Existentialist Reformtation

Sam Pawlett rsp at uniserve.com
Wed Dec 29 17:25:18 PST 1999


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Sartre's work is a good example of how and why starting with the
> consciousness of the abstract individual leads to a dead end (for
> Marxists), for the abstract individual as a point of departure already
> implies the negation of history. The same goes for postmodern circular
> reasonings about "the subject."
>

[Catching up on several thousand unread posts.]

The above is a little unfair to Sartre. He worked through all the problems of individual vs. collective&totality and subjectivty in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, ending up in a position very different from the one he arrived at in Being and Nothingness.B&N is a very early work and depending on what part of Sartre's ouvre you want to emphasize, is not representative of his thought. CDR is a Marxist work, the pages are filled with references and quotes from Marx and Engels,he deals at length with the classical problems of class, hist&dialectical materialism, rumination on the political economy of Algeria, over a hundred very empirical pages on colonialism etc. A lot of the book examines the problem of the individual and collective in the context of bureacracy and the Zinovievist-Stalinist communist parties, obviously thinking about his and other left intellectuals relationship with the French CP and its relationship to the French working class. He even throws in some Heidegger: "historical materialism is the uncovering of being." In the Verso PB edition there's a nice little snapshot of J-P at the front of the barricades.

Sam Pawlett



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