Sartre's second century

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 113
explanation. Central to Sartre's socio-historical theory is the concept of
totalisation which, at the outset, does not square readily with the
postmodern preference for detotalisation. As a synthesising activity that
draws together disparate elements into a meaningful whole, Sartre's
concept of totalisation contrasts with postmodernist attempts to fragment,
splinter and pluralise the social field. Sartre does at times emphasise the
poly valence of meanings and the detotalised nature of all alleged totalities,
but his intention elsewhere is to give history a single, unitary meaning. 26
Whether one ascribes greater emphasis to the element of detotalisation in
Sartre's work, or fixes instead on his attempts to unify history and provide
a single meaning, it is clear that his socio-historical outlook incorporates
both these elements that intensify and recede as his emphasis changes.
Sartre, however, is not the only one who equivocates between totalisation
and detotalisation in this way, for it is possible to glimpse a similar
equivocation in Foucault and other poststructuralists, who utilise totalising
methods and concepts as they simultaneously prohibit and condemn
them. 27
This complex blend of the modern and the postmodern can also be
found in Sartre's political outlook, which gravitates towards the
postmodern search for new forms of politicisation and political practice,
while retaining key modernist notions such as the categories of need,
political freedom, commitment and agency. Sartre shows none of the
suspicion that postmodernists like Baudrillard exhibit towards the category
of need, making it the starting-point of his investigation in the Critique'.
"Everything is to be explained through need; need is the first totalising
relation between the material man, and the material ensemble of which he
is a part." 28 The difficulty with Sartre's account of need in the Critique, I
have argued, is not so much the way he invokes it as a central point of
departure, but the way in which he tends to equate need with material need
alone, thus reproducing standard Marxist interpretations (reflected, above
all, in his consistent emphasis on the necessity of material abundance as a
prerequisite for the possibility of a communist society, and his consequent
preoccupation with eradicating scarcity). In spite of this, however, Sartre
does begin to probe the dynamic of solidarity through the category of
need, which creates a shared human condition, and so goes some way
See Sartre, Search for a Method, 90, and Critique of Dialectical Reason, II, 20.
27 Habermas refers to this as a "performative contradiction" in Foucault's work.
See The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Chapter 1.
28 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I, 80.