The Disappointment of a Disciple

By T Storm Heter

(For Ralph)

Editor's Note: This is the third installment in our series commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. Previous installments, by Devin Zane Shaw and Caleb Heldt, can be found, respectively, here and here.

I have been a Sartrean for more than a decade.  I’ve written about Sartre’s works, taught him in courses, gabbed endlessly to colleagues and friends about his contributions; I’ve done all those things we are used to doing with the figures we love.   My orientation to the world has been Sartrean since long before I read Sartre.  In graduate school even when I turned against Sartre—becoming a critic of the ‘philosophy of the subject’ for instance—I would find myself six months later with a new interpretation of Sartre, with a “new” Sartre (as Nik Farrell Fox puts it). 

But I can recall with vivid clarity the first time anyone referred to me as “an existentialist.”  I was taken aback.  I was sure that I had never told this person—a close friend and fellow academic—that I was an existentialist; I had never introduced myself by saying, “I’m Storm and I’m an existentialist.”  On the other hand, I could not find it in me to deny that I was an existentialist. 

The friend who had called me an existentialist wasn’t a philosopher by trade, he was a professor of French who studied and taught at Yale in the 1980s.  He had been in the mix of intellectuals who did some of the most exciting work in America on Sartre, who had carved out a unique place for their work in Yale French Studies.  Our conversations would stretch for hours, and I would leave feeling like the world was my oyster; like there were a million books to read and perhaps just as many waiting to be written.  Ralph, who was my senior by ten or fifteen years, would inevitably end the conversation with, “Now Storm, you must prioritize your writing.”  The logistics of it were impossible: teaching four-four, developing a new course every term, having two young children, serving on every committee known to man and God.  But of course, Ralph was right. 

My conversations with Ralph revealed a contrast between my own dialectical thinking, and Ralph’s fluid, allegorical, piratical style.  I would seize upon opposites and try to break them down.  Ralph would paint images and explore their recesses and folds.  Ralph thought from the cracks and the seams and the frayed edges.  He turned texts into flesh and blood which he would squeeze until long repressed meanings would issue forth from hidden sores.     

We frequently talked about the nuances of Sartre’s style and his choice of language.  Why does Sartre use the term pédophile when talking about bad faith in Being and Nothingness?  Hazel Barnes translates this as ‘the homosexual,’ which carries a different weight than alternatives like ‘fag,’ ‘pedophile,’ or ‘queer.’  The question in those pages is whether we must identify with our past.  Ralph helped me see that the past is always mediated through language, through memory, through labels.  Labels are not fungible. Sartre thought labeling, gazing behavior was alienating, but also inevitable.  He insisted that the we acknowledge the gaze, even if we remain unable to identify its object as “me.”  Existential responsibility is truly terrifying: I must own what I cannot control, what I cannot love. 

I wonder to myself what would have happened had Sartre taken a surrealist turn with the idea of labels and existential responsibility.  Perhaps the desire for control is a pathology rather than an exercise of freedom. The existential notion of ambiguity found not only in Sartre but also in Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty is halfway to surrealism.  Ambiguity is a dialectical notion: we must not try to find one term of the dyad definitive, but to accept the mutuality of the terms.  Existence is a tension between freedom and facticity.  

Sartre famously hated labels, hated political parties, hated, in short, being pinned down by the freedom of others.  An anarchist to the end.  Was this not why he rejected the Nobel prize for literature?  A writer ought not become an institution.  A damning critique of institutionalization occupies most of the eight or nine hundred pages of the Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Ralph called me an existentialist as a way of introducing me to someone else, as a shorthand way of saying what I studied and who I was.  The label existentialist carried a very different weight than if Ralph had said, “Storm wrote his thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre.”  That judgment refers to a past action, with no particular obligation extending into the future.  There is no roll to play in these words.  Even had Ralph said, “Storm teaches existentialism,” there would have been much less gravity implied.  The teaching of a class, the writing of a book—these are events, situations, happenings, actions.  But ‘to be’ an existentialist is to bear a torch, to wear a uniform, to stake out a set of boundaries, to pledge allegiance.  Thus, what could be more existentialist than denying that one is an existentialist?  If I am what I am not, then I am not an existentialist. 

I have found that I am not alone.  Many philosophers who study the existentialists do not call themselves existentialists.  For some, it is simply because the noun deprives the adjective.  They are Sartrean existentialists, and prefer to be called Sartreans.  But for a good many others, I believe they are motivated by the rejection of essentialist language. 

But I wonder what is the communal effect of rejecting the essentialist language of identity?  In the first place, it makes community much more difficult.  The anarchistic rejection of labels means that you and I are not the same; we are not identical; we do not reciprocate.  We recognize each other through a negative reciprocity; through a rejection of each other, rather than through an appeal.  Ralph’s calling me an existentialist was meant to place me within the community; my denial of the label was a rejection of this community.

I raise this point about community because I believe that one of the important questions for scholars of Sartre these days is to articulate what if anything brings us together beyond our commitment to read and discuss the works of Sartre.

As a point of reference, compare existentialism to critical theory.  The commitments of the Frankfurt School intertwine soundly with Sartrean Marxism.  Search for a Method in particular, with its aim of creating a structural anthropology, a human science, a synthesis of psychology and sociology, is kindred in spirit to the aim of German critical theory. 

So why has critical theory had such a different trajectory than Sartreanism?  In particular, why has Marxist-existentialism not had the following that German critical theory enjoys? 

One difference is that the Frankfurt School conceived of itself as a movement.  It accepted institutionalization as part of its essence.  It had a director, a physical home, a newsletter, and a cohort. 

There are parallels in the existentialist world: Les Temps Modernes and “the family.” But Sartre’s anarchism and ego were two factors that made the existentialism less a movement than a moment.  Sartre explicitly rejected institutionalization.  It is clear that Sartre had a strong desire to be read, but his attempts at collaboration were always troubled.  Sartre was not associated with any university and was not an academic. 

A second difference is that there is no parallel to Habermas in the world of Sartrean existentialism. The question “Who are the most famous students of Sartre?” has no clear answer.  If we use student in the wide sense to refer to thinkers who absorbed Sartrean concepts and then developed their own voices, of course many 20^th century intellectuals would have to be included, most prominently Franz Fanon. 

The anti-institutionalism of Sartre and the fact that he had no clear successor means that we have difficulty tracing any current movements of thought to Sartre in the way that we can trace contemporary critical theory to Habermas and back to the Frankfurt School. 

That said, there are many contemporary philosophers doing exciting, fresh work who are Sartreans in one sense or another.  Just to pick one example, the volume Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism, edited by Jonathan Judaken (SUNY Press, 2008) is packed with essays that exhibit living, breathing Sartrean thinking.   

At the most recent meeting of the North American Sartre Society (held in 2009 in Memphis, TN) there was a strong sense that Sartrean thinking should not remain aloof from recent theoretical developments, especially postcolonial thinking.  This feeling was brought home by the keynote speaker Robert JC Young, who challenged us to bring Sartre into discussions of postcolonialism. 

While I’m not in a position to answer Robert Young’s question directly, it has me thinking about two tasks.  The first task involves making Sartre’s late work, especially his Critique of Dialectical Reason, more visible in answering contemporary questions of race, nationalism, gender, technology, poverty, liberalism, and colonialism.  The second task requires doing the opposite: allowing the man (Sartre) and the text (The Critique) to utterly fade into the background of thinking.  The idea that Sartre needs to be “defended” or even “updated” strikes me as unhelpful, indeed counterproductive.  Although I am not entirely sure how to weave these two threads together into a coherent garment, I think there is some sense in which intellectuals like Francis Jameson, and Black Existentialists like Lewis Gordon, have already shown how.  As Gordon notes in his essay “Sartre and Black Existentialism” (found in the Judaken volume cited above), many Black Existentialists—including Gordon himself—began their intellectual careers by working directly with Sartre’s texts.  These philosophers subsequently found a style and voice solely their own. 

Forty years later, what can we say we’ve learned from Sartre’s Critique and where should we set our sights for future study?  Iris M. Young’s masterful essay “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective,” (Signs, 19:3, 1994) remains in my mind one of the best direct meditations on the Critique as a work of critical social theory.  Also, there is some sense in which we can say that Fanon’s work is a testament to the importance of Sartre’s Critique, but such a view diminishes the originality of Fanon.  Can’t we simply say now that Sartre is unreadable without Fanon?  Sartre was aware of the limitations of his particularity; he was a white man who wanted to flambé whiteness through a phenomenological psychoanalysis; but he knew very well that exposing whiteness from within is different from exposing whiteness from without.  The major Sartrean tools—bad faith, seriality, recognition, intelligibility, praxis, ambiguity—are not white or male or straight; but their queerness and their blackness have relatively little to do with Sartre and almost everything to do with us. 

The Critique is like a centrifuge; the deeper one reads the faster one spins and the further one is forced away from the apparent centers of Sartrean thinking.   Liquids begin separating: Sartre thought this, I think that; Sartre thought that, I think this.  The deepest Sartreanism throws one outward towards the world; it causes a direct engagement with the contemporary situation.  Little wonder, then, that Sartreanism does not conceive of itself as a social movement. 

The series is a basic concept of the Critique.  Developed as an account of sociality in mass society, the concept helps us today to think through phenomena like multiculturalism.  Multiculturalism is sometimes the name for an authentic project of democratically negotiating difference, but there is also what I call “Pier 1 multiculturalism.”  Pier 1 Imports is perhaps the oldest and most prominent chain import store in the United States.  Its customers are white middle class suburbanites who come to feed on a smorgasbord of world tchotchkies.  The store has all the sterility and charm of a strip mall gone on safari.  Perhaps most distinctive is the smell of the store: a sort of nag champa light, lightened and sweetened for the American palate.  The goods proclaim a sense of Otherness, but true otherness is reduced to that which is safe, consumable, and most importantly cheap.  There is seriality at multiple levels, beginning with the selection of goods that are marketable to the dulled taste buds of American interior design.  We want something cool and different, but not truly threatening.  We want to feel connected to the rest of the world, but without confronting the reality of market exploitation.  We want to “help” the poor of the “third-world” through “fair trade.”  We want to “save” the rainforests by stuffing a dollar into a can at the checkout lane. Pier 1 multiculturalism is an inscription of ourselves into a narcissistic narrative of tolerance, openness, good taste, of love for our brethren.  We are not consuming chairs and pillows and rugs; we are consuming ourselves.  We are paying buckets for an image of ourselves that we desperately desire to become.  The economic relationship to those who produce the goods is serial because, just as one would expect, Pier 1 has a nasty record on labor issues.  (See the “Sweatshop Hall of Shame 2010,” put out by the International Labor Rights Forum.)  Pier 1 multiculturalism serializes along many axes: consumers who shallowly recognize themselves in each other’s exotic purchases become a series; the exploited laborers behind the products become a series; and the relationship between the series of consumers and producers (“we” purchase “you”) is a serial relationship mediated by the praxis of the Pier 1 corporation. 

The Sartrean approach to multiculturalism would be based on the notion of the series, which is also to say that it would be a politics of recognition.  It is no coincidence that one of the more interesting and influential theoretical defenses of multiculturalism has come from Charles Taylor.  As the title indicates, Taylor’s seminal essay Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (1994) views multiculturalism as a politics of serial recognition. 

Sartreanism can also approach multiculturalism through the lens of the “fraternity-terror thesis” of the Critique.  The fraternity-terror thesis claims that group solidarity is possible only through the threat of exclusion, of othering.  The group defines itself by policing its boundaries with other groups, by differentiated its members from outsiders.  The clearest example from the American experience is the story of the whiteness of American citizenship; we are a “nation of immigrants” only to the extent that “we” define ourselves though one a particular story: the story of the European immigrant who fled religious oppression and material poverty to start afresh with nothing but chutzpah, a can-do spirit, and a plot of “unspoiled” land.  As John Locke says, “in the beginning all the world was America.”  Our dominant national narrative treats citizenship as an enlightened category of pure love, pure solidarity, pure universality. Taylor’s work is motivated by the Hegelian hope that universality can be attained through progressive social inclusion of marginalized groups.  Taylor frames his discussion within the history of social groups that have articulated their desire to receive equal social esteem.  Taylor’s historical approach is important because it challenges the notion that we can develop critical social norms by meditating on timeless categories such as “democracy-in-itself;” the real political work is in the murky here and now.  In my view, the murkiness of American political thought is not to be avoided but engaged directly through acts of national psychotherapy.  We are a nation that needs therapy.  Nationalism is our coping strategy, but it has long been breaking down under its own weight. 

Sartreanism shows us one way out; the way out begins by attending to a particular desire, the desire to have a multiculturalism of pure love, love without terror.  The attempted bombing of Times Square just a few days ago, on May Day, 2010, is only the latest of many manifestations of fraternity-terror.  Faisal Shahzad points to a failure of American multiculturalism; news commentators seemed endlessly fascinated with why a naturalized American, with a family, and American education, and an American home (recently lost) would take such a turn.  One of the failures of American multiculturalism is its inability to make intelligible the domestic and international violence of US politics; we prefer to repress the of American-ness of violence.  Our major theatres of military combat are 7,000 miles away.  Our televisions do not show dead American soldiers.  Our psychic geography plots a gulf between the open arms of American pluralism and the hegemony of American military might.  We stand mystified, in fact in disbelieve about the statistics of the murder rate within the US, which is an order of magnitude higher than almost any other comparable country.  Sartre’s extended discussion of the boxing match in Volume 2 of the Critique gives us the vocabulary to discuss the incarnation and internalization of violence we find in America today. 

My friend Ralph couldn’t stop talking about Sartre’s work on Flaubert, which he believed was a watershed for French Studies, marking a new orientation that was still in the process of being absorbed long after the publication of The Family Idiot.  My own anti-theoretical tendencies prevent me from viewing the Critique as a sacred text, and I could never turn to Sartre as a messiah.  If there is a Holy of Holies, I doubt that it is deep within the bowels of the Critique.

I won’t deny the human-ness of the desire to be a disciple.  And I won’t disown personal responsibility for the desire.  But I find delirious pleasure in the thought that wanting to be a disciple of Sartre creates the conditions for disappointment. 

The disappointment of a disciple does not always lead to futility; it can be the germ of a productive melancholy, a mood expressed beautifully by the painter Arshile Gorky who wrote to his family in 1938 that,

“…Nowadays an extremely melancholy mood has seized me and I can concentrate on nothing except my work.  Dearest one, lately I have been well and am working excessively and am changing my painting style.  Therefore, this constantly gives me extreme mental anguish.  I am not satisfied and from now on I will never be satisfied a single day about my works.  I desire to create deeper and purer work.” 

 *

T Storm Heter is author of Sartre's Ethics of Engagement (Continuum, 2006) and professor at East Stroudsburg University.

Transcendental Consciousness and the Dialectic of Need

By Caleb Heldt, University of Warwick

In the Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze credits Sartre with providing the definitive conditions which characterise a radically impersonal transcendental field in his 1937 essay The Transcendence of the Ego [1]. However, Deleuze immediately qualifies this encomium a few pages later, declaring that,

This field can not be determined as that of a consciousness. Despite Sartre's attempt, we cannot retain consciousness as a milieu while at the same time we object to the form of the person and the point of view of individuation. A consciousness is nothing without a synthesis of unification, but there is no synthesis of consciousness without the form of an I, or the point of view of the Self. What is neither individual nor personal are, on the contrary, emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution, radically distinct from fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of the syntheses of consciousness (LS, 102).

It is this rejection of consciousness in favour of a conception of pre-individuated singularities which marks Deleuze's decisive rejection of phenomenology – in particular the structure of intentionality – while retaining the conditions of the transcendental field marked out by Sartre [2]. From a Deleuzian perspective, Sartre's philosophical project went astray once his analyses abandoned the plane of immanence which he uncovered as the transcendental field in favour of a phenomenological conception of consciousness, allowing the perspective of the subject to be re-installed, a subject whose intentional awareness of transcendent objects (Ego and world) is the very condition of possibility and of transcendence (rather than the actualisation of virtual, or immanent potentialities) [3].

So why, we might ask, does Sartre – on the threshold of a theory of singularities – return to the subject in Being and Nothingness the way he does, as an investigation of transcendence upon which he never turns his back [4]? In all honesty, I think this is a badly posed question, one that loses sight of Sartre's most genuine philosophical commitments. In one way or another, Sartre repeatedly returns to the fundamental insights of The Transcendence of the Ego. Indeed, we must bear in mind that Sartre's early theoretical tome, Being and Nothingness, is a critical ontological inquiry [5]. It is a text which endeavours to describe the phenomena which render transcendence, free action, intelligible and to examine the various ways in which transcendence insufficiently limits itself, giving rise to transcendental illusions (NE, 532) which Sartre refers to as bad faith (mauvaise foi). Rather than pursuing this early revelation of the transcendental field as a plane upon which radically impersonal, pre-individuated spontaneities interact without egological interference, without the self-imposed illusions of bad faith – in the manner pursued metaphysically by Deleuze [6] – Sartre devoted himself to investigating the structures of human thought which give rise to these very illusions and, later, to the material conditions involved in such illusion-constitution.

In short, after opening the transcendental field (of consciousness) as a plane upon which pure (reflective) spontaneities (TE, 96) interact free of egological interpenetration – rendering actions radically impersonal or pre-personal – Sartre chose not to pursue this intuition metaphysically but rather chose to devote himself to an investigative project which would examine the conditions which veil this field in self-deceptive illusions. The project undertaken in Being and Nothingness, then, attempts to describe, phenomenologically, the formal conditions which render possible such illusion-constitution through the degradation of this spontaneity by the introduction into the plenum of Being (which is pure presence, a consequence of its self-identity, its being only what it is) a non-being, a being which 'is not'. Thus, consciousness constitutes present-being by an irremediable absence of (a particular) being, which is to say, by a lack of being. What ties this ontological critique of desire as lack in Being and Nothingness to the project undertaken in the Critique of Dialectical Reason [7] is precisely this conception of lack, although the concerns will shift from the formal considerations of ontology to material ones. As such, Sartre opens 'Book I' of the Critique with an examination of elementary individual praxis in which this ontological desire of Being and Nothingness is analysed in its most primordial ontic manifestation which Sartre calls need, i.e. material (biological) desire. As Sartre says, “Everything is to be explained through need (le besoin); need is the first totalising relation between the material being, man, and the material ensemble of which he is part” (CDRI, 80).

It is precisely because each individual consciousness “exists its body” (BN, 353) [8] as its unalterable facticity that it remains bound to its material environment and is consequently compelled to take a point of view on its material condition, and it is this taking a point of view which yields the possibility of departing from the radical immanence of the transcendental field. From a Sartrean perspective, this explains the way in which lack (or scarcity) becomes an ontological (and materialistic) category governing consciousness's interaction with its situation (or environment) transforming the nature of desire from abundance to a type of desire which is predicated upon lack (most fully elaborated by Sartre in BN and CDRI) [9]. We will spend the remainder of this short essay investigating this moment of departure from the immanence of the transcendental field (as the field of materiality) as Sartre describes it in the early pages of the Critique in the dialectic of need, the moment which we may perhaps call the birth of transcendence and the free project, or praxis.

So, what the dialectic of need unveils initially, in the first instance, is not an absence of a particular transcendent object which is apprehended as lacking in the environment, but prior to the constitution of a lack in the environment consciousness, or rather the (conscious) organism, finds itself in the presence of an environment which it constitutes co-extensively with its presence as need: “Need is a negation of the negation in so far as it expresses itself as a lack within the organism” (CDRI, 80; bold emphasis added). This consciousness of need is not a consciousness of a past need, but a consciousness of a present need through and through. The organism constitutes the lack it feels within its own being – hunger, for example – as a negation of its being which “threatens the organism as a whole with disintegration – the danger of death” (CDRI, 81). Need, in becoming elementary praxis, is posited as the negation of this negation. So, in the first instance, need-consciousness does not constitute its present environment by a particular lack but rather exists this lack in its own being as a necessity imposed by biological functions, which is to say, in the language of Being and Nothingness, its facticity. But “the negation of this negation is [only] achieved through the transcendence of the organic [of the organism's own being] towards the inorganic: need (le besoin) is a link of univocal immanence with surrounding materiality” (CDRI, 80). Initially, then, the organism “reveal[s] the material environment, to infinity, as the total field of possibilities of [the] satisfaction” of its need as the negation of the felt internal lack” (CDRI, 80) Or again:

As soon as need appears, surrounding matter is endowed with a passive unity, in that a developing totalisation is reflected in it as a totality: matter revealed as passive totality by an organic being seeking its being in it – this is Nature in its initial form. Already, it is in terms of the total field that need seeks possibilities of satisfaction in nature, and it is this totalisation which will reveal in the passive totality its own material being as abundance or scarcity (CDRI, 81).

This is significant because in the first instance of need the organism, as we have said, does not constitute the external environment by a lack, by scarcity, because – ontologically speaking – being-in-itself lacks nothing; it is what it is and it is pure presence to itself. However, this present-being becomes constituted by a lack, by scarcity, in the initial moment of elementary praxis insofar as for the organism “the material environment..., by not containing what the organism seeks, transforms the totality as future reality into possibility,” i.e. into an as yet non-existent state of (its) being (CDRI, 83; bold emphasis added). This is to say that the origin of possibility as praxis lies in the fact that the organism apprehends the present environment as incapable of satisfying its present need, so it posits a future reality, an end, which would satisfy its present need:

Need, as a negation of the negation, is the organism itself, living in the future, through present disorders, as its own possibility and consequently, as the possibility of its own impossibility [i.e. its own non-existence, or death]; and praxis, in the first instance, is nothing but the relation of the organism, as exterior and future end, to the present organism as a totality under threat; it is function exteriorised (CDRI, 83).

As such, the consequence of the failure of the organism's present environment to provide the requisite conditions for the satisfactions of its (biological) need is that transcendence, as elementary praxis, proves to be an adaptive function (the exteriorisation of its interiority, i.e. of its interior lack or negation) capable of being utilised by the (human) organism. By constituting its present environment by the scarcity of the “inorganic or less organised elements or, quite simply,...dead flesh, etc.” (CDRI, 80) which the organism lacks and as such threatens it with death, it is compelled to seek out a new environment which would satisfy its needs: “It is at this ambiguous level that the dialectical transition from function to actions can be seen. The project, as transcendence, is merely the exteriorisation of immanence” (CDR, 83).

And this analysis is completely consistent with the ontological explication of lack in Being and Nothingness where Sartre describes hunger, qua desire, as a state of the body, as a form of lived facticity in which,

the For-itself immediately flees...toward its possibles; that is, toward a certain state of satisfied-hunger which...is the In-itself-for-itself of hunger. Thus hunger is a pure surpassing of corporal facticity; and to the extent that the For-itself becomes conscious of this facticity in a non-thetic form, the For-itself becomes conscious of it as a surpassed facticity. The body here is indeed the past, the passed-beyond (BN, 409).

It is necessary to bear in mind, in this perhaps risky dialogue between the ontological and the material conditions of consciousness qua need and desire, that what is at issue in both of Sartre's analyses – and that of which Deleuze and Guattari are critical – is precisely the conception of lack and the understanding of desire and need in terms of lack. Whereas for Deleuze and Guattari, “Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counter products within the real that desire produces. [And as such] Lack is a countereffect of desire” (AO, 27), for Sartre this cannot be the case, at least not in the first instance. As he says, “We will not get out of the difficulty by making desire a conatus [10] conceived in the manner of a physical force. For the conatus...can not possess in itself the character of reaching out toward another state. The conatus as the producer of states can not be identified with desire as the appeal from a state” (BN, 111). Desire, for Sartre, is constituted (impurely) reflectively as lack as a result of, or rather co-extensively with need [11]. It is the appeal outward from a conscious state of need (hunger, for example) toward another as yet non-existent state of consciousness which would be a satisfied need (e.g. the In-itself-for-itself of hunger, or the ideal totalised totality of consciousness as satisfied hunger), which is to say, in the language of the Critique, need is the transcendence of lack by way of the exteriorisation of immanence, and it is this capacity, extended beyond its appropriate realms, which gives rise to (an array of) transcendental illusions.

While this no doubt would be the place to examine the constituent structures involved in a Sartrean conception of pure or non-accessory desire, we have already gone beyond the bounds of the present forum [12]. Let me conclude by saying that Deleuze's intuition regarding the fundamental nature of desire is Sartrean in spirit, only Sartre accords a greater significance to the role of negation and thereby transcendence than Deleuze is willing to allow. In any case, I would like to suggest that, in a sense, their respective projects can be viewed with a certain degree of complementarity given their mutual starting point, namely the transcendental field; their projects diverge, however, as Sartre sought to understand the ways in which human reality has veiled from itself its radical capacity to act spontaneously and impersonally, whereas Deleuze's project discarded these illusions at the outset in order to develop what he came to refer to as a 'transcendental empiricism'. So despite any disagreements as to what constitutes the proper field of study for an ontology or a metaphysics, the world-view of each ultimately returns to the transcendental field as a (possible) reality of lived (human) experience.

Caleb Heldt is a graduate student at the University of Warwick. His research (see here) focuses on the role of the imagination (what Sartre refers to as 'image consciousness'), affectivity and memory in providing the conditions of possibility for the phenomenon of self-deception or 'bad faith' (mauvaise foi) in Sartre's thought.

Endtnotes

1. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 98-99; hereafter LS. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991), hereafter TE.
2. LS, 105; Deleuze, 'Immanence: A Life' in Pure Immanence: Essays on Life, trans. Anne Boyman, (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 33 n2; Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 47.
3. Cf. 'Immanence: A Life', 25-33. As Sartre says in TE, “Potentiality is not mere possibility: it presents itself as something which really exists, but its mode of existence is potency” (TE, 71). But for Sartre, these potentialities really exist only because they belong to a transcendent object, namely the ego. In BN, potentiality is predominantly associated with present worldly objects. For a concise explication of Deleuze's position, drawn from the work of Henri Bergson, see 'The Actual and the Virtual', in Deleuze, and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007),148-152. For Sartre, Bergson's consciousness is fundamentally egological (cf. TE, 80). 
4. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, (London: Routledge, 2003), hereafter BN.
5. In his eulogy to Merleau-Ponty, published in Situations IV in 1964, Sartre referred to Being and Nothingness as his “eidetics of bad faith” [Sartre, 'Merleau-Ponty', Portraits, trans. Chris Turner, (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 442 n75]. Of equal import, in the Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre declares that, “The very fact that Being and Nothingness is an ontology before conversion takes for granted that a conversion is necessary and that, as a consequence, there is a natural attitude” [Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer, (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6; hereafter NE]. Also, in the penultimate chapter of Being and Nothingness itself, Sartre states that the preceding investigation was aimed only at an accessory or impure reflective analysis, asserting that an analysis of purifying, ethical reflection was as yet to be undertaken (BN, 602).
6.  No doubt, many Deleuzians would resist this designation, asserting that the plane of immanence upon which virtual potentialities are actualised refers to a Deleuzian ontology. And this may well be so from a Deleuzian perspective; however, from a Sartrean point of view, even a conception of an absolutely pure reflective consciousness which never lapse into bad faith is a postulation that belongs more appropriately to a metaphysics. And it should not be overlooked that Deleuze said of himself in the Dialogues, “Je me sens pur métaphysicien” [cited in Beistegui, Miguel, Truth and Genesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 221].
7. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Rée, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, (London: Verso, 2004), hereafter CDRI.
8. This a position Sartre maintained throughout his career, from his early writings on the imagination – in which Sartre emphasises the role which fatigue plays in the tendency toward image-consciousness [Sartre,  The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Johnathan Webber, (London: Routledge, 2004), 71.] – until the final years of his life, as can be seen in his 1975 interview with Michel Contat in which he declares, “For me, there is no difference in nature between body and consciousness” ['Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans', Situations X, (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 146 cited in Barnes, Hazel E., 'Sartre as Materialist' in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, (La Salle, IL.: Open Court Publishing Company, 1981), 684 n11.]. 
9. For Deleuze's critique of desire as lack see Deleuze's seminar from 26 May, 1973 entitled 'Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure-Jouissance)', trans. Daniel W. Smith, Contretemps 2, May 2001, pp. 92-108, esp. 95 & 101: “it is true that Western philosophy has always consisted in saying: if desire exists, it is the very sign, or the very fact, that you are lacking something. Everything starts from that. A first wielding of desire-lack is brought about; from there, it goes without saying that desire is defined as a function of a field of transcendence' desire is desire for what one does not have” (101). In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari criticise desire conceived as lack in a similar capacity, albeit within the context of a critique of psychoanalysis and capitalistic mechanisms with their notion of 'desiring-machines' as productive of desire. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. 28n for a brief critique of Sartre's conception of scarcity; hereafter AO.
10. In the manner of Spinoza, to whose conception of desire Deleuze's is closely akin. See Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, (New York: Zone Books, 1990).
11. A fact which many of Sartre's commentators fail to recognise, Deleuze (it often seems) included, is that the phenomenological and ontological descriptions in Being and Nothingness are intended to focus upon impure, or accessory reflective consciousness (BN, 602), which is to say the egological consciousness of The Transcendence of the Ego. This should be clear from the above characterisation of the conscious passage from one state to another, since states are transcendent unities of consciousness, which is to say they are fundamentally egological (cf. TE, 60-68). Sartre's examination of pure or non-accessory (reflective) consciousness appears in an introductory form in his discussion of temporality in Being and Nothingness, but this serves predominately to delineate the characteristics proper to psychic (or egological) temporality (BN, 177-193). Since Sartre associates pure or non-accessory consciousness with an ethical mode of consciousness – as it is free of egological interpenetration and aligns itself with the conditions he set out in The Transcendence of the Ego of a radically impersonal or pre-personal spontaneity – this modality of consciousness is not the subject of his 'eidetics of bad faith' in Being and Nothingness. Rather, it is that which he famously promised to study in a subsequent work on the final page of his phenomenological ontology, which did not appear in published form during his lifetime. Consequently, the best clues to what Sartre intended by this ethical, non-accessory modality of consciousness are to be found in the Notebooks for an Ethics. It is in this text where he makes the most explicit link between desire and non-accessory consciousness (cf. NE, 417).
12. I have written of desire in relation to the various modalities of (un)reflective consciousness elsewhere. See my 'The Magical and Bad Faith: Reflection, Desire and the Image of Value', in Sartre Studies International, Volume 15, Issue 1, 2009: 54–73,

Back to Sartre's Futures

Unlike the other contributors to our series, The Futures of Sartre's Critique, I've only recently returned to his work. I had studied, in my very early twenties, parts of Being and Nothingness, paged through, with varying degrees of interest, the pieces collected in the anthology Essays in Existentialism, and maybe even looked over a few  post-68 interviews. I'd written a few papers on Sartre, but overall, I felt that his work was incomplete. Indeed, it should have felt that way; only the essays on art found in Essays in Existentialism were published after the 1940s. I read and wrote, but only tangentially with Sartre (there's a few more twists in this winding story, but I will leave them aside for the time being).

This changed in June 2007. I had read Sam Harris's The End of Faith, hoping to find an ethical atheist...but I found a moralizer. For somebody so concerned with what he now calls "well-being," Harris's book is overwrought with indignation and self-righteousness, not to mention lacking a sense of justice. Anything goes, including torture and benevolent dictatorship, for Harris, if it can 'save' us from the benighted hordes of the non-Western world. Of course, political interpretations of so-called religious fanaticism are excluded from his inquiry, in order to focus on the religious ideas themselves. That's nice, but it does not tell us why some concepts become prevalent at some points and not others, how these concepts come to represent not just religious but political struggles. But Harris won't take the long history of imperialism seriously. Those who do, such as Noam Chomsky, are treated with a general condensation.

So, I had to turn to an ethical atheist...and Sartre provides a clear language to engage these kinds of arguments...but then, as it always happens, I write for a few days and then quickly get diverted, because defining the actuality of atheism (it's political and metaphysical commitments) is only part of a much larger political struggle. The fight between new atheism and religion is a particularly western kind of political fight; they can go on talk shows, sell their books and t-shirts, and feel as self-righteous and as persecuted as they want. They can inspire people, convince them to change. Either way, it's all narrated in a self-interested, self-help kind of way. There's a "secret solidarity", as Ronald Aronson states it, between the two.  It's a spectacular substitute for a much more difficult struggle for social justice.

If it's about social justice, however, what does Sartre have to say for future struggle? That's what I want to discuss here. Even though we're commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (Volume 1, of course), I'm going to introduce that book through Search for a Method. Sartre writes that

Far from being exhausted, Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy; it has scarcely begun to develop. It remains, therefore, the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it (30).

And yet he states:

Marxism stopped. Precisely because this philosophy wants to change the world, because its aim is "philosophy-becoming-the-world,"  because it is and wants to be practical, there arose within it a veritable schism which rejected theory on one side and praxis on the other....Marxism found itself unable to bear the shock of these new struggles, the practical necessities and the mistakes which are always inseparable from them (21-22).

How to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory statements about Marxism, that philosophy of our time  which has nevertheless stopped? Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community rejects the claim that a philosophy could be the horizon of our contemporary times. The very idea of a horizon, Nancy claims, is no longer valid. And, obviously, all of us educated in more or less pluralist philosophy departments might find this claim to be obvious, but it's not.

Sartre introduces three periods of modern philosophy-- the first dominated by Descartes and Locke, the second by Kant and Hegel, and the third by Marxism-- but this third period is qualitatively different. While each of these three philosophies acts, during its respective period, as a horizon to cultural and philosophical forms of its time, Marxism also describes the relationships of the means of production. Descartes, Locke, Kant, or Hegel may have put forward systems that governed other cultural and philosophical forms, but Marxism does something entirely different; it broke down the wall between philosophy and political economy. Class struggle against the bourgeois or capitalist modes of production are "the circumstances which engendered it." This has shaped previous philosophy, but not in a decisive and reflexive way. If we follow Marx himself, we could say that the crises of philosophies that do not overstep their boundaries into political economy can be refuted by their very own ideological means; their abstraction becomes a weapon against them.

And yet, "Marxism stopped." How? Sartre introduces a crucial distinction between 'philosophy' and ideology.' A philosophy constructs new set of relationships between thought and praxis, and ideology comes in and does the practical work, it takes inventory, it extends new methods (8). Existentialism, according to the Sartre of Search for a Method, is an ideology and not a philosophy. Marxism stopped, according to Sartre, because it can no longer measure the life of the masses as it is lived by them; instead, Marxism interprets a priori this lived world, individuality is reduced to a series of formulas and types. Marxism needs existentialism to seek out man (sic) "everywhere where he is, at his work, in his home, in the street" (28), but, Sartre argues, "historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality" (21).

Sartre calls this the "double demand" of praxis, for both thinking concrete reality and criticizing political economy. He also identifies the the central and persistent problem: how to make the political imagination that drives praxis (its desires, passions, and fidelities) overlap with a totalizing critique of political economy (the production and reproduction of the relationships that organize and dominate the masses under capitalism) and vice versa? This question is just as relevant today as it was in 1957, just as "the circumstances which engendered" Marxism are, broadly speaking, just as relevant today as they were when Marx wrote.

Sartre's challenge to Marxism revolves around its treatment of the concrete and lived world of the masses.He is one of the first to see that the 'factory' is no longer the locus of the political imagination, that the locus is elsewhere (anticipating post-Fordism?). He has been criticized for his lack of interest in rank and file party organization due to his petty bourgeois background, but I think we should turn this critique around. His relative lack of interest in party organization is also connected to the emphases he placed on local spontaneity and systematic anti-colonialism. 'Imagining' this intersection of spontaneity and anti-colonialism has proved to be difficult for praxis (historically speaking, it was rejected or ignored by the French Communist Party), but it does explain Sartre's proximity to post-68 Maoism.

Schematic conclusions are risky to draw, but it is probably safe to say that many of the figures of post-68 post-structuralism, with their emphases on micro-politics and resistances, lost sight of the totalizing movement of political economy. The upshot is that political practices were extended into previously marginalized social spaces (the prisons, psychiatry, sexuality, etc). Nevertheless, today, we need a totalizing critique, which should pass again through Marx, the later Sartre, and the anti-colonialism and post-colonialism of Fanon, Césaire, and others. We need a  renewed critique of capitalism and a critique of the privilege that Westerners live by virtue of living in North America or Europe, and the exploitation and violence that engender it,  we need a sense of vigilance in order to critique and refuse every so-called humanitarian justification for imperial war and exploitation. We too need to be decolonialized, de-imperialized.

Coming Soon: The Futures of Sartre's Critique

This month The Notes Taken will be commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, which includes contributions from Mark Raymond Brown (University of Ottawa), Caleb Heldt (a graduate student at the University of Warwick), and T Storm Heter (author of Sartre's Ethics of Engagement [see here], and professor at East Stroudsburg University). I am also laboring to get a short piece together.

These essays will begin running early next week, and during this time our regular contributors will continue to post. Until then, though, a few pieces that I highly recommend:

• In the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson reviews several recent books on the ascendancy of China and the transformations that follow therefrom. Whether negative or positive, Anderson finds that a recent kind of 'Sinomania' is growing.
• In The Nation, an article by Nathaniel Popper details the non-relationship between Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews, and Hannah Arendt. Arendt seems to have borrowed quite heavily from Hilburg's book, sometimes without attribution. I don't know if that is the worst thing an academic can do, but if it's compounded by the fact that she had previously recommended against its publication when she reviewed it for Princeton's press...well, that's something else.
• Finally, an interview with Gideon Levy, author of the forthcoming The Punishment of Gaza. (Norman Finkelstein also has a book on the recent assault on Gaza, entitled 'This Time We Went Too Far.') Levy's estimation of the Israeli media: "There is an enormous historic role that the Israeli media is playing. The Israeli media, which is a free media, free of censorship, free of governmental pressure, has been dehumanizing the Palestinians, demonizing them. Without the cooperation of the Israeli media, the occupation would not have lasted so long. It is destructive in ways I cannot even describe. It's not Romania, it's not Soviet Russia. It's a free democracy, the media could play any role but it has chosen to play this role. The main thing is about the flow of information. It is so one-sided, so much propaganda and lies and ignorance."