can men who have been passively brought together in their impotence and separation by large social collectives suddenly call into being an active unity in which they recognize one another? It is worth noting that Sartre, borrowing an expression from Malraux, calls this event an apocalypse. The apocalypse means that the series dissolves into a fused group. The mediation this requires is itself partly external: it is the awareness of its intolerable nature that dissolves the series and creates a new reciprocity. If, for example, the bus we are waiting for in passive indifference does not come along, there will be protests and mutterings. People will start to talk to each other about the inhumanity of their external conditioning. Even at this stage, an element of fusion is already apparent. Unity in separation is practised as an internalized unity: I speak to the Other because he, like me, finds the wait intolerable. What was ‘I am the same as the Other whilst being other than me’ becomes ‘the other is the same as me, and I am no longer my other’. As Sartre says, in the series, unity is created elsewhere, namely in the object. It is a passive unity. In the fused group, the unity is immediately there, within me and in all the others. It is an active unity and a ubiquitous unity. In the series, the Other is everywhere; in the fused group, the Same is everywhere.
It is the ability of everyone to indicate to everyone else their practical unity with everyone else that manifests this new unity. If, for example, someone says ‘Let’s all protest together’, everyone follows his lead because that practical call mediates between each and every one of them. The series really has been dissolved. The person who said that has no institutional or external status. He is the anonymous individual through whom everyone is a possible mediator of the reciprocity of all. He is what Sartre calls the regulatory third party. The regulatory third party is the statute [statut] of anyone who has a practical relationship with the reciprocity of all individual praxes. A fused group is made up of individuals who all, in their turn, become the third party who totalizes the interiority of the fused group in action. The third party is neither a chief nor a leader; anyone whose spontaneous indications and directives make it possible for others to dissolve the inertia of the series is a third party. Everyone is a means for the third party to the extent that the third party is the means for the group.
Sartre applies this schema in brilliant analyses of days of rioting or insurrection. He demonstrates the specific workings of serial collectives (the storming of the Bastille). He shows how the intolerable (poverty, fear) brings pressure to bear on inertia. He shows the emergence of fusion (the cry: ‘To the Bastille’). But he does so – and this is worth noting – within the framework of bourgeois revolutions, and especially that of 1789. He refers, that is, to days of rioting in which there is no dialectic with institutional political forces, and in which no people’s party is present in the masses. From that point of view, fusion is a historico-revolutionary concept, and not a political concept.
The discussion of the third type of gathering – the organization – does deal with politics. The matrix of the organization, or the thing that allows it to move from fusion to institution (which is another serial collective), is the oath. The oath appears at the point where the possibility that the group might disperse has been internalized. As everyone is the third party for everyone else, he fears the dispersed solitude that is both the others’ doing and his own doing. It is not enough for reciprocity to be immediate. It requires a stable mediation. It is the oath that allows everyone to commit themselves to remaining the same. The oath gives me a guarantee that the third party will not become the Other; at the same time, I guarantee that I will not become the Other for my third parties. Whatever form it may take, the oath is in fact the group’s internal struggle against the imminence of betrayal. Treason is an inevitable threat because separation is the normal form of sociality. If the series is not to reappear, the group must bring a counter-pressure to bear upon itself in the shape of an essential subjective element. That element is fear of the traitor, within others, but also within me.
That the basis of the organizational process is fear, fear of betrayal, reveals Sartre’s pessimism. The oath is necessarily supported by an atmosphere of terror. Why? Because no one knows whether the other really is afraid enough of being betrayed. In order to equalize the fear, the group must establish a terroristic reciprocity within itself: anyone who betrays the oath will be punished by everyone else. That is the group’s new interiority. Optimism is the terror that goes hand in hand with the advent of fraternity. Given that the group decides its own fate through the oath, everyone is aware of being his own son, and everyone is bound to everyone else by the obligation to supply mutual help. Fraternity is the mode in which everyone experiences, with respect to others, his own birth as an ordinary individual within the group.
The life of the group that is bound by an oath is governed by fraternity-terror. That allows the group to establish the dialectic between practical freedom and the serial; one determines fraternity, whilst the other, which has been internalized by fear, determines the necessary internal oppression of each by all. On this basis, Sartre studies the process that allows us to understand organizations, and then institutions. At each stage, the inertia increases and the memory of fusion fades. Oppression outweighs fraternity. The permanent division of tasks replaces the function of the third-party regulator. The institution brings us back to our starting point: it is a serial collective, and its unity is nothing more than unity in separation. The supreme institution is the state.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this bonding is the way it allows us to breathe new life into the Marxist concept of class. From 1955 onwards, Sartre fought vigorously against a purely objective or purely social definition of class. In his view, a class was a mobile ensemble articulated into series, groups and institutions. At the level of production, the purely objective reality of the working class is a unity in separation, a passive, serial unity. It is governed by the law of division and competition. All working-class resistance or any shop-floor revolt is a local fusion of a series. Even at that level, we have a principle of subjective reciprocity. Sartre analyses it in detail. Discussing go-slows, he demonstrates that they are a sort of dialectical ethics based upon a rejection of serial competition: ‘If a worker says, “I shall avoid doing more than the Others, in order not to require the Others to do more than they can, and in order that I shall not be required to do more than I can by another”, he is already a master of dialectical humanism.’2
If we think of the great working-class slogans of the post-’68 period in France or Italy, such as ‘work at your own pace’, we have to pay tribute to Sartre for having noticed that they have important implications for politics, but also, as he rightly says, for ethics.
A class is therefore a series: that is its social being. A class is in fusion: that is its practical being as a mass. A class is an organization: it works upon itself in the modality of terror-fraternity, which is to a greater or less extent stable and which can take the form of a para-state organization like the big unions. And its concrete history, as historical subjectivity, is the articulated movement of those three dimensions, and never the linear development of one of them. To that extent, Sartre anticipates the necessary distinction between class as social being, and class as historical and political being. Within concrete History, a class exists in the atomized form of the social series, dissolves the series in its revolts, and structures the subject of the revolt against betrayal, or through what Sartre calls the dictatorship of freedom, meaning the fraternal group. It then gives birth to organizations which have a ‘dispassionate’ capacity for fusion, and they finally revert to being institutions that generate a new type of serial: an institutional division that in a sense replicated division through labour.
All these forms of existence coexist and upset one another in the course of a History that is open. The existence of a class fluctuates between seriality and institutions. That is its organic life. We can, however, identify active, or totalizing, forms of circularity: individual praxis on the one hand, and the fused group on the other. We can also identify passive or totalized forms: the series on the one hand, and the institution on the other. In philosophical terms, this means that the movement of history is not homogeneous and is not the product of unitary dialectic. There are moments that are anti-dialectical moments: that of pure matter on the one hand, as opposed to individual praxis. That of
