphilosophie (1965)--most of these works were published in the Arguments collection and all of them centered on the theme, "Did Marx begin a new type of thought that avoided the difficulties of the Western philosophical tradition?" and "Did he open the path for a critique specifically suited to a dawning age of technology?" In general, the group viewed Marx's position as ambiguous, pointing toward a new kind of knowledge but also somewhat rooted in the old traditions. Individually, the Arguments group came up with diverse, even opposing, answers to the question of Marx's transcendence of philosophy. Looking at their works as a whole, we can say that Axelos and Fougeyrollas tended to be more critical of Marx, while Chatelet and Lefebvre saw less urgency in revising Marx's basic propositions. The Arguments group went back beyond the 1844 Manuscripts to the earlier Doctoral 220

The Arguments Group Thesis, dealing no longer with the young Marx, but with the juvenile Marx. What interested them in the dissertation was Marx's critique of philosophy. They were fascinated by Marx's statement there that" . . . the world's becoming philosophical is at the same time philosophy's becoming worldly, that its realization is at the same time its loss . . . "[24] Marx seemed to be calling for the abolition of philosophy as part of the goal of Communism because philosophy was an alienated mode of thought and presumably Marx himself had invented a new type of thought that would avoid its pitfalls. But how could philosophy be realized? Could the alienation of past philosophy be transcended? Did Marx accomplish these goals? Was his concept of alienation a fulfillment of the new type of thought? Was the project of realizing philosophy identical to the project of the Proletariat in abolishing private property? Did Marxism need to be revised in accordance with the notion of transcending philosophy? These were the questions asked by the Arguments group. The question of the goal of philosophy was raised by the group with a sharp awareness of the onset of a new historical era. They were now in an age of technology in which the entire globe was qualitatively more unified and alienated than in the past. Material needs were near satisfaction, bringing to light the question of specifically human or poetic needs. Above all, man was no longer viewed in confrontation with nature; to the extent that Marx's thought bore residues of the old Promethean combat with nature it would have to be shelved. The center of advanced technological society bad shifted from work to leisure, from the economic structure to the political and cultural superstructure. The new age raised new problems and new forms of alienation, those of the psyche, of the electronic media, of space-age politics. As a result of these sharply new intellectual concerns the Arguments group rejected http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (10 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:24]

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24 Easton and Guddat, op. cit., 62. Cf. also, The German Ideology.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism old Marxist questions and principles, whether Stalinist, Leninist, or Trotskyist. While undertaking their critique of Marxism, the Arguments group found itself inevitably drawn to the existentialists. Axelos and Fougeyrollas gained their perspective on Marx from studying Heidegger, while Chatelet and more especially Lefebvre resorted continually to Sartre's early positions in Being and Nothingness and to his criticism of diamat in "Materialism and Revolution." The differences between Heidegger and Sartre, while in some respects great, were not enough to break the unity of the Arguments group's existential Marxism. These general comments about the Arguments group will become more concrete through a review of their positions on the question of the transcendence of philosophy. 4. Kostas Axelos and the Concept of Play Kostas Axelos, who took on the burden of editing Arguments and later directed the collection, came to France from Greece during the Civil War on the same boat with Castoriadis and Kosta Papaioannou, a right-wing Marxist. We have already discussed Axelos' critique of Marx as a prophet of technique in Marx, penseur de la technique. In that book as well as in articles published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, collected as Vers la pensée planétaire, Axelos discerned a deep flaw in Marx's thought: that Marx remained in the metaphysical tradition of philosophy since Plato, an argument that Axelos took over from Heidegger. The existentialist's interest in Marx dated from the first edition of the 1844 Manuscripts. Landshut, its editor, was a student of Heidegger, and Heidegger assisted him in that venture.[25] Later, in his "Letter on Humanism" in answer to questions from the French Heideggerian, Jean 25 See the euphoric discussion of the relation of Marx and Heidegger among Axelos, Chatelet, Lefebvre, and Beaufret, "Karl Marx et Heidegger," Nouvel observateur, 10:473 (May 28, 1959) 16.

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The Arguments Group Beaufret, Heidegger argued that humanism, whether Sartre's or Marx's was, first, inadequate to confront the crisis of man in "an age of technology" and "mass society" and, second, inadequate to reveal the profundity of human reality.[26] His call for a new philosophical criticism suited to a technological age pleased the Marxists of the Arguments group, but the other argument against Marx had greater impact on them. For Heidegger, humanism led to metaphysics, since it purported to locate an essence of man, like Marx's species-being or Descartes' cogito. The idea of an essence made man into just another animal species, whereas for Heidegger human reality was existence, a "standing in the clearing of Being." Because man stands outside of himself, he is open to Being, not just to human being. In the twentieth century, man has lost his awareness of Being; this is the substance of his crisis. Humanism failed to transcend human reality toward Being, and hence reduced the scope of human possibility. Impressed by this argument, Axelos wrote a book on the relation of Marx and Heidegger, Einfuhrung in ein kunftiges Denken: Über Marx und Heidegger, '[27] an article on "Heidegger et le problème de la philosophie," published Beaufret's Dialogue avec Heidegger in the Arguments series as well a translation, "Les Principes de la pensée,"[28] and participated in a colloquium on Heidegger with Beaufret, Lefebvre, and Chatelet that was printed in Arguments. Axelos' search for an open, fragmentary, multi-dimensional, poetic, planetary thought led him to Pascal and Nietzsche.[29] Their phoristic style were examples of thought that did not close itself into a system. Axelos also discovered fragmentary thought in Rimbaud.[30] Rimbaud had announced the demise of humanist metaphysics: 26 "Letter on Humanism," in The Existentialist Tradition, ed. N. Languilli (N.Y., 1971) 204-'245. 27 Tübingen, 1966. 28 Arguments, 20 (1960) 27-33. 29 "La Pensée fragmentaire de la totalité chez Pascal," Vers la pensée planétaire, op. cit., 105-135. 30 "Rimbaud et la poésie du monde planétaire," ibid, 40-171. 223

III. Toward an Existential Marxism "l'homme a fini!" The end of man meant the end of the metaphysics of reason, of man who divided the world into reason and unreason, cutting himself off from Being. La Pensée planétaire was a kind of thinking that resembled the dialectic, but the dialectic shorn of


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metaphysics. Floundering in humanism since Plato, Western philosophy collapsed Being into thought. The search for a truly dialectical mode of thought led Axelos, following Heidegger and Nietzsche, to the pre-Socratics, especially to Heraclitus.[31] Unlike Plato, the pre-Socratics thought within the totality. [32] The pre-Socratic concept of physis was a genuine totality that Heraclitus set in motion with his concept of becoming. Since the totality was always in flux, it could never be fixed in an intellectual system. It was always open to new creations. This vision of the world as an open totality suited Axelos' intuition that creativity needed safeguarding in a technocratic society. For Axelos, Marx's concept of alienation was not adequate to the need for an open totality, since it failed to allow sufficient autonomy to political and even philosophical alienation. For this reason, Marx did not invent a theory of knowledge that was truly revolutionary. Marx's concept of alienation also concealed the alienation inherent in the development of technology, whether capitalist or socialist.[33] For Marx had reduced human reality to work, to making tools, to conquering nature, to producing efficient machines that led to automation: what he did not call enough attention to was that human reality also had to create itself, in Rimbaud's words, "to change life," not only to satisfy material needs, but to attain the full satisfaction of desire. 31Cf. Héraclite et la philosophie: La prémière saisie de l'être en devenir de la totalité, collection Arguments (Paris, 1962). 32 "Pourquoi étudions-nous les présocratiques?" Vers la pensée planétaire, op. cit., 67-76. 33 "Y a-t-il une philosophic marxiste?" Vers la pensée planétaire, op. cit., 205.

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The Arguments Group Because of his faulty concept of alienation, a metaphysical anthropology of homo faber entered into Marx's thought. [34] Subjectivity was reduced to tool making, and had no right of satisfaction of its own. Marx therefore was unable sufficiently to integrate materialism and spiritualism. In a brilliant revision of the Theses on Feuerbach, Axelos summarized his position. Here is his first thesis on Marx: The principal fault of all historico-dialectic materialism (including Marx's) is that the object, reality, the materials are taken only under the form of produced objects, material realities, materials of work; they are thus effectively grasped, but they lack a ground and a horizon. This is why the other side was developed, in a metaphysical way--in opposition to naive or sophisticated realism--by idealist philosophy which, naturally, neither knew nor recognized the world we call real: the totality of forms, forces, and weaknesses of the constituted, concretized and fixed world--the mode of being of the constituting and open World, the other side of the same and unique World. Marx wanted sensible objects to be superior to ideal objects; but be did not grasp human activity itself as problematic http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (13 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:25]

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activity. Thus he considered in the Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy as much as in the Poverty of Philosophy--material life as the only truly human one, while thought and poetry were grasped only in their conditional and ideological forms.[35] Axelos was rejecting not the basic elements of Marx's thought, only its emphasis and its consequent lacunae. The result of capturing human thought and action in the moment of work was that Marx reintroduced metaphysics and dualism: "The thought of Marx is metaphysical as soon as it wants to transcend oppositions and dualism; it is metaphysical--as is all Western and European thought since Descartes--in that it privileges the physical and 34 For a similar critique of the Marxist concept of work by a phenomenologist, see Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. C. Kelbley (Evanston, 1965) 197-219. 35 Vers la pensée planétaire, op. cit., 172.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism sensible in relation to the 'metaphysical.'"[36] Marx was still thinking in terms of the antagonism of man and nature. Now, in the twentieth century, with the conquest of nature practically over, it was possible, Axelos argued, to see what had been concealed from Marx by virtue of his Lebenswelt. Planetary thought could now place man's poetic self-creation on the same plane with his relation to nature, avoiding metaphysics. We must note that Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, to a very large degree, had set forth the same proposition, except for his Cartesian residues. The conclusions that Axelos drew from his critique of Marx were exactly those of Sartre: avoiding the metaphysics of idealism and materialism, planetary thought discovered the most appropriate dimension of thought and action in play. The planetary thought of Axelos led to the same conclusion as Sartre had reached, both in a later work called Le Jeu du monde and in Vers la pensée planétaire. Unlike Sartre, Axelos did not develop clear ideas about how human reality opened to being in play, rather be took off in poetic excursions: Nothing ever elucidates completely. Prelude, development and especially ending remain problematic. We are always embarked, en route. We are . . . in the interlude. What we are and what we are not is the interlude, not only between two games, but in the game. Man is taken in the game of the world. Enjoying it on many levels. Himself and the game. [37]


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Axelos' thought ended in fragmentary visions of the possibility of a world of play, a poetic and prophetic call to begin the game of authentic life. One might ask how we can be liberated from a metaphysics of work while we are confronted, not by hostile nature, but by bureaucratic socialism and monopolistic capitalism. The one clear mean36 Marx, penseur de la technique, op. cit., 136. Cf. 120, 126, 144. 37 Vers la pensée planétaire, op. cit., 322.

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The Arguments Group ing play did have for Axelos was its connection with the dialectic: play was the living openness of the dialectic, not the finitude of death. Certainly Axelos' image of play had nothing to do with Rand Corporation War Games, with families engaged in Monopoly, with a Freudian concept of play as acting out. Ironically, Axelos' existential Marxism relied on the somber broodings of Heidegger--with his preoccupation with death and care (Sorge), with the inauthenticity of everyday life in the technical world, where people lost themselves in things and were blind to the terribly serious business of the quest for Being--only to emerge with a philosophy of play. In French fashion, like Fourier and Sartre, Axelos' vision of the game of the world did have a lightness of tone far removed from the spirit of his Teutonic teacher.[38] 5. Fougeyrollas' Heideggerian Marxism The same age as Edgar Morin, Pierre Fougeyrollas had joined the Party at the same time, in 1942, but he stayed in it until the Hungarian invasion. With his training in philosophy, Fougeyrollas confronted Marxism with the new technological world in Le Marxisme en question of 1959. Here he diverged from existing Marxism far more than any other major figure in the Arguments group. In basic agreement with Sartre, Fougeyrollas announced that true Marxism was not represented by Stalin's diamat but by the historical concept of the alienation and liberation of man. The trouble was that even this true Marxism contained "metaphysical residues" that Fougeyrollas thought urgently required revision. In the spirit of the Arguments group, he argued that "the age of systems was over" and that a drastically new type of thought was needed, one that was not dogmatic but "problem38 Cf. Le Jeu du monde (Paris, 1969) 419-444.


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III. Toward an Existential Marxism atic," one that raised questions.[39] Borrowing from Calvez, he disputed Marx's attempt to reduce all forms of alienation to economic alienation. The elements of the superstructure were in part relative to the economic base, but they also were "other" than this base and required distinct theories of explanation. Fougeyrollas' book on politics, La Conscience politique dans la France contemporaine (1963), demonstrated empirically that political consciousness was in large measure independent from "socioeconomic interests.[40] Political consciousness was an effort to construct an integrated, total worldview, manifesting man's capacity to create "norms" beyond any reduction to the economic base. For Fougeyrollas, as for Sartre, Marxism did not account for the capacity of consciousness to transcend the given. In addition to reducing all forms of alienation to the economy, Marx's thought contained elements of metaphysical optimism --and eschatological myth. His vision of the "total" end of alienation was, for Fougeyrollas, a mystifying hope that was not justified by historical reality and did not further whatever liberation from alienation was possible. " . . to suppose that man, once he achieved economic and social liberation, would become ipso facto the total man announced by Marx, is surely an imprudent affirmation."[41] Fougeyrollas wanted a more modest Marxism that would allow for an indefinite process of overcoming alienation, as well as the acceptance of theories, like Freud's, that accounted for specific types of alienation in the superstructure. Fougeyrollas' critique of Marx's concept of alienation was in part influenced by his pessimistic mood; he had lost faith in the working class, Russian socialism, and the French CP. His call for the acceptance of theories that accounted for the autonomous alienations in the superstructure, as well as for the recognition of the active role of consciousness in history, were typical of existential Marxism. But his insistence that ali39 Le Marxisme en question, 160-161. 40 La Conscience politique dans la France contemporaine, 15-16. 41 Le Marxisme en question, 26.

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enation was without end was not clarified. He never indicated specifically why men had to lose the power over their own experience or in what respects or conditions this was so. To argue for this, one has to resort to some metaphysical principle in order to sustain the idea of the incapacity of men to control their lives. In Fougeyrollas' case, his belief in eternal alienation was based on an impression from his own experience of the direction of history. Marx's faith in the full eradication of alienation under Communism was dissonant with his mood in the early 1960s. In his book on the mass media, L'Action sur l'homme: cinéma et télévision (1961), Fougeyrollas reached what was, from a Marxist viewpoint, the worst possible diagnosis that the primary mutilation of men occurred no longer at work, but in leisure activities. With history gone so far amuck, the basic principles of Marxism were more a hindrance than a help. Fougeyrollas accepted many of the conclusions of liberal, end-of-ideology social scientists. Not only was the working class apparently uninterested in a Marxist revolution, but Fougeyrollas was persuaded by Jean Fourastié and others that advanced technology eliminated the working class and created a "new middle class, rather than a new working class of technicians, engineers, and clerical workers. In two other studies, La Philosophie en question (1960) and Contradiction et totalité: surgissement et deploiements de la dialectique (1964), Fougeyrollas attended to the questions of the Arguments group. La Philosophie en question studied the meaning of the realization of philosophy, while Contradiction et totalité took a close look at the nature of dialectical thought. The earlier work presented the Arguments group's typical blend of Heidegger and Marx: man was faced with a crisis due to the technification of his existence that traditional philosophy could not clarify. Nevertheless, the only resort men have, faced 42 Ibid., 134.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism with their current dilemma, is the invention of a new philosophy: Without doubt, the anguish of contemporary man resides in the technification of his existence and the anguish of philosophical consciousness comes from facing the enigma of Being without properly identifying it. It seems to us, however, that philosophical activity is the highest recourse of this man menaced by dehumanization and that the anguished existence of this same man is the supreme recourse of a philosophy that has decided to extract itself from thematic multiplicities in order to rediscover its original


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unified problematic. [43] Existentialism needed a neo-Marxist critique of technological society and neo-Marxism needed an existentialist comprehension of anguished consciousness. Contradiction et totalité was part of a new concern with the nature and meaning of the dialectic which arose in the early 1960s when it was recognized that neither Hegel nor Marx had adequately resolved its problems. Sartre pioneered this effort with Critique de la raison dialectique. The sociologist Georges Gurvitch, in Dialectique et sociologie (1962), sought to apply his "hyper-empiricism" to a theory of the dialectic that would avoid the alleged dogmatisms of Marx in his "decending" materialist dialectic and of the ascending" dialectic of idealism: " . . . Marx's dialectic, despite all its realism and all its empiricism, remains ascending and apologetic. It is the triumphant march toward a humanity reconciled with itself in a realized dream of terrestrial paradise. It is the apology for the suppression of all servitude, all constraints all obstacles. It is the apology for the end of history. . . ."[44] Recognizing these dangers in the dialectic, Fougey43 La Philosophie en question, 55. 44 La Vocation actuelle de la sociologie (Paris, 1950) Vol. 2, 321. For a critical review of Dialectique et sociologie, cf. A. Gucinski, Telos, 1:1 (Spring, 1968) 49-52.

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The Arguments Group rollas attempted to modify it to suit the requirements of "fragmentary thought." Fougeyrollas' articulation of the dialectic was representative of the Arguments group's orientation. Rejecting dialectical materialism, he was concerned to show that the dialectic was quintessentially a critical weapon, the antithesis of dogmatism. Against Sartre, he proclaimed that the dialectic was not a type of reason and not a method. He proceeded to reformulate the dialectic, somewhat arbitrarily and abstractly, as he admitted,[45] as consisting of two poles, one of contradiction, the other of totality. In essence, the dialectic was a totality in contradiction. Contradictions were of two types: alterity, the mere otherness of things juxtaposed as in nature, and alienation, the lost otherness of human contradictions. For its part, totality was divided into globality (the extent of the totality) and integration (the unity of the totality). Furthermore, there were no inherent contradictions and no closed totalities: contradictions-inthemselves and totalities-in-themselves were only concepts. Real contradictions and real totalities were always partial, always to be transcended, leaving the dialectic in a permanent state of openness. Thus, Fougeyrollas laid the groundwork for a dialectic that would allow continuous criticism, and continuous development in society. A "problematic," " open," "planetary" thought was now constituted. For a connection with Marxism, Fougeyrollas termed his thought a true dialectical anthropology while as a http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (18 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:25]

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philosophy it was a "transcendental phenomenology."[46] Both Marxist and existentialist, it would guarantee the unlimited freedom and negativity of consciousness. Fougeyrollas was bent on "deontologizing" the dialectic to assure the avoidance of a new dogmatism. However, an attack on dogmatism easily becomes itself a dogmatism, and Fougeyrollas' failure to deduce adequately his basic categories 45 Contradiction et totalité, 7. 46 Ibid., 133.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism left him open to this charge. Still, a beginning had been made on what is one of the thorniest problems of existential Marxism. 6. Chatelet's Concept of Satisfaction Unlike Axelos, Chatelet's existential Marxism relied less on Heidegger than on Sartre. Even so, Chatelet's debt to Sartre was primarily on the negative side of agreement with the existentialist's critique of Stalinist philosophy. [47] In addition, Chatelet was much less prepared to modify Marx than were Axelos and Fougeyrollas. By the mid-1960s, he defected somewhat from existential Marxism to the structuralist Marxism of Althusser, the only about-face of its kind among the existential Marxists. In Logos et praxis, Chatelet complained that the important question of the suppression and realization of philosophy raised by Marx had been neglected by Marxists. The purpose of his own work would be "to define how Marx, in opposing traditional philosophy, conceived theoretical work . . . "[48] From the outset, Chatelet, in existential Marxist fashion, attacked Marx for forgetting the "active side of consciousness," the truth that it was necessary "to do philosophy." In the end, he, like Sartre, discovered liberating praxis in the heart of consciousness, with the concept of satisfaction. Again like Sartre, Chatelet found the activity of consciousness as the source of the uniqueness of man, his difference from the technological world of things, manifesting a concern for a type of alienation that was fundamentally technological. To uncover the meaning of Marx's pronouncement about the "world's becoming philosophical" and "philosophy's becoming worldly," Chatelet studied the origins of philosophy in Greece. In La Naissance de l'histoire (1962) he investigated the relation be47 Logos et praxis, 11-56, "Le Matérialisme dialectique et la critique contemporaine." For Chatelet's appreciation


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of Critique de la raison dialectiqtic, Ibid., 198-199. 48 Logos et praxis, 7-8.

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The Arguments Group tween the beginning of philosophy and the cultural decision to "make history." He found the two interconnected: be found, in short, philosophical consciousness as basic to a new self-conscious stage of human becoming. The book . . . wants to show that the ultimate basis on which the comprehension . . . of historicity and the cultural decision to make history can develop is the 'Seizure by man of the political dimension of his fate, the consciousness that he has of being an active subject in this sensible-profane world in the heart of a community on which he depends, that is, the knowledge of real freedom .[40] A good Hegelian, Chatelet here connected the origin of freedom with the act of doing philosophy. Against the vulgar Marxists, Chatelet located this all-important historical act as a political act, not an economic one. The meaning of the origin of philosophy, and hence the meaning of the end of philosophy, was articulated in Logos et praxis. Philosophy began in the attempt to solve a problem in the Greek community: Logos was related to Praxis. Before philosophy, the Greeks believed that ideas were governing principles of action, a kind of practical wisdom. In the class structure of Greece, conflicts developed between different groups in civil society who were acting on their different ideas.[50] Contradictions of ideas were hence related to class conflicts. Philosophy was born in the attempt to resolve the problem of conflict in the polis, the universal, political realm beyond civil society, by seeking to resolve the contradictions in the ideas held by different groups. Philosophy originated with the concept of Logos that was beyond the world of ideas, and this Logos was implicated in the political question of preserving the polis by ending class warfare. The philosopher and the citizen, those concerned with general 49 La Naissance de l'histoire, 10. 50 Logos et praxis, 58-61.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism welfare beyond the particular interests of his group, were born in the same historical act. Such was the richness of philosophy in its origins. The particular way in which it sought to solve the question, however, was the source of its poverty overcome only by Hegel and by Marx. Philosophy sought to prove the generality and universality of Logos over against the particularity of ideas in order to provide a basis for reconciliation. Aiming at the universal truth of Logos, this new form of thought was compelled to rise above the practico-sensible world of the polis. Since Logos could not really resolve the class conflicts (there was no universal class like the Proletariat to carry out its program), it entered the "ivory tower" of pure theory. More and more, philosophy resorted to the ideal realm for the locus of justice, digressing from its original connection with Praxis. Chatelet went on to show that the philosopher's Logos did develop an answer to social conflict with the concept of satisfaction. Philosophy discovered the source of conflict in the polis as the lack of the true satisfaction of each human being in the community (for example, Plato's concept of justice in The Republic). The philosophical breakthrough did not come until Hegel placed the concept of satisfaction at the end of his Phenomenology, where the dialectic of human becoming had at last resolved the contradictions between the ideal and the real. The Greeks too had discovered the concept of satisfaction as the true fulfillment of man's potentials, yet they limited it to fulfillment in reason alone. If men actualized their potentials for rationality and identified with the universal, the polis would be saved. After Hegel had put the concept of human realization in motion, Marx found the true answer to the riddle of philosophy. Marx eliminated the question left hanging by the Greeks--the contradiction between Logos and Praxis--by indicating how philosophy could be surpassed only in its realization. He made his astounding discovery by dem234

The Arguments Group onstrating that the necessity of the transcendence of philosophy is based . . . on the recognition of the historical and human importance of the philosophical decision, that the failure of philosophy has as its profound cause a fact: the historical situation of man through a long epoch that permits him to conceive of freedom but not of realizing it, to perceive http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (21 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:25]

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the role of universal thought but not make it practical, to propose solutions to the problems of natural and social alienation but not to work to make these solutions effective; that the situation of philosophy today has evolved just because of the success of industrial society. Thus the negation of philosophy is the realization of its deepest objective . . . to make exist empirically, the universal life . . . . [51] Marx brought philosophy from heaven to earth: be alchemized idealism into materialism by reintroducing the connection of Logos with Praxis, by reformulating Logos into a doctrine of the historical becoming of the real, and by discovering the bidden structures of Praxis in industrial capitalism. Put most directly, Marx uncovered the possibilities of the empirical, material basis of universal human satisfaction in the alienation of industrial society. He brought philosophy back to human action; he seduced Logos back into "the street of history." For Chatelet, Marx transcended philosophy only through the aid of Hegel. By placing Hegel, and for that matter Marx, in the tradition of Greek philosophy, Chatelet, like Axelos and Fougeyrollas, skirted, for better or worse, the Judeo-Christian elements in their thought. The existential Marxist acknowledged Marx's deep debt to Hegel for the latter's historical anthropology, his dialectic, his concept of human realization as satisfaction. Still, Marx broke significantly with Hegel by "grasping man in his empirical reality." 51 Ibid., 187.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism Chatelet viewed Marx's achievements in overcoming philosophy in absolute terms: by making human satisfaction depend upon the conquest of nature, Marx had solved, once and for all, the riddle of history. The specific tasks of Marxism in suppressing and realizing philosophy were concrete and limited: it did not need to create a new ontology, a new theory of knowledge, or become "an encyclopedia of the sciences." Its aim was limited to showing that humanity cannot realize its fundamental goal (that of universal, empirical satisfaction implying the growth of the power of man over nature, the multiplication of human needs, the possibility of satisfying them and the definitive abolition of historical violence) except by recognizing in its fundamental-being as active materiality struggling against a material world whose intelligibility is henceforth furnished by the


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experimental sciences.[52] By ending class warfare, the Proletariat would resolve the question raised in Greece of overcoming violence in the polis. Although Chatelet clarified the meaning of the realization of philosophy, be relied far too heavily on the empirical fact that history was progressing toward final satisfaction, that the Proletariat indeed embodied the mission of humanity. Furthermore, Chatelet did not confront Marx's reliance on an abstract anthropology, Feuerbach's species-being. If philosophy was transcended in concrete satisfaction, the nature of the being who was satisfied was left somewhat up in the air. Chatelet was also less satisfactory than Axelos in rethinking the new type of thought that was introduced by Marx. Chatelet did, however, stress the existential side of Marxism, its concern with active consciousness, with the role of subjectivity in the becoming of man. At the conclusion of Logos et praxis, he acknowledged the existentialist concept of death. Marx's dialectic 52 Ibid., 178.

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The Arguments Group of need and work were "insufficient" to explain human history. Bowing to Kierkegaard and Heidegger, be noted that "In truth, the consideration of the empirical requires that this tragic dimension of human existence be recognized."[53] Death constitutes "an irreducible existential dimension , a kind of "alienation." but one qualitatively different from the alienation of nature and society. Still, Chatelet evasively refused to place human finitude as the "determining element in the present human problematic." [54] But he never specified just how the alienation of finitude was different from those of nature and society. Without explaining why death was not a determinant in history, he proclaimed his act of faith in the revolution: It is not a matter of pretending that individual problems, that the essential problem of the individual, his imperfection, his anguish and his finitude, are without importance or will be resolved by the construction of a really coherent, human world. On the contrary, what Marxism affirms, it seems, is that these problems cannot be resolved it would be naive to wish to predict it in any way--except in a universe where the individual finally finds himself free, in the wealth of his particular determinations. What is important is knowing the present problematic


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of humanity and lucidly participating in the struggle for the creation of a society that permits the indefinite development of human potentials, that makes man exist as man, that realizes effective freedom . . . [55] Chatelet's existential Marxism prophesied Communism as a society of free, authentic individuals in Sartre's sense. His existential Marxism was incomplete, however, to the extent that be could not define those structures of consciousness and action which made the revolution probable, beyond the simple acceptance of Marx's concepts by the masses in an act of rational self-consciousness. 53 Ibid., 190. 54 Ibid., 192. 55 Ibid., 195.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism 7. Lefebvre's Concept of Everyday Life a. The Break with the CP Lefebvre was among the first CP intellectuals to confess his sins in an auto-critique. In 1949 be apologized for making Marxism into a theory of knowledge, for relying too heavily on Hegel and the young Marx, and for thinking too much like a philosopher [56] --just those intellectual traits which were to make him the leader of rejuvenated Marxism. A glance at his long publication list reveals that Lefebvre retreated to the relatively uncontroversial sphere of literary criticism (a tactic also used by Lukacs in a time a political orthodoxy) from the years of his autocritique until his break with the CP in 1956: he published works on Pascal, Diderot, Musset, Rabelais, and a Contribution à l'esthétique. Before the onset of Zhdanovist restraints, Lefebvre did his best to expound and spread a view of Marxism grounded in the concept of alienation. Back in 1934 with Norbert Gutermann, be introduced selections from the 1844 Manuscripts in a text that held its freshness enough to be reprinted in the 1960s ; [58] he wrote three introductions to Marx's thought,[59] advocating a Marxist humanism; and he wrote two theoretical works on aspects of Marxist thought left in obscurity under Stalin-alienation and the dialectic.[60] With so much to be done by way of rethinking Marxism, the yoke endured from the late 1940s until 1957 must have weighed heavily on Lefebvre. His discontents with official Marxism were expressed immediately upon his expul56 La Nouvelle critique, 4 (1949) 730.


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57 La Somme et le reste (Paris, 1959) 122. 58 Introduction aux morceaux choisis de K. Marx (Paris, 1934), reprinted by Gallimard in 1964. 59 Marx et la liberté, 1947; Pour connaître la pensée de K. Marx, 1947; Le Marxisme in Que sais-je? in 1948. 60 Le Matérialisme dialectique in 1939 and Logique formelle, logique dialectique in 1947.

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The Arguments Group sion from the Party in an article in Les Temps Modernes in 1957, "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," [61] and two books, Problèmes actuels du marxisme in 1958, and an auto-critique which won the Prix de critiques, La Somme et le reste in 1959. In these works Lefebvre rehearsed the sad humiliations of an intellectual under Stalinism. Like Morin, he was brought before the Central Committee and interrogated about his "lack of discipline," meaning that he published articles without the express approval of the Party. In this interview there was no intellectual debate about Marxism and no explicit criticism of the ideas. This was in the spring of 1956, before the Hungarian invasion. Twentyeight years of Party membership were terminated with punishment deserved by a naughty child. Once expelled from the confines of Stalinism, Lefebvre immediately rediscovered his pre-Party interest in existentialism, the same existentialism he had so crudely derided in 1946. Searching to gain his theoretical equilibrium before embarking on new directions, be again reviewed the corpus of Marxism, only to expound a heretical existential Marxism. His studies of 1957-1959 labored to untangle official Marxism and redirect critical thought toward a philosophy of freedom. "Human consciousness owes to Marxism a new ideal, that of concrete freedom." [63] He sensed a new world situation: "'We must now take up the work and construct an open palace with all sides to the light, to the air, to the people."[64] The new questions be posed became the program of the Arguments group and of existential Marxism: the nature of Marxist philosophy, the relation of theory and practice, the questions of objectivity and of the State, those of the super-structure and of consciousness. 61 (August, 1957) 104-137. 62 La Somme et le reste, 155. 63 Problèmes actuels du marxisme, 6. 64 "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," op. cit., 137.

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b. Marxism and Philosophy Outside the Party, Lefebvre, who was trained in philosophy, could look at the question of philosophy in earnest. He presented Marx's texts on philosophy along with his interpretation of them in a little book in the philosophes series in 1964. A year later, be published his Métaphilosophie in the Arguments collection. Over all, he wavered considerably between viewing Marxism as a new kind of philosophy and as a type of sociology.[65] All in all, be devoted more attention to a Marxist sociology. In Métaphilosophie the familiar pattern of the Arguments group was restated: Marx's highest achievement was in calling for and partially achieving the transcendence of philosophy. Traditional philosophy was lost in a distinct form of alienation that derived from the separation of thought and action. Lefebvre stressed especially the prerequisite of the withering away of the State for the realization of philosophy.[66] His anti-Statism was pointed at Stalinist Russia, but it was also a mark of the importance given to the superstructure by existential Marxism. Having rejected philosophy, Lefebvre scanned the European intellectual tradition for signs of a new direction. Conscious of the inadequacies of Marx, he looked primarily to the existentialists, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and especially Sartre.[67] Like Marx, they had begun the quest for dialectical reason, except they bad developed a concept of the active side of consciousness in the process of human becoming. Here Lefebvre relied heavily on the studies of Axelos and Chatelet, including, like them, the pre-Socratic Heraclitus in his list of héritiers. For Lefebvre, the new mode of thought, metaphilosophy, would have several original characteristics. It would be anti-systematic; it would be neither ontological nor 65 Sociologie de Marx (Paris, 1966). English trans. (N.Y., 1969). 66 La Métaphilosophie, 28. 67 Marx, philosophe (Paris, 1964) 45; La Somme et le reste, 140; La Métaphilosophie, 133 ff.

240 The Arguments Group anthropological.[68] It would conceive itself as part of the project of "transforming the world," thereby regenerating the Sartrean "reflection on freedom." Metaphilosophy would begin with Marx's greatest accomplishment, the concept of alienation, which was more relevant than ever since men were suffering from a second-degree alienation, being alienated from their alienation and living "happily" yet without realizing their freedom. By the 1960s Lefebvre could no longer accept Marx's concept of alienation as a finished product. In its Marxist form it was too "weak" to account for such disturbing new phenomena as the revival of http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (26 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:25]

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astrology and the "religion of the cosmonauts."[69] The reality of human alienation was much more complex than Marx had understood, since each region of social life contained entire networks of alienation in their own right. An elaboration of the specific forms of alienation would be a primary task of metaphilosophy. Concrete studies of contemporary forms of alienation would eliminate the residue of "ontologism" in Marx's articulation. Its other fault was apparent in recent studies, like Rubel's, where alienation was ethical, an error Lefebvre himself had made in his earlier concept of "the total man." At bottom, each of these misconceptions blunted the revolutionary force of the concept since they cut it off from praxis. The primary thrust of metaphilosophy, for Lefebvre, was to renew the vital link between theory and practice. This revision, however, called for modifications of Marx's concept of praxis, since it accounted only for instrumental interactions like the following: labor activity, political functions, interactions of social classes, analytical and logical rationality, technology and bureaucracy.[70] The concept of praxis left out a great deal of human experience. What Lefebvre added was an existentialist concept that he called poesis, the experience and creation of human nature. The concept of poesis inclu68 La Métaphilosophie, 262; Position, 161. 69 Position, 11. 70 La Métaphilosophie, 12-14.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism ded the creation of the city, the idea of "absolute love," psychoanalysis, the decision to change one's life-in short, the creation of new "situations." He then added a concept of "mimesis" to account for routine aspects of daily life. Finally, to avoid certain tendencies in Hegelian Marxism toward historicism, he recognized certain "residues," stressing the fact that "each activity that differentiates itself tends to constitute itself into a system, a 'world,"' containing something "precious" and "essential" that has been and might continue to be preserved. In sum, metaphilosophy revealed historical action as consisting of praxis, poesis, mimesis, and residues. A general fault in Lefebvre's thinking was his proliferation of categories without clarifying them, as, for example, in his revision of the concept of praxis. Métaphilosophie resisted this tendency by unifying the new ideas under the concept of daily life. In the last analysis, the relation of theory and practice confronted the "fundamental contradiction" between philosophy and the non-philosophical, daily life. The alienation of philosophy was measurable by the degree to which it gave privilege to certain aspects of reality and devalued others. Philosophy's goal of universality, taken over by Marx, was arrested by the non-intelligibility of daily life.


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It belongs to meta-philosophical thought to imagine and to propose forms, or rather a style that can practically construct and realize the philosophical project by transforming daily life. . . . The project of a radical transformation of daily life cannot be separated from the transcendence of philosophy and its realization.[72] c. Daily Life in the Modern World The first mention of the concept of daily life appeared as far back as 1936, with the publication of La Conscience mystifiée. The volume was to be the first in a series called Cinq essais de philosophie matérialiste, of which the third would have the title Critique 71 Ibid., 17-18. 72 Ibid., 118-119.

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The Arguments Group de la vie quotidienne. Lefebvre published such a volume subtitled Introductions in 1947, followed by a second volume subtitled Fondements d'une sociologie de la quotidienneté in 1961, and, finally, a precis of a projected third volume, La Vie quotidienne dans la monde moderne in 1968. With perseverance, he elaborated the concept of daily life throughout his career. In 1933-1934, the concept of daily life was simply a negative notion of oppressed, ordinary existence. At this time, however, Lefebvre was already demanding that Marxists take into account the need for a cultural revolution that would "recover in its original force the theoretical elan toward the universal and achieve it practically in a universal human community. . . ."[73] This was the same notion that was called in the 1960s the realization of philosophy. Lefebvre already had the germ of an existential Marxism, stressing the need for a "method of precise comprehension of the possible," in which "romanticism" was "useful." Even in the 1930s, Marxism for him was a form of humanism that did not "fix" human reality into an "eternally present" essence. The chief concern of Marxism was not with the economic structure but with "revolutionary consciousness." La Conscience mystifiée, written amidst the struggle against fascism, did not take the concepts of the young Marx very far but simply restated them in relation to present events. Critique de la vie quotidienne: introduction was more a document in the rediscovery of Marx's concept of alienation than a departure from Marx toward a new concept of daily life.[74] It tasted of the Resistance spirit of national renovation, based on a traditional image of French politics and society. In http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (28 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:25]

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the Introduction Marx's philosophy of alienation was seen as already presenting a fully developed concept of daily life.[75] Lefebvre coined the concept only to remind Marxists that the revolution required a transformation of 73 La Conscience mystifiée, 50, 127, 22. 74 Cf. E. Mounier's favorable review in Esprit, 16:148 (Sept., 1948) 423-26. 75 Critique, I(Paris: Grasset, 1947) reprinted (Paris: L'ârche, 1958) 160.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism consciousness that depended on the material base of daily life. The concept of daily life was to be distinguished from the regions of experience invoked by romantics and surrealists in art and existentialists in philosophy. The significance of daily life was that it alone was a measure of the progress of the dialectic of alienation and human becoming. Lefebvre announced that man would be fully human only when daily life became a festival. For an example of daily life as a festival, he romantically invoked Ancient Greece during its holidays, when repressive norms were forgotten and "tout est permis." Under capitalism daily life was characterized by alienation, fetishism, and the lack of human satisfaction. This was still a very abstract analysis that did not concretely touch the core structures of the quotidian. (2) The Concept of Modernity In the second and third volumes of his study of daily life Lefebvre situated daily life in a fresh social theory of modernity. History had not gone according to Karl Marx's timetable; socialist revolutions had occurred in underdeveloped societies serving only as a vehicle of modernization. In the West, consequently, "the whole structure defined by Marx a hundred years ago is collapsing for want of a revolution that would have sustained and furthered the 'human totality.' " [76] Some trends noticed by Marx were continuing: the socialization of society, the integration of the planet, the concentration of wealth. On the other hand, monopoly capitalism had replaced competitive capitalism; superstructure and base interpenetrated each other and lost their distinct outlines; old social classes had been transformed; new ideological structures and modes of alienation had arisen. Technological alienation was common to capitalist and socialist countries alike. The old proletariat, no longer immediately revolutionary in any sense, was being progressively depoliticized; its economic demands bad lost their 76 Everyday Life in the Modern World, 70.

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The Arguments Group political character; threatened by automation, workers sought stability of employment first; their needs resembled, more and more, those of the petty bourgeoisie. With new abundance of material goods, new scarcities--of space and of desire--emerged, and "the center of interest" had been displaced from work toward leisure and the family. New groups, bearing new forms of alienation, bad emerged--white-collar workers, women, young people--who might become part of a new radical force, though they did not constitute social classes. Capitalism had attempted to "integrate" the classical working class and had partially succeeded. By 1967 Lefebvre stated flatly that the working class no longer had revolutionary aims. Yet the proletariat had not vanished as the liberals claimed: on the contrary, its condition of powerlessness had been generalized and regrouped into a new working class. [77] If one adds to these social changes imperialism and the World Wars, one has blended a new social reality, the age of modernity. Lefebvre, still considering himself a Marxist, was no longer certain of the cliches of the past, no longer "convinced about an absolute end to alienation." The new world of modernity was not, for him, a unified social formation, but a transitional period toward eventual revolution. Only in 1968 did he have a clear enough sense of this society to give it a name, "the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption."[78] However organized this society pretended to be, it lacked a unifying direction, a true integration, a style. The emergence of daily life went band in hand with the disintegration of style, the aesthetic unification of the most trivial acts into a meaningful cultural whole. Even the working class of the nineteenth century, with its burden of toil and poverty, retained a style. Modem daily life stood between boredom and the rebirth of style into a festival, a gathering together "of culture's scat77 Position, 107; Everyday Life, 59. 78 Everyday Life, 68-109.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism tered fragments for a transfiguration of everyday life."[79] Returning to his infatuation with surrealism in the 1920s, Lefebvre took his concept of style from the Internationale léttriste, a more recent form of anti-conformist romanticism interested in iconoclastic posturing, not in politics. Since the turn of the century, there had occurred a "chute des réferentiels," a collapse of old social and http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (30 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:25]

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intellectual reference points, without any replacement. Groping hesitantly for a concept that would distinguish the strange new world of 1960 from the past, Lefebvre pointed to the lack of social coherence in modernity. Older societies engaged everyone in a common culture, while modernity privatized the masses. Hence the unique contradiction of modernity: on the one hand, the progress of technology led to the organized socialization of all experiences; on the other, a new type of existence, daily life, emerged and stagnated outside the general movement of history. People were at once organized into activities that were complex and controlled; yet in these activities they were totally unaware of themselves as social, public beings. (3) Daily Life Revisited In the second volume of the Critique (1961), Lefebvre broke from Marx's tutelage and elaborated the idea of daily life beyond the general bounds of the concept of alienation. Although the second volume was a proliferation of categories that approached incoherence, a working definition of daily life was presented along with the main themes and methods for empirical research. Negatively, daily life was non-work experience, life outside the means of production. In the Marxist framework, daily life was situated at the frontiers between the base and the superstructure, considerably revising the central distinction of historical materialism. The region of daily life was placed at a blind spot of old Marxism where 79 Gombin, op. cit., 79.

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The Arguments Group praxis did not a ply: it was "the region of the appropriation by man . . .of his own nature," [80] or poesis. Abandoning the Marxist image of society as structures resting on a base, Lefebvre termed daily life a "level," suggesting a polyvalent image, with each level having its own significance. The level of daily life was now more prominent than the place of production because it was there that "the human" was "discovered" and "created." In the twentieth century daily life was penetrated by technical objects to an unprecedented degree, but it was also, the point of the negation of capitalism. The privatized realm of daily life, where the masses made their most fateful choices, was essentially free, autonomous, ungoverned, and uncontrolled, regardless of the efforts of bureaucratic capitalism. Lefebvre's daily life replaced Marx's work-place as the vulnerable heart of society, the point where human will could choose revolution, where new types of alienation were most oppressive and blatant. With daily life as the organizing concept, Lefebvre could discover historical tensions that were not


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named by previous Marxists. Daily life was characterized by boredom and passivity, wherein the masses viewed their society as a "spectacle." What maintained the precarious balance between the masses' passivity and their dutiful, punctual, if apathetic, performance of their functions was the role of new commodities and the mass media in their lives. The automobile privatized life; the TV, radio, and newspapers pacified it. The new commodities, different from the fetishes described by Marx, who thought of -them primarily within their circulation from production to sale, articulated a whole structure of meanings that intensified alienation. Confronting the world of consumerism, Marcuse and the Frankfurt School had turned to psychoanalysis to grasp the libidinal quality of commodities as substitute 80 Critique, II, 51, 336.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism gratifications of Eros.[81] Lefebvre looked instead to their linguistic significance. What characterized daily life in modernity was the increasing predominance of signals over signs and images over symbols. The basic social interaction in daily life was that between the isolated consumer and the isolated object of consumption. Consumer commodities were essentially signals whose meaning was self-contained. The semiotic field of daily life reduced the consumer to reflexes, automatic responses, i.e., to passivity. The traffic signal, with its simple but inexorable code, was the paradigm of communication in daily life: stop, go--commands without any space for interrogation, much less refusal. Like gadgets whose functions are built into their structure, offering no options to the operator, messages in the mass media are organized to wipe out the receiver's independence and judgment. Advertisements promised selfrealization through consumption, like an After-Shave advertisement showing a vibrant youth on a 81 There were obvious similarities between Marcuse's one-dimensional society and Lefebvre's daily life; also, their similar roles as theorists of the New Left. Lefebvre acknowledged the affinity but criticized Marcuse for finding no negation parallel to his own concept of daily life. Marcuse's role, by the way, in the development of existential Marxism in France was notable. The first full study of Marcuse's thought in French appeared only after the upheaval of May, 1968: J. M. Palmier, Sur Marcuse (Paris, 1968). And the first journal to devote an entire issue to Marcuse did not come out until 1969 and was able to entitle its issue, "Marcuse, cet inconnu," La Nef, 36 (Jan-March, 1969) with articles by Lefebvre, Goldmann, and others. Nevertheless, it was the existential Marxists of the Arguments group who pioneered the reading of Marcuse in France with their translations of Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man, and An Essay on Liberation, all of which appeared in the collection Arguments. The Arguments group was interested in another leader of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, who was


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translated in the journal in 1959. Nevertheless, extensive translating of Frankfurt School works did not come until the early 1970s. A systematic comparison of the two groups is beyond the scope of this study. Nevertheless, the following three themes would be central: the Frankfurt School's concept of critical theory and the concept of planetary thought of the Arguments group; each group's treatment of superstructural elements, such as art, communication, and so forth; finally, a comparison between Marcuse's concept of one-dimensional society and Lefebvre's concept of everyday life.

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The Arguments Group sailboat, with the caption: "A real man's life is marvelous! It's truly marvelous to find every morning the tonic freshness of your After-Shave. . . . "[82] This advertisement was a signal image unifying signifiers (the beautiful man, the boat, After-Shave) with signifieds (self-realization) that could be gobbled up in one act of consumption. Then, too, there was the negative threat of the advertisement, its "terrorism": "Use this After-Shave, or you will be nobody and know it." An incredible reversal occurs in which the object is active and the subject is passive in the interaction. With signs, the subject had some degree of freedom to connect the signifier to the signified in a synthetic appropriation of meaning. When symbols structured communication, there was still more meaning because the symbol had a value in itself, not merely referring to the signified object. Signals offered none of these advantages. Moreover, in daily life, signals were communicated in isolation, detotalizing the semantic experience. In daily life, Lefebvre asserted, the masses endured a tension between two types of time. In peasant society, cyclical time, associated with nature, was culturally dominant. Industrial societies generated a new, cumulative time, linear and progressive, based on mechanical objects that lost the previous rhythmic quality. Although cumulative time penetrated everywhere, daily life still required the time of reproduction of life, the continuous effort of its recreation. Here was the spot where revolutionary action could always interrupt the routine. "Everyday life is . . . the time of desire," of spontaneous renewal. [83] Lefebvre's discussion of temporality in daily life resembled that of Georges Friedmann, an independent Marxist sociologist of work, who distinguished between a "milieu naturel" of pre-machine societies and a "milieu technique" in which rhythms, 82 Everyday Life, 106. 83 Everyday Life, 61, 182.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism time, sensibilities, values were all dominated by machines.[84] Friedmann's categories were too static and too objectified for Lefebvre, though they were both concerned with the organization of work in modernity. Friedmann's answer to his own question "Oû va le travail humain?" was, like Lefebvre's, "a disparaître." From visits to America, Friedmann also found that workers' "center of gravity" "was displaced from work to non-work," although his nostalgia for craftsmanship prevented him from envisioning the same radical possibilities as Lefebvre for a society beyond work, a post-industrial festival of daily life. In the second articulation of the concept of daily life, Lefebvre began to outline the central categories of a new Marxist sociology. (4) Language and Daily Life Two books in the mid-1960s, Le Langage et la société (1966) and Position: contre les technocrates (1967), developed the theory of signals from the 1961 Critique. Now Lefebvre sought to incorporate information theory, linguistics, cybernetics, game theory, and structuralism while exposing their ideological aspects. In these recent trends, language was a new principle of intelligibility, discarding older concepts of substance and subject. Lefebvre rejected the reductionism of the structuralists, their flight from history, their refusal to see language in the context of social action. The linguists and structuralists, as he saw them, posed as neutral scientists who refused to set criteria of good and bad communications. Hence, Lefebvre called them technocrats. [85] Like all other human phenomena, language, for Lefebvre, was a work (oeuvre) of poesis, a creation and appropriation of meaning by man in an historico-social situation. 84 G. Friedmann, Sept études sur l'homme et la technique (Paris 1966) and Oû va le travail humain? (Paris, 1950) 3rd ed., 1963. 85 Critique, II, 348; Le Langage et la société, 35. Lefebvre continued his critique of structuralism in articles through the 1960s, which were collected in Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris, 1971).

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The Arguments Group Language was an essential expression of the subject. Agreeing with Heidegger that language was either authentic or inauthentic, he set the spoken word (la parole) as the ideal of expression between equal men in a totally democratic situation. From this standard, he looked at the evolution of communication to http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (34 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:25]

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locate the structures that mutilated the ideal. La Belle époque witnessed the already mentioned "chute des réferentiels," the core of absolute meanings dissolved: Newtonian absolute time and space and perspective line in painting all vanished, relations of production became bidden, ideas were "desubstantialized." Since then, the increasing disengagement of language from "the practico-sensible referential" drove communication toward non-sense and the absurd. This process began mildly during the Renaissance with the birth of a commodity economy. The commodity was, for Lefebvre, as for Marx, a form of exchange and communication though a particularly poor form because, with the mechanism of price and money, commodities detached both their "content" (the labor that went into them) and their "signified" (the need they were to fulfill) from the exchange interaction. The buyer and the seller saw only the price: "The look plunges into the signifier (price) in a pure obsessive state. . . ." [86] Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities was thus translated by Lefebvre into linguistic terms. With the dominance of a commodity economy, "chains of signifiers" were disconnected from "signifieds," yielding "a strange form of unconsciousness" in society. In such a context, things had a self-contained existence. When technology made abundance possible, it was easy for advertisers to invest commodities with images of satisfaction that did not reflect use value. Words were replaced by images with the spread of mass media. These images, of sexual virility, popularity, etc., were in the form of signals so that they pacified the consumers. In their cars and in front of their 86 Le Langage et la société, 345-346.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism televisions, consumers were bombarded with mystifying information in deeply alienated social relations. The social world fragmented into a plethora of semiotic subsystems, like the world of high fashion, as discussed by Barthes in Système de la mode, with no cross-references or unification. Integrated by the state and by corporate bureaucracies, everyday life at the same time completely fragmented. The outcome was paradoxical: "loneliness in the midst of overcrowding, lack of communication in a proliferation of signs and information. . . . "[87] Daily life was a linguistic "zero point" where isolated, disconnected signs made their appearance, having only a displaced unity at the distant point of their invention. The invention of the institution of writing (écriture) further detached communication from the personal,


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direct expression of la parole. Writing was a form of "violence, terrorism, and domination,"[88] a oneway form of communication that enabled the ruling class to mystify its power through propaganda. Lefebvre's preference for la parole over l'écriture, however, was riddled with difficulties. To a critic of Lefebvre's position, like Derrida, for example, the celebration of la parole required a false identity of meaning and sign and, ultimately, an impossible metaphysics in which the absolute "presence" of both was asserted. The utopia of la parole suppressed the absence, the gap, la brisure, between sign and meaning. To Derrida, la parole was itself a form of l'écriture because it connected meaning and sign only through a system of differences, an articulated language.[89] The chances for miscommunication were no greater in written than in oral languages. For Lefebvre, the signal, the commodity, the image, and writing all worked their deteriorating effects on communication in the context of the chute des réferentiels in which society had no common horizon of meaning. No wonder that the working class 87 Everyday Life, 185. 88 Position, 50-52. 89 De La Grammatologie (Paris, 1967).

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The Arguments Group had lost its sense of historical direction. Lefebvre could now illuminate the demise of the proletariat in light of a consumer society, with organized domination through language: What happened? How can one expropriate the working class, steal its objectives from it, its goals, its meaning? A gigantic substitution has taken place. For work and for the worker as subject (individual and collective) the consumer has been substituted who is no longer a subject but a place, that of consumption. Who speaks? The one who teaches consumption, the advertiser, the organizer of the everyday, the one who initiates the coincidence of the image and the situation, between the ideal and the real. To whom does one speak? To the consumer. To his ideal. When one speaks "to me" it is not to me but to the possible consumer, the ideal. . . . To what end? To consolidate a society still poorly defined, in danger, in question, where the ruling classes . . . seek to reinforce the integrative capacity that they had under competitive capitalism.[90] The contradiction in daily life centered in its function of reproducing social equilibrium. With


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competitive capitalism, the market mechanism worked well enough, even with its crises, to maintain social stability with the workers not in the society but of it. The market collapsed in the 1930s, never regaining its autonomy; bourgeois democracy receded to fascism and voter apathy; the world-view of liberalism lost its coherence and order. Faced with this crisis, advertising and propaganda entered daily life, encroached upon the intimacy of family life and leisure, in order to effect artificially a commitment from the individual to consume, while at the same time maintaining political and spiritual confusion. With daily life organized through the restructuring of language, the liberal notion of the independent individual, of the rational, self-interested, utilitarian ego, inevitably became obsolete. 90 Position, 107.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism The role of structuralism in the process was clear to Lefebvre. Its basic proclamation of the end of man, the denial of the human subject, was no more than an ideological legitimization of the newest form of alienation. The "anti-humanism" of Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser reflected the new situation in which the working class no longer saw its historical mission and the bourgeois ego was no longer integrated, autonomous, and self-conscious. When structuralists announced that kinship systems, languages, and epistemologies were structures without subjects, they did not look for the alienation of the subject, his loss of control through direct or indirect class conflict, but simply proclaimed the givenness of their finding. Lefebvre granted that the unconsciousness of history, the absence of a subject, made a philosophical anthropology very difficult. To move from these facts to the theoretical demonstration of the necessity of the subject's absence, as structuralists did, was an ideological mystification par excellence, even if this result was not intended by them. Lefebvre attempted to reformulate a socio-historical theory of the subject without ontologizing it, one of the main concerns of existential Marxism: . . . it is not necessary to sacrifice the "subject." From philosophy we detach the concept of the subject in order to transform it. It doubles. On one side, we have social subjects, groups and classes. On the other, we have sociological agents, capable of elaboration and putting into action economic, political and military strategies. Society cannot be defined as a subject but as an ensemble of social subjects (not without lacunae) and a network of sociological agents (not without lapses).[91] This double determination of social subjects and sociological agents was nothing but Merleau-Ponty's concept of ambiguity and Sartre's individual as both subject and object,


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91 Ibid., l00.

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The Arguments Group albeit transferred from ontological to social terms. (5) The Festival of Daily Life La Vie quotidienne dans la monde moderne (1968) summarized and integrated the studies of the 1960s, formulating a program of action. Slogans were invented: "Technology in the service of daily life!" and "automation" on the economic level; the abolition of the state and self-administration on the political level; "Let daily life become a work of art!", sexual and urban reform and "the festival rediscovered" on the cultural plane.[92] Daily life would include the tone of desire (from Mascolo), la parole (from linguistics), satisfaction (from Chatelet), poesis (from Heidegger), play (from Sartre and Axelos)--all suggesting the vision of Charles Fourier. [93] This utopianism was not another eschatology to Lefebvre since the projected "new life" was based on existing technical capacities, a careful dialectical and sociological analysis of the alienations of daily life, and a program for change. There was to be a "democratic regrouping" of the Left, not another "government of the Left" that would only strengthen the state," rather a "de-structuring period" that aimed at "decentralization" allowing "new social forces to develop." Were it not for the events of May, 1968, one might be tempted to conclude that Lefebvre was a visionary romantic. The festival of daily life hinged on the fate of "urbanism." In his theory of industrialization, Marx had not seen that the process of urbanization was not reducible to the economy. In fact, the urban environment contained the most profound potentials of modernity: in the city, "creation of creations," "everyday life would become a creation 92 Everyday Life in the Modern World, 194-206. 93 Cf. Position, 40, Critique, II, 289, Introduction a la modernité, 77 for Lefebvre's statement of his debt to Fourier. For an appropriate sample of Fourier's texts, cf., Mark Poster, ed., Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of C. Fourier (N.Y., 1971).

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism (poesis not praxis) of which each citizen and each community would be capable." [94] The negative model of society, the spectacle of daily life, was the new city Mourenx, where all the alienations of daily life congealed in a singular sterility. Urbanism, on the other hand, concretized the program of the festival into the poesis of creating new situations from desire. Mourenx was planned to be totally functional, eliminating from the environment places of spontaneous encounter that were the hallmark of older cities. Hence, Mourenx suffered from the nemesis of daily life, boredom. Diverse social phenomena such as promiscuity and the presence of children, which in some settings made for rich experience, in Mourenx only inhibited sociability. Yet Mourenx also demonstrated the power of daily life as the place of self-creation. Mourenx was inhabited by the new working class who showed "a remarkable and profound aspiration for democracy in urban life, for the self-managed activity of the collectivity, for a socialization--directed against statism and centralized bureaucracy--including concrete liberties."[95] Subject to the most advanced automation of the workplace, the new working class no longer worked collectively, no longer operated with tools, no longer handled raw materials directly; its work was the "non-work" of the control and surveillance of machines. The new workers did not repeat the "passivity, indifference, and corruption" of the old syndicalist "worker aristocracy." Instead they shifted the center of their concern to the city, to daily life, where they struggled with the self-consciousness of an emergent social class actively to control their environment and their lives, to have life become a festival of spontaneous, free encounters. Nothing less than the fate of modernity was at stake in the struggle of the new working class to de94 "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," op. cit., 104; Position, 48; Le Droit à la ville (Paris, 1968); La Révolution urbaine (Paris, 1970); Everyday Life, 135. 95 "Les Nouveaux ensembles urbains," Revue française de sociologie, 1:2 (April-June, 1960) 200. Cf. Introduction à la modemité, 121-130.

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The Arguments Group fine itself as a self-determining class. A new urbanism was already in the process of birth. Prophetically, one year before the explosion of May, Lefebvre asserted that the terrorism and overrepression of daily life could not long be sustained. Lefebvre's vision of the festival resonated loudly among young radicals like Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle [96] and Raoul Vaneigem in Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations, both of the Internationale situationniste (1958- ) group. Their strategy of interrupting the routines of daily life with guerrilla theatre in order to "create situations" was traceable to Lefebvre, although they http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (39 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:25]

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asserted that he also took much from them. Another New Left group influenced by him was Noir et rouge (1956-), with its theory of workers councils as the model revolutionary organization. [97] In addition, a student journal from the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Saint-Cloud, Aléthéia (1964-1967), reflected Lefebvre's theme of the need for a cultural revolution. It published Heidegger and Marcuse in translation as well as Axelos and Chatelet. Lefebvre's existential Marxism was thus a direct stimulus to a new radicalism that was geared to advanced capitalist society. d. Lefebvre and Sartre Lefebvre's metaphilosophy of daily life was dependent upon Sartre's thought. The parallels between the two were striking. Metaphilosophy was explicitly a synthesis of Marxism and existentialism: "If we adopt the Hegelian and Marxist trend that is, the realization of the rational through philosophy, a critical theory of everyday life ensues; 96 Trans. in Radical America, 4:5 (Fall, 1970) originally (Paris, 1967). For Lefebvre's comments on the group cf., Critique, II, 17; Introduction à la modernité, 336; Position, 195 and Gombin, op. cit., 84-98. 97 Gombin, op. cit., 127-151.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism if we adopt the Nietzschean theory of values . . . a constructive theory of everyday life emerges. This is the first step."[98] Let us not forget that in Being and Nothingness Sartre initiated a philosophy of everyday life, locating it, exactly as did Lefebvre, as the place of re-creation. In the 1960s, Lefebvre time and again turned to Sartre to agree or to modify his positions, elevating him as the major figure in contemporary philosophy.[99] Lefebvre now incorporated many aspects of Being and Nothingness and Critique directly. Sartre was the first to mount a serious criticism of Stalinist philosophy; he "pulled no punches" by stating "what too many people thought and said only too quietly." [100] What is more, Sartre's master, Husserl, was the first to notice and adopt as a problem the crisis of philosophy in technological society.[101] Changing his opinion from the 1940s, Lefebvre even agreed with Sartre that Engels' notion of an objective dialectic of nature was wrong. His borrowings from Sartre were considerable: from the Critique, the idea that there were two kinds of thought, analytical and dialectical, and the dramatization of the concept of totality into totalizations and totalizing activities of the subject; from Being and Nothingness, the concepts of engagement, the situation, revolution as a "choice of oneself," the appropriation of "possibility" through a "project," inauthenticity as a critical concept, and a concept of "creative freedom." [102]


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Lefebvre's reservations about existentialism were no longer those of the 1940s when Sartre was dismissed as an idealist; now Sartre made errors that could be corrected 98 Everyday Life in the Modern World, 15. 99 Critique, II, 30, 71, 187, 197, 213, 252-254, 256, 349; Position, 126, 145, 181-182; Introduction à la modernité, 363; Métaphilosophie, 77-90--these are merely selected examples. 100 "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," op. cit., 57, 132, l35, La Somme et le reste, 81. 101 La Somme et le reste, 135. 102 Critique, II, 30, 46, 213, 252-254, 256; Critique I, 198; Position, 181.

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The Arguments Group without destroying his overall thought. His errors were that he did not pose the question of the realization of philosophy: his thought was still ontological and speculative; his concept of action was only a "doing" that omitted the oeuvre or object; he had still not "recovered the historical"; and his idea of freedom stemmed "too much from consciousness." [103] These weaknesses of Sartre's existential Marxism did not deter Lefebvre from using it in his own work. In a study of the bourgeoisie, be applied Sartre's existential phenomenology to a social class with such affinity to Being and Nothingness that it could have been appended to Sartre's book. [104] The bourgeois created his being only through having, through merit, leaving in permanent question a split between his mere appearance as a bourgeois and his being a bourgeois in essence, the way an aristocrat was always an aristocrat. The fissure between being and having evoked the problem of morality for the bourgeois and led him to his original project of trying to be distinctive: With the analysis of distinction we reach the quintessence of bourgeois consciousness. The bourgeois distinguishes; he sees far and clear; he calculates; he reckons, he reasons. He isolates. He divides work, individuals, groups, activities and realities. He dichotomizes, atomizes in all domains . . . Bourgeois thought always functions in the mode of distinction and separation; it is analytic understanding. . . . At the same time, the bourgeois wishes to be distinguished. The concept of distinction . . . denotes bourgeois subjectivity and the objective activity of the bourgeois. It is a way of being.105 This analysis was supplemented by a historical study of the various efforts of the bourgeois in different epochs. Thus, Lefebvre exemplified a social and historical usage


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103 Position, 182. 104"Changements dans les attitudes morales de la bourgeoisie," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 31 (JulyDec., 1961) 26-27. In fact, Lefebvre's phenomenological study of the bourgeoisie was no more than an amplification of Sartre's treatment of it in his Critique, 717-721. 105 Ibid., 29.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism of Sartre's existentialism. Like Sartre, Lefebvre read the present as a technological world, an automated world where the question of producing things, of conquering nature--in short, of working--was replaced by the work of selfcreation. The prime question concerned the superstructure: would the new working class recognize in itself the problem of the realization of philosophy? Would it see its problem as one of authentic selfcreation in the context of collective action and in the situation of urbanism? Basically, what separated the two existential Marxists now was their personal, moral visions: Lefebvre was always the optimist, anticipating utopian possibilities; Sartre remained the eternal stoic, resisting the temptations of hope, refusing to sketch the lines of the future, preferring to capture the self-deceptions and illusions of the present. Lefebvre and Sartre, each in his own way, were prophets of May, 1968. Yet it must be noted that Lefebvre and the Arguments group in general were not generous toward Sartre, and the two major forms of existential Marxism remained isolated from each other. 8. The Question of Freud The enormous impact of Freud's thought on the twentieth century eventually forced the French to give up their resistance to him. Henri Lefebvre was probably the first French philosopher to read Freud seriously. But he did so only during his brief interest in surrealism in the 1920s. By the 1960s it bad been demonstrated clearly enough that Freud's thought was rich with potentials for explaining aspects of ideology--like the stubborn endurance of traditions and the tendency for lower classes to defer willingly to ruling classes -which were beyond the scope of Marxist theory. As theory and as practice, Freudianism posed a challenge to all doctrines, but especially to Marxism. The 260

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apparent meaning of Freudian psychology undercut the argument for social revolution, deflecting energies into individual readjustment. A few heretics in the Marxist camp, like Wilhelm Reich and later Herbert Marcuse, denied the conservative image of Freud, making him a cultural revolutionary who advocated the, end of sexual repression and the authoritarian bourgeois family. In France, the Arguments group was among the first Marxists to answer the Freudian challenge. Arguments translated Marcuse's treatise on Freudo-Marxism, and published Georges Lapassade's L'Entrée dans la vie and Joseph Gabel's La Fausse conscience: essai sur la réification. Hence it was the Arguments group that initiated the turn to the question of desire in social thought, the issue of a radical concept of libidinal economy that has been enormously popular in France since the mid-1960s. The other main line of French Freudian interpretation, that of Jacques Lacan, who was unknown in Marxist circles until the mid-1960s, will be treated later in the chapter on structuralism. I have chosen to discuss the study by Joseph Gabel rather than Lapassade because he best exemplifies a synthesis of psychological concepts with the question of the dialectic. Gabel, who studied with Minkowski and Mannheim, reconciled Marxism and psychology by testing the parallels between the concept of reification, developed by Lukacs and Goldmann, with the psychological category of schizophrenia.[106] The Marxist concepts of dialectic and alienation were the categories that encompassed psychological reality.[107] The modes of alienation within the superstructure that Marx articulated (ideology, false consciousness, reification, fetishism) were analogous to the mental distortions revealed by psychologists. The common denominator rested with 106 Cf. also, Joseph Gabel, "La Réification: essai d'une psychopathologie de la pensée dialectique," Esprit, 10 (1951) 459-482. 107 La Fausse conscience (Paris, 1962) 37. English trans. in preparation.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism the anti-dialectical nature of both pathologies. Drawing upon an enormous mass of psychological documentation, Gabel argued that reification and schizophrenia diverged from the dialectic in the same way. False consciousness displayed the traits of schizophrenia, and schizophrenia, especially in Minkowski's definition, resembled reification. The dialectic was seen as the basis of an axiology, a theory of the structure of values, demarcating the authentic and the inauthentic experience of values. Alienated modes of thought all presented values spatially, de-vitalizing them, denying their temporal qualities, their openness to the future; studies of schizophrenic patients revealed the same spatializing qualities in their thought. Melancholics, hysterics, psychotics--all the major types of abnormality--demonstrated the same de-realization or dehttp://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (43 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:25]

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temporalization of experience. It is important for our concern with existential Marxism to note that Gabel regarded the existential psychologies of Binzwanger (a Heideggerian) and Sartre as particularly close to Marxism. In fact, he stated that existentialism was not a "romantic rebellion against reason" but a "dialectical reaction against depersonalization" in contemporary society.[108] Sartre's existentialism, stressing the temporal quality of consciousness, was fully dialectical and completely assimilable by Marxism. "The thought of the existentialist school represents . . . a reaction against schizophrenization, anti-dialectic in collective consciousness and false consciousness."[109] Gabel's conclusion matched the concern of the Arguments group for a Marxist theory of the superstructure: The concept of morbid rationalism shows the preponderance of the spatializingreifying aspect of the seizure of the real--to the detriment of its temporalizinghistorical aspect-and is the common denominator of the various forms of economic and political alienation. . . . Moreover, the expression par excellence of non108 Ibid., 189. 109 Ibid., 233.

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The Arguments Group dialectical consciousness (reified and unaxiological), morbid rationalism, appears as the schizophrenic type . . . . [110] Hacking our way through Gabel's jargon, we see that his examination of the intersections between Marxism and psychology demonstrated the value of separate studies of the superstructure to illuminate its dynamics. Since "reification of consciousness was possible outside the context of capitalism," [111] cultural change was, in part, independent of economic change. The Arguments group developed an existential Marxism by reworking the advances of the 1940s. Hegel's dialectic of consciousness was preserved and transcended (aufgeheben) in Axelos' planetary thought, Lefebvre's metaphilosophy, Fougeyrollas' dialectic of contradiction and totality, Chatelet's empirical satisfaction. Marx's concept of alienated labor was placed in an open totality, with, new modes of alienation uncovered, the autonomy of the superstructure maintained, and a concession that some alienation was irreducible. Sartre's concept of freedom became social and historical with the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter6.html (44 of 45) [11/12/2007 23:16:25]

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concept of self-creation in an urban situation. In sum, the theory of the Arguments group contained a self-imposed incompleteness, demanding that thought be kept open so that it could be related to practice. Their theories preserved the necessary incompleteness of Marxist thought, refusing to become a closed, rational system. The ultimate verification of the thought of the Arguments group lay with the action of people, who would or would not demonstrate its anthropology in fact. The Arguments group had brought existential Marxism into being as a critical social theory that defined the needs of thought through the needs of human emancipation, that connected truth to being through the mediation of social transformation. 110 Ibid., 239. 111 Ibid., 73.

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Seven _______________________________________________________ Sartre's Critique: Marxian Existentialism

1. The Conversion to Marxism As we have seen, Sartre's first attempt at a theory of history sought to preserve his radical concept of freedom.[1] His political activity from 1944 to 1957 was also an intense effort to preserve the individual project in the face of history. As he wrote in his private notes: All my political efforts are directed toward finding a group that will give a meaning to my transcendence, that will prove by its existence . . . that my contradictory position was the true one. . . . If I am wrong . . . I must renounce the optimistic idea that one can be a man in any situation, an idea inspired by the Resistance: even under torture one could be a man.[2] This synthesis of freedom and history was Sartre's first existential Marxism. By 1960 his position had matured into a major philosophy of history. In the Critique de la raison dialectique, Sartre wrote "against himself,"[3] becoming ill and driving himself almost to a heart attack. It was a dramatic moment in his life. Over fifty years old, he compelled himself to alter his most cherished positions in order to account for his own experience. Although the Critique conserved much of Being and Nothingness 1 J. P. Sartre, "Itinerary of a Thought," New Left Review, 58 (Nov.-Dec., 1969) 43-66. 2 De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 148. 3 Ibid., 451-452.

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Sartre's Critique it was also a change in which he called his own past into question. In Sartre's own terms, the Critique was a conversion, a reconstituting of his original project by which he threw himself into the anxiety of nothingness, enacting his own concept of freedom. In 1960 he formulated his second existential


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Marxism, which was, as the dialectic prescribes, a richer and more concrete synthesis. The large book that appeared in 1960 [4] was only part one of the projected study of the 4 Simone de Beauvoir complained that the Critique was reviewed badly by the political Right (ibid., 498), the Communists, and the structuralists. For the right see, Raymond Aron, "La Lecture existentialiste de Marx," reprinted in D'Une Sainte famille à l'autre (Paris, 1969) 29-67 and Julien Freund, "Note sur la Critique de la raison dialectique de J. P. Sartre," Archives de philosophie du droit, 46 (July, 1961) 219-236; for the center see, Georges Gurvitch, Dialectique et sociologie, op. cit., 157-176; for the Communists see, Lucien Sève "L'Existentialisme, peut-il etre l' "anthropologie du marxisme,'" La Pensée, 92 (July-Aug., 1960) 34-68, and Roger Garaudy, Lettre ouverte à J. P. Sartre (Paris, 1960). For reviews by independent Marxists see, Henri Lefebvre, "Critique de la critique non-critique," Nouvelle revue marxiste, I (July, 1961) 57-79; Nicos Poulantzas, "La Critique de la raison dialectique de Sartre et le droit," Archives de philosophie du droit, 10 (1965) 83-106; André Gorz, "Sartre and Marx," New Left Review, 37 (May-June, 1966) 33-52; Georges Lapassade, "La Dialectique des groupes dans la Critique de la raison dialectique," Bulletin de psychologie (Paris, 1961); and Dick Howard, "A Marxist Ontology?" Cultural Hermeneutics, I:3. There were some interesting reviews by British and American Marxists: G. Lichtheim, "Sartre, Marxism, and History," History and Theory, 3:2 (1963) 222-246; Lionel Abel, "Metaphysical Stalinism," Dissent (Spring, 1961) 137-152; Raya Dunayevskaya, "Sartre's Search for a Method to Undermine Marxism," News and Letters, 7 (Oct., 1963) and William Ash, "Existentialism and Revisionism," Monthly Review (1965) 81-89. For translations of the Critique see, Search for a Method, trans. by Hazel Barnes (N.Y., 1963) and for selections from the main body of the Critique, The Philosophy of J. P. Sartre ed. by R. D. Cumming (N.Y., 1965) 415-483. There are two summaries of the Critique: Wilfred Desan, The Marxism of J. P. Sartre (N.Y., 1965) and R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy: 1950-1960 (London, 1964; N. Y., 1971). Also Pietro Chiodi, Sartre e il marxismo (Milan, 1965) and Adam Schaff, the Polish Marxist Humanist, Marx oder Sartre? (Frankfurt, 1966). I found most helpful, Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism limits of dialectical reason. It contained the first philosophical espousal of Marxism by Sartre, although it came at a time when Marxism no longer appeared to be an obvious key to understanding history. The Critique consisted of a short section called question de méthode and a long section called théorie des ensembles pratiques. The first part, translated as Search for a Method, was an elaboration of an article Sartre wrote for a Polish review in 1957, assessing the "situation of existentialism," [5] a companion piece to Lefebvre's review of current trends in Marxism. Their accidental collaboration coincided with their intellectual rapprochement. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (2 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:34]

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The preface to the entire work stated Sartre's purpose, which mirrored the goals of the Arguments group: "Do we have the means to constitute a structural, historical anthropology?" [6] This problem was first enunciated by Sartre in a 1945 article in Les Temps Modernes, where he called for the project of a "synthetic anthropology."[7] The Critique would explore the limits of Marxism as a dialectical mode of thought and free it from Stalinism. This mode-of thought would establish an "historical anthropology," a view of history intended to reveal the traces of man in the world and the traces of the world in man.[8] of Literature (Princeton, 1971), Ch. 4, "Sartre and History, 206-305. Also, Klaus Hartmann's Sartres Sozialphilosophie: Eine untersuchung zur "Critique de la raison dialectique I" (Berlin, 1966), which treats the Critique as a "transcendental social philosophy" and argues with subtlety that it is congenial with Marxism. Theodor Schwarz, in J. P. Sartre's "Kritik der dialektischen Vernunft" (Berlin, 1967), sees only idealism and pessimism, which does not unite Marxism and existentialism. 5 Sartre's existentialism had great popularity in Poland after 1956. Cf. N. Hagger, ed., "Marxism and Existentialism in Poland," Gemini, 3 (Jan., 1960) 33-36. Includes remarks by Adam Schaff. 6 Search for a Method, xxxiv; CRD, 10. I will give the English reference where I have used the translation in my text. CRD stands for Critique de la raison dialectique. Trans. in preparation. 7 G. Lapassade, "Sartre et Rousseau," Etudes philosophiques, 17:4 (Winter, 1962) 511. An interesting comparison of the two men. 8 Jameson, op. cit., 208 for a statement of the general compatibility of Marxism and existentialism.

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Sartre's Critique The first part of Search for a Method was called, appropriately enough, "Marxism and Existentialism." As in "Materialism and Revolution" of 1946, Sartre rejected "dialectical materialism." This was as far as the similarities of the two pieces went. "Marxism and Existentialism" drew a totally new balance sheet between the two philosophies. Marxism was now "the philosophy of our time," [9] whereas existentialism was only a peripheral "ideology" that was useful only because of the failure of Marxism to develop properly as an intellectual system. Philosophies were now "totalizations of contemporary knowledge," [10] not ahistorical speculations, and Marxism, given its class basis, provided the best schema for comprehending the present. The role of existentialism was minor, but pivotal nonetheless, for it alone could resuscitate Marxism. For the first time, Sartre was attempting to situate his own thought in the context of historical developments. Sartre criticized contemporary Marxism in two parts: first, as historical materialism in the second and third sections of Search for a Method; second, as dialectical materialism in the beginning section of the théorie des ensembles pratiques. In Search for a Method, his aim was to develop a new method of historical analysis; in the théorie des ensembles pratiques it was to define the limits of dialectical reason http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (3 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:34]

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and show that it alone made history intelligible. Both parts of Sartre's critique of Marxism paralleled the position of the Arguments group, although he far outdistanced them in philosophical rigor and penetration. "To reconquer man within Marxism" was the battle cry of Sartre's new existential Marxism." Contemporary Marxism was to him little more than an abstract formula that 9 Search, 30; CRD, 29. 10 Search, 4; CRD, 15. 11 Some CP theorists had begun to struggle with the dogmatism of a historical materialism that was wedded to dialectical materialism, but they did not go very far. See Jean T. Desanti, Introduction à l'histoire de la philosophie (Paris, 1956), where for all his subtlety the Marxist continued to set the whole history of philosophy in the Procrustean bed of the idealism-materialism duality, 52.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxisrn that overlooked the crucial mediations connecting economic determinants with concrete action. Like the Arguments group, he wanted Marxism to open itself up to other, "bourgeois" disciplines, like psychoanalysis, which he had earlier rejected. "Today's Marxists are concerned only with adults," he stated, whereas men first lived their alienation as children in the family. The way the "child lives his family relations inside a society," [12] must be elucidated before analyzing the adult's economic activity. Each level of experience had its own force, its differing weight, in different societies at different times. Marxist history must study these structures in their particularity before it could reduce them to the formula of base and superstructure. The problem of mediations led Sartre to advocate Lefebvre's method of socio-historical analysis. In two articles on rural Sociology,[13] Lefebvre expounded a method that would capture social experience in its multidimensionality through historical and structural analysis. Accepting Lefebvre's schema, Sartre added an existentialist touch by grounding the method in his concept of the project. The progressiveregressive method, he thought, was suitable to dialectical reason only because its object, social-historical experience, was formed through projects. Human projects carried within them the same backward and forward movement of temporality that Lefebvre ascribed to objective, social phenomena.[14] The theory of the project in Being and Nothingness had been incomplete; full comprehension of projects required a method that would grasp them in terms of the total movement of history. If existentialism had omitted the relation of the project to the historical totality, Marxism needed the concept of the project to reveal the 12 Search, 61; CRD, 47. 13 "Problèmes de sociologie rurale," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 6:4 (1949) 78-100 and "Perspectives de la sociologie rurale," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 14 (1953) 122-140. It was the second article that http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (4 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:34]

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Sartre referred to in the Critique. Cf., Search, 51n-52n; CRD, 41n-42n. 14 "Perspectives de sociologie rurale," op. cit., 134-135.

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Sartre's Critique subjective level of social experience. Only the project, as a mediation between two moments of objectivity, can account for history; that is, for human creativity. It is necessary to choose. In effect; either we reduce everything to identity (which amounts to substituting a mechanistic materialism for dialectical materialism)and we make of the dialectic a celestial law which imposes itself on the Universe, a metaphysical force which by itself engenders the historical process . . .- or we restore to the individual man his power to go beyond his situation by means of work and action. This solution alone enables us to base the movement of totalization upon the real.[15] Hence man was rescued for Marxism by compelling it to use other disciplines, to accept the relative autonomy of each social level, and above all to account for the individual project within the historical process. In Search for a Method, Sartre infused Marxism with his concern for subjectivity, for the way men endure their history and their society, for the way they interiorize their situation and totalize their action. Epistemologically, false objectivism would be avoided and, ontologically, the outlines of man's creative capacity for revolution would be drawn. It is inside the movement of Marxist thought that we discover a flaw of such a sort that despite itself Marxism tends to eliminate the questioner from his investigation and to make of the questioned, the object of absolute Knowledge. The very notions which Marxist research employs to describe our historical society-exploitation, alienation, fetishism, reification, etc.-are precisely those which most immediately refer to existential structures . . . In view of this default . . . existentialism, at the heart of Marxism and taking the same givens, the same Knowledge, as its point of departure, must attempt in its turn . . . the dialectical interpretation of History.[16] 15 Search, 99; CRD, 67-68. 16 Search, 175; CRD, 107-108. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (5 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:34]

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism Sartre's hand was open wide to the Marxists: the lessons he had to teach them were actually at the core of their own doctrine. Yet this facile "taking the same givens" as Marxism permitted him to avoid a rigorous analysis of Marx's concept of the means of production. 2. The Dialectic and Its Limits For Sartre, the pressing philosophical question was the status of the dialectic because it was the heart of Marx's historical theory. He presented the dialectic in the Hegelian-Marxist version as both the method of thought and the structure of reality.[17] Both reason and the object of knowledge were in motion, with each dependent on the other. Although the dialectic was located in the world, it was constituted only through man in the process of totalizing his experience. To Sartre, the dialectic was always being renewed, collapsing and being reformed, always open to the future and never closed in a final totality. Sartre took great pains to argue this conception of the dialectic against the predominant Marxist view which located the dialectic in nature.[18] For many years he had inveighed against the position that a dialectic could be found in physico-chemical processes. Stalinists, Trotskyists, and many independent Marxists relied on the notion of an autonomous dialectic of nature as support for the dialectic of history. Both Kojève and Hyppolite, in their interpretations of the dialectic, had decisively rejected the notion of a dialectic of nature.[19] Merleau-Ponty had also agreed with Sartre's position.[20] To 17 CRD, 119. 18 For an intelligent representation of the official Marxist position on the dialectic of nature, see Maurice Caveing, "Marx et la dialectique de la nature," La Nouvelle critique, 67 (July-Aug., 1955) 1029; and Roger Garaudy, Questions à J. P. Sartre précédées d'une lettre ouverte (Paris, 1960), where Garaudy, now friendly to Sartre, continued to harp on Sartre's ontology as the misguided basis of his rejection of the dialectic of nature. 19 Kojève, Introduction, op. cit., 217; Hyppolite, Genèse et structure, op. cit., 35, 235, 246 and Studies on Marx and Hegel, op. cit.,13; and Marxisme et existentialisme (Paris, 1962) 46. 20 Sense and Non-Sense, op. cit., 126.

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To these thinkers the whole question originated in the split between Descartes and Vico on the first principle of intelligibility: did it reside in nature, as Descartes argued, or in human, historical reality, as Vico claimed? [21] Sartre's staunch objection to a dialectic of nature was first presented in 1946 in "Materialism and Revolution."[22] He returned to it in passing many times over the next fifteen years, finally to make it a central concern in the Critique. He faced it again in a public debate with Garaudy, Hyppolite, and a Marxist scientist, Jean Vigier, on December 7, 1961, in La Mutualité. There was enough interest in this recondite matter to fill the hall, with its capacity of 6,000. [24] In the Critique and in the public debate Sartre pounded away at his position: those who took scientific evidence as proof of a dialectic of nature--that quantity turns into quality, that the law of opposites applies to matter, etc.--were naive. Man's knowledge of nature was a human construct that never revealed nature to the same degree as man knew his own reality. [25] Even if the scientific paradigm of nature was dialectical, this demonstrated further that only human reason was dialectical, not nature-initself. The great danger of resorting to the claim of a dialectic of nature was that it made human reality dependent upon the laws of an exterior world. [26] Sartre did not deny that man was within nature and that the processes of nature were preconditions of human life. What he denied, however, was that human knowledge could reduce itself to the model of matter; he affirmed instead that human reality was different enough from physico-

21 Lowith, Karl, Nature, History and Existentialism, 22 "Materialism and Revolution," op. cit., 203-212; De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 44. 23 CRD, 115-162, 169ff. 24 A stenographic transcript was published in 1962 under the title Marxisme et existentialisme: controverse sur la dialectique. 25 Ibid., 9-10, 15; CRD, 149. 26 CRD, 124.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism chemical reality to warrant its own principle of intelligibility. Ultimately, the proponents of a dialectic of nature imposed human ideas on nature (scientific knowledge) and then wanted to impose this knowledge upon human reality as if it originated in nature. These Marxists, who termed themselves materialists, were, Sartre reasoned, in fact idealists who dogmatically regarded their ideas about nature as existing superhumanly. [27] The stakes were high to him because be believed that if a dialectic of nature were kept, the very revolution that the Marxists sought would be ruled out. With a dialectic of http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (7 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:34]

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nature as an epistemological principle, the kind of thinking and consciousness necessary for a socialist society was impossible. Although Sartre's position against the materialists was strong--later Marxist schools, like Althusser's, gave up the dialectic of nature--he overlooked certain aspects of the question that would probably have aided his position. The dialectic is normally understood as a way of grasping the totality, and nature is within the totality. Sartre's concern to specify the autonomy of human reality need not exclude the recognition of the place where nature impinged upon the human scene, nor where humanity imposes itself upon nature. Hence natural reality must be regarded as dialectical to the extent that it is within the totality. Furthermore, the points at which nature enters the totality change through human history. In societies with primitive technologies, nature had a different, more pressing place than in advanced societies, where human action begins to disrupt the normal functioning of nature's cycles. In fact, one could say that in advanced societies technology enables man to penetrate nature to the extent that previous boundaries between man and nature are obscured. Existential Marxism relies upon this alteration in the relationship of man to nature, and it is necessary for it to articulate this new, dialectical relationship, or new totality. The rejection by both Marx and Sartre of a 27 Ibid., 125.

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Sartre's Critique human nature is intelligible only in terms of the new interpenetration of man and nature. Metaphysical conceptions that hypostasize "matter" and "spirit" are no longer consonant with the new Lebenswelt. Unfortunately, Sartre's existential Marxism sorely lacked a new concept of nature. In addition, there are even some hints in scientific studies that the view of man called for by the existential Marxists is in fact grounded in the full biological development of the human, species. [28] Sartre feared that a. focus on physico-chemical processes distorted human possibilities; it turns out that biology might provide norms for a higher, ecologically sound, social organization. [29] He feared that the dialectic of nature led to a positivist concept of man as a passive object, as just another mechanism ruled by blind forces. Quite to the contrary, in the newer biology species are adaptive, not determined, and they operate on feedback principles rather than on unilinear laws. Having rejected the notion of a dialectic of nature, Sartre was ready to test the validity of the dialectic for the human sciences. The advertised purpose of the Critique was "to establish a priori the heuristic value of the dialectical method when it is applied to the human sciences." [39] Sartre intended to see if


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the dialectic could establish the conditions for the possibility of the comprehension of history.[31] The question that Dilthey had raised long ago--was only thinkable, to Sartre, in the aftermath of Stalinism: ". . . the critical experience could not take place in our history before Stalinist idealism had rigidified both epistemological practices and epistemological methods." [32] Feeling the same exhilarating mood of an intellectual ouverture as the Arguments group, Sartre 28 Ibid., 129. Sartre claimed they were inconclusive about the dialectic of nature. Cf. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (N.Y., 1972) passim. 29 For a French biologist's view of the dialectic of nature, see the non-Marxist, Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, trans. A. Wainhouse (N.Y., 1971). 30 CRD, 153. 3l Ibid., 135. 32 Cumming, 425; CRD, 141.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism would now establish the value of the dialectic through what he called "critical experience." In other words, he was asking, first, was there a certain region of being (ontology) that could become intelligible only through the dialectic, and, second, what were the limits of this knowledge (epistemology).[33] Marx's concept of historical materialism lacked a discussion of these questions, which required, Sartre thought, a critical or Kantian mode of investigation. [34] In Chatelet's eyes, Sartre's Critique successfully realized the theoretical transcendence of philosophy that the Arguments group wanted. [35] Sartre endeavored to clarify dialectical rationality by testing its claim of comprehending the sociohistorical totality. If it had any validity at all, the dialectic would have to illuminate the relation of praxis to the totality; individual action could be known only within the historical movement of society. The 1960 volume of the Critique started with individual action and ended with social groups or collective totalizations.[36] Sartre was concerned only with possible structural relationships of the individual and society. A promised second volume would complete the foundation of dialectical reason by tracing these possible structures in history. [37] Volume one argued that human action could be grasped only in terms of its totalizations. Totalization differs from totality in that a totality is "inert" or static, like a finished table, while a totalization indicates a living process. Every action delineates "a practical field" of meanings. The dialectic captured the meaning of the individual's act through its connections with the larger field of society. While the individual totalized his act, for example, his act in turn was totalized by others. Sartre tried to show that dia-


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33 CRD, 139. 34 CRD, 134. 35 Logos et praxis, op. cit., 198-199. 36 CRD, 134. 37 CRD, 156. For further comments on volume 2 see "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., 58ff.

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Sartre's Critique lectical reason alone could comprehend totalizations. Analytical reason, on the other hand, could be used to study totalities. For Sartre,, analytical reason could not capture the living interrelatedness of a totalization since it always fragmented its object. This form of thought could study "anti-dialectical," phenomena in which men and institutions appeared as mechanical things. The conclusions of analytical reason, however, always had to be integrated into a more comprehensive dialectic. For social phenomena were never, in their ontological root, merely things, regardless of how inert they seemed to the observer or to the historical participant.[38] While, at any given moment, human actions appeared to be isolated and unrelated, within the intentionality of each action was an opposite movement toward synthesizing the totality, and this is what Sartre termed totalization. The dialectic uncovered the field of everyday life as a subjective network of intersecting, intentional actions. [39] Sartre's concept of totalization deepened the concept of the situation in Being and Nothingness. The choice of the individual now pointed toward and included the social field as a necessary aspect of its own intelligibility. The concept of totalization also overcame the relativism of the project in Being and Nothingness, where even a fascist might be authentic. Since the project was a totalization, its meaning was bound up with history, which arranged the multiplicity of projects into a hierarchy and presented the possibility of their global unification into a single historical direction of events. [40] Human projects were ultimately connected in a single totalization which had yet to be achieved, but which was the immanent tendency of history. This meant that those totalizations which furthered the planetary process of totalization were better than those which did not. Planetary totalization required communism as well as existentialist authenticity. The Critique thus prepared the ground 38 Cumming, 422; CRD, 139. 39 CRD, 156. 40 Jameson, op. cit., 731.

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III. Toward Existential Marxism for an axiology of projects, which Sartre had promised in Being and Nothingness. Sartre insisted that the observer bad to implicate himself in the act of comprehension. All forms of "desituated" knowledge (value-free sociology, objective science, etc.) were ruled out. In order for dialectical reason to be effective, the knower had to totalize his own investigating purposes. Engaged in the "totalization in process," the knower had to grasp the totalization from within history, or else and this was Sartre's repeated caveat--there could be no intelligibility of human action.[41] The social scientist could not remain a remote, disinterested observer. With the concept of totalization, Sartre achieved considerable success in overcoming his previous individualism. For dialectical reason implied totalizing the self-contained, isolated character of the thinker. In Sartre's words,"? the investigator must, if the unity of history exists, grasp his own life as the Whole and the Part, as the link between the Parts and the Whole, and as the relation of the Parts among themselves, in the dialectical movement of Unification. He must be able to make the leap from his own singular life to History." [42] Some critics still maintained that Sartre had not escaped the cogito because be still spoke of "subjects" and still focused on individuals. Yet his response to this objection would be that the Critique was primarily concerned with the mediations between the individual and the social world. Sartre states, " . . . the critical experience will start out from the immediate, that is, from the individual attaining himself in his abstract praxis, to rediscover, through deeper and deeper conditionings, the totality of his practical links with others, and thereby the structures of the diverse practical multiplicities and through the contradictions and struggles among these, the concrete absolute: historical man." [43] 41 CRD, 140, 129. 42 Cumming, 427; CDR, 143. 43 Ibid.

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Sartre's Critique 3. Praxis and Nature The concept of totalization was only the first principle of Sartre's Critique. It was made more concrete by a series of concepts that began with the relations of the individual to nature. The dialectical principle


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governing all these relations was that " . . . man is 'mediated' by things to the extent that things are 'mediated' by man." [44] The undefined practical field of men and things received its first totalization when a need arose in man, which he acted upon. Need replaced the "lack" from Being and Nothingness as the primary interior spring of action. Human need filled the passive field of matter with meaning; specifically, it appeared as inert resistance. In the first totalization, man made himself a tool in order to act on matter, and matter made man into an inorganic instrument, whose survival was in question. Human relations hence found their first level of intelligibility in the practical field of solitary individuals acting upon nature to satisfy needs. For example, separated by a wall, a road-mender and a gardener were working and were both seen by Sartre, the vacationing philosopher, from his window. Each unified his practical field in isolation, while Sartre, a third person, unified both of their fields into a single totalization. Their actions were integrated only from the distant vantage point of the society or from its representative. The third man totalized the actions of both men, grasping the intentionality of their work from within and organizing the field into a coherent whole. The two workers became a group for the third person. Each worker was recognized as human not through his objectification, as for Hegel, but in his action. This nexus of men working upon nature, unified by a third underlay all other social relations for Sartre.[45] The reciprocity of the two workers was one of negative, mechanical exteriority. Hence 44 Cumming, 428; CRD, 165. 45 CRD, 191.

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III. Toward Existential Marxism men were fundamentally dispersed into multiplicity by their action upon nature. Sartre's use of the third to constitute the first totalization is a far cry from the hostile monads who encountered each other in Being and Nothingness. It was an important innovation over the usual notion of the couple as the primary relationship,[46] like Hegel's master and slave. The advance in Sartre's concept of the third is that it avoids the conception that individuals are forever alone in total privacy, since (1) privacy or isolation is a specific social relation and (2) even in privacy one's thoughts and feelings return, as if drawn by a magnet, to the social world. In its positive sense, the notion of the third stressed the collective backdrop of individual actions, underlining their social mediation. In the potlatch competition, for example, the judge was part of the activity of the two contenders. The reciprocity of social interactions was always a "mediated reciprocity" that included a third party. Once again, without losing its ontological primacy, consciousness was socialized, by Sartre, ending its ideological character as "individualism."


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Though the Critique did not include a table of contents to clarify its overall plan, it had a remarkably coherent internal structure. Tracing the intelligible structure of need, Sartre began with the individual and ended with social relations, all encompassed in a magisterially enunciated dialectical network. He also began the dialectic with matter, to show how it totalized the practical field. Viewed from the side of matter, the dyad individual-nature led to the inexorable fact of scarcity--there was not enough for everyone. Like need, scarcity unified the practical field of the multiplicity of men, in negative, antagonistic relations of reciprocity. [47] In the context of scarcity, each individual, when he consumed an object, implicitly consumed that object against every46 Jameson's discussion of the third is excellent, op. cit., 241--944. He failed to notice that Sartre had begun using this notion before the Critique in The Ghost of Stalin. 47 CRD, 744.

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Sartre's Critique one else. The gratification of the individual's need was at the same time and unintentionally a threat to everyone else.[48] Sartre's vision of scarcity served as a re- minder that hunger was a constant fact for many and that relative deprivation was ubiquitous. Scarcity meant that some of the group would be determined--by whatever standard was used, all of them being relative--as "expendables," while, between groups, each would see the other as a threat to its survival or satisfaction. Sartre recalled that scarcity was not purely a matter of consumption, since consumption was dialectically related to production. Not only was there an unequal division of toil, but toil itself represented man's burdened condition. Scarcity would be eliminated only when goods would be shared equitably and when toil would be reduced to a marginal fact of life through automation.[49] In all of these ways scarcity created an "inert structure" in social relations by which the Other existed as "inhuman" for the individual or the group, as a possible expendable. The first alienation emerged when the praxis of the individual satisfying his need "turns back against him and reaches him as Other through the social environment," [50] since it defined the others as expendable. For Sartre, scarcity was "the abstract and fundamental matrix of all the reifications of human relations." [51] The mediation of scarce matter in human affairs was the original source of exploitation and violence, of all "evil." [52] There were several sides to this issue. First, with scarcity the meaning of individual praxis was distorted since each "person is objectively dangerous to the Other." More profoundly still, the labor that people effected on things lost its intended meaning and forced men to appear like things. "Alterity"' was the name Sartre gave to the process by which the praxis of the individual was "stolen" by


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48 CRD, 207. 49 Saint Genet, op. cit., 225, 390-391. 50 Cumming, 438; CRD, 206. 5l Cumming, 440; CRD, 208. 52 CRD, 691.

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III. Toward Existential Marxism the Other and its meaning modified or altered. When an individual worked on wax, making it into a seal, his action was inscribed on matter. This seal emerged in the practical field as a signifier and the next person who came upon it found its meaning already there. He found himself a passive object signified by the seal. In another example, Sartre mentioned the process of deforestation in China, wherein each peasant cleared his land in order to farm it, but in doing so created dangerous flood conditions. In this case, the peasant's praxis, engraved in matter, came back to him as a threat, with an "altered," foreign meaning. Or again, the machine, in capitalist society, worked a similar effect: ". . . the machine, as passive materiality, realizes itself as negation of human interdependence, interposing itself between the workers, to the exact extent that it is the indispensable means of their work; the living solidarity of the group is destroyed before it has even been able to form."[53] The effects of scarcity on human relations created the possibility of history; it was the collective project of transcending scarcity that actually inaugurated history.[54] History, for Sartre, began and ended in the deliberate social effort to overcome scarcity. With all history permeated by the negative effects of scarcity, happy myths of a remote Golden Age were dispelled. Ethnocentrically, Sartre discovered peoples without history. The primitives, who did not struggle against scarcity with weapons of science and technology but stagnated in a balance with nature, had "different" dialectical structures. For the West and more recently for other parts of the world, industrialization created the conditions for the reign of abundance, although Sartre did not anticipate the end of scarcity in the near future. He refused to explore the dialectical structures of abundance, in order to test the degree to which abundance might set the conditions for relations not inscribed with scarcity. 53 Cumming, 455; CRD, 253. 54 CRD, 201.

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Sartre's Critique Although many Marxists sneered at the concept of scarcity, Sartre insisted that it was compatible with Marxism.[55] The emphasis in Marx on surplus-value, on the existence of exploitation even at primitive levels of technical development, occurred, for Sartre, within a more extensive framework of scarcity. Within the broad condition of undernourishment, it was quite possible that an elite could flourish, causing the mass of peasants to suffer a deeper level of undernourishment than they would with equal distribution. Sartre's concept of scarcity paralleled Marx's notion in Capital [56] of the reign of necessity as opposed to the reign of freedom. It referred to the relation of society to nature before automation, one in which human labor did not produce enough goods to satisfy the existing level of needs. The Hobbesian tone of Sartre's discussion of history as scarcity did not end in any conservative or authoritarian political philosophy. In fact, it defined the rationality of history precisely as the revolutionary transcendence of scarcity along with the relationships that had been constituted within its horizon. One of the evils of capitalism, for Sartre, was that it produced new, unjustifiable scarcities, like the scarcity of consumers during periods of overproduction that led to depressions. [57] One of his chief aims was to show that material scarcity did not simply result in objective exploitation, as Marx and Engels indicated, but that it was also interiorized by people living in its midst and took on elaborate forms of alienation as a consequence. The working class itself could hardly be brothers and sisters to one another in societies based on scarcity. "What we are showing is this: the possibility that these social relations become contradictory itself proceeds from an inert and material negation, which is reinteriorized by man."[58] Sartre's thesis was that alienation was grounded on human interactions in a practical field of scarcity, that its extent could not be measured simply 55CRD, 224, 214, 218. Many reviewers disagreed; cf. Aimé Patri in the liberal journal, Preuves. 56 Volume III, 820 (N.Y., International Pub.). 57 CRD, 214. 58 Cumming, 449; CRD, 224.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism in the objective existence of quantitative insufficiency but that it derived as well from the positive reciprocity of individuals. Only because men lived their relations with each other, with the recognition of their mutual humanity, could the painful Otherness, exteriority, and inertness of their relations be interiorized by them. Sartre's tableau of the human scene here reached a pinnacle of pathos. There was a quality almost of beauty in the way his vision encompassed so much tragedy and so much hope in one majestic picture. In history men endured the practical consequences of their inability to satisfy their http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (15 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:34]

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needs by at once recognizing the humanity of the Other and not being able to maintain that recognition. The meaning of human labor is that man reduces himself to inorganic materiality, in order to act materially upon matter and to change his material life. Through transubstantiation, the project that our bodies engrave in the thing assumes the substantial characteristics of that thing, without entirely losing its original qualities. Thus it comes to possess an inert future, within which we shall have to determine our own future. The future comes to man through things, to the extent that it has come to things through man.[59] Now that matter had penetrated the structures of human relations, human activity no longer derived from needs, but is awakened from without, by processed matter?" The machine determined the activity of the worker to the extent that the worker determined the activity of the machine. Scarce matter also structured individuals into groups in which men were defined by matter. With his usual novelistic touch, Sartre gave stunning examples of these groups which he called "series." At a Saint-Germain bus stop people are standing in line. What is their mode of relationship? They have a common aim, the bus, through which they are 59 Cumming, 452; CRD, 246.

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Sartre's Critique united. Yet they are essentially in solitude. Their reciprocity is almost totally negative; they do not care about one another. With respect to one another they are identical, interchangeable: each one is simply another person waiting for the bus. Many modes of behavior in the everyday life of cities were similarly defined: people buying a newspaper or listening to their radios. In each case, the thing--which was not raw matter, but the product of human labor--defined the relations of individuals as external, interchangeable isolation. People formed groups that bad little human content, only an anonymity in togetherness that accounted for the statistical aspect of social-relations that so intrigued Merleau-Ponty. Sartre offered a compelling reformulation of Marx's proposition that under capitalism relations of men take on the appearance of relations of things and relations of things take on the appearance of relations among men. In his words: "If truly . . . as Marx often said, everything is Other in capitalist society, this is because atomization--origin and result of the process--makes social man an Other than himself, conditioned by Others in so far as they are Other than themselves."[60] As the time for the arrival of the


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bus approached, the people formed themselves into a line. The scarcity of seats determined that each was simply another human-object for the rest. The unity of these people was one of maximum separation. The "scandal" of it was that in these groups each person accepted and interiorized the impossibility of recognizing each of the others for his intrinsic, personal qualities. [61] People endured the cutting inhumanity of matter in the very heart of their reciprocal relations. Like a child's toys in a dollhouse, men in series were infinitely separate from one another, regardless of physical proximity. Such phenomena as prices and public opinion polls are further examples of the same separation through processed matter or, another of Sartre's terms, the "practico-inert." 60 CRD, 351. 61 CRD, 312.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism These totalizations of man and matter presented a dark canvas of human society. One might ask what has become of the radical concept of freedom from Being and Nothingness confronted by the influence of the practico-inert. In fact, Sartre gave up little of his concept of freedom, but enriched it by elaborating the active side of matter in the social field. If everywhere we discover that the individual finds his "reality in the material object," this is possible only because he is free to do so.[62] Sartre gave a splendid exposition of the dialectic of freedom and alienation which needs to be quoted at length: To be alienated or simply altered [made Other], the individual must be an organism susceptible of dialectical action; and it is through the free praxis that necessity s revealed as a transformation of his product and himself by his product in the Other. The constraints of need, the requirements of the processed Thing, the imperatives of the Other, his own powerlessness --his praxis reveals all these to him and interiorizes them. His free activity, in its freedom, takes upon itself everything that crushes him: exhausting work, exploitation, oppression, rising prices. This is tantamount to saying that his freedom is the means chosen by the Thing and the Other to crush him, and to transform him into a processed Thing. . . . Certainly [the worker] has no other out; the choice is impossible. . . . And yet, after all, a praxis is involved . . . in other words, the ineluctable destiny that is overwhelming him goes through him . . . freedom, here, does not mean the possibility of choice, but the necessity of living the constraint, in the form of a requirement to be fulfilled by a praxis . . .[63] True enough, the individual did not have the freedom of choice to change the situation in order to http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (17 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:35]

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abolish alienation; this could come about only through group action. Nevertheless, the individual remained the free being who endured and interiorized the alienating structures. Ubiquitous, allpervading, freedom haunted the serialized struc62 CRD, 360. 63 Cumming, 461-463; CRD, 364-366. Emphasis added.

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Sartre's Critique tures of everyday life and presented a constant threat to those structures. Revolution was not some future hope, some external deus ex machina: it lived within society at all times. The serialized structures did not determine the individual in the way a moving billiard ball determined the motion of the ball it hit. Instead, the series presented a dialectical necessity that the individual interiorize them. Further, although Sartre did not mention it in this context, the practico-inert of capitalism contained within itself the technical possibility of liberating man from toil (the final contradiction of capitalism), and this aspect of the practico-inert was itself continually thrust at the individuals, adding a second dimension of freedom to the practical field, one that derived from matter as past praxis. To Sartre, Marxists had suppressed the moment of individual praxis, through which alone the dialectical nature of alienation was intelligible.[64] Existential Marxism was thus a way of seeing the individual in the act of living his alienation. It also made intelligible those modes of alienation which came from matter. Sartre sought to overcome one of the basic difficulties of a phenomenological social theory which was limited to the intentionality of individual consciousness. Now there was an intentionality of processed matter. In Being and Nothingness matter had little signifying force of its own. In the Critique, on the contrary, the concept of the practico-inert enabled matter to come alive with full signifying and alienating powers. Sartre insisted that the basis of alienation was not simply human relationships in their various modes, like the capitalist organization of labor. It lay instead in the profound penetration of human relationships by scarce, processed matter. To what extent could the ontological freedom of man he realized, given the force of processed matter? In short, to what extent could alienation he abolished? Sartre's an64 CRD, 373.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism swer emerges clearly, in comparison to Hegel and Marx. In the Phenomenology Hegel located alienation in the process of objectification, [65] suggesting that the need of the self for relationships with other objects, its lack of final unity in itself, was the basis of alienation. Disagreeing, Marx fixed the point of alienation not in the dispersal of the self in the world, but only in those structures of relationship in which the produced object lost its original source and meaning. In both cases, however, alienation was primarily an aspect of human reality. For Sartre, in opposition to both Hegel and Marx, alienation plagued man only through the mediation of matter, a much more radical conception. In the Critique men always at some level recognized one another as men. This provided a much stronger basis for the re-appropriation of that recognition than was found in Marx. With scarce matter as the foundation of alienation, Sartre distinguished different types of separation and alteration in the practical field. A degree of alienation accompanied the process of objectification since things inscribed by praxis then confronted men with signifying power.[66] The process of labor itself contained a form of alienation, since nature required the individual to make himself into a tool, a quasiinert instrument, in order to act upon it. Then too, scarcity led praxis to turn against itself. In all these ways, objectification, Sartre maintained in agreement with Hegel but for different reasons, was not distinct from alienation. Another phenomenon akin to alienation was alterity or otherness. The practical field constituted by scarce matter dispersed men into solitude, in which they appeared to one another in varying degrees of otherness. This otherness was a distance between people by which each lost, in part, his human character in relation to the other. Alienation, objectification, alterity--were these eternal social pathologies? 65 Cf. Jameson's summary of Pietro Chiodi's excellent comparison of alienation in Hegel, Marx and Sartre from Sartre e il marxismo (Milan, 1965) op. cit., 237-238. 66 CRD, 285.

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Sartre's Critique Since Sartre affirmed the possibility of a post-scarcity society, he would have to admit that all of these modes of alienation were historical and not immutable. Every aspect of alienation he described was limited to the history of scarcity and would not necessarily apply to any other condition. The dialectical structures of a non-scarcity history were beyond the scope of his project. [67] Everything would change when the relation between an ontologically free human species and an ontologically inert nature would change. In fact, dialectical reason could not possibly decide the question in advance because it was limited to the intelligibility of constituted historical structures. [68] http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (19 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:35]

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4. Groups and Freedom The last section of the théorie des ensembles pratiques tested the dialectic where group relations rather than matter were primary. Sartre's dialectic of groups, moving from the spontaneous group-in-fusion to the highly structured institution, resembled Hegel's dialectic in that part of the Phenomenology which described the dissolution of "old groups" and the revolutionary irruption of freedom. [69] As we shall see, throughout the Critique the project of the individual was never the final organizing principle of dialectical reason, even though it was a moment of every totalization. Sartre distinguished the series from the more intensive mutuality of the group. If relations in the series resembled the inertness of matter, the group had the vitality of free 67 While in the Critique Sartre was adamant about the unqualified nature of scarcity in present society, he became ambivalent later. In 1965, be still spoke out against talk of an "affluent society," asserting that 50 percent of France was at a subsistence level ("Interview," Playboy, May, 1965, 74). Later, in 1969, be reversed himself, stating that advanced capitalism, "despite disparities" in income "manages to satisfy the elementary needs of the majority of the working class" ("Masses, Spontaneity, Party," Socialist Register: 1970, London, 238). 68 Cf. Jameson, op. cit., 328 for a discussion of Chiodi's differing view and Gorz, op. cit., 43 for a continuation of this argument. 69 Lapassade, op. cit., 515.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism projects. Groups were always constituted from the background of the series, replacing mechanical solidarity with organic solidarity--the same distinction he made earlier in The Communists and the Peace. The pressure toward forming the more integrated group structure derived from the "impossibility" of free beings to live in the inert structures of the series. [70] For an actual group to be constituted, however, there was an additional requirement: external danger. Sartre considered, in passing, groups that were not formed out of "the menace of mortal danger," like elderly women's library clubs, [71] but these voluntary associations were not dominant in society. Although be acknowledged the possibility of these groups which lacked the antagonistic impetus of scarce matter, he reserved their significance for a future stage of history. Sartre discussed the group through an example. In July, 1789, the people of Paris felt themselves threatened by the king's decision to encircle the city with his troops. In the passion of this new situation they suddenly shed their serial inertia and recognized themselves in the other person as possible victims. The series was negated in an explosion of fraternal reciprocity, an abrupt alteration of consciousness in http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (20 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:35]

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which "each person continues to see himself in the Other," like the people at the bus stop, only now "he sees himself there as himself." [72] The group was formed through an absolute reciprocity of praxis where each saw in the Other the same project as his own. This was the case for the people in the SaintAntoine district who decided to storm the Bastille. The result was nothing less than an apocalypse: "Each individual reacts in a new fashion: not as individual or as Other, but as singular incarnation of the common person."[73] Impersonality, isolation, atomization--these traits of the series were washed away when the intensely personal relations of the "group-in-fusion" were constituted. In fact, Sartre 70 CRD, 384. 71 CRD, 385n. 72 Cumming, 467; CRD, 388. 73 Cumming, 470; CRD, 391.

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Sartre's Critique relations of the "group-in-fusion" were constituted. In fact, Sartre said, the group was "the beginning of humanity," where men have "recuperated their lost being," their suppressed freedom. A structure of relations has been constituted by men themselves providing a total transparency of the self to others, substantiating the freedom of each to choose his destiny, and embodying the full potentials of humanness. Revolutionary action became the "extreme situation" of existential Marxism. Sartre had discovered that the recovery of freedom was possible only in a group structure. [74] The hesitations in Being and Nothingness about the ontological status of the we-subject, now the group-infusion, vanished completely. With the concept of the group, existential Marxism found its central concept and its solution to the difficulties that plagued it through the 1950s in the writings of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Traces of bourgeois individualism were decisively diminished. Man found his freedom in a common act that was directed against the structures that atomized him. The autonomy of the self that was a primary goal of bourgeois social thought since Locke had been rejected by Sartre. In the Critique, Sartre was not "the last of the Cartesians," as some have claimed, [75] but fully an existential Marxist. He still based the group on individual actions; any other basis would legitimate a superhuman realm of being and diminish human freedom. For Descartes and the individualist tradition, however, autonomous creation was fixed rigidly in the individual. Natural rights, for example, pertained to each individual as a pre-social being. On the other hand, the Critique argued that human realization was not centered on the self. It required a democratic group structure, in which each person would be recognized as a free being.


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The singular accomplishment of the Critique' s existential Marxism was to synthesize Marx's concept of man as a social being and Sartre's early concept of freedom more 74 CRD, 567, 580. 75 Desan, op. cit., 260ff.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism forcefully and coherently than ever before in the traditions of social thought. It was now clear that the freedom that was actualized in serial relations was insufficient. Alone in a room, or in a subway, the individual could not recognize and confirm the freedom of the other because individuals were too indifferent, antagonistic, and separate from one another. Furthermore, free action within seriality was not directed against alienation, and only by pursuing this project could group structures he constituted in which freedom was recognized and affirmed. In 1789, for example, the revolt of Paris was directed against a hierarchical feudal society that had been constituted within scarcity. The concept of freedom in the Critique required that it become objectified as the common project of everyone. In the group-infusion, freedom became an objective social structure; it constituted the world as a human, free world. To Sartre the cogito could never be the basis of a social theory grounded on freedom, because freedom there was always an asocial act. It was "private." At the very most, the public realm could guarantee freedom to the individual. Sartre's existential Marxism combined the subjective freedom of the individual to make himself and the objective freedom of the society (the group) to recognize the individual as free. "The group is the beginning of humanity," he proclaimed. A complete existential Marxism would also require the concept of the material basis for this freedom in the automation of toil and integration of technology with nature. Without a proper material base, the group-in-fusion had to remain, Sartre realized, a fleeting and unstable structure. In a hopeful vein, the most Sartre was able to claim was that the movement toward attaining the material level for a free society would utilize the group-in-fusion. In short, the democratic group-in-fusion, not the elite Leninist party, was the proper revolutionary organization. For Sartre, liberal social theory characterized the ideal group as a discussion group 290

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that attained consensus, agreement through open debate, with complete toleration for verbal selfexpression. Such a group fit well with the rationalist humanism of the bourgeoisie: when each member of the group could exercise his reason autonomously, without constraint, freedom was preserved. Sartre rejected this notion since ultimately it was based on detached contemplation. Experience in the group-infusion, to the contrary, was total, engaging the full, concrete existence of the individual, not just his rationality. Sartre could now address himself to the question of the status of the group. Nominalist social theories denied any being to the group, and realist social theories, like Durkheim's, substantialized the group into a thing. Sartre was at pains to avoid both positions, especially the latter, which he felt was endemic in Marxist thought. Time and again, he rejected what he called "hyper-organicism." [76] He would not grant any separate existence to the group beyond the action of the individuals. The unity of the group never transcended the common praxis of its members. If it did, if it had an ontological status of its own, it would severely diminish the freedom of the individuals. The group was continually reconstituted and retotalized in the actions of its members, and that was all there was to the group. At most, the group was the situation in which men carried out their ontological destiny. The fact that the group did not have ontological status did not, in the Critique, lessen its significance for human freedom, because the group was now an essential aspect of the totalization of praxis. Still anxious to avoid the pitfalls of hyper-organicism, Sartre dismissed the "binary" image in which society was constituted against the individual. To show the full valence of the mediating quality of the group, he claimed that its unity was based on a tertiary model. For the group the third was internal; for the series it was external. Each other 76 CRD, 507-508, 528.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism member of the group was a third to the individual. Through his recognition by the third, and not by some group substance, the individual interiorized his group membership. The fundamental relation of the group-in-fusion was that of third to third, not of the individual to the group as a whole. Hence reciprocity of recognition--the common praxis by which each could see himself confirmed in the otherwas the vital core of the group. Sartre's notion of the movement from group to series had affinities with the concepts of social organization of the classical sociologists. For Durkheim, European society had moved from mechanical to organic forms of solidarity, and for Weber modern history revealed a trend toward bureaucracy. The prospects each imagined for the future of Europe were indeed bleak. What made Sartre's theory http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (23 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:35]

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revolutionary was that the negation of seriality came through the impulse toward free mutual recognition. Admittedly, all examples of industrial society, socialist Russia as well as capitalist America, manifested bureaucratic forms of social relations that Marx had not conceptualized. In Europe, Marxist movements simply did not consider the form of social relations as a major issue. Until Sartre's Critique, Marxism had no adequate critique of bureaucracy. The importance of Sartre's theory of the series rested with its accounting for bureaucratized social relations while maintaining the possibility, however remote, of their progressive transformation. When the students and workers of the New Left raised their banner in the late 1960s, existential Marxism had already theorized the conditions of their action. Yet, for Sartre, the group-in-fusion was no more than an island of humanity in a sea of inert series, and it eternally faced dispersion into mechanical unity. As the members became more conscious of themselves as parts of a group, the necessity for some sign of commitment against seriality was noticed. In an effort to preserve the group against dispersion, each member took some sort of oath of allegiance to the group. To achieve stability, however, the group would have to have what it could not obtain: ontological 292

Sartre's Critique status. For it was threatened not only by the series, but more seriously by the freedom of the individual, who could always withdraw from it. The same free praxis by which the group was formed now became its mortal enemy. Claiming an impossible ontological status, the group-in-fusion inaugurated a reign of terror in order to suppress its possible internal destruction. If a Parisian in 1789 went over to the king's camp, the life of the group might have been in question. In the last analysis, Sartre wrote, "Terror . . . arises out of opposition to seriality, not to freedom." [77] Thus the ultimate threat to the group's existence came from scarcity, which is only an historical condition. Yet the destruction of the group was inexorable. The group required a degree of job specialization. Evolving in structure, the group now became an 'Organization," with well-defined functions. Although some spontaneity of action was lost, the separation of tasks did not destroy the common unity of the group. The common goal still overshadowed the differentiation. Yet, in its very efforts to preserve its unity through specialization, the group slowly slid into the very condition that it was created to negate. When it later became an "institution," it betrayed more and more signs of the practico-inert and began to resemble the dreaded series all over again. The institution exemplified the same trait that was observed earlier in the relations of men and matter. The action of men began to turn against them, producing a result that was unintended, even intentionally rejected. The transformation of the organization into the institution took the following pattern. First, there was a petrification of functions in which the common purpose became subordinated, for the individual, to his narrow obligation to perform his tasks. Praxis now became "exteriorized" as the free goal of each member appeared to him more and more like an alien http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (24 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:35]

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obligation. People became identified with their roles, and interactions carried greater alterity and external reciprocity. Second, au77 CRD, 578.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxist thority developed to insure that each member performed his task. The serial quality of the institution manifested the powerlessness of the individual, who could no longer recognize himself in the organized division of labor. Sartre emphasized that only on the basis of the lost power of participation did hierarchical authority emerge. The leader sustained the unity of the group only because democracy had been destroyed. There was no ontological basis for the sovereignty of leaders or elites,[78] no eternal necessity for a division of society into rulers and ruled. To the extent that it denied the legitimacy of constituted authority, existential Marxism preserved and revitalized revolutionary social philosophy. Moreover, Sartre asserted that the legitimate and necessary functions performed by leaders were a direct source of the alienation of reciprocity: "This alienation of the individual from the individual-totality represents a most profound degradation of the group as common praxis; at the same time it revives the structural bond under a stupefying form."[79] Loosely defined groups could not survive in the practical field pervaded by the series, since it was too easy for the individual to become separated from the group. So the group began defining itself more and more rigidly. The individual lost his sense of the spontaneity of the gathering, so that clear authority was needed to assure the individual of the group's cohesiveness. Ironically, these measures taken by the group to insure its unity destroyed the spontaneity of the common praxis for each member and reconstituted the external reciprocity of the series. We are faced with a circle. Larger collectivities, like social classes, states, and whole societies, became intelligible in relation to the smaller units of everyday life. Collectives were not groups themselves but groups of groups or, better, series of series. Sartre reversed the normal trend of social theory by having the relatively small units as the central structures of human interaction. Collectivities were the "matrices" of groups, "moving ensembles of groups 78 CRD, 588. 79 CRD, 599.

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Sartre's Critique and series." The unity of the collectivity was far less defined than that of the group: social classes and the state were thus not the primary structures of society. The "being-in-common-of-class" was far less immediate than that of the series or the group. Sartre's notion of the class-subject in The Communists and the Peace was now a loosely connected conglomeration of small units that could not become an active political subject." Size alone was not the decisive question, because Sartre pictured the whole city of Paris as a group-in-fusion in 1789. Rather, the lack of unity in the social class was determined by its relation to totalizing praxis. The working class, for example, was defined through processed matter (the mode of production) and equally through the praxis of workers. Taking both totalizations together, the obstacles for the working class in becoming a direct agent of historical change were enormous: "As a synchronic determination, we are thus led to consider the working class . . . both as institutionalized group organization (the "cadres"), as a grouping in fusion or in oath . . . and as inert seriality. . . ."[81] With this concept of social class, Sartre avoided the mistake that he attributed to official Marxists--one that he had made in The Communists and the Peace--of jumping too quickly to a unitary view of the Proletariat. The role of classes in the social field could not simply be assumed; it would have to be determined through careful analysis, by studying the concrete factors of specific series and groups. To assess the political situation at any given time, a realistic appraisal of the working class would have to replace the mythic assumption of its constant and unitary readiness for revolution. As an example of the way social classes could be more differentiated than unified, Sartre mentioned the syndicalists of the early twentieth century, whose social relations and politics were so distinct from the rest of the workers that working-class unity was a chimera. A similar 80 "Masses, Spontaneity, Party," op. cit., 237. 81 CRD, 647.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism unity was a chimera. A similar analysis of the working class in the 1960s would reveal new sectors, like technicians and engineers, and new discontented social layers, like students, women, and the young. The Party was another collective. Rejecting his view of 1952 that the Party was the historical subject of the working class, Sartre now treated it merely as another institution. [82] The Party could no longer become the agent of the class because it systematically distorted the intentions of the class. The pressing political problem became one of constituting a new type of revolutionary group that surpassed the inherent alienation effects of the institution, while rejecting the anarchist notion of total spontaneity. Due to Sartre's overly strong concept of scarcity, the theoretical groundwork for the new group was not http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (26 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:35]

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developed in the Critique. After 1968, he accepted the relative affluence of advanced capitalism. He could then assert that elementary, material needs were by and large satisfied and no longer constituted revolutionary demands upon the ruling class. Only the need to overcome alienation could be a basis for a new revolutionary struggles.[83] To unite a social class on the basis of the control over production was more difficult, but at least it focused on the creative side of revolutionary action. Once Sartre adopted alienation rather than exploitation as a central critical concept, his existential Marxism became a possible philosophical explanation of and guide for New Left politics. The state was a large-scale institution that approached the unity of the group, even though its composition was in a constant state of flux. In fact, the state positioned itself above the other collectivities of society in an effort to control them just through their lack of unity. The state "takes as its aim the manipulation of collectives without rescuing 82 "Masses, Spontaneity, Party," op. cit., 233-239. It might be worth mentioning that this interview was given to Rossana Rossanda of the Il Manifesto group on August 27, 1969. 83 Ibid., 238.

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Sartre's Critique them from seriality, establishing its own power on the heterogeneity between its being and serial being." [84] Like Marx, Sartre ascribed the central contradiction of the state to its pretention to "sovereign unity" over the whole society and its reliance on a "class apparatus." The concreteness of Sartre's dialectic allowed him to capture a "new type of praxis," one that derived from the transformation of the state into a bureaucracy and its intervention at all levels of society. Through advertising methods and new propaganda techniques, the bureaucracy was able to manipulate the inert seriality of society to an unprecedented degree, raising the ominous possibility of total state control of society. The principle of this bureaucracy was called "extereo-conditioning."[85] In it the alterity of praxis was pushed to an extreme limit: the individual makes himself into what the bureaucracy wants him to be. Advanced capitalism relied heavily on extereo-conditioning, for example, in its "Management of consumption." With the concept of extereo-conditioning, the social criticism of Sartre and Lefebvre merged closely. While Lefebvre's analysis of the new phenomenon of consumerism, which did not appear until the early 1960s, remained somewhat abstract, Sartre was able to penetrate the experience to its immediate structure: . . . extereo-conditioning has two complementary faces: from the point of view of the ruling group, it appears as a labor of transforming seriality


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into anti-physis; from the point of view of the serial individual, it is the illusory grasp of his being other as unifying himself in the common field of totalization and the realization of radical alterity (and oriented from an exterior group) in him and in all Others starting from this illusion. In a word, extereo-conditioning pushes alterity to an extreme since it determines that the serial individual himself must do as the others do in order to be as they are." 86 84 CRD, 610. 85 CRD, 614. 86 CRD, 620.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism For example, serialized in a department store or in front of his television, the individual interiorized the command by someone outside his group to become like other people in order to be like everyone. The individual made this command into the totalizing principle of his praxis. Extereo-conditioning was a far more illuminating concept than, for example, Marcuse's concept of false needs in One-Dimensional Man. By seeing the individual in the context of the series, it avoided a moralistic view of the consumer as a dupe who moronically consumed junk. Instead, for Sartre, manipulating capitalists and bureaucrats played upon the powerless individual's need to identify himself with the totality, which was a genuine impulse for universalization. At the same time, the full poverty of the experience for the individual was punctuated. The enticing lure of mutual reciprocity was bastardized into common consumption. ("Join the Pepsi-generation.") This "radical alterity" became a damning judgment on advanced capitalist society, which was defined by Sartre through its praxis of serial terrorism and extereo-conditioning. Even though the immediate structures of society were groups and series, not classes and bureaucracies, the primary situation of individual praxis remained the class struggle. Sartre sought to demonstrate, by intricate descriptions of the working class in Europe and Algeria and the bourgeoisie in France, that the concrete project of the individual was shaped in relation to the historical development of social classes. The bourgeois' choice of himself as a "man of distinction" was pervaded by the class violence he inherited and sustained. He actively participated in a social equilibrium based on oppression, alienation, alterity, and exploitation. The man of distinction, from which Lefebvre derived his discussion of the bourgeois, sought to distinguish himself from others and over against others, by his own merit. His selfdefinition was effected by splitting himself off from reciprocity: "But this immediate merit that distinguishes him must be found by him in an historical situation where being-of-class is already defined:


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Sartre's Critique defined: systematic oppression, justified by previous oppression and extermination and posing as the only means of preserving the practico-inert process of exploitation."[87] Sartre exposed the necessary, dialectical connection of a third-generation bourgeois, a well-meaning man who wanted only to enjoy life and harm no one, with the terrible brutality of his ancestors and with the profound alienation of the contemporary structures in which he was implicated. He denied to the bourgeois his tenuous good conscience, which was bought with minor tribute to his workers and occasional philanthropy. The selfjustification of the bourgeois, the moralism that permitted him to sleep with his deeds, turned up as a gruesome self-deception. There was an Augustinian sternness to Sartre's use of the dialectic to reveal the sins of the ruling class. In sum, the vision of existential Marxism firmly gripped the duality of extereo-conditioning and human reciprocity, of violence and love, of terror and fraternity. There was for Sartre no relief from History, no palliative by which the individual could escape living, day by day, the full consequences of his totalization. 5. Toward a Social Ontology The Critique was not appreciated for its attempted reconciliation of Marxism and existentialism. Considering the status of its author, it received remarkably little attention. The book does contain many weaknesses. It is long, torturous, obscure, as unrelenting on the reader as on its object; its concept of scarcity is flat and unhistorical, taking no account of the relative conquest of scarcity in advanced technological society; it offers no hope, no assurance about the future,[88] adamantly refusing to foretell the imminent collapse of capitalism and bureaucracy; it leaves us hanging in mid-air, abruptly cutting off at the point of introducing history to sociology. Yet the importance 87 CRD, 719. 88 For an example of this type of criticism cf. Arnold Metzger, Existentialismus und Sozialismus: der Dialog des Zeitalters (Pfullingen, 1968) 136-137.

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Early criticisms of Sartre's enterprise of synthesizing Marxism and existentialism were raised again in connection with the Critique. Aron [89] and Freund [90] repeated the formula that Marxism had its origin in social concepts and that existentialism began with the individual, an antimony that allegedly prevented their reconciliation. These critics presupposed that thought had to be a single, unified system, without internal contradictions, fissures, gaps, or breaches. Conversely, existential Marxists, both Sartre and the Arguments group, took the objective field as an open dialectical totality which required multiple perspectives. Only a closed totality could be approached with a linear, finite, smooth system of postulates. Hence any point of departure could illuminate the totalization-in-process as long as it did not obscure the interrelationships of the field. Since both Marxism and existentialism were dialectical in this sense, the charge of incompatibility because one begins here and the other there could not be sustained. Another criticism charges Sartre with an anti-humanist glorification of violence. This objection draws much of its force from Sartre's portrayal of Third World revolutionaries, like Fidel Castro, as heroes. It is certainly true that the Critique legitimizes the violence of colonial peoples against their oppressors. Like Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror, Sartre underlines the connection between human realization and violence. I do not have the space to analyze carefully the influence of Third World struggles on Sartre's thought or the extent to which he may have gone overboard in certain cases, injudiciously sanctioning simple brutality. But the humanist critics often forget Sartre's definition of violence in the Critique. He defines it as the refusal 'to recognize the humanity of the other, not simply as bodily harm.' This definition, far from glorifying 89 Marxism and Existentialists, op. cit., 175. 90 Op. cit., 235.

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Sartre's Critique violence for its own sake, demands a level of humane, civilized behavior that far exceeds current norms in the so-called advanced societies. From the first description of need confronting nature to the final pages on the class struggle, Sartre unified the diverse aspects of the practical field in a spiral of totalizations, without reducing any level to another. By proceeding through the structures of everyday life with the multiple determinations of individual, group, and nature, he produced a social theory that was singularly free of traditional assumptions and privileged regions. The rational individual, the neutral observer, the economic substructure, the objectivity of the social fact, the social contract, the Proletariat--these misleading notions of liberal and socialist thought were dissolved. Above all, human reality was grasped historically, situating the knower in the known, wherein the knower preserved a relative independence. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter7.html (30 of 34) [11/12/2007 23:16:35]

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Reason and history were neither irreconcilable opposites nor a simple, unmediated unity. The knower was enough inside history to have it appear as a "transparent object" which he could grasp empathetically, and he was enough outside history to articulate concepts critically, not simply to reflect conditions. The Critique was neither historicist nor rationalist but existential Marxist. Sartre went a long way toward accomplishing the two tasks he had set for the Critique: (1) the intelligibility, heuristic value, and limits of the dialectic were indicated, (2) the foundation was laid for a dialectical anthropology or a unified science of man. Although Sartre stopped short of the historical half of his project, he did indicate the main lines of his concept of history. Distinct historical phenomena had to be accorded their separate significances before they could be unified in the larger totalization of general history. The historical experience of mankind could be unified into a single totalization only at an ideal vanishing point in the future: history thus far was a multiplicity of temporalizations. If there was a pattern to history, it was infinitely more 301

III. Toward an Existential Marxism complex than the famous three stages of Comte, progressist straight-lines, Spenglerian circles, or even Hegelian and Marxist spirals.[91]The dialectical movement could be symbolized geometrically, Sartre announced when pressed, as "whirligigs," a somewhat unmathematical-sounding term. Sartre's concept of history was criticized for its reliance on an ontological definition of man. By the early 1960s, structuralists were rejecting ontological meditations as an arbitrary and dangerous mode of thought. To Sartre, however, ontological statements signified nothing more than essential meanings (Husserl's eidetic essences) that lay within the multiplicity of appearances and not metaphysical substances that were somehow more real than the rest of reality. Understood in this way, Sartre's Critique pioneered the route of a social ontology, a project that Lukacs was examining at the time of his death in 1971. The social structures defined in the Critique articulated the dispersal of ontological freedoms in the practical field. We must keep in mind that the first volume of the Critique unfolded the specific forms of a social ontology--series, groups-in-fusion, organizations, institutions, collectiveswithout claiming that they constituted a general theory of historical evolution, only the possible forms of human interaction within the horizon of scarcity. Given these limits, we may conclude that Sartre's existential Marxism preserved the ultimate potential of humanity to make history, that it defined the objective and subjective limits of the major forms of alienation, that it upheld a balance between the epistemological transcendence of reason and the involvement of the knower in the historical totality, that it maintained the relative autonomy of the various levels of human experience, that it constituted a method for concrete studies in the human sciences which underlined the particularity as well as the universality of events, and that it accounted for the duality of human inten-


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91 F. Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (California, 1965).

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Sartre's Critique tion and structures without agents--although in this last respect it would have to be modified by structuralism, as we shall see in the next chapter. 6. From the Critique to Flaubert Instead of the promised second volume of the Critique, articles on Flaubert began appearing in Les Temps Modernes in the mid-1960s. The first volume was finally published in 1971 as L'Idiot de la famille. Sartre had decided that a concrete example of his new method, presenting the historical totalization of a personal life and using the mediations of psychoanalysis and American sociology, was more urgent than another strictly theoretical book .[92] Saint Genet had not been historical enough; only the work on Flaubert described the mediations in their total concreteness.[93] In an interview in 1969, Sartre attributed significant theoretical innovations and modifications to the Flaubert study, some of which had been inaugurated in the Critique. The concept of freedom from Being and Nothingness was no longer quite so indeterminate. Confronting the concrete socio-historical situation, the individual could only effect the world in a small way. His choices were tragically narrow; yet he still had the burden of choosing himself. The concept of freedom, without being fundamentally altered, was being significantly enriched by "coordinating" interior experience with exterior experience: The individual interiorizes his social determinations: he interiorizes the relations of production, the family of his childhood, the historical past, the contemporary institutions, and he then re-exteriorizes these in acts and options which necessarily refer us back to them. None of this existed in L'être le néant.[94]

92 "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., 51. 93 "La Conscience chez Flaubert," Les Temps Modernes, 21; 240 (May, 1966) 1921-1951; and 21:241 (June, 1966) 2113-2152; "Flaubert: Du poete à l'artiste," Les Temps Modemes, 22:243 (August, 1966) 197-253, and 22:244 (Sept. 1966) 423-481; and 22:245 (Oct., 1966) 598-674.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism A second major change emerged more in the Flaubert study than in the Critique. Both Being and Nothingness and the Critique were too rationalist, relying too heavily upon the lucidity of consciousness over against the confused presence of lived experience, le vécu. Here was an important breakthrough for Sartre. His own phenomenological existentialism bore too many traces of Husserl's rationalism. The idea of lived experience would account better for the non-conscious, non-intentional aspect of praxis. The psychic fact was still an intentionality, but one that often eluded awareness and was marked by its absence of consciousness.[95] This line of thought would better prepare Sartre for combat with the structuralists, who saw the subject as de-centered and unconscious. It would also allow existential Marxism to incorporate the insights of Freud, so much demanded by Sartre but so little practiced. Using Freudian categories, social theory would have to underline the importance of emotional as well as material scarcity, a type of scarcity generated not directly by man's relations with matter but by his relations with others, at first in the nuclear family and later in the marketplace. It is important to bring up these late reservations, reconsiderations, and revisions by Sartre to underscore the unfinished quality -of existential Marxism. There is no claim here that it is a finished product that could be reduced to a few formulas. It should be considered a developing strain of thought, nothing more. By the 1960s there were other currents associated with the New Left which had affinities with existential Marxism. The Frankfurt School in America, with Marcuse, and in Germany, with Habermas; the Italian school of phenomenological Marxism, most notably, Enzo Paci; the Yugoslav Praxis group; the Polish Marxist Humanists; the Czech, Karel Kosik; the early New Left 94 "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., 45. 95 Ibid., 50.

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Sartre's Critique Review group in England--all of these trends were generating a radical theory for advanced industrial society much like existential Marxism and in many cases deeply influenced by the French.[96] Sartre and the Arguments group must be seen in this larger, global perspective and located at the beginning of what may prove to be a major intellectual revolution, a second Enlightenment. Any international history of New Left social thought will have to draw special attention to French existential Marxism because it was the center of an axis that ran from the New Left Review group in England down to Italian New Leftists in and around the PCI. Sartre's influence extended not only to England and Italy but also to Polish Marxists like Kolakowski and to the Yugoslavs of Praxis.


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96 For connections between Sartre and American sociologists like Mills and B. Moore, cf. M. and D. Weinstein, "Sartre and the Humanist Tradition in Sociology," in Warnock, ed., Sartre (N.Y., 1971) 357-386. During the 1960s there was virtually no interchange between the French existential Marxists and the German critical theorists. (One exception is an article by Axelos on Adorno in Arguments in 1959.) Now, however, Payot, under Miguel Abensour, is publishing translations of the major works of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas.

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Eight _______________________________________________________ Existential Marxism and Structuralism

Just when existential Marxism emerged there was an abrupt shift in the French intellectual mood toward structuralism. In this chapter I will examine structuralism to see where it challenges and where it supplements the positions of Sartre and the Arguments group. Taking the viewpoint of existential Marxism, I will test the possibility of a synthesis with structuralism. The discussion will be limited to four major figures (Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Althusser) who were broadly associated with the new tendency while varying considerably in their interests and concepts. For structuralism was a diffuse tendency, not a neatly consistent doctrine. The unifying thread of the chapter will be the problem of reconciling the two theories about the role of the subject in social thought. 1. Sartre and Structuralism a. Language and Society Repeating the success of existentialism in the Post-War years, the wave of structuralism splashed loudly on Paris in the early 1960s.[1] The man who brought structuralism from the quiet halls of linguistic faculties to the cacophony of the philoso1 The following journals devoted special numbers to structuralism: "La Pensée sauvage et le structuralism," Esprit, 31:322 (Nov., 1963) on Lévi-Strauss; L'Arc, 26 (1965) on Sartre; Les Temps Modernes, 21:240 (May, 1966) on Althusser; "Le Structuralisme," Aléthéia, 4 (May, 1966); "Problèmes de structuralisme," Les Temps Modernes, 22:246 (Nov., 1966); "Structuralisme: Ideologie et méthode," Esprit, 35: 360 (May, 1967); "Structuralisme et marxisme," La Pensée,

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism phical marketplace was the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. To insure the victory of structuralism, he felt compelled to challenge Sartre. The final chapter of The Savage Mind (1962) forcefully attacked Sartre's existential Marxism and initiated a new era of controversy that did not abate until May, 1968. A contemporary of Sartre, Lévi-Strauss attended the Ecole Normale Superieure and taught in Paris http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (1 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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Lycées with Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. Their destinies began to divide in the mid-1930s: while Sartre traveled to study Husserl and Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss went to the Amazon to do ethnographic research. Like Sartre's, the career of Lévi-Strauss was shaped by the war. A Jew, he left France for America, where he met one of the masters of structuralism. His meeting with Roman Jakobson, the phonologist, at the New School in New York, fixed his future tasks: to apply the insights of structural linguistics to the study of society, specifically to the kinship systems and Mythologies of the primitives. While the force of history impressed itself on Sartre in war-tom Europe, Lévi-Strauss immersed himself in the contemplation of timeless structures. To Lévi-Strauss the new linguistics promised to raise anthropology and the human sciences in general to scientific status. The study of man and culture must become as objective and as certain as the study of nature. The immaturity of the humanistic disciplines, plagued by subjective self-indulgence and cultural myopia, would be replaced by a method that was as cool and precise as mathematics. In linguistics an epistemological break had occurred before World War I, when Ferdinand de Saussure replaced historical philology with the study of language structures. His Course in Gen-

135 (Oct., 1967); "Structuralisme et marxisme," Raison présente (1967-1968) fascinating articles and debates reprinted in book form; "Dialectique marxiste et pensée structurale," Cahiers du centre d'études socialistes, 7681 (1968).

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism eral Linguistics, compiled from student notes and published after his death, [2] presented a new level of intellegibility of language. Saussure studied la langue, not la parole, not the spoken word but the system of signs. He studied these signs not diachronically in their temporal shifts, but synchronically in their static interrelations and permutations. After the fin de siècle, the heyday of evolutionism was over and many intellectuals strove for ahistorical forms of knowledge. The shift away from the primacy of history was undoubtedly related to the collapse of the belief in progress that had given metaphysical force to the historical study. Isolating the timeless quality of language structure, Saussure ignored the other alternative open at that time--Marxist dialectical history--with great consequences for French structuralism in the 1960s.[3] Saussure developed the principal traits of synchrony: signifiers (roughly, words) were opposed to signifieds (corresponding mental images). Previous language theory concerned itself with the signified, conceiving of language as an expression of thought.[4] Saussure switched the level of concern to the signifier, which could be analyzed formally. Signifiers were intelligible only within their total system: http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (2 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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the signifier "cool" is meaningless without the signifier "hot." Hence language was above all a system, or structure, in which the component was secondary to the totality. Meaning was located not in the thoughts of the enunciator but in the system of signs itself. Jakobson, with his distinction between phonemes (the small units of sound) and morphemes (the smallest unit of meaning) further showed that the phonological building blocks of language were an unconscious, "meaningless" substructure. Later, Hjelmslev developed the formaliza2 Trans. Wade Baskin (N.Y., 1966). 3 Lucien Sève. "Méthode structural et methode dialectique," La Pensée 135 (Oct., 1967) 90-91. 4 Oswald Ducrot, "Le Structuralisme en linguistique," in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? (Paris, 1968) 37.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism tion of language through primary emphasis on the "combinatory," the rules for combining or relating elements of a system in opposition and correlation. Benveniste's analysis of pronouns revealed that the speaking subject could not be identified with the Cartesian, individualist concept of the "I." For every "I" invoked the whole system of language, starting with the implied, reciprocal "you." In short, structural linguistics made its object intelligible without reference to the subject, the intentional individual. Sartre viewed language in the older way, as a tool for expressing states of consciousness or ideas. What troubled him about language was that it never translated thoughts into words perfectly.[5] Sartre's fascination with words, as documented in his autobiography, [6] turned on his unending struggle to narrow the gap between intention and language. For structural linguistics, Sartre's perspective was futile and incorrect. The intelligibility of language from the perspective of the speaker was entirely secondary to that of its systematic coherence. In contrast to Sartre, language was for Lévi-Strauss not an obstacle to truth but a mechanism that was its own truth. The human mind was manifest, not in its intentional statements, but in the hidden structure, the system of binary oppositions that were present to the speaker in his unconsciousness of them. Sartre's all-too-human concern to express himself in language was a laughable inversion of the situation since language expressed itself through Sartre. The intelligible structure of language was located in a totally unconscious structure: "Linguistics ? presents us with a dialectical and totalizing entity but one outside (or beneath) consciousness and will. Language, an unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reasons and of which man knows nothing." [7] While Sartre wrestled with articulating his meaning in words, Lévi-Strauss adopted 5 "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., 57-59; "L'Ecrivain et sa langue," Situations, 9 (Paris, 1972) 40, 53. 6 The Words, trans. B. Frechtman (N.Y., 1964). 7 The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966) 252.


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III. Toward an Existential Marxism the scientific advance of linguistics as the unintelligibility of intentionality. In the "phonological revolution . . . meaning is always the result of a combination of elements which are not themselves significant . . . in my perspective meaning is never the primary phenomenon behind all meaning there is a non-meaning . . . "[8] It was this "non-meaning" that Lévi-Strauss called "structure." All that Lévi-Strauss needed to do to translate linguistics into the study of society was to take the phenomena of society as a system of messages. Language was not the only means of exchanging information: all social interactions were exchanges of messages, as Mauss foresaw, [9] which were amenable to structural analysis. In 1949, The Elementary Structures of Kinship appeared in which LéviStrauss uncovered, at a hitherto unprobed depth, the structures through which women were exchanged in traditional society. He showed that all social phenomena brought individuals together and separated them in fixed relations while at the same time separating and relating man to nature. Society began with the universal prohibition of incest, distinguishing the natural system of biological reproduction from a social system in which small groups had to go outside their own group for mates, a theoretically unnecessary rule but one that was the foundation of the human world.[10] With incest banned, men entered into complex relations of exclusion and inclusion; women were exchanged between groups in patterns that were more or less restrictive. Unlike structuralists and functionalists in Britain and the U. S., Lévi-Strauss was not concerned with the observable, empirical facts of the exchanges or with the structure of these facts. 11 To the chagrin of Anglo-American anthropologists, he reduced the kinship system to a structure of messages that was not 8 "A Confrontation," New Left Review, 62 (July-Aug., 1970) 64. 9 The Gift, trans. I. Cunnison (N.Y., 1967). 10 D. Sperber, "Le Structuralisme en anthropologie," in "Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme;, op. cit., 173. 11 Structural Anthropology, trans. by Jacobson and Schoepf (N.Y., 1967) 271.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism located in the everyday life of society but was the product of scientific labor: "A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (4 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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situation." [12] Anthropology became a science when it established the structure of human activities, material and spiritual, as systems of symbolic communication, disregarding the content of the activity and the intentionality of the participants. Everything that men did or said consisted of signs, organized into structures, into logical relations, that were totally distinct from lived experience. Meaning appeared in the play of signifiers not in social subjects. Society was hence decentered from the whirl of human subjectivity and shifted to the objectivity of structure. Ultimately, the complex interactions of men in society were unconscious projections of the brain's binary logic. When Lévi-Strauss began his ambitious enterprise of classifying myths with The Raw and the Cooked in 1964, he applied the same principles used in the study of kinship. The fantastic stories that so engrossed European visitors of traditional societies were reduced to mathematical formulas. The elements of myths, like the part of a story in which a culture-hero kills his father, were organized into patterns, patterns that were apparent only to the scientist. With seeming randomness, Lévi-Strauss wove an intricate tapestry out of shreds of myths. One day, when the fundamental structural elements of all myths were known, the scientist would have in his computer nothing less than the human mind, the fixed, atemporal structure of human consciousness. The humble study of structures led to the grand revelation of the universal mind of man, dispelling forever Western arrogance about the pre-logicality of the primitives. 12 Ibid., 49.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism The popularity of Lévi-Strauss in France began not with The Elementary Structures of Kinship but with the poetic, autobiographical, travel-and-voyage report, Tristes Tropiques (1955). The bard scientist who wanted to systematize knowledge on punch cards, [13] presented himself there as a romantic, a Rousseauian, escaping the horrors of civilization to the tranquil artlessness of the savages. Yet, the popular success of Tristes Tropiques was nothing compared with the intellectual success of The Savage Mind in 1962, an event marking the beginning of the era of structuralism. The rapid spread of structuralism as a general intellectual orientation has been explained in relation to the failure of existential Marxism adequately to account for what Sartre called the "practico-inert," and what was henceforth to be known as "structure."[14] At first glance, structuralism might have complemented existential Marxism, rather than emerging as a competing doctrine. Sartre's comments in his Critique about Lévi-Strauss suggested that structural anthropology fit well with the progressive-regressive method.[15] Such harmony was not to be. The problem was that the analogy Lévi-Strauss drew between language and other social structures was made, in Sartre's view, too easily and was extended too far. It might well be the case that many social http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (5 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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phenomena could be made intelligible through structural analysis. In addition to the work of LéviStrauss on kinship and myth, Barthes applied it to the world of fashion, Foucault to epistemologies, Lacan to the unconscious, Althusser to economic structures, and countless literary critics to novels and poems. But could structural analysis be applied to social classes in industrial societies, or to politics? More significantly, structural anthropology was unashamedly reductionist, eliminating from consideration all aspects of lived experience and conceding no value to other per13 The Savage Mind, 89. 14 Lucien Sève, Marxisme et la théorie de la personnalité (Paris, 1969) 482. 15 CRD, 487-493.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism spectives. Yet many fuzzy traits of structures were not clarified: for example, to the degree that language formed a structure of signifiers, just how far could it be likened to the very different fact of kinship or, worse, to phenomena like cities whose origin was well known? Furthermore, how did the fact that structuralists made us aware of structures change their unconscious epistemological status? Before exploring the theoretical controversy, we must mention the use of structural linguistics by Roland Barthes, the literary critic. An early editor of Arguments, Barthes had connections with existential Marxism, and his use of structuralism to analyze everyday life was akin to that of Henri Lefebvre. Mythologies, which probably influenced Lefebvre, appeared in 1957 before The Savage Mind. Barthes analyzed ordinary experience like films, wrestling matches, striptease shows, advertisements, and propaganda, making subtle use of structuralist concepts. All social experiences could be taken as signs, thus introducing a general science of signs, or semiology, which had been Saussure's dream. In advanced capitalist society, communications increasingly took on a mythic semiological structure. To schematize Barthes' position, myth dehistoricized and depoliticized signs, making them appear as natural objects.[16] The picture of a black man in French military uniform on the cover of Paris-Match transmitted immediately the mythic information that French imperialism thrived. Enveloped by the image, the reader received this information in a haze, semi-consciously but powerfully. Semiology would disclose this mythic structure for what it was: a deliberate distortion. Thus, structuralism need not oppose and contradict Marxism. Not only was structuralism compatible with Marxism, but the major structuralist figures, Lévi-Strauss included, considered themselves Marxists, [17] and one 16 Mythologies, Trans. A. Wavers (N.Y., 1972) 129. 17 J. M. Domenach, "Le Système et la personnel" Esprit, 35: 360(May, 1967) 775; for Lévi-


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III. Toward an Existential Marxism of the major Communist theorists of the 1960s, Louis Althusser, was, broadly speaking, a structuralist. b. Structure and the Unconscious Under the banner of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss vigorously opposed existentialism and phenomenology for their unscientific subjectivism: lived experience provided no insight into Being. As for the trend of thought which was to find fulfillment in existentialism, it seemed to, me to be the exact opposite of true thought, by reason of its indulgent attitude toward the illusions of subjectivity. To promote private preoccupations to the rank of philosophical problems is dangerous, and may end in a kind of shop-girl's philosophy--excusable as an element in teaching procedure, but perilous in the extreme if it leads the philosopher to turn back on his mission. That mission (he holds it only until science is strong enough to take over from philosophy) is to understand Being in relation to itself, and not in relation to oneself. Phenomenology and existentialism did not abolish metaphysics: they merely introduced new ways of finding alibis for metaphysics.[18] Here is a remarkably clear statement of scientism. It disregards the fact that philosophy is a human activity. Lévi-Strauss' first impulse was toward Being, without the media-tion of epistemological selfcriticism. The expectation that philosophy would wither away under the force of scientific advance was another axiom of positivism. And that touch of asceticism, which had been lucidly exposed by Nietzsche, presumed that the scientist vanished in his own knowledge. This was Kantianism without a transcendental subject, admitted Lévi-Strauss under fire from Ricoeur and Dufrenne,

Strauss see Tristes Tropiques, trans J. Russel (N.Y., 1965) 61; Savage Mind, 130-131, 246; Structural Anthropology, 332-333. 18 Tristes Tropiques, 62. Emphasis added.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism Esprit group phenomenologists.[19] But the-self-proclaimed Kantian ethnologist discovered the absolute categories of mind only from the base of a finite, empirical, scientific subjectivity. On the other hand, his position against existentialism on the ground that the immediate certainties of experience were an inadequate avenue to truth forgot that phenomenologists refused the naive statements of natural consciousness, distinguishing them from reflective consciousness. Structural anthropology differed from existentialism at heart over the intelligibility of subjective reality and over the relation of knowledge to action. Finally, after all the data about society or mind has been processed by the computer, one must still decide what to do with it; to Sartre and to Marxists it was still knowledge for man. To the important phenomenologist, Mikel Dufrenne, "In whatever element it moves, the thought of man always encounters the exhausting task of returning thought to the thinker; whatever is said of man, it is a man who says it . . . " [20] If structuralism was to mount a challenge against phenomenology and existentialism, it would have to be on the ground that consciousness was not an intelligible object. The commitment of Lévi-Strauss to science was profound. The passion of this singularly un-savage mind was to mathematize the knowledge of society. "Starting from ethnographic experience, I have always aimed at drawing up an inventor of mental patterns . . . when the mind is left to commune with itself and no longer has to come to terms with objects, it is in a sense reduced to imitating itself as object? it shows itself to be of the nature of a thing among things."[21] Paradoxically, Lévi-Strauss' dream of total knowledge, in which the mind confronted itself in perfect reciprocity with its object, led 19 "A Confrontation," op. cit., 59. 20 "La Philosophie du néo-positivisme," Esprit, 35:360 (May, 1967) 783. 21 The Raw and the Cooked, trans. J. and D. Weightman (N.Y., 1969) 10.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism him to explore the social object in search of the mind that was not there, the mind that was the essence of society without being empirically given. This perfect object was structure. In order to arrive at it, it was necessary for him to deny to empirical consciousness the dignity of meaning. Hence the notorious structuralist inversion: "I claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact." 22 The real was the rational, but without the savages knowing it-a final insult to the primitives from the colonialists.


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In good faith, Lévi-Strauss could invoke the support of Marx, Freud, and even Sartre: "Marx and Freud . . . taught us that man has meaning only on the condition that he view himself as meaningful. So far I agree with Sartre. But it must be added that this meaning is never the right one: superstructures are faulty acts which have 'made it' socially. Hence it is vain to go to historical consciousness for the truest meaning." [23] Surely Sartre would agree: distorted consciousness prevailed everywhere over transparent truth. But, from the Hegelian base, existential Marxism posited an evolution, a dialectical movement, of consciousness through nature and society and through various forms of systematic distortion, toward the possibility of a greater elimination of "faulty" constructions of meaning. Existentialism claimed that man created his own meanings; existential Marxism, with the concept of scarcity, added that there was a meaning to the history of the meanings man created. Most adamantly, Lévi-Strauss and structuralism denied this: the meanings (sens) man made for himself were nonmeanings (non-sens). [24] The phenomenologist Paul Ricocur was displeased by the exclusiveness of Lévi22 Ibid., 12. 23 The Savage Mind, 253-254. 24 Cf. Merleau-Ponty's sympathetic treatment of structuralism: "From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss," in Signs, op. cit., 114-125.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism Strauss' position : [25] did not socio-cultural phenomena have many levels of signification beyond that of structure? Did not hermeneutics, the recovery of the meaning of the subject, have a role in the human sciences? For example, to Lévi-Strauss totemism was nothing more than a system of signs that separated clans and related them: "natural species are classed in pairs of opposites" with some analogy from the species to the social group.[26] A totem was nothing more than a name. The fact that the totem animal was experienced as sacred, that rituals and myths pivoted around it-these aspects of the conscious experience of the totem by the native carried no scientific meaning. Yet the phenomenologist exulted in the sacred quality of the totem, marveling at the richness of meaning embodied in it. Conversely, the sole interest of Lévi-Strauss was in uncovering the binary pattern of signs in the social custom, attributing them to an underlying mental logic and ultimately to the brain. Structuralists had indeed brought to light a new level of meaning, but they concluded from this that structure was necessarily opposed to the subject. They shifted attention away from any reconciliation of object and subject toward a programmatic examination of the systematic incongruities between structure and subject, without accepting the need for concrete studies to determine if human beings could selfconsciously design structures. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (9 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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The structuralists appear to have relied upon certain aspects of the contemporary Lebenswelt. With the unchecked growth of bureaucratic structures in advanced industrial society (structures that were ruled by no one), with the dissolution of historical consciousness (the sense that the future was not in the hands of the people), it should not be too surprising that a theory developed in which society was composed of 25 "Structure et herméneutique," Esprit, 31:322 (Nov., 1963) 596-627. 26 Le T'otémisme aujourd'hui (Paris, 1962) trans. R. Needham as Totemism (Boston, 1963) 87-88.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism agentless structures. [27] Generalizing from the distinction between the subject and his language to posit a fixed disjuncture between social beings and institutions that effectively excluded liberating action, was not only unproved but worked into the hands of the ruling class. If Lévi-Strauss was right that no social agent could be attributed to the origin of language, could the same be said of the absolute state? When Louis XIV invented the syntax of daily life at Versailles, he, and for that matter the Duc de Saint-Simon, knew perfectly well what was happening. The semiology of Louis' morning habits was an etiquette fatefully damaging to the nobility. His nods and signs of recognition were part of an orchestrated system of political dominance. If some structures rose and fell by themselves, others were the products of social action. The pertinent question--could alienating structures be dismantled by social action?-was not answered by Lévi-Strauss. On the other hand, Marxism assumed too quickly, not that the ego was the absolute center of its own experience, but that it was centered enough to choose effective, revolutionary action. c. From Subject to Structure The aim of "decentering" human experience, of eliminating the egoistic illusion of man's location at the metaphysical center of things, was not new with structuralism. Copernicus "decentered" man and his planet from a privileged place in the universe; Darwin "decentered" the human species, placing it in an evolutionary chain of biological forms; Freud "decentered" the moral concept of the ego as the autonomous agent of the personality. Continuing in the line of man's detractors, structuralism decentered man from his own meanings; the conscious subject was displaced from the center of social activity. 27 Henri Lefebvre, "Claude Lévi-Strauss ou le nouvel éleatisme," L'Homme et la société, 1-2 (1966) and Lucien Goldmann, "Structuralisme, marxisme, existentialisme," L'Homme et la société, 2 (1966).


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Existential Marxism and Structuralism With Hegel, thought moved from substance to subject; with Lévi-Strauss, it went from subject to structure. What Lévi-Strauss drummed into the civilized, "domesticated" mentality was that structure is unconscious: " . . . we are led to conceive of social structures as entities independent of men's consciousness of them (although in fact they govern men' s existence.) . . . "[28] The emphasis fell on the distance between structure and consciousness, rather than on the complete unawareness of structure. [29] At times, he was willing to grant that the complex patterns of kinship that he developed could be sketched by the native, rare as this was. But generally in lived experience the structure was beneath consciousness. The "subject is the one who speaks . . . his discourse never was and never will be the result of a conscious totalization of linguistic laws." [30] From this the scientist concluded that the ego was not the center of social reality and that science must take drastic measures: " . . . I believe the ultimate goal of the human sciences is not to constitute but to dissolve man." [31] The dissolution of man, the battle cry of structuralism, would leave the scientist the task of taking "an inventory of mental enclosures" such that the underlying logical structure of the mind, which was the same everywhere, would be known. For Lévi-Strauss, the foundation of structure was no longer man but Being. In sum, structural anthropology would displace the subject in two ways: the focus of intelligibility shifted from the subject to the structure, and then, within the structure, it looked not for the expression of meaning (signifieds) but for the pattern of elements (signifiers). The task of decentering the subject was carried further by the Freudian, Jacques Lacan, 28 Structural Anthropology, 117, also 23; The Savage Mind, 251; The Raw and the Cooked, 11. 29 Agreeing on the unconsciousness of structure for the ego, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan were worlds apart on its nature. For the anthropologist, the unconscious was a sterile realm of repetition, whereas for Lacan, following Freud, it has the intentional quality of desire or eros, a teleological, meaningful structure. 30 The Savage Mind, 252. 31 Ibid., 247.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism the second major structuralist figure, whose abstruse discourse applied structuralism to the psyche. A contemporary of Sartre and Lévi-Strauss, Lacan had practiced and theorized about psychoanalysis since the 1930s but was unknown to social theorists until Althusser introduced him at the Ecole Normal Superieure in the early 1960s. He directed his "subversion" of the ego as much against Freudians as against existentialists and Marxists. [32] The Freudians had developed an ego-psychology that gave the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (11 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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ego more autonomy, more unity, than had Freud. As for the existentialists and Marxists, Lacan actually negated the same bourgeois concept of the ego that they had: Marx berating individualism in The Jewish Question, and Sartre's early positions against the calculating self. Lacan, however, conceptualized the decentering far more than -they. The picture of the ego as an autonomous, unified, captain of the soul, or the hope that it should be so, was Lacan's chief target. [33] Following Lévi-Strauss, Lacan introduced linguistic theory in his fight against egoism, redefining the therapeutic process as a talking cure with new prominence given to the role of language. [34] To Lacan, linguistics decentered the subject since the signifier represented a subject "not for another subject but for another signifier." [35] The spoken I could never enunciate the actual I. Hence: "I am not in what I say; I am not where I think; I do not think where I am." [36] The level of language was so distinct from the level of the subject that the media32 Lacan criticized Sartre's Being and Nothingness in "The Mirror Phase," New Left Review, 51 (Sept.-Oct., 1968) 76 originally published in 1949. 33 "Some Reflections on the Ego," international journal of Psychoanalysis, 34 (1953) 12. 34 "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud," trans. J. Miel in Yale French Studies, 36-37 (1966) 112-147. First given in 1957. 35 "Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever," in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Macksey and Donato, trans. A. Wilden (Baltimore, 1971) 194. 36 Domenach, op. cit., 778.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism tion of speaking did not unify the two. Worse still, there was a second level of structure, a second language: the unconscious was itself structured, enunciating the language of desire. 37 In the new structuralist Freud, the ego was decentered between two levels: the language of culture and of desire. Freud had introduced the concept of unconsciousness to explain the absence of the self in the words of the subject: free association, dream analysis, slips, jokes, hypnosis--these methods circumvented the ego, moving from the language of culture to that of desire. To attain a substantial unity of the self, the ego had to be disunified. Such concepts as the "total personality" of the Gestaltists and the unified intentionality of the phenomenologists were pure fictions to Lacan. Systematic misunderstanding (méconnaissance) characterized the ego's relation to itself. Life goes down the river, from time to time touching a bank, staving for while here and there, without understanding anything--and it is the principle of analysis that nobody understands anything of what happens. The idea of the unifying unity of the human condition has always had on me the effect of a http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (12 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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scandalous lie.[38] With Lévi-Strauss, the subject was split off from social structures, with Lacan it was divorced from itself. Freudian structuralism subverted the ego both synchronically and diachronically: synchronically, the ego was immersed in otherness; diachronically, it was lost in the unconscious structure of desire, "fading" and slipping from its phantasm of an object that was its illusory foundation. In the "mirror stage" of his development, the child identified with the image of the other.[39] Before it had the capability of distinguishing itself from another person, the child perceived the other as himself, as in a mirror. In this 37 M. Safouan, "De La Structure en psychanalyse," in 'Qu'est-ce que le structuralism (Paris, 1968) 241. 38 Ecrits, II (Paris, 1971) 190. 39 "The Mirror-Phase," op. cit., 71-77 and A. Wilden, The Language of the Self (Baltimore, 1968).

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism first constitution of the individual's identity there was a radical misrecognition. From then on, the ego would name itself while actually referring to the imaginary other. The self was a composite of false introjections, hardly a unified personality. Ego and other were inextricably confused in the language of the self. The second permanent, structural distortion of the ego was that of unconscious desire. Like Hegel with his concept of desire as the "law of the heart," Lacan viewed the ego's desire as an ungratifiable quest for the desire of the other. In each demand, each need could be satisfied, but never the desire that moved the ego toward its unattainable lost object. With these difficult concepts of otherness and desire, Lacan dismantled the centered subject. The pleasant sense of coherence that the individual might enjoy was shown by Lacan to be nothing more than an illusion. This suggestive if heterodox reading of Freud went further than the master in displacing the secondary processes of the ego toward the primary processes of desire. Freud's program for psychoanalysis, "where the id was, the ego shall be," provided for an ultimate reintegration of the ego. Lacan reinterpreted the program to coincide with his subversion: "The ego (of the analyst no doubt) must dislodge the Id (of the patient )." [40] Lacan would not allow psychoanalysis to serve the autonomous ego. Yet he did allow for an authentic ego in genuine "interpersonal communication," as in therapeutic situations. Here Lacan envisioned a socialized ego, a bit like Sartre's individual in the groupin-fusion, that accepted the otherness of its identity. Still, the decentering was open to the criticism made of Freud by Paul Ricoeur, that it did not account for unifying processes like sublimation. [41] If Lacan destroyed enlightenment liberalism, it is difficult to say how much his theories were a threat to ex-


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40 Ecrits, II, 208. Cf. 160-161 and 229 for other revisions. 41 Freud and Philosophy: Essay on Interpretation, trans. D. Savage (Connecticut, 1970) 255.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism istential Marxism, even though many regarded them as such. In Sartre's Critique, the individual was centered only through reciprocity, through totalization, and through all the concrete mediations that constituted his historical being-in-the-world. Even then, centering was always distorted by scarcity, by objectification, and by alienation. It was not all clear that structural psychoanalysis was antithetical to existential Marxism. d. Savage and Dialectical Minds Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists raised once again the old bogey against Sartre [42] and existential Marxism: the charge of the cogito. By the 1960s, the Marxists had lowered their guns, granting that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, though they relied on some form of phenomenology to account for the subjective nature of human experience, were far from the idealism of Husserl, with his transcendental ego, his concept of the ego as the absolute foundation of experience and truth, which indeed had Cartesian resonances.[43] Yet, in The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss did ascribe the cogito to Sartre's thought: 42 For the controversy between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss, cf.: Jean Pouillon, "Sartre et Lévi-Strauss," L'Arc, 26 (1966) 55-60, who takes a conciliatory stance; Lawrence Rosen, "Language, History, and the Logic of Inquiry in Lévi-Strauss and Sartre," History and Theory, 10:3 (1971) 269-294, an excellent discussion; Lionel Abel, "Sartre vs. Lévi-Strauss," in Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, eds. E. N. Hayes and T. Hayes (Cambridge, 1970) 235-246, who is more concerned to comment on Third World violence and American youth than to examine the question at hand; David Levin, "On Lévi-Strauss and Existentialism," The American Scholar, 38 (Winter, 1968) 69-82, a weak article that takes the concept of structure as "expressions of freedom." On the relation of structure and history see, A. J. Greimas, "Structure et histoire," Les Temps Modernes, 22:246 (Nov., 1966) 815-827 and Marc Gaboriau, "Structural Anthropology and History," in M. Lane ed., Structuralism (London, 1970) 156-169, trans. N. Court from L'Esprit, 31: 322 (Nov. 1966); Henri Lefebvre, "Reflexions sur le structuralisme et l'histoire," Cahiers internationux de sociologie, 35 (July-Dec., 1963), reprinted in Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris, 1971) 195-219. 43 Jean Desanti, Phénoménologie et praxis (Paris, 1963) 133.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism He who begins by steeping himself in the allegedly self-evident truths of introspection never emerges from them. . . . Sartre in fact becomes the prisoner of his Cogito: Descartes made it possible to attain universality, but conditionally on remaining psychological and individual; by sociologizing the Cogito, Sartre merely exchanges one prison for another.[44] To be precise, Sartre was accused of speculative philosophy over against scientific analysis, not of idealism as opposed to materialism. Stumbling over his own weapons, Lévi-Strauss, in the same text, brought up the opposite charge of historicism: that Sartre immersed the knower in the flood of history. [45] It could not be both ways: either Sartre erred in the traditional solitude of the absolute cogito, or be erred by relativizing reason within history. The best mental acrobat could not accomplish both. The prosecuting structuralists were better off in conceding the count of the cogito and staying with their basic charge that no form of philosophy of consciousness could account for unseen structures. It was here that the structuralists would win their verdict and even contribute to the development of existential Marxism. Sartre's dialectical reason was a method of comprehending the visible intentionality of the social field, whether that intentionality originated from individuals, groups, or processed matter. All "presences" could be woven into dialectical cloth; but structures made their effects through their "absences," through their invisibility. The linguistic structure was absent from discourse as the speaker focused on the content of his discourse. So too with social structures: one is aware of buying this object in the store, not of the structure of commodities. The structuralists also accused Sartre of humanism, again deriving this flaw from the original sin of the cogito. The decentering of the ego implied to them that the popular forms of humanism--existentialism., Marxism, Christian personalism, Freudianism, and 44 The Savage Mind, 249. 45 Ibid., 256.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism Phenomenology --would have to be abandoned. The battle over humanism was fierce, but the issue, it seems, was one of emphasis, not of principle. To Lévi-Strauss, knowledge could not begin with a statement about man: ". . . that a properly appointed humanism cannot begin of its own accord but must http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (15 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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place the world before life, life before man . . . " [46] Too often humanist doctrines assumed that man acted on the model of the artist, deliberately shaping objects with full consciousness. It was this focus on the individual at the point of creation that perturbed the structuralists. Marx was guilty of "humanism" when he adopted Feuerbach's notion of man as self-conscious action. Sartre too leaned this way when he posited freedom as the self-creation of man. Yet neither Marx nor Sartre spoke of society as the simple sum of autonomous, individual actions; Marx always mediated individual action through social structures and Sartre postulated that the choices the individual made were pre-reflective. In the final analysis, Lévi-Strauss' argument against humanism concerned the prominence of history and historical knowledge in human affairs. Humanism argued that man created history, that the praxis of the subject was the ground of social structures, while structuralists maintained that structures had no agents and did not become intelligible through the study of agents. The locus classicus of the encounter was in Lévi-Strauss' chapter devoted to Sartre in The Savage Mind and in Sartre's replies. Lévi-Strauss agreed that both structuralism and existential Marxism were totalizing conceptions, finding basic unities at the level of the totality, with the individual (element) in a subordinate position to the larger structure. In these respects, both were anti-liberal. Lévi-Strauss could not agree with Sartre's definition of dialectical reason, preferring to call his own method dialectical. What was outrageous to Lévi-Strauss in Sartre's Critique, however, was that he labeled his own project a "structural anthropo46 Cited in E. Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss (N.Y., 1970) 35.

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III. Toward Existential Marxism -logy," without having the slightest understanding of structures. Sartre reduced structures to "pure seriality," giving them a vague, "natural" mode of existence. For Sartre, with his notion of the total antimony between man and nature, all objectivity was anti-human "naturalness." The opposition between man and nature led to Sartre's "disordered and lawless form of humanism . . . [in which] man, lord and master of nature, exists on one side, on the other side, there is nature entirely exterior to him. That makes nature no more than a thing, an object, an instrument." [47] The inadequate concept of social structure as seriality was said to be symptomatic of all Sartre's errors. Behind the opposition of man and nature lay Sartre's vision of history as the arena in which man conquered nature. Lévi-Strauss was not completely opposed to the value of history in general, although he distinguished it sharply from anthropology and placed it in a second rank. "History organizes its data


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in relation to conscious expressions of social life, while anthropology proceeds by examining unconscious foundations," [48] a distinction with which many historians would not agree. The unconscious "imposed forms," and these forms were theoretically prior to patterns of change. History could not be to Lévi-Strauss a story of human control over nature; instead, it was a succession of structures, each of which was essentially atemporal in the sense that it had no "origin" and therefore no rise and development. If historians took these structures as their object of investigation, "events" in the traditional sense would have only secondary importance. Missing the structural core of society, historians invented a code, a series of dates that constituted an irreversible sequence of befores and afters. The function of the code was to establish continuity when, in fact, social structures demarcated pure discontinuity be47 Psychology Today, (May, 1972) 80. 48 Structural Anthropology, 19.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism tween different levels and different structures: " . . . history seems to restore to us not separate states, but the passage from one state to another in a continuous form . . . it appears to reestablish our connection, outside ourselves, with the very essence of change." [49] Here was the core of the structuralist's position: history was the historian's method of transforming objective reality into a placid, recognizable home for himself, a way of erasing the strange and the unfamiliar, a way of making everything understandable in terms of himself, of relating the entirety of experience to his own little world without recognizing that he was doing so. History projected the "totalizing continuity of the self' into the world. This description is familiar: history is seen as myth-making. Lévi-Strauss complained that Sartre, in his Critique, excluded all traditional societies from knowledge by limiting the efficacy of dialectical reason to those societies that had interiorized history, or, in Sartre's words, that had consciously taken on the project of struggling against scarcity. Lévi-Strauss' limitation to traditional society was supposedly not theoretically significant. The opposition here was between Sartre, who studied historical societies and claimed the primacy of history, and Lévi-Strauss, who studied ahistorical societies, claiming the primacy of atemporal structures. Lévi-Strauss acknowledged that his own studies of primitive societies were not a fruitful ground for the historical approach since there was no documentation. He did insist that all societies were historical, that all changed, and he granted that there was a fundamental rupture between primitive and industrial worlds: "In fact, every human society has a history. . . . But whereas so-called primitive societies are surrounded by the substance of history and try to remain impervious to it, modern societies interiorize history, as it were, and turn it into the motive power of their development." [50] There was, I suggest, a curious double http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (17 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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49 The Savage Mind, 256.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism bind in Lévi-Strauss' position. Primitive societies, "impervious" to history, did away with change only by creating myths that camouflaged the temporal as atemporal. Historical societies, having "interiorized" history, also created myths except these were in the form of history. Either way one lost because myths were "inauthentic" forms of knowledge. Myth is the most fundamental form of inauthenticity. I define authenticity as the concrete nature of the knowledge people have of each other and, contrary to what might seem to be the case, there is nothing more abstract than myth. Myths depend on propositions which, when we try to analyze them, force us to resort to symbolic logic.[51] Structuralist logic ran: all societies are historical; all societies deal with history by myth-making; mythmaking is inauthentic. The fact that some historical societies interiorized history did not legitimate historical knowledge, since the only valid knowledge of a society pertained to its structure. To Lévi-Strauss, Sartre too was guilty of myth-making. His group-in-fusion invoked the "Myth of the French Revolution," in which there was indeed a maximum "congruency between practical imperatives and schemes of interpretation."52 The revolutionaries knew what they were doing in establishing new institutions. So their myth was the "truest" but it was still a myth, one that "men of the Left" cling to" as "the golden age of historical consciousness." Lévi-Strauss granted a certain necessity to myth-making: The question is to know whether what we are trying to attain is what is true in and of the consciousness we have of it or outside this consciousness. I believe it is perfectly legitimate to look inside, by a recovery of meaning, 50 Conversations with Cl. Lévi-Strauss, ed. G. Charbonnier trans. J. and D. Weightman (London, 1969) 39. 51 Ibid., 55. 52 The Savage Mind, 254.


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Existential Marxism and Structuralism except that this recovery of meaning, except that this recovery, this interpretation philosophers or historians give of their own mythology, I treat simply as a variant of that mythology itself.[53] The only refuge from myth was science, which stood outside the social object in order to attain knowledge of it, refusing to immerse the knower in society or to build continuities between the knower and his object. Paradoxically, the otherness of primitive societies facilitated the adoption of the scientific attitude by the very distance between the knower and the known. Here Lévi-Strauss neglected the role of the otherness of exotic, non-industrialized worlds for the romantic and for the anthropologist. Often primitive society had continuity with mother Europe by its very difference and distance from it, as it did for Malinowski, who found his intellectual utopia in the Amazon, in a world where the anthropologist could make whatever be wanted of what be saw. Yet Sartre's philosophy remained pure myth for Lévi-Strauss: . . . something which can be true when we look at it from inside a culture is no longer true when we try to consider it from the outside. Therefore I am in full agreement with Marx, and even with Sartre, when they say that for a member of modern contemporary civilization things appear this way. History has a meaning and should have, because this is the only way to give a wider meaning to civilization itself. I can perfectly well claim, at the same time, that while this is true inside the society of the observer, it ceases to be true when we try to reflect a broader point of view and look at it from the outside.[54] Of course, this epistemology of the outside, of the look, was completely divorced from considerations of praxis. To reject any connection between objective knowledge and our 53 "A Confrontation," op. cit., 268. 54 George Steiner, "A Conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss," Encounter, 26 (April, 1966) 34. Also, The Savage Mind, 257.

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subjective existence was to deny the vital bond between theory and action. At times the connection would be made too easily, as in the case of Stalinism, with the consequence of myth-making. But LéviStrauss moved to the other extreme of positivism, with the result that the actual connection he finally drew between scientific knowledge and practice was purely utopian. Lévi-Strauss violently denied the Hegelian effort to locate the unity of mankind through a stadial concept of history. There was no "succession" or evolution of societies: the primitives were not lower in some evolutionary scale than the moderns. With history discarded, where could the unity of mankind, if there was any, be located? For Lévi-Strauss such unity existed only as a possibility in the sum of all structural combinations. Through this implicit unity, different societies could be located atemporally and without any hierarchy, as having chosen, unconsciously of course, one particular combination. Structural anthropology radically excluded the search for origins and for ends, preserving the discontinuity of social formations against any theme -- progressist, eschatological, cyclic -- that arrayed them in an evolutionary order. Yet there was temporal movement for Lévi-Strauss which he called "structural history," without being able to give this notion much coherence. Structural history concerned the diachronic transformation of structures. Structures were always changing because a disparity existed between rules and the signs representing them, each of which was an integrated system. In addition to this internal contradiction, there were "external" factors such as environmental modifications. Structural history would comprise the changes in the combination of any system in temporal sequence. Lévi-Strauss' concept of history denied man's creative capacity by reducing novelty to shifting mixtures of the same elements. If one wanted to refute the charge by Lefebvre that Lévi-Strauss was a technocrat, no better testimony could be marshaled than his con330

Existential Marxism and Structuralism cept of history. It undercut not only the utopian aspects of existential Marxism, but the technocratic faith in productivity, growth, and technical mastery of nature. In so far as structuralism broke through those faiths and allowed room for ecological criticism of unbridled scientific development, it served a beneficent function. The trouble was that Lévi-Strauss' own utopianism, a weird combination of scientific knowledge and pastoral calm, a kind of inversion of Teilhard de Chardin, was hardly better. For Lévi-Strauss, man's only hope lay in ending the conquest of nature, de-historicizing Europe, completing technological development, and then imitating the primitives: . . . history would make itself by itself. Society, placed outside and above history, would be able to exhibit once again that regular and, as it were, http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (20 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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crystalline structure which the best-preserved of primitive societies teach us is not antagonistic to the human condition. In this perspective, utopian as it might seem, social anthropology would find its highest justification, since the forms of life and thought which it studies would no longer have a purely historical or comparative interest. They would correspond to a permanent hope for mankind over which social anthropology, particularly in the most troubled times, would have a mission to keep watch.[55] The musty smell of the anthropological museum was decked out as a flickering hope for man. LéviStrauss' utopian statement, which followed logically from his positions and was not a passing remark, revealed his underlying Rousseauian faith in pre-literate, small-scale society, where reality was transparent not to its members but to the outsider. This self-styled Marxism would render socialist praxis impossible. Sartre's replies [56] to Lévi-Strauss were often more defensive and harsh than pertinent 55 The Scope of Anthropology, trans. from Lecture inaugurale of 1960 (London, 1967) 49. 56 "J. P. Sartre répond," L'Arc, 30 ( 1966) 87-96 trans. in Telos, 9 (Fall, 1971) 110-115; "L'Ecrivain et sa langue," Revue d'esthétique, 18 (1965) 306-334; "Entretien sur l'anthropologie," Cahiers de philosophie, 2-3 (1966) 3-12; "Determinisme et liberté," op. cit.; "Itinerary of a Thought

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism He could not answer the charge that he misconstrued nature as a thing, opposing man to it in a stance of conquest. In this respect, structuralism "de-constructed" the obsolete antimony of man and nature better than existential Marxism. Nor could Sartre detract from the advantages that Lévi-Strauss' approach to structures had over his own concept of the practico-inert. He insisted, however, that the structure, whatever its internal system of coherence, was a product of human praxis: "I am in complete agreement that social facts have their own structure and laws that dominate individuals, but I see in this the reply of worked matter to the agents who work it. . . . Structures are created by activity which has no structure, but suffers its results as a structure." [57] The failure to relate structures to their anterior, constituting activity would lead inevitably to a mechanical view of society and to a determinist assumption about man. In Sartre's eyes, omission of the place of creative praxis in the formation of structures also distorted the role of history. Although historical knowledge was man-centered and oriented toward a future that was not fixed, thereby preparing for that future in the manner of myths, the structuralist concept of society excluded the future completely:


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For structuralism, history is an internal product of the system. There are as many histories as structured societies: each society produces its temporality. Progress is the development of order. This historical pluralism subordinates history . . . to structural order. The future remains anticipated, but at the interior of well-defined limits, in a positivist sense. In this way, it is viewed as already in the past. It will be understood as anterior future, it will realize for the social agent that it produces and that it conditions, the

," New Left Review, 58 (Nov.-Dec., 1969) 43-66. All but the third are collected in Situations, Vol. 9 (Paris, 1972). 5 7 "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., 59-60.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism future being that is implicitly present in its past. In other words, it is not to be made, but to be predicted. Praxis is here eliminated in favor of process.[58] In this crucial passage Sartre defended history as the human freedom haunting all structures by putting the future of those structures in question. Only when this was done could the existence of structures in the present be captured without reification. The opposite of myth, historical understanding de-, naturalized the practical field of society. When historical knowledge was self-consciously grounded in a situation, itself historical, and oriented to future action, it reduced to a minimum its mythic quality since it relativized its own position in accordance with its own finitude. What structuralism justly discredited in Sartre's eyes were those historical constructs that failed to recognize their own contingency, like nineteenth-century Whig history and twentieth century Stalinism, [59] among others. Sartre granted that structures were a moment of the practico-inert, but they had to be located within the larger totalization of history, in which an important determination of meaning came from man. The incompatibility of Sartre and structuralism was slightly reduced during the 1960s. In 1966 Sartre objected too strongly to the structuralist decentering of man. He overly restricted the lack of presence of the ego to "neurosis," although he rightly called for empirical proof of the degree of decentering in specific cases: "The real question . . . is knowing how the subject, or subjectivity, constitutes itself by a perpetual process of integration and reintegration on a base prior to it." [60] Or, in dialectical formulation, "What is essential is not that man is made, but that he makes that which made him." [61] By 1969, Sartre, while still positing the man-made nature of structures, accounted for the decentered subject by replacing his former concept of consciousness with a more ambighttp://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (22 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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58 "Determinisme et liberté," Ecrits de Sartre, op. cit., 743. 59 "Replies to Structuralism," op. cit., 111. 60 Ibid., 113. 61 Ibid., 115.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism uous notion of lived experience. This concept permitted a large degree of unconsciousness while preserving the final freedom of the subject. Lived experience was neither consciousness nor unconsciousness but "the terrain in which the individual is perpetually overflowed by himself and his riches and consciousness plays the trick of determining itself by forgetfulness."[62] In lived experience the subject is absent, distorted by numerous forms of alienation and neurosis; yet he is also present, present enough to reappropriate his absence so that, acting collectively, he can remove the distortions of the structure without eliminating its necessary features as a vehicle of communication and reciprocity. A skeptical interviewer pressed Sartre on this point: how could individual acts possibly result in ordered structures? It was here that many concepts of history went astray, relying either on pre-established harmonies or the cunning of reason. Sartre was manifestly hard-pressed for an answer. He replied by outlining his projected second volume of the Critique, where he planned to show that "there is an institutional order which is necessarily?the product of masses of men constituting a social unity and which at the same time is radically distinct from all of them."[63] The next task for existential Marxism would be to integrate structuralism by showing how the order and decenteredness of structures cohabited the social field with subjects acting in dispersed, unconscious groups. e. Foucault's Science without Scientists The enfant terrible of structuralism was Michel Foucault. More than anyone else, Foucault evoked passionate protests: he was the enemy of man, reason, democracy, a danger to order; he was a wild irrationalist, a nihilistic misanthrope who gloated in the destruction of humanity. [64] In truth, he, more than anyone else, defined the limits of 62 "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., 48. 63 Ibid., 60. 64 Olivier Révault d'Allonnes, "Foucault: les mots contre les choses," in Structuralisme et

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism structuralism and prepared for its possible integration with existential Marxism. The theme of decentering man was extended by Foucault with dramatic force. The future of man would not be a final triumph but a humbling dissolution: " . . . man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." [65] The Nietzschean wish for the death of God was applied to man with an anger equal to the anchorite's: "Rather than the death of God . . . what Nietzsche's thought heralded is the, end of his murderer . . . man is in the process of dissolution." [66] With a sharpness calculated to irritate his opponents, Foucault aimed his daggers carefully and threw them swiftly at that bundle of illusions so despised by structuralism: humanism, historicism, philosophical anthropology, philosophies of consciousness. For Foucault, it was Hegel's Phenomenology that initiated false humanism. Drawing upon the resources of structural linguistics, he enunciated the major trend of modern thought as the expansion of man's domain over the world: "?modern thought is advancing towards that region where man's Other must become the Same as himself." [67] The impulse of modernity was to project human finitude as an absolute principle over the whole of creation. The great minds of the past century, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the new list of saints, pushed back the limits of the unknown and of the unconscious: ". . . the whole of modern thought is imbued with the necessity of thinking the unthought-of reflecting the contents of the In-Itself in the form of the For-Itself, of ending man's alienation by reconciling him with his own essence . . . of lifting the veil of

marxisme (Paris, 1970) 37 and Roger Garaudy, "Structuralisme et la mort de l'homme," La Pensée, 135 (Oct., 1967) 110, 118. 65 The Order of Things (N.Y., 1970) 387, a trans. of Les Mots et les choses (Paris, 1966). 66 Ibid., 385. 67 Ibid., 322-323.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism the unconscious . . ." [68] Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud strove for a new unity, with the awareness that it was absent. These great ones "decentered" man by pointing to structures that were not deliberately created by man." [69] http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (24 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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In Les Mots et les choses, Foucault unveiled yet another hidden structure, the epistème, which was totally unconscious, like kinship, myth, and desire. The epistème worked at the level of knowledge, limiting the way objects were defined and perceived. Relations of words and things were governed by unconscious rules that delimited the boundaries of discourse. What Foucault stressed was the discontinuity between successive epistèmes, the principle that they were not the product of intentional creativity, that consciousness was not sovereign even in its own home of knowledge. Furthermore, the specific epistème in which man, consciousness, ego, or subject was elevated to the center of reality was only of very recent origin. It was a transitory structure that was bound for imminent disappearance. . . . it is not men who constitute [the human sciences] and provide them with a specific domain; it is the general arrangement of the epistème that provides them with a site, summons them, and establishes them--and thus enabling them to constitute man as their object . . . a "human science" exists not wherever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis--within the dimension proper to the unconscious--of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and contents.[70] Foucault studied the history of science in its most favored place, not in the distant Amazon but in modern Europe. Hence he confronted humanism, at its heart. His campaign was fought with no amenities of civilization; he wrote articles in prominent 68 Ibid., 327. 69 The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, trans. A. M. S. Smith (N.Y., 1972) 13 from L'Archéologie du savoir (Paris, 1969). 70 The Order of Things, 364.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism campaign was fought with no amenities of civilization; he wrote articles in prominent journals with titles like "Is Man Dead?" [71] Sartre and others were irritated by Foucault's apparent challenge to Marxism: the lesson of the epistème was that man did not make his own history; instead, the epistème made man. It was one thing for LéviStrauss to demonstrate that the primitives did not make their own kinship structures, for Lacan to show that the ego was immersed in unconscious desire; but it was outrageous to assert that the most selfconscious activity of human experience was beyond human control. Perhaps social structures bore the quality of blindness; this could be corrected in the future. However, if man did not fashion the structure http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (25 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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of knowledge, it would be theoretically impossible for man to shape history. Yet there was a weak spot in Les Mots et les choses which was pounced upon by Sartre and others. It was Foucault's failure to account for the succession of epistèmes. [72] The dismal import of Foucault's thesis was chanted sonorously by Bertherat, writing in Esprit: What man discovers beyond his representation, his interiority, is . . . a question without a subject, coming from this mute region where language arises, from this dead space where life is repeated, from this object, always lost, that obsesses desire. The modern age is the age of separation, of limits and if there is a humanism . . . and a science of man, it is to the degree that the unity of man, the world and words is defeated.73 Yet existential Marxists, Christian personalists, phenomenologists, Marxist humanists--all those who felt opposed to structuralism--were deceived by its apparent prognosis of 71 "L'homme est-il mort?" Arts, 38 (June, 1966). On p. 6 he argued that structuralism was incompatible with humanism. 72 Sartre, "Replies to Structuralism," op. cit., 110. 73 Yves Bertherat, "La Pensée folle," Esprit, 35:360 (May, 1967) 876.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism the end of man. Long ago, Roman Jakobson suggested that structuralism was not the end of humanity but of private property. Structuralism maintained that communication of language was inherently social, and that any phenomenon that was withdrawn from the social system, like private property, must be doomed.[74] The implications of structuralism were suddenly the same as those of existential Marxism. In their effort to clear a space for their ideas, the structuralists had exaggerated their attack upon the dominant intellectual trends, while their opponents defensively overreacted in response. The chance of theoretical complementarity between existential Marxism and structuralism was nowhere more clearly stated than by that arch-enemy of man, Michel Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge of 1969. Foucault made it clear that history was not the continuous, linear evolution of events assumed by humanists. Discontinuity, ruptures, the dispersion of the subject, uncentered anonymity--these were the true qualities of history, as historians themselves were beginning to show. Unconsciousness was a fact, not an ideological belief. What he found in history were discourses without agents, and structures without subjects. However, once the "inhumanness" of history was acknowledged, it was then possible


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"to recover in the second degree . . . what we have lost over the last half-century . . . it seemed to me that, for the moment, the essential task was to free the history of thought from is subjection to transcendence." [75] The raging battle over structuralism could now he viewed with some perspective: its task was now accomplished: My aim was to analyze this history, in the discontinuity that no teleology would reduce in advance; to locate it in a dispersion that no pre-established horizon would embrace; or allow it to be deployed in an anonymity on which 74 Octavio Paz, Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction, trans. J. and M. Bernstein (Ithaca, 1970), 113. In the same vein, my colleague David Carroll reports that Derrida, when asked to define structuralism, cryptically answered "the end of property." 75 The Archaeology of Knowledge, 202-203.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism no transcendental constitution would impose the form of the subject; to open it up to a temporality that would not promise the return of any dawn. My aim was to cleanse it of all transcendental narcissism . . . . [76] The philosopher of the "end of man" now conceded that he asked no more than the recognition of "the right of a piece of empirical research, some fragment of history, to challenge the transcendental dimension. . . ." [77] Once that was achieved, "the powers of constituent consciousness" could again be maintained. The final touch to the integration of Structuralism in existential Marxism came from Foucault himself: structures do not limit freedom; they are simply Situations. The positivities that I have tried to establish must not be understood as a set of determinations imposed from the outside on the thought of individuals, or inhabiting it from the inside, in advance as it were; they constitute rather the set of conditions in accordance with which a practice is exercised, in accordance with which that practice gives rise to partially or totally new statements, and in accordance with which it can be modified. These positivities are not so much limitations imposed on the initiative of subjects as the field in which that initiative is articulated . . . rules that it puts into operation . . . relations that provide it with a support. . . . I have not denied--far from it--the possibility of changing discourse: I have deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it. [78]


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In the end, structuralism promoted social change by articulating the structure of the practico-inert, a task that Sartre had not accomplished. Foucault placed himself in the same camp with the rebels of May, 1968: . . . what the students are trying to do . . . and what I myself am trying to accomplish . . . is basically the same thing . . . What I am trying to do is 76 Ibid., 203. Emphasis added. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 208-209.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism grasp the implicit systems which determine our most familiar behavior without our knowing it. I am trying to find their origin, to show their formation, the constraint they impose upon us; I am therefore trying to place myself at a distance from them and to show how one could escape.[79] This radical position emerged from the structuralist camp only after May, 1968. One wonders if radicalism was implicit in the structure of structuralism, or if the students and workers created a situation in which it had to change. 2. Althusser's Revolution Without Rebels When Marxists began translating Marx into structuralist language, the CP was dominated theoretically by Roger Garaudy and his effort of dialogue and reconciliation with humanists, existentialists, socialists, and Christians. Garaudy magnanimously but facilely integrated the young Marx into CP orthodoxy. [80] Everyone was welcome aboard the Marxist ship, which was repainted in the bright colors of humanism. Garaudy's oecumenical campaign merited skepticism because it manifested the sheen of surface de-Stalinization in a party that was becoming integrated in the Gaullist regime. Even with its new paint, the CP vessel would not disturb the flotilla of France on its way to the shores of advanced capitalism. Marxist humanism went hand-in-hand with the revised Soviet strategy of co-existence. The more Garaudy pontificated on alienation and dehumanization, the more the French workers were directed to support De Gaulle's glorious France. Against this open-handed strategy of Marxist humanism came the "theoretical anti-humanism" of Louis Althusser, [81] a CP member himself and a philosopher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Along with Maurice Godelier and Lucien


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79 J. Simon, "A Conversation with Michel Foucault," Partisan Review, 2 (1971) 201. 80 E.g., Perspectives de 1'hornme (Paris, 1959). 81 For the controversy over Althusser, cf.: attacks by CP theorists on early articles; Guy Besse, "Deux questions sur un article de Louis Althusser," La Pensée, 107 (Feb., 1963) 52-62;

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism Sebag, [82] two young anthropologists, Althusser prepared a structuralist reading of Marx. Althusser's intellectual pilgrimage in the 1960s contained distinct phases, but was basically unified in a single direction. His early articles sharply attacked all forms of Marxist humanism, the reading of Marx that relied heavily on the 1844 Manuscripts. At the same time, he denounced the economism of diamat. Althusser must not be seen as a regression to Stalinism, as many contend, but as a new departure in Marxist thought.[83] Dismissing the philosophical anthropology of Marxist humanism based on the concept of alienation, Althusser redefined dialectical materialism and historical materialism based on different epistemological premises. Far from being a Stalinist, Althusser lacked direct political orientation. Throughout the 1960s his theoretical anti-humanism remain-

Althusser," La Pensée, 107 (Feb., 1963) 52-62; Roger Garaudy, "Les Manuscrits de 1844," op. cit.; Gilbert Mury, "Matérialisme et hyperempiricisme," La Pensée, 108 (April, 1963) 38-51. In one issue, Les Temps Modernes printed a favorable review by Nicos Poulantzas, "Vers une théorie marxiste," 21:240 (May, 1966) 1952-1982, followed by an attack, Rbt. Paris, "En déça du marxisme," 1983-2002, concluded by a commentary by Jean Pouillon, "Du coté de chez Marx," 2003-2012. Two excellent articles then appeared, one in favor, Alain Badiou of the Cercle d'épistémologie, "Le (Re) Commencement du materialisme dialectique," Critique, 240 (May, 1967) 438-467; and one against, André Glucksmann, "Un structuralisme ventriloque," Les Temps Modernes, 22:250 (March, 1967) trans. in New Left Review, 72 (March-April, 1972) 68-92. Aron was hostile in D'Une Sainte famille à l'autre., op. cit. A good summary was presented by Jean Claude Forquin, "Lecture d'Althusser" Les Cahiers du centre d'études socialistes, op. cit., 7-31. A biting review of Lenin and Philosophy appeared by François George, "Lire Althusser," Les Temps Modernes, 24:275 (May, 1969) 1921-1962, trans. in Telos, 7 (Spring, 1971) 73-98. Also Emile Bottigelli, the translator of Marx, "En lisant Althusser," in Structuralisme et marxisme (Paris, 1970) 39-65. 82 Sebag's excellent and unpolemical Marxisme et structuralisme (Paris, 1964) traveled along parallel lines with the efforts of Althusser and Godelier. For reasons of space, Sebag will not be given individual treatment. 83 For Marx, trans. by B. Brewster (N.Y., 1970) 9-15 from Pour Marx (Paris, 1965), where Althusser situated his own thought against the over-reaction of anti-Stalinism.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism ed a scholastic enterprise of reinterpreting Marx's texts, calling for an extreme separation of theoretical practice and political practice and suggesting if anything a political struggle within the CP between the functionaries and the intellectuals. The political import of Althusserianism worked to assert the autonomy of the CP intellectual against the dominance of the politicians, the same principle that Sartre bad advocated since 1946. To Althusser dialectical materialism was not a set of laws derived from nature, but a philosophical enterprise, an autonomous heoretical practice. Unlike Sartre he turned to Capital to examine Marx's theoretical practice. Borrowing aspects of Gaston Bachelard's concept of an epistemological break, [84] he claimed that in Capital Marx established historical materialism as a science but that he did not conceptualize the epistemological novelty of his advance. This was the "absence" in Marx's text that Althusser's reading would discover. The goal of Althusser's thought was to redefine dialectical materialism, or the "philosophy" of Marxism, [85] a task first articulated by the existential Marxists. This striking resemblance in problematics between the structural and existential Marxism puts their animosity in a different light. His new Marxist epistemology opposed what Althusser termed "empiricism," especially in its historical variant. The vital distinction, obscured by empiricism, between the object of thought and the real object had to be guarded scrupulously. Ideas did not co-mingle with the objects they sought to represent. Marxist science had to strain to generate concepts (knowledge-objects) that enabled society 84 Cf. Dominique Lecourt, L'Epistémologie historique de G. Bachelard (Paris, 1969) partially trans. in Theoretical Practice, 13-4 (Fall, 1971) 13-24. 85 Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster (London, 1970) 31 from the second edition, which omitted the contributions of Macheray, Rancière, and Establet and included changes in Althusser's text from the original Lire le capital (Paris, 1965) 2 vols.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism and history to be known. Althusser's thought was here strongly neo-Kantian: concepts actively created by thinkers were the preconditions for the knowledge of any experience. The strength of scientific http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (30 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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Marxism for Althusser was that at the moment of the production of concepts the scientist was disinterested, beyond all attachment to or interest in the objects of the social world. To Althusser ideologies were those theories that failed to observe this distinction. Both empiricism and humanism were ideologies, since the former conflated theoretical objects with real objects and the latter erased the distinction between theory and practice. For Althusser, Hegel, the young Marx, Lukacs, Gramsci, and Sartre were all guilty of some form of ideology. In the recent debate between official Marxists and humanist Marxists, Althusser found both camps in error. Neither could account theoretically for the crucial difference between the political economy of the bourgeoisie and the socialism of the proletariat. Marxist epistemology had floundered on the problem of accounting for its own thought as a theory that was qualitatively distinct from past ideologies. For official Marxists theory merely "reflected" the economic position of the thinker, rendering all theories equally ideological since truth was reduced to the social interests of the theorist. The humanists, for Althusser, did not overcome this difficulty. Lukacs, for example, replied to the reflection theory that the truth value of Marxism derived from the unique position of the proletariat in society, through which it alone could grasp the totality. The proletariat's knowledge was therefore universal, as distinct from the particular knowledge of the bourgeoisie. Yet, to Althusser, Lukacs' position was just as ideological as his opponent's, since thought was still dependent on social interests. Hence Lukacs was a historicist who was more concerned with socialism than with establishing a scientific social theory. It should be noted that Sartre's position was closer to Althusser's than was Lukacs' because for Sartre dialectics had an independent truth value to the degree that it made the social 343

III. Toward an Existential Marxism field intelligible, not simply because it led to revolution. But Althusser did not carefully discriminate among his enemies. To the structural Marxist, the criterion of ideology was clear: "Indeed, it is a peculiarity of every ideological conception . . . that it is governed by 'interests' beyond the necessity of knowledge alone." [86] Religious, ethical, and political interests had to be abandoned if thought was to become scientific. Ideologies merely expressed the relation of the "lived experience of men to their world," and were without scientific value. Althusser's dangerous conclusion was that human interests and scientific interests were completely separate and perhaps opposed. Logically, his revised philosophy of Marxism had to be totally divorced from any leaning toward socialism. Science could have nothing to do with revolutionary action. It is apparent that Althusser's definition of ideology was in some ways in contradiction with Marx's. For Marx, ideology was a false representation of man and the world because it took the given situation as natural, dehistoricizing and thereby mystifying the present social formation. In relation to society, ideologies were part of the superstructure, serving to reinforce the substructure. Ideologies were http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (31 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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theories that legitimated economic and social relations, and hence were weapons of class rule. Marx did not criticize theories as ideological because they fostered certain human interests but because they solidified class society. To Marx, the theory of the proletariat de-legitimated existing class rule and hence was different from ideology. This difference, to Althusser, was not enough to establish Marxism as a science. What made Marxism a science for him was not that it led to revolution but that it did not conceptualize society from the point of view or from the situated presence of any of its members. The theoretical advance of Marx came from the purely theoretical production of concepts 86 Ibid., 141. Sebag agreed with Althusser on the nature of ideology, except for him Marxism, which was at bottom a subjectivist doctrine of the recovery of man's alienated essence, was itself ideological. Op. cit., 181, 243.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism that revealed the hidden structure of capitalism. On purely theoretical grounds Althusser presented, as Marx bad failed to do, a theory that showed why Marxism was a science. To the Marxist humanists, however, Marx was able to advance his theory of capitalism only on his prior commitment to the working class. Once be took the point of view of the working class, he was able to theorize the social formation without the errors of ideology. In the 1844 Manuscripts, [87] they argued, Marx advanced toward socialism only through an anthropological conception of man's reappropriation of his powers that were lost under capitalism. None of Marx's later works were intelligible except through this early commitment. From this point of view, Althusser's distinction between science and ideology threw out the baby with the bath water: in order to defend the autonomous power of theory, the vital link between theory and practice was cut. Before carrying the debate between Althusser and the humanist Marxists further, we must look at the structuralist reading of Capital. In the collective work, Reading Capital, Althusserian structuralism presented an attitude of scientific indifference toward its object. Due to the peculiar mode of presence of the social object it could be known only through the scientific attitude. For example, in 87 The debate over Marxist humanism, affecting the political composition of the Party, raged fiercely in Communist journals. Cahiers du Communisme devoted an issue to it in May-June, 1966, entitled "Les Problèmes ideologiques et culturelles." Garaudy's forces predominated. La Nouvelle Critique contained a continuing debate on humanism throughout the mid- and late-1960s. Michel Simon's articles, "Marxisme et humanisme," La Nouvelle Critique 165 (1965) 96-132 and "Progrès, raison, histoire," La Nouvelle Critique, 176 (1966) 66-78, represented a tempered Althusserianism. One could argue the anti-humanist position by calling it a philosophy of the concept as opposed to the humanist philosophy of the subject or consciousness. The best statement of the


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position came from Georges Canguilhem, "Mort de l'homme ou épuisement du cogito?" Critique, 242 (July, 1967) 599-618, a review of Foucault's Les Mots et les choses. The problem here was, as Glucksmann, op. cit., pointed out, that one ended in Kantianism.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism tific attitude. For example, in Reading Capital, Rancière [88] argued that Marx's analysis of the commodity switched from an anthropological method that grasped it as created by the labor subject, to a structuralist method that grasped the commodity as an illusory appearance that concealed its structure. He quoted Marx: "Value does not carry what it is written on its forehead." [89] Value, the sensuous activity of the laborer embodied in the commodity, was absent in the appearance of the commodity in the market. Hence if we view the commodity from the worker's perspective and interest, we fail to attain any knowledge of its structure. Only if we detach the commodity from any "constitutive subject" can we overcome systematic "misrecognition." Therefore, scientific Marxism had to be limited to Marx's mature writings, where Feuerbachian anthropology and Hegelian historicism were allegedly eliminated. In capitalist society, labor was "represented" in the cornmodity as value, except that this value was not manifest in the commodity phenomenon. The real "cause" of the existence of the commodity on the market was not present but absent in its appearance. It was systematically hidden by the structural processes of circulation. No knowledge could be gained from a phenomenology of the worker, the industrialist, or the merchant because they viewed the commodity from the perspective of their own interests. Since we were looking for an "absent cause" or a "hidden structure" we had to adopt, as Marx did, scientific structuralism. In Rancière's words: "We are no longer concerned with a text calling for a reading which will give its underlying meaning, but with a hieroglyph which has to be deciphered. This deciphering is the work of science. The structure which excludes the possibility of critical reading is the structure which opens the dimen88 Rancière's recent defection from the Althusserian camp does not detract from the pertinence of his contribution to Lire le Capital. 89 "The Concept of 'Critique' and the 'Critique of Political Economy,' " Theoretical Practice, 2 (April, 1971) 39, a trans. from Lire le Capital (Paris, 1966) Vol, 1, 123-154.

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sion of science." [90] Rancière's decipherment rendered the structure of the economy intelligible not in its inertness but in its articulated complexity. Against Sartre's view of the practico-inert as an almost unintelligible mechanism, the structuralist revealed its opaqueness to the social subject, and lucidly exposed the degree to which it was impossible for the subject to transform the structure. Further achievements of structuralist Marxism [91] came in works devoted to specific structures, like Nicos Poulantzas' Pouvoir politique et classes sociales (1971) and Althusser's study of ideology. [92] In the latter work, Althusser went so far as to abandon Marx's distinction between base and superstructure. The state, traditionally viewed as a mere superstructure, maintained an ideological apparatus in addition to its coercive power and its bureaucracy, which was central to the socialization of workers. For Marx, ideologies were mere illusions; but for Althusser, ideologies, with a history of their own, were a systematic element of every society and would have to be combatted independently, in the same way that the bourgeoisie had fought the church. These ideological state apparatuses, functioning in diverse locations--like the church, the family, the schools, and the media --were, at the present conjuncture, a central target for political activity. Althusser, like Lefebvre and Sartre, rejected an exclusive concern with the economy. However, his lucid analysis of ideological apparatuses came only after 1968, when the action of the students against the university put its sinister functions on glaring public display. Still, the rigor and penetration of Althusser's method exceeded the capability of Sartre's concept of the practico-inert in articulating unconscious structures. However, the scientific epistemology that made the knowledge possible also 90 Ibid., 39. 91Althusser had refused grouping with structuralism, which he considered an ideology, but he did acknowledge debts to Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and Foucault. 92 Trans. in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays by B. Brewster (London, 1971).

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism also cut it off from effective praxis. Marx's injunctions against merely interpreting the world came back to the structuralists as the "absent cause" of their own theory. The science of the unconscious would have to be joined with an historical anthropology that conceptualized the subjects who were to act upon the knowledge. In Sartre's terms, knowledge of the anti-dialectic, or analytical reason, would have to be inserted into dialectical reason. Structural Marxism legitimately grasped the structure-in-itself, more precisely, structure-for-science; but the structures, in their absence, have a level of existence for-their-"bearers," for the people who inhabit them. Part of the structure of the structure is its existence for the subject. These subjects constitute the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (34 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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structures but not fully consciously since they are also constituted by the structures. The unconsciousness of structures could be known from the subject's side, through categories like alienation and bad faith. To save structuralism from reifying the concept of structure one would have to combine it with Sartre's dialectical reason and then situate the observer in his own world. Althusser's original escape from ideology into science can be only a provisory, temporary procedure for the constitution of the scientific subject, valid for limited kinds of study. In the end, the scientific subject must erase his own bracketing, must re-bridge his own epistemological coupure, and return from withdrawal to the full reality of his subjectivity, acknowledging that the place of return is not a heaven of absolute transparency. In sum, the controversy over structuralism solidified for the French the final lack of a Hegelian absolute subject, forcing the recognition of a duality or even a multiplicity of partial subjects-one scientific, one existential--whose unity in the present situation could be found, if at all, only in action. Such a decentered, multiple subject, was the vision of the Arguments group with its concept of "fragmentary thought." It probably goes back to Nietzsche: the death of God must proceed through the dissolution 348

Existential Marxism and Structuralism of Man (God's object) to arrive at the birth of men and women. After providing dialectical materialism with an epistemology, Althusser turned to the problem of historical materialism. This topic will be treated under three headings: (1) the division of Marx's texts into the Hegelian and the scientific, (2) the structuralist definition of the concepts of totality and contradiction, and (3) the structuralist concept of history. Althusser's wrath fell on those who relied upon the 1844 Manuscripts to present a Hegelian Marxism burdened with humanism, historicism, anthropologism, and empiricism. Against all evidence to the contrary, Althusser maintained that there was a "break" in Marx's thought by which Marx totally rejected his youthful concern with man and located a new object for knowledge, the mode of production. With this "immense theoretical revolution" Marx founded the science of history. Logically, all of Marx's writings before the rupture, which occurred in 1845 and was fully developed after 1857, were fruitless. [93] The persistence of Marx's early concerns into the Grundrisse of 1857-1858 and even into Capital eventually compelled Althusser to retract his absolute division and restrict the "true" Marx even further to The Gotha Program and to the obscure Marginal Notes on Wagner: "When Capital Volume One appeared (1867), traces of the Hegelian influence still remained. Only later did they disappear completely: the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) as well as the Marginal Notes on Wagner's 'Lehrbuch der politischen Okonomie' (1882) are totally and definitively exempt from any trace of Hegelian influence." [94] One anti-Althusserian wit, François George, surmised that Marx must have remained young almost until the end of his life. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (35 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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93 For Marx, 155-160. 94 Lenin and Philosophy, 90. For a translation of the latter, cf. Theoretical Practice, 5 (Spring, 1972) 40-64.

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There was clearly, as Althusser maintained, a change in Marx's writings when he studied capitalism closely as a fixed system. Yet this absolute rejection of certain texts seems more tendentious than realistic. It would at least be better to say that Marx complemented the earlier dialectic of alienation with a later structuralist analysis, without being able to resolve the differences between the two approaches. Allowing the opposite tendencies in Marx's texts to emerge without imposing a false unity on them is actually more in keeping with structuralist principles of interpretation than Althusser's bifurcation. A more serious contribution by Althusser came with his critique of the Hegelian concepts of totality and contradiction. Before Hegel, social causation was seen mechanically, with isolated elements at one point in society effecting isolated elements at another point. Dissatisfied with this, Hegel accounted for the effects of the totality on each element, but he did so, Althusser warned, by reducing the totality to an essence that was "expressed" in every level, [95] as in the Philosophy of History, where the world spirit permeated whole civilizations. It is not clear to me, however, that Hegel did this in the Phenomenology, which was the main interest of the existential Marxists. In Althusser's opinion, Marx rejected Hegel's concept of totality and arrived at a "structuralist" concept in which the priority of the totality over the elements was kept and the relative autonomy of each level was asserted. Hegel's concept of contradiction was in similar need of revision. Contradiction was the inner motor of history, the source of tension that led to change. In Althusser's view, Hegel had misplaced the concept of contradiction by associating it with the Idea. Ultimately the cause of contradictions in society was the failure of men to realize the Idea. This left Hegel with an Idealist notion of causation. For Marx, however, causation was fixed within structures as their interiority. Effect and cause were not distinct but in95 Reading Capital, 186-187.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism inseparable aspects of the presence of structures. In Althusser s view of Marx: . . . the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the contrary . . . the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short . . . the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.[96] Following closely the concept of structure in Lévi-Strauss, Althusser demonstrated that a contradiction within a structure could not be located exclusively at one level--for instance, the economic--but that it was compounded by contradictions specific to every other level of the structure and was hence "overdetermined." More lucidly than the Arguments group, Althusser specified the differential effects of each qualitatively distinct level. To Althusser, however, Lévi-Strauss' concept of structure was finally inadequate because it regarded each level as equal in force, whereas Marxists had to account for the dominance of the economy. For this purpose Althusser spun out a distinction between "the determination in the last instance" of the economy and "the dominant role" of any level at a given conjuncture. This distinction was included to account for the "dominance" of kinship in primitive society and of politics in feudal Europe. In order to reproduce itself as a structure, feudalism had to use political means to insure economic activity. In feudal society politics was visibly the dominant structure. Yet the dominant role of politics was possible only because, in the final analysis, work had to be done. The economic level was the "absent cause" of the dominant role of politics; in other words, the structural effects of the economy were present through their absence. By redefining the nature of contradiction and totality, Althusser transformed the dia96 Ibid., 189.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism lectical method into a structural method. All that was preserved of dialectics was the primacy of the whole over the parts and a focus on the relations of the parts. Gone from the Hegelian dialectic was the intelligibility of the signified and the role of men in the process of negation. Structures were now totally http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (37 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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objective and men were merely its bearers (Träger, support). [97] The "ahumanity" of structures defied bourgeois common sense, in which, for example, the individual labored to make money and to spend it. If we look at the structure as a whole to define its rules of operation, money actually used man to maintain itself, not the reverse. Human intentions, in this case self-interest, were present but structurally of secondary importance. Money operated as a system in expansion or contraction through well-defined rules, rules that were obscure from the perspective of a person in search of gain. Althusser's concept of men as bearers of structures made the structures intelligible but de-emphasized the role of man in changing the structures. As a total theory of society, structural Marxism proposed to explain history without resort to human agents. We must now turn to Althusser's theory of history. It must be stressed that, in the structuralist controversy, the concept of historicism had a specific meaning. To structuralists, historical research places man as an active subject, affecting reality through projects that have meaning even though they might lead to unintended results. Denying this assumption, Althusser underlined Marx's achievement as the understanding of capitalism as "processes without subjects." [98] If history dealt with structures, it could no longer view change as linear and homogenous. In its present evolutionist form, history systematically over-centered the social field by locating meaning in the subject as an "absolute reference." [99] 97 Reading Capital, 252. 98 Lenin and Philosophy, 201. 99 Sebag, op. cit., 155.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism Given the concept of structural contradiction, it was plain that concepts of history as homogenous, continuous succession would be inadequate. On the contrary, to Althusser, each level of the structure had its own temporality and its own history. Multi-temporality was not to imply pluralism because the whole was bound together through the "structure in dominance." Historians had to be reminded that their habit of periodizing was a theoretical practice that was distinct from the flow of events. Historians produced temporality and that production would be scientific only if it demarcated the diachrony of structures, not the intentional acts of individuals or groups. In the history of structures, discontinuity and differential temporality prevailed. From the structualist perspective, Sartre's Critique was a stunning case of historicism. Sartre could never articulate the structure of the practico-inert because it was referred back, for its intelligibility, to the social agent who constituted it. On the contrary, the unity of social structure, its systematic coherence, went beyond the agent's totalization. For Althusser, Sartre's concept of the practico-inert led http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (38 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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to voluntarism. Sartre reduced structures too quickly to the historical action of totalizing individuals, without capturing the interior complexity and intricate play of structural unity. But Althusser went too far if he meant that Sartre was guilty of speculative historicism. For Sartre did not reduce the structure to a Hegelian externalization of the Idea. Further, Sartre's historical subjects were not contemplative but active, already immersed in the practico-inert. And, unlike Lukacs, his history was not absorbed in a subject-object reconciliation. By lumping Sartre with all other Hegelian Marxists, Althusser missed the crucial distinction: Sartre's historicism did not preclude structural analysis and was open for revision in that direction.[100] 100 My argument that structuralism must be understood as complementary to existential Marxism is not, hopefully, eclecticism. The foremost critic of structuralism, Jacques Derrida, a philosopher at the Ecole Normale, has repeatedly taken the position that structuralism cannot

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism In his polemic against historicism and humanism in the 1960s Althusser never confronted Sartre directly. When be finally did so, in 1972, the results were not at all impressive. Sartre was dismissed as a humanist and an idealist, a bourgeois philosopher of freedom, a "pre-Marxist and pre-Freudian ideologue," who made the mistake of believing that history is made by man."[1Ol] This effort by Althusser to criticize Sartre's existential Marxism confronts only the Sartre of Being and Nothingness and not the Sartre of the Critique. speak out against the metaphysical nature of philosophies of consciousness without taking into account the rebounding influences of the rejected doctrine on itself. By defining itself against philosophies of consciousness, structuralism inevitably shapes itself in relation to those philosophies and can never succeed in simply surpassing them. In Derrida's words, "The paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed the opposition it was reducing. The opposition is part of the system, along with the reduction." (From "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in The Structuralist Controversy, op. cit., 251.) Derrida's statement reminds the structuralists of their dialectical dependence on a phenomenological metaphysics of subjective meaning. The intelligibility of the signifier appears only in relation to the doctrine of the intelligibility of the signified. Yet Derrida appears to regard this unconsciousness within structuralism as an unwanted situation that can be done away with, whereas it is my position that the dependence of structuralism on existential Marxism, or other philosophies of the subject, is necessary and desirable. The structuralist reduction of the field of the intelligible to the signifier would so impoverish the human sciences that the project of doing structuralism would recede into the absurd. It is only against the philosophy of the subject, and as a necessary corrective to it, that the project of structuralism takes on significance. That is why structuralism can never escape existential Marxism and that is why structuralism can fulfill its possibilities within the human sciences only by deliberately embracing its http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (39 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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antithesis in a relation of attraction-repulsion. The meaning appropriated by philosophies of consciousness is overrich and must be thinned out or decentered by structuralism. By the same token, structuralism must refer itself to existential Marxism as the Other of its project. It is in the sense of this double movement that I see the possibility of reciprocity between the two positions. 101 Althusser, Réponse à John Lewis (Paris, 1973) 21-22, 43-44, 73-75.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism Even then, Althusser's Arguments do not have the weight of the early objections by Lefebvre, Mougin, and Lukacs. For their own concept of history, the structuralists formalized what they regarded as Marx's achievement in Capital. Taking over for Althusser, Balibar was left with the Herculean task of presenting Marx as a structural historian. Balibar asserted that, in Capital, Marx produced a table of invariant elements of the means of production, thereby avoiding historicism. In this "combination" there were three elements (workers, means of production, and non-laboring appropriators) and two rules of combination (property connection and appropriation connection). [102] The combination presented the economic structure of any society. It differed from the equally atemporal "combinatory" of Lévi-Strauss, which indicated that "the places of the factors and their relations change, but not their nature." [103] We will leave aside the problem of the alleged universality of Balibar's concept of combination. What is important is that Balibar defined his concept of history as changes in the combination. Structural change consisted not in the dissolution of one structure and the constitution ex nihilo of a new one, but in "the transformation of one, structure into another." [104] The rules of transformation followed Freud's concept of the process of displacement, in which one element takes the place of another even though the former has no logical connection with the latter. In the formation of capitalism, for example, structural change meant a "displacement" within the means of production. Both the "object of labor" (the product) and the means of labor" (the tools) were "separated" from the laborer in two ways: in the property relation, the worker owned nothing; in the appropriation relation, the worker lost the skills to make the product. In each of the relations of the worker to the means of production, there was a homology of separation that was unique to capitalism. Capital102 Reading Capital, 215, also 177. 103 Ibid., 216. 104 Ibid., 242.


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III. Toward an Existential Marxism ism thus began with the introduction of the "machine-tool," since, from that point on, all structures were adjusted to the new combination: the worker was separated both from the product and from the tool. The process occurred without a subject, without anyone willing the new combination. Also, capitalism arose out of the structural contradictions of the previous transitional form (manufacturing). The recombination of the same elements took the form of a displacement. More precisely, within the manufacturing or handicraft system a unity existed between the tools and the worker, whereas under fully developed capitalism the place of the unity shifted to the relation between the product and the tools. Under industrial capitalism, the tool was structured to produce the product; under earlier methods, the tool was structured to the human body. Capitalism maximized the separation of the worker and the means of production, not simply by private ownership of property but also by the use of machines which maximized output, disregarding the structure of the body (or the mind) of the worker. Contradiction plagued the new structure since its effects were both stabilizing and disruptive. The more absolute the separation between the worker and the means of production, the more perfect became the structure and the closer it came to dissolution. In this way, structural history traced displacements in the combination without reference to human action. In detail, the process of change went as follows.[105] Structures were formed out of bits of existing structures. The dissolution of a structure, like feudalism, took place without apocalyptic drama. The structure was simply less able to integrate its subordinate levels, which floated, so to speak, in the social field. The loose elements gradually combined through a process of bricolage, a concept developed by Lévi-Strauss. This bricolage, which had no human bricoleur, [106] assembled sections from 105 Badiou, op. cit., gives an excellent account of this.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism the junk heap of the previous structure, like a tinkerer in his workshop filled with used remnants. Gradually but discontinuously, a new structure emerged, containing contradictions or imperfections since it was not designed ahead of time by a perfect planner using appropriate materials and proceeding systematically, but rather through fits and starts, with materials suited for a different social machine. To Balibar, Marx's description of the primitive accumulation of capital fit the structuralist model of history. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (41 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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Hence, the science of historical materialism could demonstrate apodictically that capitalism could not endure forever; it was not a frictionless machine. Moreover, its contradictions led to a combination in which the means of production would be socialized, uniting the separated workers with their tools and their products. Yet if Althusser's claim for the universality of his model is taken seriously, it is hard to see what would become of the appropriators, the third element, under socialism. In Althusser's concept of history, as we have seen, social change came about regardless of the deliberate action of human groups. And so, cosmic fatalism crept into his anti-humanism: all action seems futile both because structures move autonomously and because praxis is always inspired by ideological interests which distort it. Conilh, writing in Esprit, captured Althusser's vision by relating it to the change from the post-war era to a technological world. No doubt we can measure here the contemporary malaise, our malaise. The existential anguish born from the war, in the night of the occupation, is no longer apparent; it is muted by a huge stupor before the fullness of our knowledge and our unlimited powers. This knowledge surrounds us completely, it penetrates us to our deepest intimacy. It is our mode of being and doing, our ineluctable presence in the world. Nothing can escape it and 106 Reading Capital, 250. 357

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism declamations against science are merely laughable hypocrisy.[107] In the mad, chaotic human world, praxis was always infiltrated by ideology since men always took the point of view of the human species or some part of it; they were always practicing humanists, measuring the world by their own image and desire. Conversely, to the structuralism, social change was a matter of structures in complex systems of autonomy and interdependence that was beyond human will. Althusser thus avoided any hint of "anthropology." Yet even he was caught in the ontological web of being human and his discourse projected an "interest," inherent in all discourse, one that was not purely scientific. This was to read Althusser first, and then to accept the logically necessary truths of his discourse, as in any communication. One could claim that discourse was a system like all others and therefore that it did not depend on subjects who were only its bearers, as in Lévi-Strauss' position, where myths were thought through men. This resort was not open to Althusser because his concept of the epistemological break maintained that scientific discourse, unlike ideology, did not depend on unconscious infrastructures.[108] Science was not decentered and therefore it did require subjects, constituting creators like Karl Marx, who deliberately produced knowledge. If science rested on subjects, it reintroduced an http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (42 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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element of anthropology and with it the "ideological" imperative to read Althusser. Even structuralist history, at some point, was compelled to utter the word "man." From a Sartrean viewpoint, Althusser's discourse was characterized by a refusal to accept the risk of finitude, that is, the dependence of science on action by the scientist. The existential commitments of the scientist were "structurally" an element of his theoretical practice. The Hegel controversy had proved at least that science must accept its involvement in history and therefore its incompleteness. Anthropology could not be 107 "Lecture de Althusser," Esprit, 35:360 (May, 1967) 899. 108 Badiou, op. cit., 443.

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Existential Marxism and Structuralism totally eliminated from science; human interests, as Habermas argued in Knowledge and Human Interests, were not separable from scientific ones. The absoluteness of Althusser's position and his polemical style necessitate defining the limits of his achievements. His radical denial of the intelligibility of the subject led him into a cul de sac where the concept of praxis was lost.[109] Because he called into question all doctrines of praxis, it was not enough to say that he had not yet dealt with the question himself. The notion of processes without subjects, of history without men, could be accepted as no more than a partial truth. The impact of Althusser and structuralism turned attention away from existential Marxism. Students of Marxism flocked to Althusser, somehow finding Maoist inspiration in his teaching.[110] A band of Althusser's students, known as the cercle d'Ulm, set themselves up within the UEC, the CP student organization, in 1964. After the Party sided with Garaudy and against Althusser, the young structuralist Marxists spoke out openly against the Party, and by 1966 they were excluded from it. By holding back his own criticisms Althusser was able to avoid the censure of the Party while it enjoyed the prestige of his intellectual success. The Communist Party, bathing in Althusser's theoretical sunshine, found itself in the midst of an intellectual renewal. Things were going so well that Tel Quel, an avant-garde literary journal, associated itself with the CP in the late 1960s, aping the surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s and the existentalists of the 1940s and 1950s.The theoretical organs of the CP hummed with excitement and sales 109 "Sur le travail théorique," La Pensée, 132 (Mar.-April, 1967) 3-22 for a weak effort at a concept of praxis. 110 For a discussion of Althusser's Maoism, cf. Alain Lipietz, "D'Althusser à Mao?," Les Temps Modernes (Nov., 1973) 749-787. Philippe Sollers, in Sur le matérialisme (Paris, 1974) 135-136 notes the similarity of http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html (43 of 44) [11/12/2007 23:16:47]

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Mao's concept of the dialectic in On Contradiction with that of Althusser. They are both anti-Hegelian concepts that do not reduce the dialectic to an "original organic totality."

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism steadily rose after 1968. Whether the increased subscriptions to La Pensée and La Nouvelle Critique were due to Althusser, as has been suggested,[111] or to the events of May, 1968, or even to the growing independence of the CP from Moscow, was not at all clear. By the early 1970s, however, the intellectual force of structuralism began to abate. Althusser's project seemed to have run its course, and students no longer rushed so quickly to his classes. Generally speaking, structuralism had become more of a middle-brow fashion than an intellectually heuristic theory. In fact, for the moment, the future direction of French social theory seems uncertain and impossible to predict. After three decades of intense theoretical ferment a moment of relative quiet has emerged. In some places, however, one can detect efforts to combine existential Marxism and structuralism in the manner suggested in this chapter. 111 Pradeep Bandyopadhyay, "The Many Faces of French Marxism," Science and Society, 36:2 (Summer, 1972) 145. 112 I am thinking specifically of Jean Baudrillard in Le Système des objects (Paris, 1968), Pour une Critique de 1'économie politique du signe (Paris, 1972), and Le Miroir de la production (Paris, 1973). He uses Lefebvre's concept of daily life and carries further his critique of language, employing a structuralist kind of binary opposition with a Sartrean phenomenology to show the new importance of consumerism, its active quality, and the autonomy of the language code connected with consumer objects. Cf. also Jeremy Shapiro, "OneDimensionality: The Universal Semiotic of Technological Experience," in Paul Breines, ed. Critical Interruptions (N.Y., 1970), 136-186.

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Nine _______________________________________________________ Epilogue: Intellectuals and May, 1968

1. Post-Industrial Society and the New Working Class In this chapter, the events of May-June 1968 will be analyzed from the perspective of existential Marxism as indicating the beginning of a new radicalism emerging, however indistinctly, in opposition to advanced capitalism. We must first understand the social changes that formed the context of May 1968, and on this basis the value of existential Marxism in analyzing the events can be estimated. By the 1950s and 1960s it was clear that a new social world was in process of formation: huge corporations, concentrating vast wealth, dominated an increasingly non-competitive economy; the state played a pivotal role in regulating numerous aspects of the economy; firms began to organize consumption through the media, through style changes, and through built-in obsolescence; scientific and technical accomplishments surpassed the sanguinary dreams of the prophets of progress; trips to the moon, nuclear reactors, synthetic products, computers, knowledge about vital reproductive processes, even the disturbing growth of pollution (which was, after all, a sign of man's technical capacity to interrupt nature). Human environments shifted to new suburbs and new cities. The spread of leisure activities, film, sport, automobile, transformed the most common day-today experiences. Sexual mores drastically reduced puritanical practices. Nothing seemed secure against these changes. The earlier sluggishness of the French economy, attributed by many to the Malthusianism of the 361

III. Toward an Existential Marxism capitalists, vanished overnight. Technocrats like Servan-Schreiber recognized that France was well on its way to a fundamentally new order of society. [1]The cherished balance of the French economy between agriculture and industry was erased. In the 1930s, the agricultural sector took over 40 percent of the work force; by 1945 it was down to 36 percent, and by the late 1960s to only 15 percent. In this spectacular new world, what would become of the working class and its politics? Could one still speak of a work class, or had it been altered beyond recognition? While liberals and technocrats foresaw the disappearance of working-class radicalism,[2] and while the Communist Party, under Thorez and Rochet, simply repeated the formula of increasing pauperization with no sense of the changes in the proletariat's nature, a diverse group of intellectuals and sociologists http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (1 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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[3] began to describe a very different working class. Working independently, Friedmann (Le Travail en miettes, 1956), Touraine (L'Evolution du travail ouvrier aux usines Renault, 1955), Mallet (Les Paysans contre le passé, 1959), Belleville (Une Nouvelle classe ouvrière, 1963), and Gorz (Strategy For Labor, 1964) dispelled the myth of a unified proletariat by studying the working class empirically and pointing up the differences in types of jobs, skills, and salaries. Thus a far more shaded picture of the working class under advanced capitalism began to emerge. The best articulation of the meaning of advanced capitalism for the working class 1 The American Challenge, trans. R. Steel (N.Y., 1968). 2 Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago, 1964) and The World of the Office Worker, trans. D. Landau (Chicago, 1971). 3 In English see Dick Howard, "French New Working Class Theories," Radical America, 3:2 (March-April, 1969), 1-19, which is favorable and Donald Hodges, "Old and New Working Classes," Radical America, 5:1 (Jan.-Feb., 1971) 11-32, which is critical. In the U.S., Veblen anticipated in many respects the theory of a new working class.

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Epilogue came from an existential Marxist, André Gorz, the political editor of Les Temps Modernes through the 1960s and a disciple of Sartre.[4] Gorz's book, Strategy For Labor, [5] which had a large impact on the New Left internationally, took its point of departure from the proletariat's material well-being. No longer at a subsistence level, the working class to Gorz could not be a revolutionary force if it were organized around the issue of poverty or exploitation: these quantitative criteria were not a threat to capitalism. [6] Additionally, advanced capitalism, in need of sophisticated technicians, altered, Gorz showed, the composition of the working class in favor of highly educated, mental workers, reducing by automation unskilled and blue-collar positions. Only the concept of alienation provided a critical tool to unite the new and old workers around a radical program. To him, the chief evil of capitalism was not exploitation but the alienation of the workers' creativity. Gorz's conclusion anticipated the events of May: to combat alienation, worker self-management, autogestion, must be the focus of the socialist movement. Workers must unite over the structural reform of the enterprise toward control of the process of production, a reform that would be revolutionary because it would dismantle the capitalist apparatus while putting an end to alienation. Reform and revolution were not antinomies but the same process once technology prevented the military seizure of 4 The filiation of new working class theorists and existential Marxism is striking. In addition to the facts mentioned in the text there are the following. Gorz was a disciple of Sartre. Their contact began with Sartre's interest in Gorz's novel Le Traître (Paris, 1957) for which he wrote the Preface. See his "Sartre ou de la conscience à la praxis, and "Sartre et le marxisme," both in Le Socialisme difficile (Paris, 1967) trans. by N. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (2 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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Denny as Socialism and Revolution (N.Y., 1973). Mallet and Touraine offered versions of Sartre's progressiveregressive methods. See Touraine, La Sociologie de l'action (Paris, 1965) 53. Also, they continued in Lefebvre's direction of studying the media, leisure, and consumption within a Marxist totality. 5 Trans. M. Nicolaus and V. Oritz (Boston, 1967) from Stratégie ouvrière et néo-capitalisme (Paris, 1964). 6 Ibid., 3.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism of the state. To the sociologist, Alain Touraine, in La Société post-industrielle, [7] the focus on worker control of the firm highlighted the political character of the despotism of capital and the struggle against it: "The general problem of the workers' movement is that of the nature of power relations between rulers and ruled." [8] Advanced capitalism required a new response from the workers: In modern societies, a class movement manifests itself by direct political struggle and by the rejection of alienation: by revolt against a system of integration and manipulation. What is essential is the greater emphasis on political and cultural, rather than economic action. This is the great difference from the labor movement, formed in opposition to liberal capitalism. Such movements are scarcely beginning but they always talk about power rather than about salaries, employment or property.[9] To Gorz, affluent capitalism had prepared the ground for a new type of socialism, a "rich socialism," that could be contested around qualitative issues of alienation and self-management, as opposed to the " poor socialism" of existing socialist societies which struggled for elemental, material needs. In Gorz's demand for autogestion there was a certain danger of co-gestion, a "participatory" system like the one presented by De Gaulle in which private property would be left intact.[10] Further, Gorzian strategy was dangerously Proudhonian or anarcho-syndicalist, minimizing the problem of state power and the question of politics in general during the process of structural reform. Yet the strategy for autogestion complemented the analysis of the "new working class." The discussion of the new working class began with the existential Marxist journal 7 (Paris, 1964) trans. L. Mayhew (N.Y., 1971). 8 In G. Friedmann and P. Naville, eds., Traité de sociologie du travail (Paris, 1962) Vol. 2, 281. 9 Post-Industrial Society, 74. 10 A. Geismar, et al., Vers la guerre civile (Paris 1969) 85.


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Epilogue Arguments in 1959.[11] Concepts of the new working class varied with each thinker. Belleville's book, Une Nouvelle classe ouvrière of 1963, published in the Les Temps Modernes collection, was a modest study of a few of the more technologically advanced firms. He found that new workers--scientists, engineers, technicians--struggled with capitalists not over salary, but over questions that hit at the hear of the control of the company. [12] In a 1962 strike at Neyrpic, the new workers protested management policy in which profit considerations were at odds with the social utility of the products.[13] Belleville noted the absence of a proletarian mentality among the new workers, modestly asserting that they were only "potentially" a part of a new labor movement. [14] Even so, the CP's notion of pauperization was clearly seen to be obsolete and could not account for the new shape of the working class.[15] Serge Mallet's La Nouvelle classe ouvrière, also of 1963,[16] was less hesitant than Belleville and elicited a deeper response. From a working-class background, Mallet, who was killed in an automobile accident. in 1973, had joined the CP after World War II, only to become disillusioned by the 1950s. At this time he was befriended and supported by Sartre. Hence the theorists of the new working class -Gorz, Belleville, and Mallet -- had direct contact with existential Marxism. In La Nouvelle classe ouvrière, Mallet argued that the highly trained workers in the advanced industries were not only part of the working class; they were its avant-garde. In every way, the new working 11 "Qu'est-ce que la classe ouvrière française?" Arguments, 12-13 (Jan.-March, 1959) with contributions by Touraine, Mallet, Mottez, Mothé, Le Brun, Barjonet, Betraz, Collinet, Crozier. 12 Belleville, Une Nouvelle classe ouvrière (Paris, 1963) 188. 13 One of the leaders of the May movement, Alain Geismar, referred to the Neyrpic strikes as the first tangible manifestation of white collar militancy. Op. cit., 84. 14 Belleville, op cit., 18. 15 Ibid., 10. 16 Partly translated as "Socialism and the New Working Class," International Socialist Journal, 2 (April, 1965) 152-172.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism working class was potentially more radical, at the present conjuncture, than the traditional, manual, bluecollar workers. The overall structure of capitalist society had changed fundamentally, altering the nature http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (4 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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of the working class. In the nineteenth century, the labor movement was dominated by workers who maintained their craftsmanship in the new industrial plants. Then came a second phase of the labor movement in which workers performed Taylorized operations, without the older sense of a metier. Nineteenth-century syndicalism became twentieth-century unionism, in which workers were passively disciplined by huge organizations like the CGT and the CP. Better educated, having important technical skills, the new working class of the mid-twentieth century resembled, in some ways, the workers of the nineteenth century. In the advanced sectors of industry, automation generated a new situation for workers. Mallet divided the new working class into engineers, organized in research units, who "produced the conditions of production," as distinct from those who worked in the traditional production situation. A series of strikes in the advanced firms in the early 1960s revealed the traits of the new working class to Mallet. They were organized by the workers in each firm without craft distinctions or huge labor bureaucracies. Young, with secure jobs, they worked in small teams on potentially creative tasks. Unlike the mass production workers of the CGT, the new workers took an interest in the entire firm. Their strikes were not total shutdowns, but carefully prepared disruptions at one point in the highly synchronized process that cost the capitalists dearly. Unlike the old working class, they would not be bought off with higher material benefits having rejected culturally the petty bourgeois ethic that bad just won over the blue-collar workers: At the center of the most complex mechanism of modern capitalism, the new working class is brought to realize the inherent contradictions of the system more quickly than any others. Precisely because its basic 366

Epilogue demands are largely satisfied, the new working class is led to pose other problems which cannot find their solution in the sphere of consumption. It is the hierarchical nature of industry that is placed in question by each partial demand on the control question.[17] What characterized the new working class was the identification of its interests with socialism, the same attribute Marx gave to the nineteenth-century proletariat. The modern working class has an immediate interest in uninterrupted technical advance, with all its consequences: a substantial fall in working hours, new professional status, changes in employment. Capitalism, on the contrary, has a tendency to hold back the development of the productive forces, because their development tends to bring a fall in the rate of profit and implies more and more reliance on economic instruments of a socialist character, whose effects capitalism cannot fully master.[18] http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (5 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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At Caltex, in the advanced petrochemical sector, it was the most skilled workers who led the struggle. [19] Mallet had no doubt that the new working class, which enjoyed so many privileges under capitalism, was revolutionary. Gorz, Belleville, Touraine, and Mallet all found that the organization of work among technicians and engineers required a degree of autonomy from the capitalist and a degree of conscious team work unknown to blue-collar workers.[20] In the highly complex tasks of the new working class, creativity was mandatory: . . . in scientific industries, stimulated by automation . . . the work itself takes on a potentially--or even actually-- creative character and there is a latent conflict between the teams of scientific and technical workers, con17 La Nouvelle classe ouvrière, 42. 18 Ibid., 43. 19 Ibid., 143. 20 Alone in the CP, Garaudy agreed with the new working class analysis. Cf. "La Révolte et la révolution," Démocratie nouvelle (April-May, 1968) 8.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism scious of their abilities and eager to valorize their labor power and the capitalist management of the firm, whose policy subordinates . . . this valorization to criteria of short or long-run profitability.[21] To these social critics, the embryo of socialism was already in formation among the new working class. Gorz went on to show that this contradiction over the control of industry could not be localized in the economy, but spread throughout society. The student population became part of the new working class since the experience of education led to an independence of mind, Gorz believed, which was inimical to the obedience demanded by tyrannical capitalism. Thus, the new working class called capitalism into question as a global social system. All four advocates of the new working class were united in their objections to the traditional leadership of the labor movement, to the CP and the CGT. They disagreed in emphasis over the place of the new working class in the larger socialist struggle, but the political strategy that emerged from their analysis was that of a syndicalist movement for structural reforms, not a general strike and certainly not including


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a Leninist Party. They objected to the alienating consequences of bureaucratic organizational structure as much as they did to capitalism. Gorz and Belleville, more than Mallet and Touraine, saw a possible unity of the Dew and old working classes. However, none of them accounted for the role of clerical white-collar workers. Also, they mistook the few strikes among technicians, scientists, and engineers as a general oppositional consciousness. They overlooked the role of many new workers in the direction of blue-collar workers, indeed, in their exploitation. In 1971, Gorz retracted much of his earlier 21 "Capitalist Relations of Production and the Socially Necessary Labor Force," in A. Lothstein, All We Are Saying . . . (N.Y., 1970), 168-169. Taken from Le Socialisme difficile.

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Epilogue enthusiasm for the new working class. [22] Nevertheless, the concept of the now working class brought to the open the notion of autogestion and concretized the concept of alienation, providing focal points for the movement of May, 1968. Gorz also called attention to the new importance of students in advanced capitalism, to their place in the reproduction of the labor force, and to schooling as preparation for a proletarian role in industry. Hence the theoretical basis was laid for an alliance between students and workers that found a realization in 1968. At the very least, it would have to be conceded that the laboring force, taken as a whole, was a new working class; that the primary focus of its struggles, if it would unite, would be self-management and alienation; and that the traditional leadership of the labor movement was inadequate in its theory and in its organizational structure. With the concept of the new working class, the existential Marxists thought they had found, at least potentially, a new proletariat that corresponded to their analysis and their theory. Since there could be no Marxism without a class basis of some sort, the concept of the new working class fulfilled a vital need of existential Marxism. 2. From the Spectacle to the Festival No one anticipated the events of May. [23] Even with rising unemployment and low salaries for many workers, France in 1968 was a stable, prosperous, advanced industrial 22 "Techniques, technicians et la lutte des classes," Les Temps Modernes, 27:301-302 (Aug.-Sept., 1971) 141180. 23 A bibliography of materials on May, 1968, is L. Wylie, F. Chu, M. Terrall, France: Events of May-June, 1968: A Critical Bibliography (Pittsburgh, 1973). The following have been useful to me: René Andrieu, Les Communistes et la révolution (Paris, 1968); J. Ardagh, The New French Revolution (London, 1968); Raymond Aron, The Elusive Revolution: Anatomy of a Student Revolt, trans. G. Clough (N.Y., 1969); Geismar, op. cit.; R. Gombin, Le Projet révolutionnaire: éléments d'une sociologie des événements de mai-juin, 1968 (Paris, 1969); R. Johnson, The FCP vs. The Students (New Haven, 1972); H. Lefebvre, The Explosion:: Marxism and the French


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Upheaval, trans. A. Ehrenfeld (N.Y., 1969) from L'Irruption de Nanterre au sommet (Paris, 1968); Charles Posner,

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism society. De Gaulle had ended the ministerial shuffle that so weakened the state during the Third and Fourth Republics; he had rescued France from its most troubling colonial question and raised her to the center of world diplomacy. Economically, the French "Miracle" put the nation on the highway of the third industrial revolution. With centralized economic planning, France appeared the very model of an emerging technocratic society. Yet this model society came perilously close to revolution in May-June, 1968, undergoing the most radical domestic upheaval since 1945 in Western Europe. None of the traditional Marxist or liberal explanations, it seems to me, account for what happened. The events of May brought into question the future of advanced technological societies, imposing possibilities of social transformation that until then were nothing but idle dreams. Commentators differed widely on the meaning of May: on one side, Raymond Aron considered it a nihilistic psychodrama, an "unpatriotic" happening [24] led by "fascist" students, [25] without deep significance for France's future; on the other side, to Lucien Goldmann, it was the apocalypse of man, the final reconciliation of subject and object, of freedom and community. The spokesman for Le Figaro was projecting his pessimism, fearing the collapse of an all-too-fragile civilization into an unliberal barbarism. The Lukaesian critic optimistically fantasized his perfect drama of human realization. 1968 may still be too close for final appraisal if only because the future alone can determine its historical weight. However, it can be argued ed., Reflections on the Revolution in France: 1968 (Baltimore, 1970); Intercontinental Press, ed., Revolt in France (1968); A. Schnapp and P. Vidal-Naquet, Journal de la commune étudiante (Paris, 1969); P. Seale and M. McConville, Red Flag/Black Flag (N.Y., 1968); D. Singer, Prelude to Revolution (N.Y., 1970); Alain Touraine, The Movement of May, trans. L. Mayhew (N.Y., 1971); Alfred Willener, The Action-Image of Society, trans. A. M. S. Smith (London, 1970); Sylvan Zegel, Les Idées de mai (Paris, 1968). 24 Aron, op. cit., xv. 25 Ibid., 275-276.

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Epilogue that the main elements of the May movement, when compared to previous social movements and http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (8 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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rebellions, were symptomatic of the new era of advanced society. The events brought into the open the latent conflicts that had not been politically prominent because established parties, Gaullist and Communist, had repressed them. Social relations and cultural forms lagged considerably behind the potentials of an advanced economy.[26] By opening the eyes of France to arbitrary hierarchies and needless alienations, the upheaval, from this perspective, pulverized the notion of the end of ideology. In Touraine's words: " The May Movement was a thunderbolt announcing the social struggles of the future. It dispelled the illusion that improvement in production and consumption result in a society in which tensions replace conflicts, quarrels replace disruptions, and negotiations replace revolutions."[27] Bureaucratic capitalism had extended its control so completely over the traditionally non-integrated private worlds of leisure, family life, and consumption, had so coordinated, organized, and manipulated the world of everyday life, that a spark at one point in the society could quickly envelop the whole in the flame of revolt. [28] To Touraine, it was against this all-pervasive regimentation, rather than against any particular person or social category, that the May movement erupted. For these reasons, the uprising came to most observers as a bolt from the blue. Yet intellectuals had been analyzing the new conjuncture since the Hegel renaissance, and existential Marxism had announced as a possibility what the events of May indicated as the deepest current of the emerging social formation. Granting the hazards of writing contemporary history, I will argue that the abortive revolution of May becomes intelligible through the lenses of existential Marxism. 26 Touraine, The Movement of May, 54. 27 Ibid., 79-80. 28 Ibid., 347. Cf. also Morin, Lefort, Coudray, La Brèche (Paris, 1968).

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism The story of May-June, 1968, is familiar. A handful of students led in an unconventional manner by Cohn-Bendit, a student of Henri Lefebvre at Nanterre, detonated a student uprising throughout France [29] that spread to the working class and brought French society to a complete halt. De Gaulle's government and the government of the working class, the CP and the CGT, found themselves without effective control of their constituencies. Perhaps for the first time in the history of advanced industrial society, the routines of everyday life were totally upset by dissident groups. From Nanterre in March, to the Sorbonne on May 3rd, to the Renault factory at Flins on May 16th, the rebellion spread quickly. What appeared at first as the pranks of children, the schoolboy's chahut, soon became a general threat to established authority. After ten days of street battles between students and police, with popular sympathies going to the students, the Sorbonne and schools throughout France were relinquished to the students. Just as the authority of the state was overturned in academia, so the authority of the capitalists was brought down in the factories. Ten million workers went on strike, and they did so not by going home or picketing but by taking control of their workplaces. France was without electricity and oil, http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (9 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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without mail, telephones, garbage collection, banks, and stores; movie houses were closed, the production of commodities was stopped. Everywhere the smooth bum of the technocratic machine was silenced. Liberated from the deadening pressures of everyday routines, the French paused and then began talking and relating to each other in new ways, ways that evidenced creative powers that had hitherto lain dormant. In the eyes of many, the monstrous spectacle of 29 It was true that French higher education in particular was highly over-centralized and that the system suffered from a doubling of the student population in the 1960s. Yet the irrationalities of the educational structure particular to France cannot explain the events of May, since similar student strikes broke out at that time in many places, like the U.S., where these disfunctions did not apply.

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Epilogue meaningless toil and passive consumption gave way to an exhilarating, joyous festival. We must examine the groups that participated in the festival of May: their composition, their overall unity or disunity, the kind of organizations they generated, the consciousness, ideas, and programs they activated and expressed, and the tone of life in the schools, the streets, and the factories. The relation of the intellectuals to the events must be noted, but, more significantly, we must study the ability of their theories to illuminate what happened. From May 3rd to May 13th the upheaval was limited to university and lycée students. Cohn-Bendit, "disorganized and unorganizable," and the March 22nd movement, followed by the Trotskyist groupuscule, JCR, ignited the student protest. At Nanterre in March, "Dany the Red" expressed the suffocated desires of youth: he asked Michel Crozier, who was lecturing on the U.S., why be did not mention Vietnam; he asked a sports minister who had written on contemporary youth why his book contained no mention of sex. Here was the tactic from March 22: compel the repressive institution to reveal its repressiveness. At the Sorbonne on May 3rd, the anarchic group again confronted the authorities and they fell into the trap. The police were called onto the sacred grounds of the university to make arrests. Incredulous, the other students watched and then began to confront the police. The battle quickly escalated and for over a week barricades, tear gas, and striking clubs filled the streets of the Latin Quarter. With De Gaulle in Rumania, Pompidou, faced with the whole of public opinion behind the students, called off the police. If the university revealed its connection with the repressive state by using the police, the CP, the supposed instrument of revolution, revealed its conservatism. Humanité quickly denounced the students as "adventurers." The CP conflated subjective and psychological categories, like adventurer, with objectivist social analysis, disregarding http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (10 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism the actual desires of actual groups. To the Party, the consequences of the students' action in relation to capitalism had to be fruitless. Since the students had bourgeois parents, their actions could not be revolutionary. Althusser, who agreed with the wooden formula of the CP,[30] might have used his own theory to express better the CP's meaning: the structural effects of the students' practice could not have an impact on the larger social instance. When the workers came out in support of the students, the CP and structuralism had more difficulty justifying their positions. The exemplary action of March 22 and JCR needed an organization form. Still without overall direction, the students organized themselves into action committees. The action committees of the May movement had much in common with the Soviets of 1917 and evoked the long history of workers councils. Yet in the conjuncture of 1968 there were new elements. Extremely democratic, the action committees were intended to be the organizational form that would replace the bureaucratic institutions that dominated advanced society. More than expedients of the revolution, they were the future society itself in embryonic form. Instead of presenting a coherent program for a new society, the action committees were already that society. It was the form of organization that counted, not a codified platform, since only from within liberated relations could thought and action become non-alienated and creative. The image of society presented by the action committees was one of continual, free creation. [31] In this context, new energies were discovered and the rebels had to be reminded to go to sleep. From many accounts the action committees gave birth to a ludic mode of existence, anticipated by Arguments: "Proletarian revolutions will be festivals or they will not be, for the life they herald will itself be created in festivity. Play is the ultimate rationality 30 "A Propos de l'article de M. Verret sur 'mai étudiante," ' La Pensée, 145 (May-June, 1969) 3-14. 31 Willener, op. cit., 68.

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Epilogue of this festival, living without boredom and enjoying without limitation are the only rules that will be recognized."[32]


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Moreover, the action committees were not limited to the work situation. They cared for children, procured food, wrote and mass-produced leaflets and posters, and discussed openly the ideas of the participants.[33] At Nantes, where for a few days the rebels took charge of the city government, action committees administered everyday needs. Elsewhere students went to the suburbs and residential action committees cropped up. Workers came to the Sorbonne and worker-student action committees were formed to build ties between the two groups. Later, in some plants, workers organized themselves into committees which, in a few instances, resumed production under worker control. Highly autonomous and democratic, the committees were in these instances effective organizations that also eliminated the alienating effects of hierarchy and reification. In the end, the action committees did not grasp state power and they were charged with anarchic spontaneity. Yet there was a coordinating committee that sought to direct the overall movement; that is, here was some form of leadership. By infiltrating each committee the JCR Trotskyists also tried to shape the movement. More anarchistic March 22nd rejected the need for leadership in any form. The Maoist-Althusserian UJC-ML was interested only in the workers, with their ideal of servir le peuple 33a, and played only a limited role during May. The sectarian Trotskyists of FER shunned the movement from the opening days. The national student union, UNEF, was an umbrella institution. 32 De La Misère en milieu étudiant, cited in Willener, op. cit., 173. 33 Seale, op. cit., 122. 33a Another Maoist group, whose members became part of UJCML, centered around the journal Cahiers pour l'analyse. Members of this group, Milner, Miller, Beni-Lévi, had split from Althusser in the mid-1960s. With May 1968, they abandoned theoretical practice for the factories.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism Geismar's teachers' union, SNE-sup, never managed to provide leadership either. Hence, none of the groups behind the explosion were able to coalesce the movement into a national political vehicle. Yet the action committees did achieve a non-Leninist form of organization which was claimed to be appropriate to advanced society. It was not clear that the failure of the committees to provide a national political force was due to the structure of their organization rather than to the contingency of events. On May 13th the CGT called for a one-day nationwide strike to support the students. By doing so, the union thought it could express sympathy with the protestors while controlling the workers, some of whom had joined the students at the barricades. Like the CP, the CGT was unmasked as a conservative organ, unwilling to struggle for the workers' control of the factory. Throughout May and June it did all in its power to prevent students and workers from mixing and to steer the workers toward traditional demands that would not challenge the authority of capitalism in the firm. The CGT and the CP viewed http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (12 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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the upheaval as a Gaullist plot, intended to split the workers from their "vanguard" organizations.[34] By their "irresponsibility" the students had engendered a situation that supposedly worked to the benefit of capitalism. For the Communists, there was no revolutionary situation in May, and the petty bourgeois students were only fomenting a useless civil war. Its image of May was "one of the most powerfulperhaps the most powerful-movement for material benefit" ever witnessed in France.[35] In this way, the CP and CGT reduced the qualitative, revolutionary demands of May to quantitative, co-optable proportions. On May 14th, workers at Sud-Aviation stopped work against orders from the CGT. Their action spread quickly and in a few days the wildcat strike counted ten million workers, practically the entire work force of a nation of fifty million. Like the students, 34Andrieu, op. cit., 103. 35 Ibid., 168.

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Epilogue the workers did not unanimously support the radical demand of autogestion or reject the benefits of consumerism. Still, in several respects this general strike manifested the new conjuncture. First, it was sparked by the students, and many workers saw the students as victims of hierarchical, alienating institutions, like themselves. Second, it was primarily young workers who led the strike, those who were not yet well-integrated either into capitalist structures or into the CGT. Their protest, like that of the students, was as much against the traditional leadership of the workers' movement as it was against capitalism. Third, the workers rejected the CGT's notion of its interests, presenting new demands that reflected the tensions of advanced capitalism. The major unions met with the state on May 25th, arriving at the Grenelle agreements, which gave workers substantial, even unprecedented, material gains. When Séguy, the leader of the CGT, presented the package to the workers at Renault he was met with a resolute NO! To his complete bewilderment, the workers in large majority would not go back to work. It is not possible to conclude that the workers were now so well paid that they disregarded material benefits. What probably happened was that, during the strike, the discipline of the CGT in the plant had broken down and workers talked freely among themselves and in some cases with students. Many began to express deep discontent with the stifling of their creativity in the work process. In countless plants the workers evidenced their desire for control of the production process, for responsibility and variation in work. [36] At a CSF factory in Brest the workers resumed production, making what they deemed important: walkie-talkies to help the strike. At the Rouen naval yards the workers helped the students to distribute revolu-


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36 E. Mandel. "The Lessons of May," New Left Review, 52 (Nov.-Dec., 1968) 23-24.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism tionary literature, showing sympathy for the students' ideas in defiance of the CGT. At the Atlantic yards in Saint-Nazaire the workers refused to agree to the demands of the CGT itself. In all of these cases and in others, the workers, more dissident than their leadership, were redefining their own situation along lines of alienation. In the words of one student, here is what happened at Sud-Aviation: The strike was not voted in this firm in order to achieve traditional benefits, but for benefits concerning the management of the enterprise by workers. . . . Workers here made contact with students . . . inviting them to come to explain to the workers the student movement. The discussion was lively and quite rapidly it was established that the true problem posed by the movement was that of power which, at the level of the enterprise, implied self-management.[37] Although the workers en masse did not embrace the students en masse, the partial contacts and understandings that did take place were evidence of a new radical alliance. The fourth new aspect of the general strike was the composition of the participants. Not only were young workers breaking with the CGT, but the "cols blancs"--the technical, intellectual workers-played a substantial role in the strike. As Touraine pointed out: One of the significant aspects of the May Movement is that it demonstrated that sensibility to the new themes of social conflict was not most pronounced in the most highly organized sectors of the working class. The railroad workers, dockers, and miners were not the ones who most clearly grasped its most radical objectives. The most radical and creative movements appeared in the economically advanced groups, the research agencies, the technicians with skills but no authority, and, of course, in the university community.[38] 37 Zegel, op. cit., 52. 38 Touraine, Post-Industrial Society, op. cit., 18.


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Epilogue In many plants where the CGT was weak, workers disregarded their status differences and joined together in the strike and the discussions. In some advanced firms, the "cadres," middle management, joined the strike. Physicists and unskilled laborers recognized their common oppression. In the strikes of the Compagnie de Té1égraphie Sans Fils of Brest, the Compagnie Générale d'Electricité and the Commission de l'Energie Atomique, the technical intellectuals were crucial.[39] In the sectors where blue-collar workers were in the minority--like the ORTF, the government-controlled radio, and TV stations--workers presented demands for self-management. What all of this means is that Marx's vision in the Grundrisse of the incorporation of technical intellectual work into the factory had already occurred, and that the workers' movement, when freed of the unionism of the CGT, reflected current conditions. Surely many, even a majority, of the blue-collar workers were content with revendications; and many, even a majority, of technical workers, saw themselves more as professionals than as proletarians. Yet the May events clearly indicated that there was a potential new working class and that the direction of the future would have to reflect this fact. The CFDT, formerly a Catholic union, was deeply influenced by the events and took up the battle for self-management. Still, it argued for selfmanagement without completely challenging private property. Autogestion could be distorted into a reformist position, just as the CGT had made exploitation a reformist program. One does not have to be an anarchist to argue that France came very close to a revolution in May. On May 24th, De Gaulle went on television to save the situation with a program of "participation" in all institutions. But what followed was a night of riots and protests. The situation had only become more tense. The leader of the left confederation, Mitterrand, gave a news conference on the 28th proposing a provisional 39 Geismar, op. cit., 83.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism government to be headed by himself or Mendès-France, speaking as if the Fifth Republic was already past history. The day before, a huge rally was held at Charléty stadium, with Mendes-France present, where victory seemed at hand, but, forbodingly, no one seemed to know what to do with the favorable circumstances. On the 29th, Cohn-Bendit, who had been expelled from France, surreptitiously returned. With this apparent power vacuum, De Gaulle, unsettling his staunchest supporters, could not be located. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (15 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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Had the old man decided to retire? In 1830 Charles X had done so in less dangerous circumstances. In fact, De Gaulle had gone to Germany to assess the loyalty of his troops, an indication of how far the situation had progressed. What is more, General Massu could not guarantee that the soldiers would fire on the workers. To solidify the army's support, De Gaulle seems to have made a deal whereby, in return for support, the rebel leaders of the Algerian crisis--Salan and the rest--would be released from prison: in mid-June they were, in fact, freed. At this point, near the end of May, revolution, civil war, or a coup d'état seemed certain. France came that close to the first socialist revolution in an industrialized society. But Mitterrand rebuffed a coalition with the CP and, at Charléty, Sauvageot of the UNEF and Geismar of PSU and the leader of SNE-sup were confused. The left was without strategy. Hence De Gaulle, after contemplating retirement, came back on television and with a mere gesture was able to restore the situation. Just as the composition and forms of the groups that participated in the May festival were new, so too were the ideas, the consciousness, and the principles for reorganizing society. One caveat: even for a relatively limited event like that of May-June, 1968, it is not possible to know the concepts and aspirations of every group, much less every indi380

Epilogue vidual. Studies have been made and continue to be made by sociologists, [40] but the historian's task is still formidable. There are different kinds of evidence: the writings of the student action committees during the events; the affiches produced by the art students; the discourses of the groups like the Internationale situationniste, who are known to have influenced some of the participants; the journalists' columns; the positions of the political forces printed in their periodicals; the interviews given by participants. With this chaotic melange, no wonder the structuralists want to eliminate consciousness from the human sciences. Nevertheless, certain patterns do emerge which are significant in their novelty. It is clear that the intellectual vanguard of the students thought of students as apprentices of advanced capitalism, not as petty bourgeois destined for command of society. Their analysis focused on the features of the university structure which were coordinated with the interests of capitalism. They argued that advanced capitalism needs technical intellectuals, that the university becomes an arm of capitalism, shifting its gears to the command of the economy. Students become labor commodities subject to the reified relations of the school. The critical and cultural functions of the university become lost under the pressure of the mass production of trained workers. Hence students, like the workers, were alienated in repressive, hierarchical organizations. The process of the reproduction of labor power took on the same dehumanized attributes as the process of production, disregarding the concrete desires and needs of the student body. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (16 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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Using a melange of ideas from Rosa Luxemburg, André Breton, Wilhelm Reich, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Lefebvre, Sartre, Marcuse, Mao, Guevara, and the Situationists, students conceived of the society as a spectacle, threatening the humanity of its subjects. During May the walls became theorists: 40 E.g., Willener, op. cit.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism Imagination au pouvoir. Le gaullisme est l'inversion de la vie. La révolution qui commence remette en cause non seulement la société capitaliste mais la civilisation industrielle.

Power to the imagination Gaullism is the inversion of life. The revolution that is beginning challenges not only capitalist society but industrial civilization.

La société de consommation doit perir de mort violente. La société de l'alienation doit perir de mort violente. Nous voulons un monde nouveau et original. Nous refusons un monde où la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'échange contre le risque de périr d'ennui. (Cohn-Bendit)

Consumer society must die a violent death. Alienated society must die a violent death. We want a new and original world. We reject a world where security against starvation is bought for the risk of death by boredom.

Nous menons ici [the Sorbonne] une vie merveilleuse, nous y dormons, nous y mangeons, nous ne touchons pas d'argent, personne n'y pense ici. C'est déjà la société que nous voulons créer.

We lead a marvelous life here. We sleep; we eat; we don't touch money; no one thinks of it. This is already the society we want to create.


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Je prends mes désirs pour des réalités, car je crois à la réalité de mes désirs. Il est strictement interdit d'interdire.

I take my desires for realities because I believe in the reality of my desires. It is forbidden to forbid.

L'humanité ne pourra vivre libre que lorsque le dernier bureaucrate aura été pendu avec les tripes du dernier capitaliste.

Humanity will not be free until the last bureaucrat is strangled with the guts of the last capitalist.

L'action ne doit pas être une reaction mais une création.

Action must not be a reaction but a creation.

382 Ne changeons pas d'employeurs, changeons l'emploi de la vie.

Don't change employers; change the employment of life.

Les réserves imposées au plaisir excite le plaisir de vivre sans réserve.

Cautions imposed on sure excite the pleasure of living without caution.

Un flic dort en chacun de nous, il faut le tuer.

A cop lives in each of us; we must kill him.

La révolution doit cesser d'être pour exister. Ne travaillez jamais! [41]

The revolution must cease to Be in order to exist Never work!

This marvelous graffiti expressed the rebels' intentions: to change both structures and culture, object and subject, society and individuals in relation to contemporary alienations, not to nineteenth-century formulas. The utopian call for immediate, total transformation had the same shock value as the tactic of contestation. What was written on the walls was existential Marxism. In the past the visible opposition to Gaullist capitalism came from the CP, which comprehended France in 1968 much as it did in 1936, at the time of the Popular Front. In the imperialist stage of capitalism, the argument ran, monopolies replaced competition, transforming the state into "fascism." The struggle of the Left had to be for parliamentary democracy, which was threatened. All talk of socialism was premature. Stifled behind the bureaucracy of the CP, the workers' true discontents did not emerge. http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (18 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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Against the "filthy Stalinists" (Cohn-Bendit), the May movement aspired to a qualitative change in social organization, a cultural as well as economic and political revolution. Although the students rejected the authority of the older intellectuals, their basic concepts were prefigured by the existential Marxists. In the words of Cohn-Bendit, Some people have tried to force Marcuse on us as a mentor: that is a joke. None of us have read Marcuse. Some read Marx, of course, perhaps Bakunin, and of the moderns, Althusser, Mao, Guevara, Lefebvre. 41 For a more complete list of the affiches see, Julien Besançon, Les Murs ont la parole (Paris, 1968) and A. Ayache, Les Citations de la révolution de mai (Paris, 1968).

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism Althusser, Mao, Guevara, Lefebvre. Nearly all the militants of the March 22nd movement have read Sartre. But no writer could be regarded as the inspiration of the movement.[42] Nevertheless, there were some direct intellectual filiations that must be noted. One group whose ideas were found in the affiches was the Situationists, who were located at the Faculté des Lettres of Strasbourg. I have already shown the role of Lefebvre, who taught there in the mid-1960s, in their intellectual development. The Situationists created a mini-May in 1966, disrupting the university and publishing a very popular pamphlet, De La Misère en milieu étudiant, which was an application of the theory of the Arguments group to student life. In 1968, the Paris Situationists set up the first action committee at the Sorbonne. Socialisme ou Barbarie also had an influence on the events of May. Cohn-Bendit had attended meetings of a study group that included Claude Lefort and in general, at Nanterre, Socialisme ou Barbarie had been widely read before 1968. Most of the positions in Cohn-Bendit's book, Obsolete Communism, can be traced back to Socialisme ou Barbarie. Moreover, at Nanterre the faculty had introduced the concepts of existential Marxism. Lefebvre taught sociology there. Also, the philosophy department was dominated by phenomenologists and existentialists (Ricoeur, Dufrenne, Lévinas) and was staunchly anti-structuralist. In sum, however, we cannot say that existential Marxism was thoroughly assimilated by the students; nor can we say that they acted in its name. The documentation of the ideas of May suggests a main emphasis on openness and fluidity of relationships and consciousness aiming toward the flowering of desire and active creativity. A


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combination of Sartre's concept of freedom and Lefebvre's notion of unalienated festivity best captures the vision of the students. Completely absent from 42 Cohn-Bendit, The French Student Revolt, trans. B. Brewster (N.Y., 1968) 58.

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Epilogue the ideas of May were traditional liberal notions of the individual as atomic, freedom over society, society as an objective other, emotion as in contradiction to reason. Reified ideologies and institutions would be avoided, for the students, by the reciprocity of "shared experience." Certainly the students did not carefully articulate these notions; discourse itself was an evil to them. But the standpoint from which their Arguments or epigraphs emerged was that of existential Marxism. Its notion of free choice of one's destiny in collective action was called autogestion by the students and was their central demand. Perhaps the quotation they took from Nietzsche best expressed their state of mind: "One must have chaos in one's soul to give birth to a dancing star"--in Sartrean terms, one must live freedom authentically to avoid bad faith. The feature of the events of May that I would like to draw most attention to was its festive tone, its absence of reification in consciousness and relationships, an astonishing openness of personal encounters. (The Latin Quarter was without cars.) The direct communication of the spoken word, even to total strangers, transformed the stiff politeness of bourgeois interactions. All the walls between people seemed to crumble in a flash, dissolving old inhibitions, defenses, and fears. Many people, not only students, but old and young, men and women, intellectuals and workers, the specialized and the unskilled, spoke simply about what shape the world should take, what should they do and be, what life should be like. There was thus a metaphysical quality to the talk: it seemed possible that reality could be changed. The [social] pyramid had melted like a sugar loaf in the May sunshine. People talked to each other, they understood one another at once. There were no more intellectuals, no more workers, only revolutionaries discussing everywhere, generalizing a communication from which only "proletarianist" intellectuals, or other would-be organizers, felt excluded. In this context, the 385


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the word "comrade" found its true meaning once again: it really marked the end of all separation between people.[43] For a brief moment, France tasted life beyond alienation.

3. Sartre and Lefebvre Explain History The response of intellectuals to May was almost universally approval. Technocrats like Michel Crozier were hostile, [44] and Aron saw himself as the lone voice of sanity amidst a general madness. Structuralists were also skeptical, staying away from the Sorbonne as if it housed the plague. [45] Significantly, Lévi-Strauss lamented the death of his ideas because of May: "In France you know structuralism is no longer in fashion. Since May, 1968, all objectivity has been repudiated. The position of the youth corresponds more to that of Sartre." [46] At one point, Althusser went to the Latin Quarter, accompanied by Louis Aragon, the veteran poet of the CP, only to be booed for not leaving the Party. Still, the authorities fancied structuralism dangerous and Jacques Lacan was dismissed from the Ecole Normale Supérieure after May. Overall, structuralists maintained silence during May, giving the students and workers no support. In Althusser's case this was baffling since one of the groups, the UJCML, was led by his followers.[49] Within the existential Marxist camp, the Arguments group fully supported the upheaval. They were nevertheless spurned as revisionists precisely by those groups (the Situationists) who borrowed heavily from them. Edgar Morin was jeered; Henri Lefebvre was threatened 43 R. Viénet, Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Paris, 1968). For the same impression cf. Seale, op. cit., 93 and Ardagh, op. cit., 471. 44 Johnson, op. cit., 84. 45 Ibid. 46 N.Y. Times (Dec. 31, 1969). 47 Johnson, op cit. 48 D. Cooper, The Death of the Family (N.Y., 1971) 73n. 49 Oelgart, B., Idéologues et idéologies de la nouvelle gauche (Paris 1970) 125.

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Epilogue physically; and Axelos was insulted with bags of excrement at his door.[50] Sartre, upon offering his services to the liberated Sorbonne, fared a little better. And yet Mascolo and Lapassade, from Arguments, participated in the Writers and Artists Action Committee.


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In the last analysis, the relation of existential Marxism to le joli mai is determined by its capacity to make the events intelligible. Although it is true that some liberals like Servan-Schreiber [51] saw in the protesting students and workers a voice of healthy reform, they tended to ascribe these reforms to further modernization and rationalization of society, not to the expression of a qualitatively new set of possibilities. It seems to me that it was the existential Marxists who were best able to discover and to explain those features in the events of May that were new to protest movements and that make May 1968, so historically significant. [52] In 1968 Lefebvre taught sociology at the place where it all began: Nanterre. His small tract about May, The Explosion, developed from a concrete sense of what the students were up to, one that was often lacking in books on the subject by other intellectuals. From this contact, Lefebvre translated the discontents and hopes of May into the language of his existential Marxism, avoiding many of the issues, like spontaneity versus a party that tended to obscure so many discussions of the upheaval. He trod a careful course between the antinomies that caught the attention of others: May represented to him the kind of new protest that made sense only in relation to the new stage of capitalist society. It was not a matter of workers versus students, of the old or new proletariat, of generational or oedipal conflict. With the increasing concentration of 50 Willener, op. cit., 92. 51 The Spirit of May (N.Y., 1971). 52 The book on May 1968 by Morin, Lefort, and Castoriadis, La Brèche (Paris 1968) demonstrates the same strengths as Lefebvre and Sartre, but I do not have the space for a full discussion of it.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism decision-making power in a tiny technocratic elite, the vast majority of the population, in all sectors, experienced a sense of anomie and alienation, of pointless activities and empty theories. [53] With the conquest of scarcity, Lefebvre saw the entire population being subjected to the deadening pressures of consumerism. The action of the students symbolically expressed what others felt: hence the rapidity with which the strike spread and the universality of support. The politics of spontaneous confrontation was the only means of avoiding the establishment's enormous powers of co-optation. Selfmanagement, the universal cry, was directed not at special spaces of experience but at everyday life itself. Politics and culture were fused as the students challenged all reified forms of experience: learning based on distant, authoritarian contacts between teachers and students; art segregated from life; work in which planning and thought were divorced from active production. Lefebvre claimed that only his theory of urbanism could express the central themes of the new contradictions.[54] The protest was


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against the totality of everyday life, not merely against the workplace or the parliament. The method of confrontation was a great refusal, in Marcuse's sense, that eluded the ubiquitous manipulations of bigbrother bureaucracy, It was in the streets, on the walls, that the challenges were made. "Contestation is an all-inclusive, total rejection of experienced or anticipated forms of alienation. It is a deliberate refusal to be co-opted." [55] The students combined "urban guerrilla warfare" with "urban celebration," violence with festivity.[56] in a blend that caught the technocratic ruling class totally off guard. To traditional Marxists, Lefebvre's analysis was weak just where the May movement was weak: it had no strategy for the future, no leadership, no coherent revolutionary or53 Lefebvre, op. cit., 97. 54 Ibid., 98. 55 Ibid., 67. 56 Ibid., 115.

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Epilogue ganization. The reply of the existential Marxist indicated the difficulty of the problem: anything with system, with fixed leadership, with coherent strategy, inevitably fell into the hands of the bureaucracy, became reified, and contradicted the very nature of the initial project of socialism. A deeper sense of the situation in advanced societies was emerging: it was not so much that rational planning was proscribed in a romantic flourish, but that theory and action had to be integrated in the concrete, immediate creativity of politics. Everything had to be subordinated to the union of desire and action in the selfmanaged group if the struggle was to be pointed against reification and alienation. For Lefebvre, a "new praxis" of urbanism emerged in May in which "the term 'political' is restored to its oldest meaning--the theoretical and practical knowledge of the social life in the community."[57] Only movements that began from this point spoke truly to the context of advanced society because advanced technology made this unity, for the first time in human history, a practical possibility. The May events did not profoundly change Lefebvre's thought or action if only because he was perhaps one of the few to foresee them. More than Lefebvre, it was Sartre who was jolted from his intellectual slumber by the festival, even though his Critique, in some uncanny way, practically wrote the scenario for much of what was to occur. Very quickly, Sartre leaped to the support of the students. On May 8th, Le Monde carried a declaration, signed by Sartre, De Beauvoir, and others, calling on workers and intellectuals to join the students.[58] Two days later, a manifesto appeared in Le Monde, signed by Sartre, Gorz, Lefebvre, Lacan, and others, characterizing the movement as an effort to escape an "alienated order" of society, not simply a project http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (23 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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of university reform. Existential Marxists saw May in a world-historical perspective, not as a French phenom57 Ibid., 155. 58 Contat, op. cit., 463.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism enon. On May 12th, Radio Luxembourg carried an interview with Sartre, who favored the student tactic of contestation and street fighting. [59] On May 20th, Le Nouvel Observateur printed an interview between Sartre and Cohn-Bendit, in which the intellectual, with gracious self-effacement, took the role of the interviewer, allowing Dany to speak his mind freely. In addition to public statements in the media, Sartre was a constant visitor of the "liberated zone" in the Latin Quarter. On May 20th he spoke at the Sorbonne, applauding the students' "new conception of a society based on full democracy, a marriage between socialism and freedom." [60] Socialism and freedom--the program Sartre had fought for since the days of the Resistance--had won the day. In the interviews that he gave during and after the events, Sartre was struck by the students' spontaneous awareness of the unity of theory and action. Their demands for university reform, which Raymond Aron viewed as pure barbarism, were completely backed by Sartre. Student power to participate in choosing faculty--the one demand most difficult for the older generation to appreciate--made eminent sense to Sartre.[61] The existential Marxist agreed with the students that the university embodied a sterile concept of learning in which the authority of the teacher could not be challenged. True learning, to him, demanded a constant challenge, an active criticism that should be open to all members of the society, not just to a tiny elite. [62] Sartre asserted that the students were expressing the demands of a new working class for self-management in every aspect of life. More important than Sartre's sympathetic comprehension of the events of May, was the ability of existential Marxism, especially in the Critique, to make this social experience 59 Ibid., 464. 60 Ibid., 466. 61 Situations (Paris, 1972) Vol. 8, 188. 62 Ibid., 189.

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Epilogue intelligible. [63] In two interviews in 1969 [64] Sartre was asked to explain how the Critique anticipated the May explosion. He spoke of the war in Vietnam as an origin of May, since it vastly expanded the "field of the possible." If a tiny peasant society could resist America, advanced society was vulnerable. [65] In fact, the lesson of May, for Sartre, was that revolution in advanced society could now be regarded as a possibility. In terms of the Critique, the project of revolution required the moment of the subjective grasping of its possibility. The Critique also made clear the relation of the student-worker movement to the established oppositional institutions. The CP and CGT were bureaucracies that serialized the workers, opposing the, group-in-fusion and making militant action impossible.[66] The traditional Left had lost the power of the negative, since it aped the inertia of the ruling class in its structure. The difference between the group-in-fusion and the series lay behind the CP's conservatism during May. To Sartre, the May movement lacked the leadership of a party that would not stifle the creative freedom of its members and still be able to direct the revolution. May was a cultural revolution without a political revolution, and hence it bad to fail. Nevertheless, it presented advanced society with its true negation for the first time: the struggle against alienation and for self-management confronted technological society with its limitations and contradictions. The more striking parallels between the Critique and the May movement were not mentioned by Sartre, either out of modesty or because he thought them too obvious. His 63 This was noted only by one commentator in France. A pseudonymous professor from Nanterre [Epistemon], pseud. for Didier Anzieu in Ces Idées qui ont ébranlé la France (Paris, 1968) 76. Johnson, op. cit., also tried to understand May through the Critique, 151-152. 64 "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., and "Masses, Spontaneity, Party," op. cit. 65 "Itinerary," op. cit., 63 and "Masses," op. cit., 239. 66 "Masses," op. cit., 235.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism understanding of the emergence of negativity in the social field, the formation of fused groups amid seriality, captured remarkably what happened in May. As in his description of 1789, the sudden comprehension by the students, and later by the workers, of mutuality through external threat was the spring of action during May.


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The university was an excellent example of Sartre's concept of the practico-inert. [67] Students were indeed serialized by an institution that appeared as an alien Other. The university confronted the students not as a field for them to refashion, but as a totally fixed set of relations whose origin and meaning were obscured by the fragmentation of knowledge into compartmentalized disciplines and by the contemplative nature of the knowledge that was imparted. Here was a perfect illustration of a detotalized totality. Furthermore, there was a strict separation between teacher and student, bifurcating the praxis of learning. Also, relations between students resembled Sartre's concept of the series, with competition for grades creating a scarcity that had to be interiorized by the students and that compelled them to regard one another as interchangeable, depersonalized enemies. A similar analysis could be rendered of the workers' conditions. On May 3rd, as the students watched their companions being loaded into police wagons, they saw in the other their own situation. Mutual recognition led to the formation of groups-in-fusion, breaking the atomized seriality of the structure of everyday life. A Sartrean account of the origin of May compares favorably with those of other groups. Gaullists and official Marxists invoked a weak conspiracy theory, blaming everything on a handful of troublemakers from outside France (to which the students and workers, 30,000 strong, chanted "we are all German Jews and we are all small groups"). With somewhat more pertinence, many liberals attributed everything to the 67 [Epistemon], op., cit., 78-81, also attempts to apply the categories of the Critique to May '68.

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Epilogue obsolescence of the university. Others used psychoanalysis with its theory of students acting out oedipal tensions to diminish the proportions of the May events. On the other hand, Sartre's theory seems to allow the events to be grasped more concretely. It would be possible to trace in detail how the students and workers retotalized the practical field in the new situation, without resorting to determinism, reductionism, or irrationalism. What Sartre had not accounted for in the Critique was the ability of exemplary action to stimulate the latent violence of ruling institutions and to provoke the external threat. This was the genius of CohnBendit and the March 22nd Movement. In other words, a revolution could be sparked by the oppressed themselves and did not require an unintended cataclysm, like a depression, or an aggressive action by the ruling class, like Louis XVI surrounding Paris with his troops. The weight of the practico-inert in tension with the transcending freedom of collective action was condition enough for revolution. Sartre's dialectics of individual and group, thought and action, freedom and necessity were all


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exemplified in May. During the uprising the individual, by himself, did not contemplate revolution and then act on it. The individual in the situation pre-reflectively projected himself through the other and then, from the mutuality of projects, from the existential quality of the group-in-fusion, intellectual representations of the group's consciousness emerged. Freedom was not a product of individual thought or even of individual action; it required the structure of the group-in-fusion as its condition of existence. Suddenly each student totalized his own field, expanding this totalization to include all the oppressions of the university structure, and later, after May 13th, all of the oppressions of the larger society. Similarly, the workers, serialized on one side by capitalism and on the other by the CGT and the CP, saw themselves in the students' act393

III. Toward an Existential Marxism ion on the barricades. How many times had they battled the police? Were not the demands of the students for autogestion applicable to their own condition? In many cases the first step of negation was followed by the second step of group formation. Out of the barricades came the action committees. In the Critique, the group-in-fusion led to the organization, the oath, the terror, and finally to reserialization in institutions. The dialectic of groups-in-fusion followed a slightly different pattern during May. They began to divide their labor and become organizations; the action committees were democratic organizations that preserved the creative praxis of the group-in-fusion. But oaths were not taken, even symbolically, and terror did not enter the organizations. During the festival, the protestors did not perceive the denial of their action in the freedom of their comrades. This was important. The absence of terror could be used to explain the failure of the May movement, since terror worked to stiffen the self-defense of the revolution and to direct it politically toward the final overthrow. On the other hand, the absence of terror within the action committees could be explained through the profundity of the new consciousness and new relations germinating there. The crucial fact was that the action committees did not turn to the enemy as Sartre thought they must. They did not become obsessed with the threat of the old authority, as had Robespierre and the long, tragic history of revolutions. In large part, the students had avoided terrorism.[68] Therefore, they did not carry out witch hunts in their own camp in search of the omnipresent, infiltrating enemy. Perhaps the event did not last long enough. Yet one can speculate that what made it possible for the action committees to avoid the terror was the fullness with which they actualized the new relations of reciprocity. The students and workers in the specific cases mention 68 Ibid., 81-84, for examples of tense Situations in which the students avoided terrorism.

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Epilogue ed above escaped the circular return to serialization by living the new society in the groups they had established. The revolt against the series and the emergence of creative action were not two distinct phases of May but moments in the same dialectical process. Hence the rebels discounted, no doubt unrealistically, the threats of De Gaulle and the capitalists. The May movement chose to negate authority and to build new structures at the same time. The commentators who bemoaned the rebels' utopian demand for immediate revolution tended to miss the point of what they had done. Here was both the weakness and the strength of May. It was able to define itself against the enemy without having the enemy define its own structures. Sartre had argued that the enemy's seriality would necessarily be introduced by the revolutionaries as they struggled against it. The events of May suggest that the circularity of the Sartrean dialectic could be broken by the preservation of the group-in-fusion. The closer that means and ends were united, the less the rebels were, subject to reserialization. It is not at all clear that the failure of May could be attributed to its refusal to divorce means and ends and push for instrumental action against the state. It might rather be argued that it had no chance of total success in any case and that many of the rebels knew this since they chanted, "This is only the beginning." From an: existential Marxist perspective the May events were successful in showing the possibility of nonatomistic social relations and in showing that these relations were not the direct consequence of overthrowing property but of a new, intersubjective praxis. The lesson of May was that social transformation in advanced society must concentrate on the immediate creation of new relations of reciprocity rather than concentrate on overthrowing the enemy. Exemplary action embodying the new principles must be combined with negative unmasking of established oppressions. 395

III. Toward an Existential Marxism Furthermore, if it is accepted that advanced society nurtures the demands for self-management, for the end of alienation, for qualitative rather than quantitative changes in society, it could be said that the continued development of advanced society, the ever more profound serialization of people in more bureaucratic, more powerless relations, creates ever more surely the conditions for the emergence of the group-in-fusion; that the continued spread of the contradictions specific to advanced society, its need to integrate and control more and more aspects of daily life, prepares the ground for a deeper and more widespread May movement. It seems clear that the proletarianization of the old middle class, the technicians, and the white-collar workers in service industries prepared these groups to be able to identify their own Situations with those of students and blue-collar workers. By the same token, the http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter9.html (28 of 30) [11/12/2007 23:16:56]

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weaknesses of May called for a new kind of politics that could centralize the impulses of the action committees. In fact the Left coalition formed after May 1968, including Socialists and Communists, took up the program for worker self-management, a demand that the CP traditionally opposed. Still, it is not clear that this coalition would promote the full implications of the May events should it gain an electoral victory. At the very least, it seems that the transformation of advanced capitalism into socialism will have little in common with the transformation of feudal, agricultural societies into industrialized societies, whether on the model of the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks. To the extent that a new theory is needed for this unprecedented process, existential Marxism seems appropriate. The May events forced Sartre to reexamine the question of the relation of the intellectual to the movement. Once more his life was in question. Should he now resume his position as gadfly of the CP? Was it possible for the intellectual to regard himself as a man of theory who preserved the interests of pure criticism against those of 396

Epilogue politics and action?'[69] Sartre's action after 1968 manifested another change in his attitude. He began to act. In the street, he distributed a Maoist newspaper when the regime had banned it. He was placing his body, not merely his mind, on the line. In 1970 an interviewer pressed Sartre on the apparent changes May, 1968 had stimulated in his life. Hesitantly, he agreed with the interviewer that abstruse writing, like his new book on Flaubert, needed to be supplemented by writing that was readable by the masses. Further, the intellectual bad to lend himself to political action to an extent that he had previously avoided. Selling prohibited newspapers in the street was contestation. By 1971, Sartre accepted what was in France the Maoist model of a cultural revolution without terror, thereby rescinding the circularity of the social dialectic in the Critique. It was possible to forget the CP and develop a different sense of Party leadership. At last Sartre was freed from his ambiguous reliance on the Party. Giving up the CP in turn, changed the situation for the intellectual. Then May, 1968, happened, and I understood that what the young were putting into question was not just capitalism, imperialism, the system, etc., but those of us who pretended to be against all that as well. We can say that from 1940 to 1968 I was a left-wing intellectual and from 1968 on I became -an intellectual leftist. The difference is one of action.[71] Sartre claimed that he was coming closer to Gramsci's model of an organic intellectual who is closely connected to the revolutionary class. The implications of Being and Nothingness were now fully


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brought home to him. To avoid bad faith, action had to supplement thought, unifying the project even of the intellectual: the risk of ideas was 69 In 1965 Sartre still basically maintained his old position. See, "Plaidoyer pour les intellectuals," Situations, Vol. 8, 375-455. 70 "Sartre Accuses the Intellectuals of Bad Faith," New York Times Magazine (Oct. 17, 1971), 118. 71 Ibid.

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III. Toward an Existential Marxism false without the risk of the body. Unity of theory and practice still eluded Sartre, for his position contained numerous difficulties and contradictions. Virtually a cultural institution in France, he could not carry out contestation without having it become a spectacle, as his newspaper hawking certainly was. More deeply, I sense a certain inability in him to develop a politics that both follows from his theory and is personally satisfying to him. For what, after all, were Sartre's politics in the 1960s? There were the strident appeals for violent action in the Third World, especially in the preface to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth; then, after 1968, there was the call for intellectuals to put down their books and go to the workers, servir le peuple. These are, of course, possible projects; yet Sartre continued to pour out thousands of pages on Flaubert that, valuable as they are, few proletarians would ever read. The point here is that his politics do not fully confront the experiences of advanced capitalism in France. Instead they seem to flee from relevant theoretical and practical work, from the challenges posed by the new conjuncture, as if impelled by a guilty conscience. Sartre still seems to struggle against his own best talents. In wanting to save himself from the characteristic bad faith of the intellectual--hiding behind one's knowledge--he moved to bad faith at a second level, that of the ultra-revolutionary. None of this is meant to diminish the great significance of his thought, which, I have argued, goes far toward conceptualizing the path of liberating social change. 398


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Bibliography _______________________________________________________

NOTE: A full bibliography of existential Marxism would require a volume by itself. The following is a list of books that I found useful for this study. It does not include articles and it does not include any books on May, 1968, since the bibliography by Lawrence Wylie, Franklin Chu, and Mary Terrall, France: Events of May/June 1968: A Critical Bibliography (Pittsburgh, 1973) is excellent. When available, English translations have been listed here, not the French original. Albérès, R.-M., Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosopher Without Faith, trans. Wade Baskin (London, 1964). Althusser, Louis, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (N.Y., 1970). , Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1971). , and Balibar, Etienne, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1970). , Réponse à John Lewis (Paris, 1973). Aron, Raymond, Histoire et dialectique de la violence (Paris, 1973). , Marxism and the Existentialists (N.Y., 1969). , The Opium of the Intellectuals, trans. T. Kelmartin (N.Y., 1962). , D'Une Sainte famille à l'autre: essai sur les marxismes imaginaires (Paris, 1969). Asveld, Paul, La Pensée religieuse de jeune Hegel (Louvain,1953). Audry, Colette, Connaissance de Sartre (Paris, 1955). , ed., Pour et contre 1'existentialisme (Paris, 1948). Axelos, Kostas, Le Jeu du monde (Paris, 1969). ,Marx, penseur de la technique (Paris, 1961). ,Vers la pensée planétaire (Paris, 1964). Baas, Emile, L'Humanisme marxiste (Paris, 1947). ,Introduction critique au marxisrne (Paris, 1960). 399

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston, Le Matérialisme rationnel (Paris, 1963). Bannan, John F., The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (N.Y., 1967). Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (N.Y., 1972). Bartoli, Henri, La Doctrine économique et sociale de Karl Marx (Paris, 1950). http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bibliography.html (1 of 7) [11/12/2007 23:16:59]

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Baudrillard, Jean, The Mirror of Production, trans. M. Poster (St. Louis, 1975). Beauvoir, Simone de, Force of Circumstance, trans. R. Howard (N.Y., 1964). ,Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. J. Kirkup (N.Y., 1959). ,The Prime of Life, trans. P. Green (London, 1963). Beigbeden, Marc, L'Homme Sartre (Paris, 1947). Belleville, Pierre, Une Nouvelle classe ouvrière (Paris, 1963). Bigo, Pierre, Marxisme et humanisme (Paris, 1945). Bourdet, Yvon, Communisme et marxisme (Paris, 1963). Burnier, Michel-Antoine, Choice of Action, trans. B. Murchland (N.Y., 1969). Caire, Guy, L'Aliénation dans les oeuvres de jeunesse de K. Marx (Aix-en-Provence, 1957). Calvez, Jean-Yves, La Pensée de Karl Marx (Paris, 1956). Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. J. O'Brien (N.Y., 1955). ,The Rebel, trans. A. Bower (N.Y., 1956). Castoriadis, Cornélius, La Société bureaucratique (Paris 1973). Caute, David, Communism and the French Intellectuals (N.Y.,1964). Chatelet, François, Hegel (Paris, 1968). ,Logos et praxis (Paris, 1962). ,La Naissance de l'histoire (Paris, 1962). Cogniot, Georges, Karl Marx, notre contemporaine (Paris, 1969). Contat, Michel and Rybalka, M., Les Ecrits de Sartre (Paris, 1970). Cornu, Auguste, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels (Paris, 1955). ,Karl Marx et la pensée moderne (Paris, 1948). Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Red and Black (Boston, 1970). Derrida, Jacques, De La Grammatologie (Paris, 1967). Desan, Wilfred, The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre (N.Y., 1965). Desanti, Jean, Phénoménologie et praxis (Paris, 1963). Desroches, Henri, Signification du marxisme (Paris, 1949). Ducrot, Oswald, et al., Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? (Paris, 1969). 400

Bibliography Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society, trans. J. Wilkenson (N.Y., 1964). Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. S. Smith (N.Y., 1972). ,The Order of Things (N.Y., 1973). Fougeyrollas, Pierre, La Conscience politique dans la France contemporaine (Paris, 1963). ,Contradiction et totalité (Paris, 1964). ,Le Marxisme en question (Paris, 1959). http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bibliography.html (2 of 7) [11/12/2007 23:16:59]

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,La Philosophie en question (Paris, 1960). Friedmann, Georges, Sept études sur 1'homme et la technique (Paris, 1966). Gabel, Joseph, La Fausse conscience (Paris, 1962). ,Sociologie de l'aliénation (Paris, 1970). Garaudy, Roger, Le Communisme et la morale (Paris, 1945). ,Dieu est mort: étude sur Hegel (Paris, 1962). ,Humanisme marxiste (Paris, 1957). ,Literature of the Graveyard, trans. J. Bernstein (N.Y., 1948). ,et al., Mesaventures de l'anti-marxisme (Paris, 1956). ,Perspectives de l'homme (Paris, 1959). ,Questions à J.-P. Sartre (Paris, 1960). Godelier, Maurice, Rationality and Irrationality in Economics (London, 1973). Goldmann, Lucien, The Human Sciences and Philosophy, trans. H. White (London, 1969). ,Immanuel Kant, trans. R. Black (London, 1971). ,Lukacs et Heidegger (Paris, 1973). ,Recherches dialectiques (Paris, 1959). Gombin, Richard, Les Origines du gauchisme (Paris, 1971). Gorz, André, Socialism and Revolution, trans. N. Denny (N.Y., 1973). ,Strategy for Labor, trans. M. Nicolaus and V. Ortiz (N.Y., 1967). ,The Traitor, trans. R. Howard (N.Y., 1959). Grégoire, Franz, Aux Sources de la pensée de Marx (Paris, 1947). Gurvitch, Georges, Dialectique et sociologie (Paris, 1962). Hartmann, Klaus, Sartre's Ontology: A Study of Being and Nothingness in the Light of Hegels' Logic (Evanston, 1966). ,Sartres Sozialphilosophie (Berlin, 1966). Hegel, Georg F. W., Morceaux choisis de Hegel, eds. Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guter-mann (Paris, 1938). ,La Phénoménologie de Hegel, trans. J. Hyppolite (Paris, 1939-1941). 401

Bibliography Hughes, H. Stuart, The Obstructed Path (N.Y., 1968). Hyppolite, Jean, Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel (Paris, 1946). ,Introduction à la philosophie de 1'histoire de Hegel (Paris, 1948). ,Logique et existence (Paris, 1952). ,Studies on Marx and Hegel, trans. J. O'Neill (N.Y., 1969). Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form (Princeton, 1971). Jeanson, Francis, La Problème moral et la pensée de Sartre (Paris, 1965). http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bibliography.html (3 of 7) [11/12/2007 23:16:59]

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Jordon, Z. A., Philosophy and Ideology (Holland, 1963). Kanapa, Jean, L'Existentialisrne n'est pas un humanisme (Paris, 1947). Klare, Karl, and Howard, Dick, eds., The Unknown Dimension (N.Y., 1973). Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. J. Nichols (N.Y., 1969). Korsch, Karl, Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday (London, 1970). Kosik, Karel, Die Dialektik des Konkreten (Frankfurt am Main,1967). Labedz, Leo, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (N.Y., 1962). Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits (Paris, 1966). ,The Language of the Self, trans. A. Wilden (Baltimore, 1968). Lacroix, Jean, Marxisme, existentialisme, personnalisme (Paris, 1949). Lafarge, René, Jean-Paul Sartre: His Philosophy (Indiana, 1970). Laing, R. D., and Cooper, David, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy (N.Y., 1964). Lane, Michael, ed., Structuralism: A Reader (London, 1970). Lapassade, Georges, L'Entrée dans la vie (Paris, 1963). Leach, Edmund, Claude Lévi-Strauss (N.Y., 1970). Leduc, Victor, ed., Structuralisme et marxisme (Paris, 1970). Lefebvre, Henri, Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris, 1971). ,and Gutermann, Norbert, La Conscience mystifiée (Paris, 1936). ,Critique de la vie quotidienne (Paris, 1947-1962). ,Le Droit à la ville (Paris, 1968). ,Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. S. Rabinovitch (N.Y.,1971). ,L'Existentialisme (Paris, 1946). ,Introduction à la modernité (Paris, 1962). 402

Bibliography ,Le Langage et la société (Paris, 1966). ,Logique formelle et logique dialectique (Paris, 1947). ,Marx et la liberté (Paris, 1947). ,Le Marxisme (Paris, 1948). ,Marx philosophe (Paris, 1964). ,Le Matérialisme dialectique (Paris, 1939). ,Métaphilosophie (Paris, 1965). ,La Pensée de Karl Marx (Paris, 1947). ,Position: contre les technocrates (Paris, 1967). ,Pour connaître la pensée de Karl Marx (Paris, 1948). ,Problèmes actuels du marxisme (Paris, 1957). ,The Sociology of Marx, trans. N. Gutermann (N.Y., 1969). http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bibliography.html (4 of 7) [11/12/2007 23:16:59]

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Bibliography Mascolo, Dionys, Le Communisme: révolution et communication ou la dialectique des valeurs et des besoins (Paris, 1953). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. J. Bien (Evanston, 1973). , Humanism and Terror, trans. J. O'Neill (Boston, 1969). , The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London, 1962). , Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. and P. Dreyfus (Evanston, 1964). , Signs, trans. R. McCleary (Evanston, 1964). Metzger, Arnold, Existentialismus und Sozialismus: der Dialog des Zeitalters (Pfullingen, 1968). Monnerot, Jules, Sociology of Communism, trans. J. Degras and R. Rees (London, 1953). Morin, Edgar, Autocritique (Paris, 1959). Mougin, Henri, La Sainte famille existentialists (Paris, 1947). Mounier, Emmanuel, Introduction aux existentialismes (Paris, 1946). Naville, Pierre, De L'Aliénation à la jouissance (Paris, 1954). , L'Intellectuel communists: à propos de J.-P. Sartre (Paris, 1956). http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bibliography.html (5 of 7) [11/12/2007 23:16:59]

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Index

Index _______________________________________________________

Abraham, 29 Action, 109-11, 179 Adorno, Theodor, 43, 248n, 305n Alain, 76, 113 Aléthéia, 257 Algeria, 186, 298 Algerian National Liberation Front, 186 Algerian War, 76, 78, 161, 205,380 Allonnes, Olivier R. d', 334n Althusser, Louis, 19, 51, 232,254,272,306,312,314, 320,340-60,374,384,386 Amazon, 307, 329, 336 America, Americans, 38, 164,250,292,304,307,391 anarchism, 296 Antelme, Robert, 215 Anzieu, Didier, 391n Aragon, Louis, 138, 386

http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (1 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

Arato, Andrew, 44n Argomenti, 211 Arguments, 313, 365,374, 387 Arguments group, 162, 179, 210-23, 227, 229, 231, 239, 240, 248n, 260-63, 266-68, 273, 300, 305-6, 348, 351, 384, 386 Aristotle, Aristotelian, 15, 17 Aron, Raymond, 8, 81, 135n, 187,190-94, 265n, 300, 341n, 370, 386,390 Ash, William, 265n Audry, Colette, 76, 125n, 126n Axelos, Kostas, 305n; and Arguments, 210, 213, 214, 220, 222-27, 232, 235, 236, 240, 255, 257, 263; and Marx, 50n, 55, 57, 58, 60-62, 64, 65, 69;and May '68, 387

Baas, Emile, 50n, 54n Bachelard, Gaston, 342 Badiou, Alain, 341n, 356n, 358n Bakunin, Michael, 383 Balibar, Etienne, 355, 357 Baroque, 23 Barthes, Roland, 211, 252, 312,313 Bartoli, Henri, 50n, 59n, 60n Bastille, 288


Index

Bataille, Georges, 8 Bateson, Gregory, 273n Baudelaire, Charles, 195, 201 Baudrillard, Jean, 360n Beaufret, Jean, 222, 223 Beauvoir, Simone de, 20, 74-77, 80n, 81n, 110, 111n, 122, 135n, 139, 173, 175, 183n, 195n, 264n, 265n, 271n, 307, 389 behaviorism, 132 Belleville, Pierre, 362, 365, 367,368 Benda, Julien, 125n Benveniste, Emile, 309 Bergson, Henri, 20, 49, 113 Berlin University, 33 Bern, 28 Bernstein, Eduard, 45, 52 Bertherat, Yves, 337 Besse, Guy, 39n, 179, 340n Bigo, Pierre, 50n, 51, 54n, 60,69 Binzwanger, Ludwig, 262 Blanqui, Auguste, 36 407


Index

Bloch, Ernst, 43 Blondel, Maurice, 113 Bloom, Allan, l0n Bolsheviks, 396 Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, 184 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 17, 21 Bottigelli, Emile, 42n, 341n Bourdet, Claude, 178, 212 Bourdet, Yvon, 211n, 213n Breines, Paul, 43n Breton, André, 3, 116, 138, 381 Brunschvicg, Leon, 4n, 9, 113,115 Bukharin, Nikolai, 47, 154, 155, 158,159,199 Burnier, Michel-Antoine, 75n,139n, 172n, 182n, 186n, 187n

Caire, Guy, 50n, 60n, 70n Caltex, 367 Calvez, Jean-Yves, 50n, 51, 5355,57,59-61,63,69,228 Calvin, Jean, 15 Camus, Albert, 110, 161, 187-91


Index

Canguilhem, Georges, 345n capitalism, 29, 38, 40-41, 45-48,68, 84, 121, 123, 131-32, 14243, 155, 162-63, 167-69, 171, 184,191, 197, 204-5,217,219,226, 244-45, 247,263, 281,283, 285, 300, 340,345,350, 352, 355-57, 363, 366-68, 374, 376, 377, 381, 393, 397 Carr, Edward H., 214 Carroll, David, 338n Cartesian, Cartesianism, 4, 17, 20, 90, 98, 103, 126-28, 143, 147, 153, 175, 177, 193, 226, 289,309,323 Castoriadis, Cornélius, 202-5,211,222,371n, 387n Castro, Fidel, 300 Catholics, 5, 6, 8, 28, 29, 49, 51, 54,57,60,85,126,174n Caute, David, 38n Caveing, Maurice, 39n, 133, 270n Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 128 Cercle, d'Ulm, 359 Charles X, 380 Chatelet, François, 60, 214, 220, 222, 223, 232-37, 240, 255, 257,263,274 China, 280 Chiodi, Pietro, 265n, 286n, 287n Christ, 28, 29 Christian Churches, 15 Christians, 29, 209, 340 Classicism, 23 http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (5 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

Cogniot, Georges, 40n, 51n Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 372, 373,380,382-84,390,393 Collège de France, 18 Comité National des Ecrivains,109,139 Commission de I'Energie Atomique,379 Committee of Intellectuals Against the War in North Africa, 210 Common Market, 8 Commune of 1871, 184 Communist International, 37 Communist Party of France, 9, 36-39, 49, 50, 55, 68, 79, 110-12, 125-28, 131, 133, 136,138-141, 146, 153-154, 159, 161,163-69, 171-87, 200, 201, 209-15, 218, 227,228, 238-39, 340,342, 359,360,365-66, 368, 371-76, 380, 383, 386, 391, 393, 396-397 Communist Party of Italy, 305 Compagnie Générale d' Electricité, 397 Campagnie de Télégraphie Sans Fils de Brest, 379 138-41, 146, 153-54, 159, Comte, Auguste, 3, 302 Confédération Française Démo- 161, 163-69, 171-87, 200,Communist Party of Italy, 305 Compagnie Generale d'Electricit6, 397 cratique du Travail, 379 Confédération Générale du Travail, 366, 368, 372, 376-79, 391,393 conservatism, 6, 7, 49, 85 consumerism, 247


Index

Contat, Michel, 76n Cooper, David, 197n Copernicus, Nicholas, 193, 318 Corneille, Pierre, 16n Cornu, Auguste, 69

408

Cottier, Georges, 43n, 50n, 51 Courtade, Pierre, 110, 112, 215 Crozier, Michel, 363n, 373, 386 cybernetics, 250 Czechoslovakia, 70

Dalmas, Louis, 171 Darwin, Charles, 193, 318 Debord, Guy, 257 Deleuze, Gilles, 19 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 252, 338n,353n-54n Desan, Wilfred, 265n, 289 Desanti, Dominique, 112 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 8, 9,38n, 61, 64n, 110, 112, 122, 267n, 323n Descartes, Rene, 20-22, 25, 72, 76, 90, 122, 127-28, 148, 193, 223,226,271,289,324 dialectical http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (7 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

materialism, diamat, 36, 38, 40-41, 43, 45, 116, 118, 120, 126, 150, 222, 227, 231, 267, 269, 341, 342, 349 Diderot, Denis, 22, 25n, 37, 87, 238 Dienbienphu, 161 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 192n, 273 Domenacb, Jean-Marie, 51n, 320n Dubrovsky, Serge, 16n Duclos, Jacques, 164, 165 Dufrenne, Mikel, 3n, 21n, 314,315,384 Dunayevskaya, Raya, 265n Durkheim, Emile, 6-8, 291-92 Duvignaud, Jean, 3n, 211

Ecole Normale Supérieure, 3n, 76, 145, 187, 257, 307, 320, 341,386 Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 8 economism, 40, 43, 57, 341 Einstein, Albert, 194 Eluard, Paul, 138 Engels, Friedrich, 9, 42, 45, 52,123,131,258,281 England, 3, 212, 217, 305, 310 Enlightenment, 79, 86, 87 L'Esprit, 68, 315, 337, 357 Establet, Roger, 342n Europe, 38, 41, 46, 68, 79, 122, 137, 140-41, 292, 298, 307, 329,331,336,351 http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (8 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

L'Express, 178, 183, 185 Fanon, Frantz, 398 fascism, fascists, 12, 49, 111, 123, 125, 243, 253, 275, 383 Fédération des Etudiantes Révolutionnaires, 375 Fessard, Georges, 8 feudalism, 351, 356 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 19n, 27, 29n, 236,325 Fifth Republic, 210, 380 Le Figaro, 135n, 191, 370 Flaubert, Gustave, 98, 139, 195, 201,303,304,397,398 Fondane, Benjamin, 121n Forquin, Jean-Claude, 341n Fortuni, Franco, 211 Foucault, Michel, 19, 254, 306,312,334-39,345n, 347n Fougeyrollas, Pierre, 179, 211, 214, 220, 222, 227-29, 23132,235,263 Fourastié, Jean, 229 Fourier, Charles, 61, 227, 255 Fourth International, 180, 202 Fourth Republic, 40, 167, 210,370 Francastle, Pierre, 180


Index

France, 3-5, 9, 18, 32, 36, 38, 4142, 48, 50, 53, 55-56, 68, 70, 81n, 105, 110-12, 117, 13031, 136-37, 140, 157, 159, 162, 165n, 171, 173, 179-80, 184-86, 191, 202, 205, 21012, 222, 248n, 261, 298, 307, 312, 340, 362, 369-72, 376, 379-80, 383, 386, 391n, 392, 397-98 France, Anatole, 37 France Observateur, 178 Frankfurt, 28 Frankfurt School, 43, 64n, 247, 248n, 304 French Revolution of 1789, 21, 27,28,288-90, 328,392 409

Freud, Sigmund, 87, 112, 147, 218, 228, 260-61, 304, 316, 318-22,335,336,355 Freund, Julien, 7n, 265n, 300 Friedmann, Georges, 36, 138,249-50,362,364n Fromm, Erich, 43

Gabel, Joseph, 49n, 214, 261-63 Gaboriau, Marc, 323n game theory, 250 Garaudy, Roger, 27, 36n, 37, 50n, 51, 69, 113n, 117n, 125, 129, 130n, 132, 157, 161, 174n, 187, 209, 265n, 270n-71, 34041n, 345n, 359, 367n La Gauche, 139 Gaulle, Charles de, 38, 40, 110,144, 161, 210, 340; and May'68, 364, 370, 372-73, 379-80, 395 http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (10 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

Geismar, Alain, 364n, 365n, 375,380 Genet, Jean, 80, 98, 195-97, 199-201 George, François, 341n, 349 Germany, 3, 154, 212, 304, 380 Gilson, Etienne, 74 Glucksmann, André, 341n, 345n Godelier, Maurice, 341 Goethe, Johann W. von, l,'18 Goldmann, Lucien, 42, 44, 4750n, 209,261,318n, 370 Gombin, Richard, 211n, 213n,246n, 257n Gorz, André, 187, 265n, 287n, 363-69,389 Gramsci, Antonio, 43, 142, 343,397 Greece, 232, 233, 236, 244 Greek Civil War, 202, 222 Gregoire, Franz, 29n Grenelle Agreements, 377 Griset, Antoine, 187 Guèsde, Jules, 36 Guevara, Che, 381, 384 Gurvitch, Georges, 69, 168, 230,256n


Index

Gutermann, Norbert, 3n, 36, 42n, 116,238

Habermas, Jürgen, 64n, 304, 305n,359 Halbwachs, Maurice, 168 Hamelin, Octave, 113 Hartmann, Klaus, 266n Hegel, Georg W. F., 277-78, 286-87, 319, 322, 335-36, 343, 350, 358, 371; Arguments group, 215, 219, 230, 234-35, 238, 263; Marx, 45, 53, 66-67, 69, 70; Phenomenology of Spirit, 3-35; Sartre, 76-77, 80n81n, 83-84, 98, 103-5, 119-20, 145, 147, 149, 156, 159, 162, 188, 192 Heidegger, Martin, 16, 18, 33-34, 43-44, 49, 74n, 77, 80n-81n, 94, 111, 121n, 159, 307; Arguments group, 222-24, 227, 229, 232, 237, 240, 251, 255, 257 Hellenistic, 23, 65 Helvétius, Claude, 37, 87 Henri Martin Affair, 161 Heraclitus, 224, 240 Herr, Lucien, 3n Hervé, Pierre, 110-13n, 179-80,182,215 Hilferding, Rudolf, 214 historical materialism, 40, 246, 267,274,341-42,349,357 historicism, 335, 346, 349, 35255 Hitler, Adolf, 123, 155 Hjelmslev, Louis, 308 Hobbes, Thomas, 94, 281 Holbach, Paul-Henri d', 87 http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (12 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

Horkheimer, Max, 43, 305n Howard, Dick, 11n, 70n, 140n, 265n, 362n Hughes, H. Stuart, 6n Hughes, H. Stuart, 6n Hugo, Victor, 37 Hugo, Victor, 37 humanism, 6, 27, 67-68, 72, 105, 117-18, 125, 127, 129, 155-57, 164, 223-24, 23, 291, 324-326, 335336, 340, 343, 349, 354 humanism, 6, 27, 67-68, 72, 105, L'Humanité, 373 117-18, 125, 127, 129, 155Hungary, 49, 121, 141, 161, 169, 182-183 57, 164, 223-24, 243, 291,324-26, 335-36, 340, 343,349,354 L'Humanit-6, 373 Hungary, 49, 121, 141, 161,169,182-83 410 Husserl, Edmund, 77, 80n-82, 122, 147, 159, 193, 258, 302, 304,307,323 Hyppolite, Jean, 69, 270-71; and Hegel, 5, 8n, 18-34

idealism, idealists, 5-7, 27, 35, 64, 67, 76-77, 105, 113-15, 118, 122-23, 127-29, 135, 140-41, 143, 147, 162, 180, 200, 226, 230, 235, 272-73, 323-24 imperialism, 85, 245, 313, 397 industrial revolution, 62, 91 information theory, 250 Italy, 3, 138, 211, 305


Index

Internationale lettriste, 246 Internationale situationniste, 257,381,384,386 Jacobinism, 36, 396 Jakobson, Roman, 307-8, 338 Jameson, Frederic, 265n, 266n,275n, 278n, 286n, 287n Jaspers, Jarl, 125n jaur'es, jean, 36 Jeanson, Francois, 128n, 186-89 Jena, 28-29 Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire, 373-75 Jews, Judaism, 26, 29, 392 Johnson, Richard, 39 Joliot-Curie, Frédéric, 36 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 47n

Kanapa, Jean, 110, 112-13, 125, 129,165,167 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 25, 47, 76,122,128 Kantian, Kantianism, 4, 9, 17, 274,314,315 Kautsky, Karl, 45, 52, 169 Kierkegaard, Søren, 16, 26, 33-34,44, 49, 73n, 147, 192, 237 Koestler, Arthur, 153-55, 159 http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (14 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

Kojève, Alexandre, 145, 215, 270;and Hegel, 5, 8-18, 20-21n, 26, 33-34 Korean War, 141, 161, 163, 178 Korsch, Karl, 40n, 43, 214 Kosakiewiez, Olga, 76 Kosik, Karel, 305 Koyré, Alexandre, 3, 4n Kravetz, Marc, 187

Labedz, Leo, 3n Lacan, Jacques, 5n, 8, 261, 306, 312, 319n-22, 337, 347n, 386, 389 Lacroix, Jean, 19n, 50n, 59, 68 Laing, Ronald, 197n Landshut, Siegfried, 222 Langevin, Paul, 36 Lapassade, Georges, 214, 261,265n, 287n, 387 Latin Quarter, 373, 385, 386, 390 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 214 Lecourt, Dominique, 342n Leduc, Victor, 113n Lefebvre, Georges, 180


Index

Lefebvre, Henri, 3n, 4, 8n, 174n-75, 197, 313, 318n, 323, 330, 347, 355; Arguments group, 2I0n-215, 220, 222, 223, 238-60, 263; Being and Nothingness, 110, 112, 115-21, 123n, 129, 138n, 151; 1844 Manuscripts, 36, 42n, 50n, 55-57, 60n-62, 67, 69; May '68, 360n, 363n, 372, 381, 384, 387-89; Critique de la raison dialectique, 265n-66, 268, 297, 298 Lefort, Claude, 161, 172-73, 202-3, 205, 211, 216, 371n, 384,387n Leiris, Michel, 135n Lenin, Vladimir 1, 39, 42, 52, 111, 129, 169, 174, 203, 381 Leninism, 41, 47, 122, 171, 204, 222 Lessing, Gotthold Epliraim, 29 Letter of the 121, 78 Les Lettres Françaises, 110 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 384 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 180, 254; May'68, 386; Sartre, 337, 347n. 351, 355-56, 358; structuralism, 306-32 411 liberalism, 11, 15, 31, 105, 143,155,167,187,191,194,253,322 liberals, 8-10, 49, 85, 123, 154,168, 174n, 184, 191, 209,245,392 Liberation, 4, 37, 42, 44, 109,111,139,145 Lichtheim, George, 37n, 41n, 47ii, 50n, 51ii, 265n Lipietz, Alain, 359n Locke, John, 10, 148, 289 London, 73 Louis XIV, 318


Index

Louis XVI, 393 Lowith, Karl, 33n, 271ii Lukacs, Georg, 174, 197, 214, 215, 219, 238, 261, 302, 343, 353, 355; Being and Nothingness, 112, 12125, 142, 146n, 150-51, 157; History and Class Consciousness, 42-49 Luxemburg, Rosa, 381 Lyotard, Jean-François, 203, 205 Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich, 195

Macheray, Pierre, 342n MacPherson, C. B., 11n Malinowski, Bronislaw, 329 Mallet, Serge, 362, 363n, 365-68 Malraux, André, 47 Mannheim, Karl, 261 Manuel, Frank, 3n, 302n Maoist, 79, 359, 375, 397 Mao Tse-Tung, 381, 384 Marcel, Gabriel, 74n, III March 22nd Movement, 373-75,384, 393 Marcuse, Herbert, 7n, 43, 124n, 214, 247-48n, 257, 261, 297, 304,381,384,388 Martinet, Gilles, 157n, 178 Marx, Karl, Arguments group, 217-27, 229-30, 232, 234-47, 251, 255, 261, 263; Being and Nothingness, 76-77, 81n, 87, 95, 99, 101-2, 104-5, 111-12, 121n, 131-32, 142, 147, 148, http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (17 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

412 152-56, 159, 162, 168, 170, 173, 177, 184, 190-92, 197-98; Critique de la raison dialectique, 270, 272, 274, 281, 283, 286, 289, 292, 297; 1844 Manuscripts, 36-37, 39-43, 45, 49-70; Hegel, 6, 9, 11, 1316, 1819, 30-35; May '68, 367, 379, 381, 383; Socialisnie ou Barbarie, 204; structuralism, 316, 320, 325, 329, 335, 336, 340-52, 355, 357, 358 Marxism-Leninism, 44, 51, 141 Mascolo, Dionys, 130n, 212, 21516,218-20,255,387 Massu, Jacques, 380 materialism, 37, 67, 114, 118, 122--93, 126-27, 129-31, 14041, 147, 200, 225-26, 235, 324 Maublanc, Rene, 110 Mauss, Marcel, 310 Mendès-France, Pierre, 178, 380 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6-8, 42, 44, 81n, 110, 122, 139-40, 144-64, 166, 171-72, 174-79, 18385,191,193-94,197,2014, 254, 270, 283, 289, 300, 307, 316n, 323 Metzger, Arnold, 299n Michels, Robert, 6 Middle Ages, 26 Milan, 211 Mill, John Stuart, 10 Minkowski, Eugène, 261-62 Mitterrand, François, 379-80 Momigliano, Franco, 211


Index

monarchist, 49 Le Monde, 389 Monnerot, Jules, 38n Monnet Plan, 210 Monod, Jacques, 273n Morhange, Pierre, 36, 115 Morin, Edgar, 38n, 11n, 159, 210-11, 214-18, 227, 239, 371n, 386-87n Moscow, 38, 47, 121, 360 Moscow Trials, 141, 154, 215 Mougin, Henri, 110, 112-15,129n, 355 Mounier, Emmanuel, 50n, 115n,125n, 130n, 243n Mounin, Georges, 112n Mourenx, 256 Mury, Gilbert, 341n Musset, Alfred de, 238 mysticism, 27

Nanterre, 205, 372-73, 384, 387,391n Nantes, 375 naturalism, 57, 67 Naville, Pierre, 15n, 29n, 39, 126, 129, 138, 161, 180-82, 212, 364n http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (19 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

Nazis, nazism, 78, 84, 128, 212 neo-Kantianism, 6, 343 New Left, 74, 78-79, 137, 143, 186, 211n, 213, 248n, 257, 292, 296, 304, 305, 363 New Left Review, 305 New School for Social Research, 307 New York, 73, 307 Neyrpic, 365 Nicolaus, Martin, 70n Niel, Henri, 5n, 10n, 16n, 29n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 74n, 112, 147, 223-24, 240, 314, 335, 348,385 Nizan, Paul, 36, 76, 116, 138n Nobel Literature Prize, 79 Noir et Rouge, 257 Le Nouvel Observateur, 390 La Nouvelle Gauche, 178 La Nouvelle critique, 360 La Nouvelle Réforme, 179

OAS (Secret Army), 186 L'Observateur, 180, 212, 216


Index

Occupation, 109, 135, 154 October Revolution of 1917, 40 Office de la Radio-TelevisionFrançaise, 379 official Marxism, 91, 129n, 157,168, 216, 238, 239, 343, 392 Ollivier, Albert, 135n

Paci, Enzo, 304 Papaioannou, Kosta, 222 Pareto, Vilfredo, 6-7 Paris, 50, 55, 73, 79, 212, 288, 290, 295, 306-7, 393 Paris-Match, 313 Paris, Robert, 341n Parti Socialiste Unifié, 380 Pascal, Blaise, 47, 85, 135, 223, 238 Patri, Aimé, 9, 34, 281 Paulhan, Jean, 135n Paz, Octavio, 338n Peninou, Jean-Louis, 187 La Pensée, 36, 119, 360 personalists, 29, 59, 209, 325, 337


Index

phenomenology, phenomenologists, 5-6, 77, 81, 123, 147, 160, 204, 314, 315, 323, 325, 337,346,384 philosophes, 15, 85, 86 Philosophies group, 115, 138n Piaget, Jean, 48, 209 Picasso, Pablo, 128 Pinay, Antoine, 164 Plato, 22, 222, 224, 234 Plekhanov, Georgii V., 52 Poland, 210 Political economy, 29, 55, 66, 343 Politzer, Georges, 36-37, 116 Pompidou, Georges, 373 Pontalis, Jean-Baptiste, 125n Pope, Alexander, 85 Popular Front, 383 positivism, 36-37, 43, 63-65, 118-19, 129, 273, 314, 330,332 Pouillon, Jean, 125n, 323n, 341n Poulantzas, Nicos, 265n, 341n,347 Pravda, 121 Praxis, 304


Index

Prenant, Marcel, 36 Protestantism, 4 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 36 psychoanalysis, 6, 303, 320, 322,393

Queneau, Raymond, 8, 10, 20

413 Rabelais, François, 37, 238 Racine, Jean Baptiste, 47 Rajk Trial, 215 Ranciere, Jacques, 342n, 346, 347 Rand Corporation, 227 Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, 139-44, 181 Rassemblement du Peuple Française, 110, 135n rationalism, rationalists, 4, 6-7,9,20,36,49,193,304 Reich, Wilhelm, 261, 381 Renaissance, 23, 251 Renault (Flins), 372, 377 Resistance, 4, 37, 51, 109-12, 117, 123, 127, 134, 154, 178, 187,212,243,264,390 Revolutions of 1848, 184


Index

Ricardo, David, 31 Ricoeur, Paul, 81n, 225n, 314,316,322,384 Ridgway, Matthew B., 161, 164 Rieber, Alfred J., 38 Rimbaud, Arthur, 223-24 Robespierre, Maximilien, 394 Rochet, Waldeck, 362 romanticism, 23, 26, 68, 137-38,243,246 Rosenthal, Gérard, 140n-41 Rouen Naval Yards, 377 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 21, 138 Rousset, David, 139, 140n, 141,144 Roy, Claude, 36n Rubel, Maximilien, 41n, 42n, 50n, 55-57, 65, 69, 212, 241 Rumania, 373 Russia, see Soviet Union

Saint-Just Circle, 210 Saint-Simon, Louis de, 318 Salan, Raoul, 380 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Arguments group, 210, 215, 217, 223, 226-28, 230-32, 237,240, 255, 257-60, 262-63; http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (24 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

Being and Nothingness, 72-105; Communists and the Peace, 161-73; Critique de la raison dialectique, 264-305; 1844 Manuscripts, 49; Ghost of Stalin, 183-187; Hegel, 5, 8, 18, 3233, 35; liberalism, 187-95; Marxists, 109-18, 121-45; May '68, 363, 365, 381, 384, 38698; Merleau-Ponty, 146-58, 174-79; Naville, 179-83; Saint Genet, 195-201; Socialisme ou Barbarie, 202; structuralism, 306-8, 312, 315-16, 320, 32234, 337, 339, 342-43, 34748,353,354 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 307-8 Sauvageot, Jacques, 380 Schaff, Adam, 265n, 266n Schiller, Johann C. F. von, 22 Schwarz, Theodor, 266n Sebag, Lucien, 341, 344n Seguy, Georges, 377 semiology, 313, 318 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, 362,387 Sève, Lucien, 133, 265n Shapiro, Jeremy, 360n Shelley, Percy B., 138 Simmel, Georg, 44 Simon, Michel, 345n skepticism, 21-23, 26, 178, 187 Smith, Adam, 15, 29, 30-31 Soboul, Albert, 212 socialism, socialists, 4, 36, 49, 68, 78, 87, 137-38, 141-42, 154, 157, 158, 162-63, 171, 177-78, 183-85, http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (25 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

203-4, 226, 343-45, 357, 364, 367-68, 389-90,396 Socialisme ou Barbarie group, 172,202-5,210,216,384 Socialisme et liberté, 139, 145 Socialist Party, 179, 186 Socrates, 110 solipsism, 24, 92, 94, 124, 169 Sollers, Philippe, 359n Solomon, Jacques, 36n Somerhausen, Luc, 50n, 51, 55n Sorbonne, 18, 76, 372-73, 375, 382, 384, 386-87,390 Sorokin, Pitirim A., 169 414 Soubise, Louis, 211n Souyri, Pierre, 203 Soviet Union, 38-40, 44, 59-60, 68, 78, 122, 136, 140-41, 15354, 157, 159, 161-63, 165, 169, 172-73, 178, 184-85, 189, 199, 202, 205, 216, 240, 292 Stalin, Joseph, 37-40, 52, 85, 111, 125, 129, 158-59, 164, 172, 179, 185, 203, 227, 238 Stalinism, Stalinist, 6, 9, 36, 39, 41, 43-44, 50, 55, 57, 114, 119, 122, 129, 136, 150-51, 157, 172-73, 177, 182, 2012, 204, 212-16, 218, 239, 266, 270, 273, 330, 333, 341 stoicism, 21-22, 25, 157, 186 structuralism, structuralists, 5, 8 5, 8, 18, 68, 81n, 209, 250, 254,261,303-4,306-60,374,386 http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/bookindex.html (26 of 29) [11/12/2007 23:17:02]

Index

Sud-Aviation, 376, 378 surrealism, surrealists, 3, 8, 116 116, 138, 181, 244, 246, 260, 359 syndicalism, 36, 295,364,365, 365, 368 Syndicat National de l'Enseignement Superieur, 376, 380 Szekeres, Georg, 215

Taylorism, 132 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 209, 331 Tel Quel, 359 Les Temps Modernes, 110, 125, 134-35, 139, 145-46, 153, 161, 163, 165, 172, 174-75 17980, 182, 18687, 189,191, 203,239,266,303,363 Third Republic, 210, 370 Thomism, 6 Thorez, Maurice, 37, 362 Tito, Josip, 126, 157, 215 Touraine, Alain, 210, 212, 36265n,367-68,371,378 Troeltsch, Ernst, 15n Trotsky, Leon, 138, 174, 202, 214,381 Trotskyists, 39, 49, 76, 126, 129, 138, 141, 180, 181, 202, 222, 270, 375ff Turin, 211


Index

Union des Etudiantes Communistes, 186, 359 Union de la Jeunesse Communiste--Marxiste-Leniniste, 375, 386 Union Nationale des Etudiantes de France, 375, 380 United States, 68, 70, 136, 140, 165, 184, 310, 373 utilitarianism, 66, 219

Vailland, Roger, 125n Vaneigem, Raoul, 257 Venice, 183 La Verité, 180 Versailles, 318 Vichy Government, 51 Vico, Giambattista, 271 Vietnam, 373, 391 Vigier, Jean, 271 vitalism, 36 Voltaire, 87

Wahl, Jean, 26, 27, 90n, 92n Wallon, Henri, 36


Index

Weber, Max, 6-7, 44, 46, 174, 191,192n, 202, 292 Weil, Eric, 32 Whig Interpretation of History, 333 Wilden, Anthony, 5n Wittfogel, Karl, 214 worker-priest movement, 51 worker self-management, 68, 142, 203,216,363ff World War I, 307 World War 11, 3, 9, 18, 35, 38, 42,49,134,211,365

Yahweh, 26 Yugoslavia, 70, 126

Zévaès, Alexandre, 41n Zhdanovism, 38, 122, 123, 238 Zinoviev, Grigori, 47 Zola, Emile, 37 415


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