Sartre's second century

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 109
and behind". Purpose and play both appear as important themes at
different times in Sartre's philosophy, the former being most evident in the
Critique, where he adopts a praxis-based model of agency, and the latter in
his earlier existentialist texts where he assumes a more aestheticist leaning.
Despite the strong Marxist colouration of Sartre's social philosophy in
the Critique, the concepts of process and antithesis capture well the
essence and features of the Sartrean dialectic. The concept of totalisation
that looms large in Sartre's dialectic involves synthesis insofar as it
consists in drawing disparate elements into a meaningful totality but is
always, as William McBride notes, a "process word" denoting activity,
performance and happening, and so does not refer to a rigorously
completed or definable entity. 14 Similarly, in contrast to the Hegelian
dialectic, the Sartrean dialectic invokes no ultimate synthesis of its
constituent parts (pour-soi and ensoi, "for-itself" and "in-itself f ) that
proceeds towards a state of perfected human consciousness or the "end of
history". Sartre's theory of history conceives the historical process in
terms of contingency, chance, negation and circularity, criticising linear
accounts that give history a progressivist telos or intrinsic pattern of
design. 15
The political logic of Sartre's work also displays a discernibly
postmodern ethos insofar as it is premised on the eradication of hierarchy
and distance. This blossoms into a form of political activism that drew him
towards political Marxism in the 1940s and 1950s, but eventually drove
him away following May 1968. Sartre's archetype of the group-in-fusion
can be seen alongside Deleuze's and Guattari's idea of the subject group
as guiding theoretical models for a new form of political practice that
emerged out of the student revolts of 1968. Unlike the hierarchical,
authoritarian structures of modern political practice, this involves fluid,
egalitarian, anarchic, reciprocal and participatory forms of political
organisation. Although Sartre did not explicitly adopt the dialogue of
"micropolitics" advocated by Foucault, Lyotard and others, his political
project, both before and after the war, is generally consistent with it,
moving beyond the traditional focus of Marxist theory to uncover and
contest wider sources of power and domination in the social field: these
extend beyond the productive order and serve to "jeopardise the exploited
classes to the extent that they intrude into each individual from without
13 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 182,713,179.
14 McBride, "Existential Marxism and Postmodernism", 332.
15 See, for instance, Critique, 33-35.