Hegel, Sartre therefore tries to conceptualize a dialectical continuity. Practical freedom is constantly being turned against itself by natural and institutional inertia, even though material products and institutions are products of praxis. The transparency of the free man is absorbed into its opposite, and Sartre calls that opposite the practico-inert. As a result freedom can only perceive itself at very specific moments: that of the dissolution of the series and that of unifying revolt.
This is undeniably the stumbling block for Sartre’s logic. If man is truly human – or in other words capable of reciprocity towards the Other – only during the revolt that dissolves the series, then human unity can exist only in the form of antagonism and violence. The only form of collective activity is the mass movement against social inertia, but that inertia is protected by the adversary and the supreme institution of the state. Passivity is the normal form of sociality. Is history oriented towards a greater liquidation of passivity? That is the meaning of the communist idea. But according to Sartre, serial passivity is a precondition for collective activity. Indeed, men are men only when the series is dissolved. Activity and reciprocity have as their content the destruction of passivity. If the social basis of passivity is restricted, then what existence lies in store for men? According to Sartre, the human is nothing more than the dissolution of the inhuman. The dialectic is conditioned by the anti-dialectic. How can we hope for its stable, or even expanded, advent? One has in fact the feeling that man exists only in flashes, in a savage discontinuity that is, ultimately, always absorbed into inertia and the law of separation. Collective action is the pure moment of revolt. Everything else is an expression of man’s inevitable inhumanity, which is passivity.
It follows that Sartre’s politics is a politics of the mass movement, which means that it is in many respects an infra-politics. It is typical that, when he examines the question of working-class organizations, it is the trade union that serves as an example, rather as though the logic of trade unions was, in his view, the same as that of political parties. Basically, the Subject that Sartre wants to restore to Marxism is a historical subject. It is, if we can put it this way, a mass-subject. The Critique of Dialectical Reason develops a formidable formal logic to make intelligible the principle that ‘It is the masses who make History.’ What is being conceptualized here is in a sense the historical know-how of the masses. But whilst the masses make history, can they, by the same criteria ‘make’ politics in the same sense?
Sartre clearly believes that the organization is the absolute term of politics and that, from that point of view, we cannot identify History with politics. But he always looks to the masses in order to discover the truly dialectical reason of organizations. In his view, an organization is basically a revolt that has crystallized. It has crystallized because it has been forced to internalize the passivity against which the group rebelled. For Sartre, the political party is still an instrument. It is instrumental passivity in action.
In my own view, the logic of the political Subject or the logic of class do not exist in a continuum with the mass movement. The party is a specific process internal to the masses, but it brings about a particular break: the break known as politics, as communism. The party is therefore something more than an instrument and something other than an instrument. The party integrates homogeneous contributions into its presence within the masses, and they are mainly of an ideological and theoretical nature. The logic of its development is not inscribed solely within the discontinuity of riots. It has a particular continuity, and it is no longer that of the inertia of the institution, but that of the continuity of proletarian politics. And if we are to think the continuity of that politics through to the end, we must take the view that there is more to the masses than the destructive ability to dissolve the series. We have to conclude that mass activity and mass ideas have an internal correctness [justesse] that is simply not there in the fused group. In a word, we have to conclude that, at any given moment, popular ideas and practices are divisible and contradictory, and that collective experience is never simply trapped into the activity/passivity contradiction. We can trust the masses precisely because their ideas also have to do with processes that shift their ground and assert something new that exists outside the activity/passivity contradiction.
Ultimately, Sartre fuses politics and History because history’s sole driving force is the contradiction between transparent individual practice and inert matter. He draws what conclusions he can from that, and many of them are fascinating. But we can also understand why, after ’68, he became the Gauche prolétarienne’s fellow traveller.3 The Gauche prolétarienne had only one slogan: ‘On a raison de se révolter’ [‘It is right to rebel!’]. The Critique of Dialectical Reason supplies the reason why it is right to rebel [‘la raison de cette raison’].
In my own view, the political Subject, which Marxism really does have to theorize anew, never coincides with the subject-in-revolt, even though it presupposes its existence. The fact that the proletariat is active amongst the people is not to be confused with the fact that it is the masses who make History, which is always true. There is within the political subject, and within the process of a new type of political party, a principle of consistency, and it is neither seriality, fusion, the oath nor the institution. It is an irreducible that escapes Sartre’s totalization of practical ensembles. It is a principle that is no longer based upon individual praxis.
There are two Maoist realities whose necessity cannot be demonstrated by Sartre. First, trust in the masses, defined as a permanent principle that refers not only to insurgent violence but also to the communist future. Second, the new-style party, which is the support not only for the revolutionary idea but also for a logic of popular unity that is valid in itself: it is affirmative and creative, and not simply warlike or dissolving.
Sartre still remains one of those who re-awakened Marxism. He urges us to reflect upon politics and History precisely because he develops a purely historical and revolutionary conception of Marxism as far as it can be developed. And we need something political and communist [du politique et du communiste] as well as the historical and the revolutionary. Sartre invites us to look again at the question of the political subject, and to trace the path for a dialectical-materialist philosophy centred on that question. That is why Sartre is not just a great fellow traveller when we act. He is also a great fellow traveller when we think.
In order to do him full justice, we really have to talk about the character of Jean Hyppolite and about his existential singularity, despite the novelty and consistency of what he has bequeathed us. Why is that important? Because Hyppolite established a sort of mediation, which was both quite unusual, and as it happens extremely fragile, between the academic regime of philosophy, within which he worked and held an important position, and what lies outside it. He was, from that point of view, an exception within the academic apparatus of French philosophy. He defined a singular moment, a sort of bright interval into which we – ‘we’ meaning those of us who were about twenty around the 1960s – had the good luck to stumble. In those years, thanks to Hyppolite, the bolts on academic philosophy, which were normally shut tight, were released. As a result, he won the support and complicity of Canguilhem, and the two of them became an outward-looking intra-academic duo who accepted what might be called ‘the lesson from outside’. That openness had a major impact on a whole sequence in the history of philosophy in this country. Frédéric Worms likes to call it the ‘philosophical moment of the 1960s’, and it occurred somewhere between 1950 and 1980. That is why the personality of Hyppolite is important. And that is why I ask your permission to be absolutely anecdotal and completely superficial today.
As has already been said in very dense terms, Hyppolite mounted a fundamental operation around Hegel. But there were also a lot of derivative or secondary operations, and they are not all reducible to his plan for a new French appropriation of Hegel that implied a revision of Victor Cousin’s old verdict. I would like to devote a few vignettes to those operations.
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