Sartre's second century

CHAPTER EIGHT
THE NEW SARTRE:
A POSTMODERN PROGENITOR?
NICHOLAS FARRELL FOX
"[...] for every thought one must expect a strange tomorrow." 1
In the eyes of many, Sartre was the foremost intellectual of the
twentieth century, a master thinker of freedom whose diverse literary
talents earned him notoriety as a philosopher, playwright, novelist and
polemicist. And yet, he is often seen as a philosopher of a world that has
passed, a child and relic of modernity whose voice rang out amidst the
alienations and horrors of the twentieth century, but which is now scarcely
detectable in the soundwaves of our contemporary postmodern condition.
After all, history has it that the Sartrean corpse was laid to rest not only in
the cemetery at Montparnasse, upon the event of his death in April 1980,
but also twenty years or so earlier when a (post)structuralist revolt—
organised by Foucault, Derrida and others—overthrew the monarchical
Sartrean regime and buried its humanist entrails in the ground. 2 So, what
relevance, it might be asked, does Sartre's work hold for postmodernism? 3
Sartre and the (Post)structuralists
In some respects, it is not altogether surprising that standard interpretations
have cited Sartrean existentialism as the principal target for the
(post)structuralist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. An initial sense of
hostility between Sartre and the (post)structuralists found expression in a
1 Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 99.
2 "(Post)structuralism" is used here to denote both structuralist and poststructuralist
theory, whereas "poststructuralism" refers only to poststructuralist theory.
3 An earlier draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the Centenary Conference
of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Fran^ais, London, in March 2005.