Sartre's second century

116 Chapter Eight
and aims of the intellectual that followed 1968. In Foucault's view, this
involved a shift away from the "general" (modern) intellectual, who
speaks on behalf of all oppressed groups, towards the (postmodern)
"specific" intellectual, who acts as an advisor within a particular group or
form of struggle. In opposition to the unifying aims of the general or
classic intellectual, the specific intellectual, Foucault argues, helps to
ensure the autonomy of local struggles by recovering "subjugated" and
"disqualified" knowledges from the hegemony of positivistic sciences,
hierarchical political parties, and master-narratives. While it is clear that
Sartre's abiding search for a totalising consciousness and primary political
agent would seem to contravene the pluralist discourse of the specific
intellectual that Foucault and other postmodernists advocate, it is also the
case that 1968 precipitated a change in Sartre's outlook. The events of
1968 made him realise the limitations of his privileged classic intellectual
status, and changed his view of the intellectual's role which, he now
argued in line with Foucault, must be to serve the masses:
Today I have finally understood that the intellectual [...] must resolve his
own problem—or, if you like, negate his intellectual moment in order to
achieve a new popular status. 36
Sartre Old and New
In the course of this essay, I have endeavoured to sketch a picture in
which two Sartres can be seen to emerge alongside each other: the Old
Sartre—assertive and totalistic, Cartesian and classic, modernist and
Marxist, an optimist and grand-thinker—and a New postmodern Sartre
who is changing and plural, aestheticised and splintered, aporetic and
anarchistic, a pessimist and arch-deconstructionist. Like two pugilists in a
boxing-ring (an image central to Sartre's investigation in the second
volume of the Critique), they shadow one another, join together, clash,
contend and struggle for primacy within individual texts and in his work
taken as a whole. However, there is no clear resolution or victorious endpoint
to this fight but an ongoing agonism of differences and emphases
that rise and fall as Sartre's critical perspective shifts.
In standard interpretations of Sartre, only the face of the Old classical
Sartre is recognised—that is, the humanist Sartre resolutely opposed to the
postmodern trickeries of the French poststructuralists. This view still bears
a strong influence and is evident, for instance, in Andrew Dobson's book,
Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, 227.