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was the outcome of a new configuration in the French intellectual field: the decline of
social sciences gave rise to structuralism as a new science, which questioned the validity
of existential humanism as the philosophy of the subject. Even though he subscribed to
the ethics and politics of Sartreanism, Roland Barthes was to detach himself from Sartre
after the publication of Mythologies. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he played a key
role in promoting structuralism. With the effacement of ‘humanism’ as the subject of
critical investigation, this new science studied formal rules, codes and structures. To
quote Bernard Pingaud: ‘We can no longer talk about consciousness or about the subject,
but about rules, about codes, about systems. We do not say anymore that man makes
sense, but that meaning constructs man. We are no longer existentialist, but structuralist’.
36 Althusser attempted to re-think Marxism in scientific, i.e. structuralist, terms by
removing it from the clutches of humanism. Foucault perceived existential humanism as
the medievalism of our age; he dismissed Sartre as a nineteenth-century thinker. Lévi-
Strauss levelled the charge of ethnocentrism against Sartre, because he defined Man in
dialectical terms that restrict history to the West as a historical community; the rest of
humanity is excluded from this historical totality. 37
It is true that Sartre attempted to humanize Marxism’s economism. 38 However, Sartre,
in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, denounces the collusion of
humanism with European colonialism. He writes: ‘Let us quit this Europe which talks
incessantly about Man while massacring him wherever it meets him, on every corner of
its own streets, in every corner of the world. For centuries … in the name of a supposed
“spiritual adventure”, it has been suffocating almost the whole of humanity’ (this volume,
p. 137). He reveals ‘the strip-tease of our humanism’ by exposing the ideology of the
Enlightenment thus: ‘What empty chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honour,
country and who knows what else? That did not prevent us from holding forth at the same
time in racist language: filthy nigger, filthy Jew, filthy North Africans. Enlightened,
liberal and sensitive souls – in short neocolonialists – claimed to be shocked by this
inconsistency; that is an error or bad faith. Nothing is more consistent, among us, than
racist humanism, since Europeans have only been able to make themselves human beings
by creating slaves and monsters’ (this volume, p. 151). What Sartre announces in his
preface is the breakdown of the project of the Enlightenment that served Europe’s
colonial adventure and led to the over-exploitation and dehumanization of the colonized
people. Young is right to point out:‘It was the recognition of this use of the human as a
highly politicized category which led to the sustained critique of “Man” by a broad range
of post-war thinkers in the movement known as “anti-humanism”.’ 39 No doubt this
movement overshadowed Sartre’s contribution. To give a response to the question why
he is eclipsed in the postcolonial agenda, one could argue that Sartre was perceived as the
epitome of the very humanism that he condemns in his preface to The Wretched of the
Earth. This movement announced the breakdown of grand narratives of legitimation and
evoked in the 1950s what Derrida calls ‘the eschatological themes of the “end of history”,
of “the end of Marxism”, of “the end of man”, of the “last man” and so forth’. 40
However, by jettisoning the notion of the ‘subject’ to focus on structures of power and
signification, this movement eschewed the colonial problematic which was at the core of
Sartre’s work. The fact that postcolonial studies flourished in Anglo-American circles is
significant in this respect. Postcolonial France repressed its colonial past and the trauma