Sartre's second century
Sartre's second century
Sartre's second century
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112 Chapter Eight<br />
Strauss's criticisms of Sartre in The Savage Mind, where <strong>Sartre's</strong> Critique<br />
is seen as ethnocentric since, as Levi-Strauss observes, it excludes from<br />
the "properly human" all previous, supposedly "ahistorical", societies of<br />
"repetition". 22<br />
Although Sartre is consistently vitriolic towards forms of humanism<br />
associated with bourgeois individualism, there is nonetheless a discernible<br />
anthropocentric bias in his work that places him much closer to the<br />
modernist paradigm. This is evident most of all in the way he consistently<br />
distinguishes the human realm from the rest of nature in his work,<br />
valorising the former as pour-soi, active and transformational, and<br />
associating the latter with the brute, inert, en-soi qualities of matter. As<br />
Boundas points out, this demonstrates a noticeable difference between "the<br />
Sartrean prose of the is and is not" and "the poststructuralist, minoritarian<br />
discourse of the and'? 3 Indeed, <strong>Sartre's</strong> Cartesian theorisation of nature<br />
clearly estranges him from the postmodern quest to re-enchant nature and<br />
to resurrect it from the denuding, utilitarian and analytical logic of modern<br />
science.<br />
This is, however, at least partially offset by other elements in his<br />
work—in particular, his notion of dialectical reason—which inveigh<br />
against the analytical reason of modern science and move beyond a<br />
simplified Cartesianism. Although Sartre clearly elevates the human above<br />
the non-human throughout his work, he does reject forms of humanism<br />
that serve to exclude and subordinate, arguing in the Critique (in tones<br />
redolent of Derrida) that "humanism is the obverse of racism: it is a<br />
practice of exclusion". 24 Thus, in the third volume of U Idiot de lafamille<br />
(The Family Idiot), he is quick to dismiss abstract notions of "humanity":<br />
Humanity is not and corresponds diachronically to no concept; what exists<br />
is an infinite series whose principle is recurrence, defined precisely by<br />
these terms: man is the son of man. For this reason history is perpetually<br />
finished, that is to say composed of broken-off sequences each of which is<br />
the divergent continuation (not mechanically but dialectically) of the<br />
preceding one and also its transcendence toward the same and different<br />
ends (which assumes that it is at once distorted and conserved). 25<br />
The complex constellation of modern and postmodern themes in<br />
<strong>Sartre's</strong> work can also be seen in the area of social theory and historical<br />
See Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 324-57.<br />
Boundas, "Foreclosure of the Other", 339-40.<br />
Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I, 702.<br />
Sartre, VIdiot de lafamille, III, 346-47 (my translation).