Sartre's second century

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor? 117
Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason, where Sartre is presented as a
Master Constructionist impelled by an Enlightenment animus that is
distinctly anti-postmodern. Against this view, I would argue that there are
strong postmodern elements in Sartre's work that span the broad
theoretical range, from his analysis of the subject through his theory of
history to his understanding of political life, making him, to use Frederic
Jameson's phrase, a "hidden origin" of important theoretical manoeuvres in
postmodernist theory. 37
In general terms, I present Sartre as a schizophrenic thinker whose
critical consciousness is split between the modern and the postmodern.
Indeed, I think that much of the originality and dynamism of his work lies
precisely in this tense relationship between modern and postmodern
elements. Sartre's relation to modernism is not straightforward but
complex, vacillating between a project to overturn, break open and move
beyond modernist modes of understanding and an underlying impetus to
hold on to certain modernist ideas and categories. This tension is reflected
in the final years of his life, which he divided between a political activism
that struggled desperately to overthrow the social conditions of capitalist
modernity and a classic, academic study of the bourgeois Flaubert that was
far removed from this activist impulse. Thus, although Sartre was unable
to transcend fully his starting-points, he was able, as Ronald Aronson has
pointed out, to think—and live—them to their limits, while immersing
himself in our world and its most powerful cross-currents. 38
Undoubtedly, there are several respects in which Sartre was unable to
transcend the limitations imposed on him by the philosophical, social,
historical and political situation of his time. On a theoretical level, this
manifests itself in his inability to get beyond some of the theoretical
limitations of the (modernist) outlook he inherited from Descartes, Husserl
and Marx. On a political level, this came into view in the early 1950s,
where Sartre's allegiance to the PCF was strongly influenced by the
ideological polarities of the Cold War environment. In this sense, although
Sartre stretched the parameters of modernism to their limits, articulating
new perspectives that prefigured many important themes taken up later by
postmodernists like Foucault, Guattari and Derrida, in other respects he
was unable to progress fully beyond these limits, reproducing some of the
basic assumptions which form the modernist outlook and the classical
French tradition of which he was a part.
37 Frederic Jameson, "The Sartrean Origin", 19.
38 Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World, 353.