Sartre's second century
Sartre's second century
Sartre's second century
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The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 117<br />
Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason, where Sartre is presented as a<br />
Master Constructionist impelled by an Enlightenment animus that is<br />
distinctly anti-postmodern. Against this view, I would argue that there are<br />
strong postmodern elements in <strong>Sartre's</strong> work that span the broad<br />
theoretical range, from his analysis of the subject through his theory of<br />
history to his understanding of political life, making him, to use Frederic<br />
Jameson's phrase, a "hidden origin" of important theoretical manoeuvres in<br />
postmodernist theory. 37<br />
In general terms, I present Sartre as a schizophrenic thinker whose<br />
critical consciousness is split between the modern and the postmodern.<br />
Indeed, I think that much of the originality and dynamism of his work lies<br />
precisely in this tense relationship between modern and postmodern<br />
elements. <strong>Sartre's</strong> relation to modernism is not straightforward but<br />
complex, vacillating between a project to overturn, break open and move<br />
beyond modernist modes of understanding and an underlying impetus to<br />
hold on to certain modernist ideas and categories. This tension is reflected<br />
in the final years of his life, which he divided between a political activism<br />
that struggled desperately to overthrow the social conditions of capitalist<br />
modernity and a classic, academic study of the bourgeois Flaubert that was<br />
far removed from this activist impulse. Thus, although Sartre was unable<br />
to transcend fully his starting-points, he was able, as Ronald Aronson has<br />
pointed out, to think—and live—them to their limits, while immersing<br />
himself in our world and its most powerful cross-currents. 38<br />
Undoubtedly, there are several respects in which Sartre was unable to<br />
transcend the limitations imposed on him by the philosophical, social,<br />
historical and political situation of his time. On a theoretical level, this<br />
manifests itself in his inability to get beyond some of the theoretical<br />
limitations of the (modernist) outlook he inherited from Descartes, Husserl<br />
and Marx. On a political level, this came into view in the early 1950s,<br />
where <strong>Sartre's</strong> allegiance to the PCF was strongly influenced by the<br />
ideological polarities of the Cold War environment. In this sense, although<br />
Sartre stretched the parameters of modernism to their limits, articulating<br />
new perspectives that prefigured many important themes taken up later by<br />
postmodernists like Foucault, Guattari and Derrida, in other respects he<br />
was unable to progress fully beyond these limits, reproducing some of the<br />
basic assumptions which form the modernist outlook and the classical<br />
French tradition of which he was a part.<br />
37 Frederic Jameson, "The Sartrean Origin", 19.<br />
38 Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World, 353.