Paul Trembath

Colorado State University

 

And that lie that success was a moving upward. What a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your own selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.

 

–Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man

 

The tension between art and politics looms large in the life and work of Jean-Paul Sartre. The child-aesthete depicted in The Words, the celebrity of Post-World War II Existentialism, the Marxist revisionist of The Critique of Dialectical Reason and, arguably, the uneasy Freudian of The Idiot of the Family–all of these and more seem like a family of conflicting self-representations. Contemporary interpreters of Sartre find themselves addressing several related dilemmas. First, was Sartre a philosopher, an artist, or a political theorist? Second, to what extent did Sartre’s literary writings contribute productively to an effective oppositional politics? Finally, given the early Sartre’s modernist use of phenomenological metaphors (as an apolitical philosopher) and the later Marxist Sartre’s interest in political “totalization,” how can Sartre survive familiar postmodern and poststructural criticisms of phenomenology, ontology, and Marxist theories of totality? I think that the later Sartre understood the hermetic redundancies produced by such questions and–having lost interest in art, philosophy, and totalizing social theory– strove to manipulate his multivalent historical reception in the service of specific political projects. These projects were invariably oppositional. In retrospect, they illustrate how Sartre moved away from professional philosophy, literature, and totalizing social theory toward a commitment to specific political protests calculated to reinvent the social world and our experience of it. I propose that the later militant Sartre makes possible a new understanding of aesthetics itself, one that anticipates John Rajchman’s discussion of Michel Foucault’s “politics of revolt.”¹

 

In his biographical narrative on Sartre, Ronald Hayman writes that Sartre “used his life to test ways of facing up to the evils of contemporary history. If he was not always honest, it was partly because honesty was a luxury he could not afford.”² Hayman’s suggestion that Sartre “used his life” to affect what he considered the “evils” of contemporary history–racism, dictatorship, colonialism, multinational capitalism, the serial family, and so forth– requires us to consider how Sartre’s “life” was largely made up of the literary, philosophical, and political-theoretical representations that people had come to associate with his name and public reputation. These representations were what Sartre “used” or manipulated to give voice to different political positions and programs. Hayman is unclear about what the word “honesty” implies in this passage, but the word is provocative. Hayman’s use of “honesty” suggests something like an unprofitable lack of social versatility; in a world as diverse in knowledges, truths, economies, and political interests as Sartre’s in the 60s and 70s, unilateral moral concepts like “honesty” serve only to bury any versatile engagement of seemingly contradictory political commitments beneath an ultimately reactionary–and apologist– language of hypocrisy. If Sartre allowed himself to be described variously as an Existentialist, a Marxist, or a Maoist (to name only a few of his provisional “identities”), his lack of representational stability–his inconsistency in Kantian moral terms–made his larger objectives seem dubious to a public trained to recognize in Sartre’s political versatility only his inability to take a definitive political stance of his own.

 

Clearly such a stance–when compared to the complex, changing, and situation-specific political commitments of Sartre–would have limited Sartre’s concrete ability to contribute to political change. In fact, the “luxury” of political “honesty,” in Hayman’s supramoral sense, would have ultimately re-empowered the problematic concept of historical totality that the activist Sartre arguably left behind with his “theoretical” Marxism, or the luxurious assumption of representational accuracy he had once assumed for himself as the phenomenological ontologist of French Existentialism.³ For the militant Sartre, “honesty” became the political, theoretical, and philosophical luxury of stepping outside one’s specific historical situation, of stressing Truth to disguise the workings of power, of theorizing Totality at the expense of advocating difference, and of describing Consciousness and Authenticity authoritatively instead of letting languages speak uniquely for themselves. Such “luxuries,” I shall argue, became untenable for Sartre toward the end of his productive life, when he was not only post-aesthetic (at least in traditional terms), but post-philosophical and post-theoretical as well.

 

The working distinction I want to draw between Sartrean philosophy and Sartrean critical theory is roughly the distinction between Sartrean Existentialism and Sartrean Marxism. Sartre became dissatisfied with the former because of its ahistoricism and naive faith in the representational function of phenomenological metaphors. He became dissatisfied with the latter because it attempted to describe authoritatively and comprehensively the social freedom of others. Sartre’s rejection of Existentialism, and his reasons for it, are today commonly recognized and understood in intellectual circles. However, the differences between the theoretical Sartre of The Critique of Dialectical Reason and the militant Sartre of the later demonstrations and interviews remain to be elucidated.

 

The theoretical Sartre and the militant Sartre are not consistently the same Sartre. Both are Marxist. But the theoretical Sartre of the Critique is a Marxist revolutionary–that is, someone with a total political program in mind that will definitively transform society. The militant Sartre, in contrast, is one who rejects any such authoritative program and, in part, the goal of revolution with it. This Sartre sees “revolution” as the ongoing business of revolt, not as the political end of a long history of class struggles. The militant Sartre emphasizes the historical materialism of Marxism but de- emphasizes the totalizing objectives of Marxist theory; where he once stressed the importance of global revolution, Sartre now stresses the importance of strategic local rebellions. Neither does he do this in particular texts, something of a first for the endlessly writing Sartre; he does it in his acts. His attempts to get arrested in political demonstrations, his participation in explicitly political debates and discussions, his visit to a well-known Western “terrorist,” his endorsement of oppositional political regimes around the world, and his publicized travels to diverse third world countries struggling for political autonomy⁴–these and additional activities demonstrate how Sartre used his global fame to lend credence and voice to marginal or oppressed political causes worldwide. (I will demonstrate this at some length later on.) In each instance, we see a Sartre who, dissatisfied with his professional reputation as a novelist, playwright, philosopher, comprehensive social theorist, and so forth, strategically uses his Euro-American cultural reception to draw public attention to marginal politics and underprivileged peoples throughout the world.

 

This shift in emphasis from globalizing social theory, philosophy, and literature to militant local practice is not the only change we can recognize in the activist Sartre. Sartre also undertook an implicit revaluation of the aesthetic. In a historicist or even pragmatist way that anticipates Michel Foucault’s discussion of an “aesthetics of existence,”⁵ Sartre came to demonstrate that the whole notion of private creativity–so much a reified part of our collective Western culture–needed to be reinvested with a sense of public effectiveness. That is, Sartre strove to reinvent the concept of the aesthetic not merely in commonly expected terms of private expression and production, but in terms of public and historical effectivity. For the later Sartre, “artwork” was no longer something one did in quietistic solitude, only to emerge publically with the hermetic results of one’s private labor (a painting, a play, an opera, a new theory of art, and so forth). The aesthetic became the entire realm of social invention–a realm utterly mediated by our continuous responsibility for the freedom and power of self-determination of other social “selves.” This, I think, is Sartre’s most neglected contribution to contemporary arts, to philosophy and literary theory and, perhaps most important of all, to social criticism.

 

In Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy, John Rajchman describes the writings of Foucault in a way that makes possible a post-voluntaristic discussion of freedom. The later, activist Sartre both enacted and anticipated this conception of freedom. In his chapter entitled “The Politics of Revolt,” Rajchman explains that “[l]ike Sartre, Foucault was an ‘intellectual’ with public positions, and as such, he had to worry about the political aims and consequences of both his histories and their methods” (43). Consequently, Rajchman is willing to discuss similarities between Sartre and Foucault that have gone unexamined largely because of the success of poststructuralist rhetoric and its critique of voluntarism or, of late, what has been described as “philosophy of mind.”⁶ In response to the way Sartre has been received recently (he has been ignored), Rajchman acknowledges that:

 

Foucault has often been seen as Sartre's philosophical rival. Yet as an intellectual he shares with Sartre an inclination to present his work as nonacademic and nonspecialized, and as addressed in a nontechnocratic way to basic issues in the lives of all of us. And like Sartre, as Foucault assumes this intellectual role, he moves from primarily epistemological to primarily political concerns, identified with an oppositional Left, though not with a party, or with any claim to bureaucratic or charismatic authority. (Michel Foucault, 43.)

 

What Rajchman describes as the central difference between Sartre and Foucault is their different approaches to freedom. Sartre, who Rajchman asserts “attempted to make freedom into the philosophical problem” (Michel Foucault, p.44), conceptualized freedom in a way that gave the phenomenological subject priority over the contingencies of history, whereas “Foucault’s commitment [is] to a nonvoluntaristic, nonhumanistic freedom within history” (45). Rajchman describes the difference between Sartre’s voluntaristic idea of freedom and Foucault’s historical idea of freedom as the difference between “anthropological” and “nominalist” ideas of freedom. Sartre’s anthropological idea of freedom, according to Rajchman, remains tied to a politics of revolution which has the final liberation of Man as its objective, whereas Foucault’s nominalist/historicist conception of freedom manifests itself in the world as a continuous politics of revolt–a politics that attempts “to occasion new ways of thinking . . . and sees freedom not as the end of domination or as our removal from history, but rather as the revolt through which history may constantly be changed” (Michel Foucault, p.123). As Rajchman explains:

 

[a]nthropology entails that we are free because we have a nature that is real or one we must realize; nominalist history assumes that our "nature" in fact consists of those features of ourselves by reference to which we are sorted into polities and groups. Our real freedom is found in dissolving or changing the polities that embody our nature, and as such it is asocial and anarchical. No society or polity could be based on it, since it lies precisely in the possibility of constant change. Our real freedom is thus political, though it is never finalizable, legislatable, or rooted in our nature. (123)

 

I quote Rajchman at some length because his emphasis on a certain tacit idea of “freedom” in the texts of Foucault makes it possible to recast Sartre as a nonvoluntaristic local aesthetician. I suggested earlier that Sartre’s activism might encourage us to re-evaluate aesthetics, not in terms of the beautiful, the sublime, the innovative, the problematic, and so forth, but instead in terms of social efficacy. And because Sartre’s activism is oppositional, because it always takes on explicitly political and counter- hegemonic emphases, critics who wish to aestheticize Sartre’s political activities need to remind themselves that Sartre’s effective/aesthetic practices are always activities of protest against specific configurations of political authority. Thus Rajchman’s Foucauldian conception of a post-revolutionary politics of revolt, as it empowers my reinvention of Sartre, might usefully be redescribed as an aesthetics of revolt.

 

This use of “aesthetics” may pose problems for many contemporary readers, and with good reason. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin warns us brilliantly and convincingly that the “aestheticization of politics” can coincide historically with the emergence of political fascism.⁷ Benjamin argues that critics and artists who wish in some way to associate artwork with political power must do so in projects that politicize artwork, not in projects that aestheticize politics. The politicization of artwork, Benjamin argues, helps break down political hegemony in a way that encourages Marxist participatory democracy. The aestheticization of politics, in contrast, elevates political regimes and their leading representatives to an almost mythic status of unquestionable authority, thus obscuring the real concrete workings of power and exploitation by drawing attention instead to transcendental narratives about national destiny, the greatness of the people, spirit of place, racial purity, and so on.

 

Benjamin’s useful distinction between politicized aesthetics and aestheticized politics has become too general and constraining in discussions of aesthetics and politics. Moreover, its unquestioned heuristic authority might make it possible for critics to interpret Sartre’s pragmatist aesthetics of revolt, prematurely and too simplistically, as an instance of aestheticized politics. Benjamin’s distinction, in short, has taken on a kind of automatic legitimacy in critical discussions; it divides political artists up all too neatly between the good guys and the bad guys, between desirable Marxist artists who shake up the artworld by exposing its complicity with forms of political power and domination, and undesirable fascistic mystifiers who, instead of demonstrating critically how art is a form of historical power, legitimate political power by giving it an aesthetic and mythical identity. The lauding of Hans Haacke in recent art criticism, for instance, and the complementary castigating of Joseph Beuys–the former for his “politicized art” and the latter for his “aestheticized politics”–demonstrate quite clearly just how automatic Benjamin’s overly polaric distinction has become.⁸

 

Writing critically of Joseph Beuys in his essay “Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys,” Stefan Germer claims that “Beuys . . . made all historical reality disappear behind a self-created myth of the artist-hero,”⁹ and that Beuys’s theory of social sculpture presented “creativity . . . as the means to shape and change society” (OCTOBER 68). In a discussion that defers constantly, if implicitly, to the authority of Benjamin’s metaphors and the critical positions they shape, Germer writes:

 

[b]y identifying political and artistic practice with one another, Beuys avoids the relevance of his activity, since he borrows for it the aura of the political. The necessary precondition of this is the aestheticization of the political. Abstracting from actual conditions, Beuys in effect invents state and society, thus making both into artistic creation. (OCTOBER 68.)

 

Germer’s critique of Beuys allows me to demonstrate how Benjamin’s critique of aestheticized politics, although important and necessary, should not automatically discredit my Foucauldian revision of Sartre as a local aesthetician. Germer’s Benjaminian critique of Beuys is based largely on Beuys’s belief “that, by inventing rather than analyzing social conditions, he could actually contribute to their change” (italics mine; OCTOBER, p.66). Germer’s use of “invention” invokes a whole tradition of thinking in which voluntaristic subjects supposedly create the world in which they live, unconstrained by their historical conditions. In such a view politicians are indeed “artists” whose “wills” create the social world–privileged subjects who manipulate social individuals, with truly epic panache, as the medium of their heroic self-expression. But after Rajchman on Foucault, the word “invention” can take on an entirely different sense–one that has nothing to do with the “out- moded concept of creativity,” or of the equally out-moded concept of the voluntaristic hero-artist who invents our political reality in the manner of a high Modernist “genius” creating an innovative painting or poem. It is this more recent view of “invention”–as it implies a nominalist aesthetics of historical effects rather than an anthropological aesthetics of self-expression–that Sartre’s activism and Rajchman’s work on Foucault prepare us to consider.

 

Clearly Sartre’s “aesthetics of revolt” is as intolerant of aestheticized politics–and certainly of fascism–as is the politicized art Benjamin advocates. Any aestheticization of politics, in Benjamin’s sense as well as Germer’s, coincides with the valorization of a regime, that is, with the legitimation of some form of political authority or domination–precisely what Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt seeks constantly to challenge. In fact, if we were to understand Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt as a politics we would need first to redefine politics as the counter-hegemonic practice of local resistance rather than as the structured and hegemonic practice of political domination. In short, Sartre aestheticizes continual resistance to political power, not political regimes themselves.

 

I say that Sartre’s practices of resistance are inventive because, in Rajchman’s Foucauldian sense, they freely contribute to the social transformation of polities and groups and, in effect, reinvent the world (and our potential experience of it) by so doing. In no way does this sense of “invention,” as it pertains to a nominalist aesthetics of revolt, reproduce the modernist/anthropological vocabulary of “creativity,” “genius,” the “hero-artist,” and so forth that is so central to Benjamin’s description, and condemnation, of aestheticized politics. Germer, for example, criticizes Beuys’s work by suggesting that Beuys’s privileging of “invention” over “analysis” in discussions of how best to describe and initiate social change–as well as his corresponding belief that people “invent state and society, thus making both into artistic creation”–relies upon an inevitable anthropological conception of invention. But such a (modernist) conception of invention is not the only one at our critical disposal, and Germer writes as if it is. The fact is that after Foucault’s dicussions of ethics and aesthetics in The Use of Pleasure, and after Rajchman’s redescription of Foucault’s aesthetics as a free politics of resistance, Benjamin’s unequivocal identification of “invention” with a mythology of “creativity,” as it sometimes appears in art criticism of a materialist persuasion, has become as out-moded as the very concepts it set out to criticize.

 

My discussions of Rajchman on Foucault and of the Benjaminian Germer on Beuys put us in position to revaluate Sartre as a kind of oppositional pragmatist or local aesthetician. In contrast with Germer, Sartre realizes that analysis is simply one pragmatic tool that enables the reinvention of society by producing effects within and upon it, but that it is not the only tool at our disposal. In fact, analysis is only one kind of effective/inventive practice; there are numerous others, and no single one is unilaterally the most conducive to participatory democracy. Instead, the context and the desired objective of any political project must determine the tools and practices that, in a given situation, contribute most effectively to social change. Sartre also realizes that abstractions, ideologies, religions and so forth produce specific effects on simultaneously collective and local individuals. Such a critical position makes it possible for Sartre to acknowledge how his public reception as something as general and hopelessly over-determined as an “Existentialist” can nonetheless empower the specific effects his thought and practice have upon concrete social individuals.

 

The major difference between Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt and Beuys’s social sculpture–at least as Benjamin inspires automatic criticism of the latter–is that Sartre’s work pursues political ends whereas Beuys’s work pursues predominantly aesthetic ends. That is, Beuys’s theory of social sculpture is designed to give us new ideas about art, whereas Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt strives primarily to bring about political change. This suggests enormous dissimilarities between Sartre, as I see him, and Beuys, at least as Germer sees him. Germer seems to believe that Beuys’s social sculpture, as it strives to produce further mythologies for an already ahistorical theory of art, engenders historical confusion in the service of Beuys’s “artistic” reception, and does so at the expense of specific examinations of political praxis.

 

Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt, however, does just the opposite. At the point in Sartre’s life where his activities take on a local aesthetic emphasis, Sartre already has the received and overly-general identity of an Artist and all the charismatic authority that goes with it; in fact, he is often openly ambivalent about his mythic identity.¹⁰ Thus where Beuys’s theorization of social sculpture can be understood, perhaps too one-sidedly, as an attempt to obtain a mythic identity, Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt can be understood as an attempt to use such a troublesome identity in the service of counter-mythic and oppositional practices. Indeed, Sartre has considerably more by way of “myth” at his pragmatist/historicist disposal than the aesthetic Beuys: not only is he a canonical literary writer of mythic proportions (Nausea, Roads to Freedom, The Flies, The Words, etc.); he is also famous as a philosopher who tells us something dramatic about a “human condition” (Being and Nothingness), a political theorist who describes for us our social present and its histories (The Critique of Dialectical Reason), and a social critic who addresses current events in oppositional terms (“The Maoists in France,” “Elections: A Trap for Fools,” “Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide,” etc.).¹¹ Sartre thus achieves dubious charismatic status, in Benjamin’s propagandistic sense, as a cultural “celebrity.” And despite Rajchman’s claim to the contrary, Sartre does have “charismatic authority,” or at least more than Foucault, even if like Foucault he makes no claims to having such authority.¹²

 

Enter Sartre the pragmatist. Now Sartre knows that he has indeed obtained celebrity status as a writer and a philosopher. For example, The Words is in some sense an attempt to come to terms with, and criticize, the socially acquired motivations that encouraged him to pursue such a status.¹³ But Sartre also knows that, given the levels of fame he achieved as the 20th Century “Voltaire” of Post-WW II France¹⁴–and arguably of the North Atlantic area in general–that he can never simply erase his fame. He can, however, put it to some productive counter-hegemonic use, which he proceeds to do.

 

As a major cultural celebrity of most of the capitalist First World, Sartre realizes that his cultural fame covertly legitimates the political status quo of the Western world at large–with its political and economic interests in the exploitation of Third World countries–despite the fact that he overtly condemns those interests. So Sartre brings his fame to bear upon the very world from which he derives his cultural authority by reproducing it supportively in places where it is not expected to be. Algeria, the Soviet Union (which he later repudiated for its Stalinism), Israel and Palestine, China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Brazil, and others all acquire some potentially sympathetic attention from Europeans and Americans when they see the “great” Sartre, keeper of the flame of Western culture, clearly advocating the political programs and interests of oppressed peoples contra the imperialist West’s negative representations of their interests and programs. Sartre thus becomes the enemy within, and the unforeseen statesman from without. But it is a curious sort of “statesman” that Sartre becomes for, unlike the comprehensive “theorist” we expect him to be, Sartre refuses to speak for others, to “lead” them on their behalf, or to presume to understand their historical needs and desires (unlike the authoritative West he supposedly represents) better than they do themselves. Instead he gets the West looking at him and listening to him, and then leaves the stage to its proper organic narrators, in Gramsci’s sense, for whom he or any other representative of the First World has nothing to say.¹⁵

 

Sartre’s use of his public identity demonstrates several related things pertinent to my reinvention of him. First, the revolutionary and theoretical Marxist of The Critique of Dialectical Reason has become unexpectedly a pragmatist of revolt. No longer making authoritative or transcendental claims for his pro-revolutionary “theories,” Sartre now uses the over-determined notoriety he has acquired for having “created” such theories to draw attention to specific problems in social polities.¹⁶ Sartre thus turns Western expectations inside out by allowing us to decide for ourselves that, politically and morally, we are not always what we proclaim ourselves to be.

 

Second, Sartre’s oppositional pragmatism coincides with his rejection of celebrity status as a hermetic cultural end in itself. Sartre at once demonstrates his critical dissatisfaction with concepts such as the “artist-hero,” “creativity,” “genius,” “eternal value,” “mystery”– precisely those concepts rejected by Benjamin and Germer in his criticism of Beuys–by moving toward oppositional nominalism while distancing himself, as much as his historical moment will allow, from any aesthetics or politics of creativity. Arguably, this distancing coincides with Sartre’s activist rejection of the voluntarism with which he is still too automatically associated, as well as with his rejection of the anthropology that Rajchman rightfully reinvokes where he distinguishes Sartre’s totalizing theoretical work from the nominalism we find, more profitably, in Foucault’s histories.

 

I call Sartre’s nominalist activism local aesthetic practice since it is at once inventive in a post- anthropological sense, and micro-political in its pragmatist suggestion that we resist authoritarianism, in Malcolm X’s words, by any means necessary. This last phrase has been popularly interpreted as an advocacy of militant violence; yet it is quite clear that “any means” can and should suggest a great deal more than simply “violent means.” Occasionally Sartre does speak out in support of “revolutionary” violence, as in his strategic 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth–a book which, in its theories and objectives, does anticipate the thought of the mature Malcolm X.¹⁷ Other times, however, Sartre refuses to support the violent practices of militant revolutionaries, although he periodically idealizes what he refers to in one interview as the “militant intellectual.”¹⁸ For instance, we know that in 1974 Sartre visits the incarcerated Andreas Baader in a West German prison, that he goes to express solidarity with the oppositional militant and to protest the treatment of political prisoners worldwide, but that he refuses to condone the terrorist tactics of the Baader-Meinhof group.¹⁹

 

What accounts for Sartre’s willingness to support counter-authoritative violence in one instance and his unwillingness to do so in another? I would argue that Sartre chooses to represent himself as a “violent revolutionary” when he thinks it will serve the interests of oppressed peoples whose organic situations clearly demand such a representation, and that in other kinds of specifically oppressive circumstances he sees fit to represent himself in other ways entirely–but always in pursuit of the same political revisionism. I say “revisionism” because the pragmatist Sartre, if we think of him as a local aesthetician, no longer believes in a final revolutionized state, but instead in the ongoing need to invent provisional democratic situations which, because they risk becoming hegemonic in their own right, constantly require revision and modification.

 

One of Fanon’s critical distinctions can help us see why Sartre’s direct public response to Fanon is necessarily different from his ambiguous public response to Baader. On the one hand, Fanon suggests that capitalist societies rely largely on their infrastructures to keep things in order.²⁰ Such infrastructures are maintained by “bewilderers”–teachers, lawyers, doctors, priests, clerics, and so on–who, themselves unconscious victims of power, mediate the hard realities of power by training citizens to believe that their governments work to protect their interests rather than those of the rich and powerful. On the other hand, Fanon suggests that colonized countries like Algeria require the immediate violent policing of occupied “natives” to protect the interests of the political powers that be. In the cases of both West Germany and Algeria, those who have power are those who either have or manage money. However, the actual tactics of oppression and exploitation in an infrastructural state such as West Germany in the 1970s–although arguably “occupied” by our even more infrastructural United States–are not as obviously violent to oppressed but serialized West Germans as are the visible guns and clubs of French militia to collectively oppressed Algerians.

 

Unlike the Fanon of French-occupied Algeria, Baader can thus be made to look like the only militant thing that exists in an otherwise peaceful West Germany. And because this is precisely what happens, it is not Baader’s illegality or militantism with which Sartre feels an urgent need to take issue–despite his disapproval of it–but rather with the way that Baader’s identity has been over- totalized by the First World press. Sartre understands that the French-occupied Algerians with whom Fanon is directly familiar, and whose plight encourages Fanon’s militant advocacy of a full-scale African revolution, collectively recognize an oppressive enemy in the French, and that the Algerian revolutionaries have organic narratives that can justify and explain their organic rebellion to counter- revolutionary Europeans. Europeans might not sympathize with the “self-descriptions” of oppressed Algerians, but these self-descriptions nonetheless exist, are collective, and make a certain sense; consequently, colonial countries will have to come to terms with them. This makes it productive for Sartre to support violence openly, for such violence, or its threat, will clearly yield counter- authoritative results by making negotiation necessary.

 

Baader, however, represents no full-scale revolutionary program and, as such, is easily “psychologized” and represented for public consumption only as a sociopath engaging in random acts of terrorism, when in fact other interpretations of militant protest merit public consideration. Sartre thus finds himself in the following dilemma. He must not allow the state to use Baader to condemn militancy in general on a symbolic level. But neither can he simply support Baader’s militancy on a specific level, for he risks enabling the state’s public representation of Baader as the Zeitgeist of terrorism, irrationality, anti-civilization, and so forth. Sartre is thus concerned that any blanket endorsement of militantism in a passive infrastructural state might affront uncritical citizens and opportunist state management enough for them to suppress those legal outlets for oppositional practice that already exist, and which already produce valuable counter- hegemonic effects. Yet arguably Sartre’s decision to visit the symbolic Baader in prison–an event which he knows will generate some attention–is an attempt to keep Europe’s interpretation of militancy open so people can question the state’s suggestion that all militant behavior is a priori pathological behavior.

 

Sartre’s strategic support of the student Maoists in France, to give another example, often takes the micro- political form of dialogues and open forums which are in turn publicized–dialogues and forums which then impart all the cultural credibility that a collaboration with Sartre carries in the Western world.²¹ (This is a specific strategy of Foucault’s as well, who more obviously than Sartre was no Maoist.²²) Once again Sartre chooses the means which most effectively empower oppositional representations. Thus his commitment to the contextual specificity of inventive resistances resembles Jonathan Swift’s as Edward Said describes it in “Swift as Intellectual.” Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt is always reactive in Said’s sense²³ (or “specific” in Foucault’s²⁴); that is, it always responds to a concrete political situation and shapes the form of its resistance accordingly, despite the fact that Sartre’s aesthetics, unlike Swift’s, is activist to the point of abandoning traditional category of “art” entirely. And the nominalist quality of Sartre’s later oppositional practices demonstrates how Sartre’s aesthetics becomes a politics, and not an anthropology, of freedom; Sartre strives to invent political room for organic speech-acts, protests, and rebellions, and demonstrates that reform is never final in a manner that emancipates people from an oppressive Past, but that reforms are instead ongoing, specific, and endlessly provisional.

 

Sartre’s oppositional activism also suggests that the “success” of any aesthetics of revolt can never be gauged, as has the success of all aesthetic enterprise in the past, by the degree of fame or recognition it obtains, for local aesthetic practice never conceives of success simply as originality, wealth, cultural canonization, and so forth– all of those representations of success which quickly become commodities within the authoritative market systems they covertly legitimate. Instead Sartre, like Ellison’s invisible man in the epigraph that begins this paper, understands success purely in terms of efficacious resistance. The question is no longer “Am I well-known, rich?” and so on, but instead “Have I released any of the counter-hegemonic potential that is stored up in the current regime? That is, have I affected the world in ways which unleash the possibility of endless resistance to authority?” Sartre, of course, is not the unknown protagonist of Ellison’s novel; in fact, the circumstances of Sartre’s life, existence, and influence are obviously different from those of an impoverished member of a social minority. Nonetheless what goes for Sartre goes for others as well; everyone in their specific and local situations can resist authority in local aesthetic ways and can do so, in part, by manipulating their various socially assigned “selves” in the service of inventive microphysical revolts. Moreover, the story I tell here of Sartre might usefully empower our unique resistances by lending them some (provisional) authority for which they are in dire need.

 

One inconsistency remains, but it is one that enables Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt in practice as much as it might seem to disable it in theory. If the reactive quality of Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt makes his activism “microphysical” in Foucault’s well-known sense of the word, a large portion of Sartre’s specific power–that is, the power he derives from his fame–is unavoidably drawn from the “mythologies” of creativity criticized by Benjamin and Germer. I think it is unproductive, however, simply to berate mythology for its “ideological” status, for such berating implies that we can “expose” mythology as pure false-consciousness, when in fact no such form of mythology exists. Rather mythology must be understood for what it is: a concrete force of history which can be used inventively and oppositionally against exploitive powers, or which will be used instead, almost invariably, to conserve those powers. In fact, we have no humane choice at present but to follow Sartre’s example and to redirect authoritative mythologies against themselves. Our failure to do so automatically leaves mythologies in the hands of those exploitive powers who, pragmatists already, use mythologies to legitimate their authoritarian politics. Just as honesty is a luxury that Sartre cannot afford, neither can we afford the a priori anti-mythologism of Benjamin’s automatic following. Such a rejection of the historically-constituted currency of struggle is the strategic equivalent of putting down guns in the thick of battle, of refusing to tell Attila a lie, as the famous illustration of Kant’s imperative goes, though it mean the death of an entire population.

 

Let us then reconsider Benjamin’s distinction between politicized art and aestheticized politics. If there are good reasons to avoid theoretical syntheses of aesthetics and politics (and there certainly are), Sartre’s local aesthetics cautions us against taking these “good reasons” too far, because they risk disempowering us entirely. If we should never equate power, in some mythic and glorious sense, with art, neither should we allow cultural materialism, since it is often our area of critical commitment, to become passive, commodifiable, and politically unengaged. This latter possibility is a far greater threat to critical activism than the social sculpture of Joseph Beuys, for it discourages many of the keenest critical minds in cultural studies, simply for fear of reprisal, from directing their inventive powers explicitly toward political issues. Sartre, for his part, refuses to practice an aesthetics which is not at once an effective historicism, and strives, in keeping with his larger democratic objectives, to affect social polities in ways that encourage us to criticize authority, to conceptualize political alternatives, and to empathize with the plights of suffering social selves. His nominalist aesthetics, which considers invention from a viewpoint radically different from that of Benjamin’s followers, neither simply aestheticizes politics nor politicizes art but, ceasing to privilege artwork altogether, politicizes the potential of our ongoing nominalist freedom.

 

Notes

 

1. John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). I am indebted to Rajchman’s superb reading of Foucault in this paper.

 

2. Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 13.

 

3. See Simone de Beauvoir, “Conversations with Jean- Paul Sartre,” Adieux, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 165. The later activist Sartre questions the impossibly broad scope of his theoretical Critique of Dialectical Reason when he suggests to de Beauvoir in an interview that he finds it too “idealistic.” And in an attempt to provide the phenomenological vocabulary of Existentialism with something of a historicist emphasis Sartre claims that Existentialism is autonomous with Marxism. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 60.

 

4. See Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre, ed. Norman Macafee, trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). Cohen-Solal gives examples of Sartre’s political protests (e.g, 141-22), his numerous travels as an “anti- ambassador” (391-414), his brief arrest in 1970 for distributing La Cause du peuple (479-480), his visit to the imprisoned Andreas Baader (507), and suggests that these and other of his activities are instances of Sartrean engagement. See also Keith A. Reader, Intellectuals and the French Left since 1968 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1987), 31. Reader mentions Sartre’s “involvement with the banned Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple, and subsequently with Liberation, participation in demonstrations, and attempts to get himself arrested” which are “shrewdly rebutted by the regime.”

 

5. For Foucault on his treatment of an “aesthetics of existence” see Michel Foucault, “Introduction,” The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), especially 11-12.

 

6. See Richard Rorty, “Epistemology and ‘the Philosophy of Mind,'” Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1979), 125-27.

 

7. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books, 1969), 241-242.

 

8. See Thierry de Duve, “Joseph Beuys, or the Last of the Proletarians”; Stefen Germer, “Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys”; and Eric Michaud, “The Ends of Art according to Beuys” in OCTOBER, eds. Joan Copjec, Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson (Cambridge: MIT Press), Number 45, Summer 88.

 

9. Germer, OCTOBER, 71.

 

10. Sartre indeed has mixed feelings about the fame he has acquired as a cultural figure. He sometimes discusses his fame openly, his early reasons for desiring it, and speculates about his relation to “posterity” in a matter-of- fact manner. See de Beauvoir, Adieux, 162-64. Other times, however, he is defensive about his fame, and attempts to deny that it empowers him since he associates celebrity status very unfavorably with “bourgeois” society. See Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” 25-31. Nonetheless, the later politicized Sartre capitalizes on his fame (or his “mythic identity”) to draw attention to political alternatives. Moreover, in reference to Sartre’s 1968 interview of the less famous Daniel Cohn-Bendit–in which Sartre was provided with the opportunity to use his fame while playing it down–Reader writes in Intellectuals that “[f]rom being famous for being Sartre, the curse that had dogged him for years, it was as though he were moving toward ‘un-being’ Sartre,” 32.

 

11. See Sartre, “Elections: A Trap for Fools,” and “The Maoists in France,” Life/Situations; and Jean-Paul Sartre, “Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide,” Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).

 

12. See Rajchman, 43.

 

13. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964).

 

14. See Cohen-Solal, 415. Cohen-Solal writes that de Gaulle’s response to continued French disapproval of Sartre’s political views and activities in 1960 was the famous “You do not imprison Voltaire.”

 

15. For an excellent summary of Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between the organic intellectual and the traditional intellectual see Edward Said, “Swift as Intellectual,” The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983), 82.

 

16. For a similar view of how Sartre uses his cultural recognition to enable projects of resistance which are not necessarily his own, see Reader, 32. Regarding Sartre’s close relation with the French student Maoists in the late 1960s and early 70s, Reader writes that “Sartre subordinates himself to the Maoists, using his prestige to amplify and propogate their ideas rather than ideas he has himself developed.”

 

17. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Preface” to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1966); and for an interpretation of how the thought of the later Malcolm X resembled the “revolutionary socialism” of a “Third World political perspective” (237) see Ruby M. and E.U. Essien-Udom, “Malcolm X: An International Man” in Malcolm X: The Man and his Times, ed. John Henrik Clarke (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1969), 235-267.

 

18. See Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” 61. In this interview Sartre characterizes the Maoist Pierre Victor as a “militant intellectual” and expresses hope that Victor “will carry out both the intellectual work and the militant work he wants to.”

 

19. Sartre discusses his reasons for visiting Baader, the public’s reaction to his visit, and his judgment of the visit itself in “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” 27, 31. Despite all the attention his visit drew, Sartre claims: “I think it was a failure, which is not to say that if I had to do it over again I would not do it.” Sartre acknowledges that, although many people did interpret his visit as an expression of approval for Baader specifically or, even worse, exploited it as a political opportunity to question the aging Sartre’s lucidity through the press, the fact that some attention was drawn to the merits of oppositional militancy more than justified Sartre’s visit, and would have justified it again. I think Sartre used Baader as an available representation of militant activism simply to keep the possibility of such activism alive in the European imagination. For even if Baader’s practices were specifically unproductive and even questionable as activities of “resistance,” Sartre knew that the state would manipulate Baader’s reception on a symbolic level to condemn militancy in general, when militancy might in some cases be necessary, effective, and absolutely desirable. Sartre thus strove to respond to the state’s symbolic over- totalization of oppositional militancy by producing alternative symbolics. See also Cohen-Solal, 507, and Hayman, 462, 465, 467.

 

20. For Fanon’s characterization of the difference between capitalist and colonized countries and the role that “bewilderers” play in the former see The Wretched of the Earth, 38. Fanon does not use the word “infrastructure” to characterize institutional activities of “bewilderment; however, I think the word “infrastructure,” with some qualification, communicates the sense of his argument well. I am not using “infrastructure” to imply the base (or substructure) of a society, but instead to suggest the more microphysical practices of subjectivization that take place in complex societies which cannot be explained simply in terms of base or superstructure.

 

21. See Sartre, “The Maoists in France,” Life/Situations, 162-171. This article first appeared as the introduction to Michele Manceaux’s Maos en France (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1972). Manceaux’s book is a collection of interviews with Maoists, and Sartre was eager to endorse the Maoists’ moral commitment to illegal action. Sartre did so, I think, both to provoke France to consider the merits of illegal action, and to provide a moral discourse that could justify the necessity of such action to uncritical citizens who were otherwise trained to understand illegal action as a priori illegitimate action. See also Cohen-Solal on Sartre and the Maoists, 474-88, 494.

 

22. Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 1-36. This interview is largely a conversation with Sartre’s close associate toward the end of his life, the Maoist Pierre Victor.

 

23. For Said on the “reactive” intellectual see “Swift as Intellectual,” 78. Elsewhere in this essay Said describes Swift as a “local activist” (77) and characterizes Swift’s writings and practices as “local performances” (79). These distinctions are all pertinent to my reinvention of Sartre.

 

24. For Foucault on the “specific” intellectual see “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge, 126.