Sartre's second century

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? Ill
To clarify the complexity of this modern / postmodern constellation in
the work of the French poststructuralists, it is useful to employ the
distinction between affirmative and sceptical forms of postmodernism, in
order to contrast those who reconfigure, rework and transform modernist
categories such as the subject, freedom and reason, with those who tend to
dissolve them as sceptics do. It is the way in which the more extreme,
sceptical forms of postmodernism dissolve completely these modernist
categories that has prompted some affirmatives, like Guattari, to distance
themselves from postmodern discourse. Despite agreeing with postmodernism
in general that a "certain idea of progress and of modernity has
gone bankrupt", in his essay "The Postmodern Dead End" (1986), 20 for
instance, Guattari identifies the popular discourse of postmodernism as a
cynical and reactionary fad which engenders an ethics of non-commitment
that paralyses affirmative political action when social repression and
ecological crises are escalating. In the 1980s, both Lyotard and Foucault
similarly distanced themselves from some of the fashionable bons mots of
the postmodern discourse.
In spite of these "constellated similarities" between Sartrean and some
forms of affirmative postmodern theory, there is nonetheless a greater
intensity and gravity towards the modern in Sartre's work than in the work
of Foucault, Deleuze and other poststructuralists. In the area of the subject,
Sartre maintains a consistent attachment to some forth of humanism and
freedom that contrasts with the anti-humanist dialogue sometimes taken up
by the French poststructuralists, even though he prefigures many of the
themes of the "decentred subject" which they later adopt. In this respect,
Sartre's assiduous efforts to probe the complex dimensions of (subjective)
freedom and his endeavour to resurrect a theory of autonomy in the face of
its progressive alienation through "bad faith" {Being and Nothingness), or
through the determining force of the "practico-inert" {Critique of
Dialectical Reason), contrast favourably with the extreme anti-humanism
of the 1960s, in which Foucault and others were proclaiming the "death of
the subject" and the eclipse of meaningful agency.
Without doubt, the humanist insignia of Sartre's work is something
that generally sits uncomfortably with the postmodern outlook. According
to Derrida, for instance, by making "man'' into a supreme value or
measure, "humanism" is essentially a form of exclusion and racism since it
excludes women, children and animals and defines "humanity" according
to specific cultural norms. 21 This critique of humanism links up with Levi-
20 Guattari, "The Postmodern Dead End", 40.
21 See Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, 62, 70.