Why has Sartre fallen out of favor [NF]

Well, by now it's probably clear to y'all that I'm not too fond of Sartre, and I guess I've been quite vocal about it too.

Regardless of what I think, though, there seems to be the historical or sociological question (in the sense of sociology of French academy) of why does it seem -- rightly or wrongly -- that Sartre has fallen out of favor, or out of fashion. I can't think of any other major European or American thinker who is citing him as a significant influence. Again, it's a question mark for me. Who was Sartre's circle? Who read him Whom did he influence? What about that journal he founded, Les Temps Moderne (which is still running, BTW). Has any of you ever read anything from that journal, or saw citations from it? I can't think of one. So again, are we talking about a very small, perhaps even marginal group? Did he have his moment and then faded? Did he appeal to youngsters of a certain generation and then failed to recognize major developments? And how does that fit in with the thousands and thousands who attended his funeral and all that?
I honestly don't know.

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But turning now from this sociological question to a more content-based one, let me try and summarize very briefly why I think Sartre is committing some fundamental mistakes. And if I'm not mistaken, then those are also the mistakes that many other French thinkers would hold him accountable for. Even if--and that goes back to the previous puzzle--they didn't really write any explicit criticisms of him. (Does anyone know of a text by, say, Foucault, criticizing Sartre's idea of freedom, directly I mean? I don't. Is this debate there in the background and we're just not noticing it because we're not sensitive to the politics of the Left Bank, and to the subtleties of French academic writing? Maybe).

OK. So the two major reproaches to Sartre seem to revolve around (1) his idea of freedom and (2) his idea of consciousness or reflection.

(1) Sartre's idea of freedom seems to be too individualistic, and that in two respects. First, in the sense that it seems to be about individual people attaining freedom, and not so much about groups or classes. Second, it's individualistic in the sense that it's all about me breaking away from the role assigned to me by others, me escaping myself. Perhaps we can say it's an 'escapist' kind of freedom. Recall here Ramona's example of Sartre's play Kean, which ends with the hero going "fuck all this, I'm going to America". Great. Have you made any significant social change? No. You're escaping because you don't like being told what to do. Very mature. (sorry, I'm riffing here).

Perhaps this point is best made by asking what is the problem of freedom for Sartre. What's bothering him? What is he trying to solve? It seems to me--from my limited understanding--that it's something like Roussaue's dilemma: men are born free but everywhere they are in chains. Freedom, says Sartre in Being and Nothingness, is the essence of man. Admittedly, it's a negative, rather than positive essence: freedom seems to be a very rare and fleeting condition for Sartre, as opposed to something lasting and ever-present. We're free in the sense that we can not be who we are. At any given moment we can step out of ourselves, choose to do things otherwise, etc. So while freedom is our essence, that is to say that we are, in principle, always free, it's as if this freedom is for the most part "buried", latent, potential. It only surfaces and manifests itself in those moments we negate ourselves (step outside our roles, outside ourselves, catch ourselves as being in bad faith, etc).

So what's the problem? The problem is that most of us don't realize just how essentially, how deeply, how fundamentally free we in fact are. We tend to think of freedom as something positive, something we can hold, something we have, whereas in fact it's what we're not; or better yet, it's our potentiality to not be what we are (or what we think we are, or what others think we are--he gives many variations to this). In other words--and I think this is the crucial issue--the problem of freedom for Sartre is that people don't quite live up to their freedom potential. And I would even go so far as to make the following conjecture: for Sartre, the problem (say with Marxism) is that there's too much talk about how unfree people are (or at least certain groups of poeple). Whereas in fact, we are much more free than we think. Resistance--and subsequently freedom--"starts from within", so to speak.

Now let me contrast this with someone like Althusser, Foucault, or even Zizek. They would say the problem is precisely the opposite. The problem is that today (at least since the great democratic revolutions, and increasingly so in post-WW2 liberal societies) there's so much talk (or ideology) about how free we all are. And what we don't realize is just how unfree we really are. Ideology and power trickle down to very intimate areas of our lives, shaping not just where we can work and how much we earn but also what and how we desire (Disneyland). And I think that this is something Sartre would either never get, or would never be willing to accept. To him this would sound like abomination, a sin against the deep-seated fundamental freedom of man. This, I think, is the major fault line. Can we rescue Sartre even after Foucault and Zizek and many others have shown us just how implicated we are in networks of power and desire that are beyond our control? Can Sartre nonetheless say "yes, this might be true, but under all those layers there's still a kernel of negative-freedom"? Or even, "yes, I'll grant you we are shaped and molded in more intimate and small-scale ways than I first admitted--and yet I still maintain that we succumb to those forces out of our willful choice, and at any given moment we are free to will otherwise"? That seems to me to be the 64,000 dollar question.

(2) The problem with Sartre's idea of consciousness or reflection
I think I actually already touched on this point, so I'll try to be brief. Sartre thinks that, at least in principle, we can always be reflective about who we are, who we expect ourselves to be, what others expect us to be, how we lie to ourselves (bad faith), etc. People like Lacan and Althusser, for example, think this is too naive.

In short, Lacan would say that the very categories by which you reflect upon yourself, the very words you use to do it, to express yourself to yourself, even if it's a non-verbal language (not words as such)--those are never under your complete control. Your control is always relative, always to a degree, always within the confines of a "system" which is not of your making. That doesn't mean you don't have a certain leeway, a certain degree of freedom. It just means it's never complete freedom, because that would mean complete transparency--of language, society, etc. And for the structuralists, this can never be attained. Not because we are limited, or because we tend to lie to ourselves too much (bad faith etc.), but because we are always-already part of the system, and hence can't be completely reflective from the inside (in other words, the problem is not psychological, but structural).

Think of Althusser's exapmle of how your parents choose a name for you even before you are born, as a kind of "primary" interpellation. Think also of Butler's example of the doctors in the delivery room going "it's a girl". Again, it's not that we are completely determined by those things. It's just that Sartre's position seems to be too naive: as if with enough honesty I could reflect upon my life and realize what are my problems and what I really want to do about them.

Another way to put it is this: Sartre's idea of freedom is based on a false idea of autonomy. Namely, of control, of taking charge of your life. And one of the big lessons of psychoanalysis (which he rejects), or of Foucault's theory of power (which would make him sick, I think), is that we are never autonomous. Certainly not in the way Sartre would like us to be.

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Epilogue: Sartre and Ranciere
All that being said, let me end with a quote from Sartre, and I'll leave open the question just how similar or not this is to Ranciere's project in Night of Labor. Is Sartre back with a vengeance after everything I said? I wonder.

"A person wishing to study one of those culture groups which we find in certain factories, will not be quit of them by resorting to the old remark--the workers believe that they are reading... but in actuality they are only retarding their own attainment of self-awareness and delaying the emancipation of the Proletariat. For it is very true that they are delaying the moment of their own awareness, but it is very true also that they read and that their reading is effected at the center of a community which favors it and which is developed by means of it." (Sartre, The Search for Method, part 1 -- sorry, don't have page numbers: it's the fifth paragraph from the end of part one)

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