The Return of Jean-Paul Sartre

All that has changed. If Sartre's legacy once seemed a casualty of the Cold War, it now grows ever more pertinent to the way we live now. The arguments over systemic violence, emancipatory struggle, and terrorism that dominated much of his work have now come back into view as matters of interest well beyond the community of Sartre scholars. The thinkers who displaced Sartre from his once-central role in public life didn't have much use for Sartrean concepts like "freedom" or "authenticity." But they keep popping up anyway, which may be another reason that "the philosopher of the twentieth century" is being rediscovered in the twenty-first. Our guest today, Ronald Aronson, is the author of a forthcoming book, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It, appearing early next year from the University of Chicago Press. He has published quite a few other titles over the years. But one in particular merits a reference here, his book Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (Verso, 1981), which may still be the single best comprehensive overview and analysis of his thought and politics.

Having said this, it’s also true that I often run into people coming to our meetings for the first time who discover Sartre scholars to be welcoming and unpretentious, as well as - most remarkable - interested in what they have to say. I think this is because most Sartre scholars see Sartre as a philosopher of emancipation, and as someone who opposed all forms of oppression. Sartre was a partisan on behalf of colonial and ex-colonial peoples, African Americans, Jews, gays, and women, all of whom still see something deeply affirming in his thought and life.

Perhaps a better way to put it is to say that after the Liberation in 1944 he resolved to involve himself fully in his times, and for the second half of his life he succeeded in doing so, whether causes were popular or not. He was quite courageous in this respect. I suppose the accusation of being “fashionable” is meant to apply most specifically to Sartre’s support for the French student rebels in 1968 and his lending himself to the gauchiste cause after this, including speaking at factory gates and taking a major role in helping Liberation survive. But as Hope Now (his final interviews with Benny Lévy) indicates, the ageing Sartre’s political views remained consistent with his 1950s and 1960s radicalism.

I think that the real problematic hidden within the question posed in this colloquy is violence. In a very contemporary instance, the violence of the anti-globalization protests has often been focused on the destruction of property (despite statements made in the U.S. mainstream press). This violence is arguably Sartrean in that it engages on the one hand traditional Marxist conceptions of praxis. On the other hand it attacks the "habitus," if you will, of participants in the "free market" system. As the anti-globalization protests do destruction to property they supplement this with reminders that some commodities do not enter into the market on a "free" basis: labor.

This, of course, points up the logic of specific forms of state and corporate violence. All polemics aside, not only do first-world countries derive their labor from "peripheral" geopolitical spaces, they also deny workers who participate in the production end of market economics several de facto freedoms associated with modern global economic systems (e.g. citizenship, health and welfare benefits, access to most tenets of free markets).

It seems then that there are several ways in which Sartre exposes one to alternatives to postmodernity which are humanist, Marxist, and anti-totalitarian. As is the case in the explication of political theories one must always think on contemporary forms of participation and practice. Say what you will about Sartre but he constantly exhibited this tendency throughout his career.

Ronald Aronson:
    There are two interconnected discussions to have about Sartre and violence (and they relate to the two discussions we should also be having about Camus and violence). First, Sartre saw deeper than perhaps anyone in the twentieth century into the forms and consequences of institutional violence - of the capitalist system, of colonialism, even of calcifying revolutions. This is the Sartre who is largely repressed or forgotten today, and who you are calling to mind. But Sartre - the same man - also eulogized violence as “the beginning of humanity,” apologized for terrorism, and spoke glowingly about anti-colonial violence. He made a fetish of violence, as far back as The Flies (1943), before he became political. To find our way in this world, I think we need to rely on side of Sartre that illuminates systemic violence, just as we need to strongly criticize and the side that celebrates, or even tolerates, violence as a form of political therapy.

I spoke above about the positive and negative heritage of Sartre on violence. Or shall we say, with a bow towards your fine book, his “ambiguous” heritage. The negative side, Sartre’s great weakness, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, was to not clearly indicate that violence against noncombatant civilians deserve censure no less than do oppressive regimes and societies. I would like to think that, in responding to September 11 he would finally abandon his fetishization of violence and return to one of his core philosophical ideas, namely that human always choose how they will respond to situations in which they’ve been placed, and that this includes what means they use to struggle against oppression. Sartre, above all, was the person to understand that the African National Congress used that space to control and discipline its impulses towards terrorism, and that this strengthened its struggle both morally and politically.

One biographical fact that has always fascinated me is that although Sartre lived in Berlin during the fateful year of 1933, when Hitler came to power, he hazards almost no reflections or judgments about these earth-shaking political events. Instead, he spends the entire period in libraries reading Husserl and Heidegger. By his own admission, only seven years later - when, after the fall of France, he becomes a prisoner of war - does his thinking become "historicized." Even then, the political "turn" in Sartre's though is not really evidenced until the late 1940s.

In your opinion, is there a relationship between Sartre's "belated" political maturation and the judgmental miscues he subsequently makes about Stalinism, Castroism, and Third Worldism - leading up to the incredible claim in a 1973 Actuel interview that the Jacobin dictatorship failed because "The revolutionaries of 1793 probably did not kill enough and therefore unintentionally served the return to order and then the Restoration"?

Ronald Aronson:
    I too have always found it astonishing that the first months of Nazism in power find no reflection in his thinking or writing. And I do think there is a connection between this earlier distance from the world and Sartre’s acceptance and sometimes even celebration of the worst aspects of the movements he came to identify with. I think the personal root of the problem lies in his concern to become politically “real.” This entails, as in the startling last gesture of the play, The Devil and the Good Lord, Goetz killing the soldier who refuses his command. If the real world is governed by violence, and movements for change must be violent, then why cavil at a few deaths? Making an omelet, after all, requires breaking the eggs. Sartre’s most attractive dramatic character, Hoederer, explains to his eventual assassin Hugo, the necessity of having “dirty hands.” And so, If the FLN massacres several hundred non-FLN nationalists at Melouza during the Algerian war, its supporters have to accept its logic, or at least not criticize them for it.

But none of this explains the “not killing enough” statement, made a year after he said that Palestinian terrorism was their “only means of struggle.” In these remarks he’s no longer trying to become real, or overcompensating for his earlier distance from politics. I think we simply can’t avoid linking together his casualness about violence in Nausea, Orestes’ need to be violent to establish his reality in The Flies, the ontological separateness of individuals in Being and Nothingness, and above all, the seriality-group-in-fusion dynamic in Critique of Dialectical Reason. Violence for Sartre is a way of breaking out of individual and collective isolation, a way of establishing one’s reality. It is not just about survival, but has an ontological function. It also connects with his great strength, namely, his ability to see how the reality of violence is imbedded in the structures of daily life, but this only increases his casualness about what he regards as the violence of the underclass and of revolutionary movements. In any case, for all his scathing judgments of oppression and oppressors, the sad fact is that he almost never criticizes the excesses of political violence from below.

It's true that Sartre described the terrorism as the only weapon available to the Palestinians. But in that same article -- and indeed throughout his life -- he defends the existence of Israel. In the opening sentence of his article on the murder of the Israeli athletes in Munich by the Black September organization, Sartre refers to himself as being among those "who affirm the sovereignty of the Israeli state and also believe the Palestinians have a right to sovereignty for the same reason..." He places the burden of the situation on Israel's government, which he calls "literally crazy" -- and says that "a state of war exists between Israel and the Palestinians."

Now, this is all in the context of an apology for the murder of the Israeli athletes, so we are prone to placing all the emphasis on that aspect. But at least as striking, it seems to me, is the fact that Sartre endorses the existence of a Jewish state, and does so in categorical terms. That makes Sartre (to use a certain old-fashioned vocabulary) a "fellow traveller" -- reserving the right to criticize Zionism, but not denouncing its fundamental aims.

The implications of this seem worth following up. The history of European philosophy's relationship to the Jews is not exactly covered in glory. So Sartre already stands out for having written a searching, if flawed, book on anti-Semitism. And it's almost as if there ought to be a third volume of the Critique, analyzing the formation of the state of Israel in terms of his dialectical anthropology. Beyond a few pages in Bernard Henri Levy's rather quicksilvery book, however, not much appears to have been written on Sartre-as-Zionist.