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and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of
Negritude as antithetical value is the moment of the negativity. But this negative
moment is not sufficient in itself and the blacks who employ it well know it;
they know that it serves to prepare the way for the synthesis or the realization of
the human society without racism. Thus Negritude is dedicated to its own
destruction, it is passage and objective, means and not the ultimate goal. 31
In response to this, Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks: ‘When I read that page, I
felt I had been robbed of my last chance. I said to my friends, “The generation of the
younger black poets had just suffered a blow that can never be forgiven.” Help had been
sought from a friend of the coloured peoples, and that friend had found no better response
than to point out the relativity of what they were doing.’ 32 In Fanon’s view, Black
Orpheus ‘is a date in the intellectualization of the experience of being black’. According
to Fanon, Sartre presents the poetry of Négritude as the source of revolutionary politics,
but blocks this source of its poetic spring by abstracting the experience of being black.
Fanon argues that ‘black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes’. 33 Negro
consciousness must not therefore be seen as a negative term in a dialectical schema, as a
lack; it is not the potential of something, but it is wholly what it is. In the concluding
section of his book, however, Fanon comes round to Sartre’s way of thinking that
negritude is the only means to overcome the differences of race, but that this anti-racist
racism cannot be an end in itself. Fanon clearly realizes the dangers of its totalizing and
racialized language and therefore refuses to ‘derive [his] basic purpose from the past of
the peoples of color’. 34
Sartre envisaged the solution to the problem of racism in a Marxist eschatology: a
classless society. I speculate that the absence of Sartre from the postcolonial agenda can
be attributed to his tendency to reduce the colonial problematic to a notion of class
struggle and to seek to resolve this problematic in a Marxist eschatology. One of the
consequences of this solution in existential-humanist Marxism is the perceived reduction
of difference to a negative concept: the voided character of the Jew and the negativity of
Négritude. As we shall see, this would leave Sartre open to the accusation of being
ethnocentric. Clearly what is at stake is his Marxism.
III
When Sartre moved to the Left in 1952, at the pinnacle of the Cold War, most French
intellectuals distanced themselves from the PCF. As F. Dosse points out, the
Rassemblement Démocratique which brought together prominent intellectuals such as
André Breton, Albert Camus and Sartre disintegrated. 35 After the publication of
L’Homme révolté, Sartre became embroiled with Camus in a controversy. In the summer
of 1952, Merleau-Ponty left Les Temps Modernes, and in 1955 in Les Aventures de la
dialectique, he dismisses Sartre’s politics as Bolshevistic. These two controversies
signalled a change in the attitude of French intellectuals towards communism and
political commitment. The political ground shifted: Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser and
Michel Foucault emerged to challenge Sartreanism. To echo Dosse, the eclipse of Sartre