in revolt that has never been crushed. They are writers who never surrender.
If there is something enigmatic about Sartre, it is not, as they say today, the fact that he marched side by side with the Stalinists in the 1950s. Quite the contrary: for him, that was the moment of a real conversion. Whilst he did not really have any illusions about the PCF, Sartre realized at that time that the choices facing intellectuals were historically situated. Anyone who claimed to be able to remain neutral had simply chosen to side with the forces of social conservatism. When he said that ‘an anticommunist is a dog’, he was simply recognizing the necessity of political reality. In 1950, it was quite true that an anti-communist had simply abdicated his responsibility and chosen servitude and oppression, both for himself and for others. It was that historical, limited nature of choice that wrested Sartre away from the metaphysics of individual salvation.
We can pinpoint the moment of that conversion – and it was both pure and confused – in his play Lucifer and the Lord. Goetz wanted to be the hero of Good, and then he wanted to be the hero of Evil. But that formal ethics led to disaster in the Germany of the Peasants’ Revolt. Goetz therefore rejoined the peasant army, with one specific task in mind: winning the war. Like Stalin, he ruled that army, which was threatened by divisions amongst the peasants, through terror. These are Goetz’s final words:
I shall make them hate me, because I know no other way of loving them. I shall give them their orders, since I have no other way of being obeyed. I shall remain alone with this empty sky above me, since I have no other way of being among men. There is this war to fight, and I will fight it.1
From that point onwards, Sartre remained convinced that there was always some war to fight. In 1950, he still thought that being alone was the only way of being among men, and that was a trace of his past. But he was about to change. The important thing is that, in 1950, Sartre became the man of specific commitments, the man of concrete historical conflicts. They were the three great struggles of which I spoke. That is the logic – the profound logic – of Sartre.
The enigmatic thing about Sartre came before that. There was one struggle he missed, and which did not really revolutionize either his practical attitude or his philosophy: the struggle waged by the anti-Nazi Resistance. Sartre came to politics between 1945 and 1950. It was metaphysics and art that initially made him famous. That is because Sartre elaborated his first philosophy in wartime. Being and Nothingness was published in 1943. There is a huge gulf between that philosophy and political commitment. Sartre made the absolute freedom of the Subject central to experience, and that freedom is still strictly a matter of individual consciousness. The relationship with the Other is certainly a given which constitutes that consciousness. But my relationship with the Other is what makes me see myself, through the gaze of the Other, as a shameful thing, as reduced to the being that, because I am free, I am not. The immediate relationship with the Other therefore oscillates between masochism, which allows me to make myself be for the other, and sadism, in which I make the other in order to be me. In both cases, freedom makes a point of becoming limed in being, either because I deny it in myself, or because I deny it in the other. The reversibility that allows freedoms to flee one another means that there is no room for any reciprocity or combative solidarity. The Subject is freedom’s never-ending flight from being, and man is hell for man. From that perspective, no political cause can unite consciousnesses in any collective project. All unification is external: it is a form of being that itself refers to a great Other, to an invisible gaze for which we are things, and we freely accept that we are things. Any collective project can therefore only be passive. Only the individual is an active centre. Even in 1960, Sartre would describe as ‘collective’ a multiplicity of individuals whose unity is a passive synthesis.
And yet from the end of the 1940s onwards, Sartre’s immense effort revolved around just one question: how can activity, the only model for which is the free individual consciousness, be a collective given? How can we escape the idea that any historical and social reality is inevitably passive? The outcome of this effort was the appearance, in 1960, of the Critique of Dialectical Reason.
The paradox is that, in the meantime, things had taken a very different turn. Althusser wanted to restore Marxism’s cutting edge by rejecting Sartre’s entire frame of reference and eliminating all reference to a historical subject. By insisting on the structural character of Marxist analyses. By emphasizing scientificity, which Sartre approached only with circumspection? That was the path that was initially taken by living Marxism, but it was not Sartre’s path. The Maoists of the late 1960s were to combine Marxist rigour with the historical experience of the Cultural Revolution in China. They laid claim to the cutting edge of science as a theoretical equivalent to the cutting edge of rebellion.
But with hindsight, it might also be said that, after May ’68 and perhaps even more so today, political subjectivation appears to be the central item on Marxism’s balance sheet. It takes the form of a twofold question:
What independent revolutionary activity are the masses capable of? Can they, as Maoism puts it, be ‘self-reliant’? What is the relationship between the mass movement and the great inert political institutions of imperialism: parliament and the trade unions?
What political party does the working class need today? What is the essence of the constituted political subject?
Hence the return, if you like to put it that way, to Sartre’s basic concern. Although, to go one step further, we could also say: the Subject that we inevitably talk about today is not the subject of History. The idea of a historical totalization is no longer of any use to us. We are talking about a very specific subject: the political subject. So Sartre’s question is not exactly the right question. All this means that summing up what he was attempting to do is very complex.
First of all, we find in Sartre some astonishing historical and concrete descriptions of social ensembles. He identifies three main types: the series, which is an inert gathering; the group, which is collective freedom and reciprocity; and the organization, which is a serial form that has been internalized by the group.
The series is the collective form of social inertia. What Sartre calls ‘inorganic social beings’. The series is a gathering of men in which every man is alone because he is interchangeable with every other man. Sartre’s initial example is that of a queue at a bus stop: everyone is there for the same reason, but that common interest brings people together externally. That externality is internalized in the form of everyone’s indifference to everyone else: I do not speak to the others, and simply wait in the same way that they wait. In a series men are, if you like, brought together by the object. The unity of the gatherings exists because everyone’s relationship with the object is the same. But that external identity becomes an internal alterity: if the object makes me the same as everyone else, then I am other than myself. As Sartre puts it: ‘Everyone is the same as the Others to the extent that he is Other than himself.’ Ultimately, the law of the series is unity through separation. Sartre extends this formula to all collective activities: working on an assembly line or in local government, listening to the radio – in all these cases, the object produces an undifferentiated unity or a unity based upon separation. Typically, this is a passive synthesis. It is the moment when material production has a retroactive impact upon individual praxes and totalizes them into inertia. The human unity of the series is a unity that is grounded in impotence: being identical with the Other, everyone is external to himself and therefore cut off from free practice. The series is the rule of the Other. At which point, Sartre rediscovers one of Marxism’s great ideas: the impotence of the people is always its internal division, its separation from itself. And it is that that ensures the continued reign of the Other, the reign of the bourgeoisie. There is still a trace of Sartre’s pessimism here because, for him, the series is the archetype of sociality. It is, if we can put it this way, the ordinary structure of the life of the masses.
The emergence of the fused group, which reacts against social inertia, signals, on the other hand, a bid for optimism. It has to be said that
