Sartre's second century

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