Why We Should Read Sartre Today

A critical review of Paige Arthur's  Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (2010)

Alexander Zevin, Critique of Neo-colonial Reason, NLR, July-August 2011

Excerpts

There is no shortage of either scholarly or popular works on Jean-Paul Sartre, or on the intellectuals with whom he sparred in post-war France. Yet if the number of studies continues to expand, the themes they treat tend, at the same time, to narrow: friendships, paramours and quarrels are laced into larger, moralizing narratives of alleged Sartrean backsliding on camps in the Soviet Union and show trials under its client regimes in Eastern Europe. This tradition found its own shrill champion in Tony Judt, whose Past Imperfect (1992) dwelt on the silence or complicity of intellectuals in and outside the PCF who, ‘in the name of the proletarian and the class struggle made a daily contribution to the legitimation of the enslavement of the satellite states.’ A methodological consensus has meanwhile congealed around the work of Anna Boschetti, itself heavily indebted to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which interprets Sartre’s long career through the lens of self-promotion and the accumulation of—and competition for—intellectual capital.

These approaches, dominant since at least the mid-1980s, are in need of revision. It is not just that they have aged poorly since the polemics  attendant upon the end of the Cold War, but that they depend on the most pious and rudimentary of mises-en-scène. Sartre is given the role of villain in an anti-totalitarian passion play in which his anti-colonialism is all but ignore…

A portion of Europe over which Frenchmen exerted no control has obscured debates about the vast empire whose destiny France never willingly ceased to direct. Sartre pronounced the necessity of colonial independence well in advance of his apparent moral betters, and did more than most to secure it as a matter of fact.

Sartre’s own evolving critique of racism, colonialism and neo-colonialism was extensive and varied. The racial problem in the us was the focus of a number of post-war works, including the 1946 play La Putain respectueuse, unfolding the prostitute Lizzie’s dubious struggle to protect a black man accused of her rape in the South. Sartre’s contribution to the inaugural issue of Présence Africaine (1947) and his introduction to a selection of Francophone poets in 1948 marked his early appreciation for the négritude movement and the way in which, by refashioning the French language for their own ends, its poets might play an important role in the process of colonial emancipation. As early as 1956 Sartre argued against the idea that

economic reforms could ever seriously attenuate the basic political demand for Algerian independence in ‘Colonialism is a System’ (Les Temps Modernes did so a year earlier in ‘L’Algérie n’est pas la France’). His 1962 preface to the political writings of Patrice Lumumba analysed the challenges confronting newly independent states in a world in which different forms of domination had emerged even as formal colonization ended. In 1967 Sartre agreed to chair the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam, and his activism continued through the 1970s even as his health began to deteriorate.

 Paige Arthur’s study [Verso 2010] draws needed attention to the early Sartre, attempting to place his most famous and controversial preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) in the context of a continuous and less hortatory engagement with the Third World. Her contribution to the most recent sedimentation of scholarship on Sartre is twofold. On the one hand, Arthur fills a void in the biographical feuilletons assembled by Annie Cohen-Solal and Bernard-Henri Lévy, both of whom omit any mention of their subject’s anti-colonialism before 1961. On the other hand, by reading the Fanon preface alongside his other writings on colonialism and neo­-colonialism, she suggests that Sartre’s attitude towards violence was neither adulatory nor ‘curiously ambivalent’, but historically situated, intriguingly consistent.

Sartre’s engagement with American blacks in the immediate post-war period was especially significant, Arthur argues, because it led him to understand European colonialism as under-girded by a form of structural racism.  In his contribution to Alioune Diop’s new review Présence Africaine, though, he cautioned against complacent French indignation at segregation in America. The few blacks from

Senegal, Martinique or the Congo allowed to filter into France were ‘hostages and symbols’, whose equality—at Parisian universities, concerts, these ‘handsome courteous strangers who dance with our women’—depended for its charm on their strict exclusion from white society in the colonies. [That echoes the wars and military interventions of Britain, for example, which depended on the 'humanism' and 'benevolence' when it helps treat an injured or a disfigured Iraqi or a Palestinian child or grant an Afghan girl a place at Oxford.]

‘Black Orpheus’ is the centrepiece of Arthur’s excavation. Sartre’s address to white readers began with an inflection of the duelling gazes in Being and Nothingness: ‘Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground?’ ‘Here are black men standing, looking at us’, he announced, ‘and I hope that you—like me—will feel the shock of being seen.’ The poetry of négritude was the only revolutionary verse being written in French, and Césaire’s calamitous lyricism had nothing to learn from the surrealist leftovers of Eluard or Aragon. Yet négritude and the notion of a black soul, Sartre insisted, were transitory revindications. Blacks were unlike other victims of capitalism: they could not choose to deny their difference, as some Jews might, and unlike his white counterpart, a black peasant or worker, ‘oppressed in his race and because of it, had first to become conscious of his race. The identitarian reflex was the precondition for a much broader solidarity with the toiling classes in Europe. ‘And because he is the most oppressed’, Sartre writes, in a reformulation of Marx to which he would return with insistence in the 1960s, ‘in working for his own deliverance, it is the liberation of all he necessarily pursues.’

The analysis of Algeria in the Critique of Dialectical Reason revolves around two conceptual axes: the practico-inert structures erected by colonizer and colonized, and the praxes, or bonds of alterity and reciprocity, between individuals and groups. In the first case, Sartre unfolds the history of the French colonization of North Africa since Charles X and the pacifications of Bugeaud, focusing on the role of low wages in driving expansion in the nineteenth century, and the need to keep them low if colonizer and colonized were to retain their roles in the twentieth. By the 1950s the only possible response to a history of expropriation and exploitation, conquest and occupation, was a decision to return to sender and therefore a choice of particular praxes—the FLN, for example. For Arthur the affirmation of the FLN’s revolutionary violence in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, the following year,

must be read in the context of the Critique, for two reasons. Sartre’s voluble rejection of political compromise takes on explanatory clarity in light of his account of petrified violence: the policies of Jules Ferry, the creation of the first colonial banks and maritime transports, the army as both an institution and a war machine, and colonial administrators—these had made violence the original situation, the fundamental relation, of daily life in French Algeria. On the other hand, his earlier pessimism of the intellect serves to temper the somewhat sanguine portrait of the FLN and its political prospects in the preface. In the Critique Sartre was mindful of the tendency of groups-in-fusion to relapse into serial collectivities, or to turn inwards, resulting in fraternal bloodshed. The criticism of an ‘embrace of violence’ levelled by Raymond Aron and somewhat clumsily reprised by Judt becomes difficult to sustain. For Sartre armed struggle was not a requisite form of negation on the road to freedom nor an end in itself, but a tool of counter-violence to which workers, peasants, the colonized, had recourse in given historical situations. [Think Palestinians's use of violence]

In the Third World, Sartre’s earlier stress upon the revolutionary capacities of the colonized in essays such as ‘Black Orpheus’ had returned as movement and conjuncture. Sartre was deeply imbricated in both: a signatory to the Manifesto of the 121 in 1960; prefaces for Fanon in 1961 and Lumumba in 1963; interventions on behalf of Régis Debray, the Russell War Crimes Tribunal and visits to Egypt and Israel, all in 1967. Arthur might also have included his and Beauvoir’s trip to Cuba in 1960, a personal and political escape ‘to keep from shrivelling up in the French misery’. Meetings with Che Guevara and university students in Havana, trips to the countryside in the company of Fidel Castro, attendance at the funeral for victims of the La Coubre explosion made a profound impact on Sartre. He promoted the young revolution, in need of friends abroad, as a popular model only partially foreseen by the Critique. A reportage entitled ‘Storm over Sugar’ appeared in sixteen instalments in France Soir in the summer of 1960, while in forums, interviews and essays he argued that Cubans were forging their ideology out of praxis, radicalizing in response to offshore pressures from the us and to the objective need to alter the production processes in their single-crop economy. In 1968, too ill to travel to an international conference on culture in Havana, he still told the newspaper Granma, ‘I think that at the present time, it is in Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America that a European’s own fate is at stake.’ Arthur understands this and similar expressions of support for the Third World by Western intellectuals to represent ‘a new ethics of personal responsibility, based on an idea that, in an increasingly interconnected world, people’s actions can have distant consequences.’

Though blindness and other accumulated ailments slowed his pace for much of the following decade, Sartre nevertheless contributed several short speeches and texts on the subject of immigration and immigrant workers, in ‘The Third World Begins in the Banlieue’ and ‘The New Racism’, and on regional rights for Basques, Bretons and others, in Le Procès de Burgos. These applied theories of colonialism developed earlier to new contexts within Europe. Just as the metropole had once imported raw materials from its colonies, explained Sartre in ‘The Third World Begins in the Banlieue’ today it extracted human labour: unskilled workers whose low wages allowed France to remain competitive in Europe and who, as in the Congo, were denied professional advancement because of their race. The process of ‘reconstituting within itself the colonies it had lost’ took physical form in the bidonvilles rising on the outskirts of Paris, and in the ‘farce of clandestinity, the very kind of immigration favoured by the bosses’. This was an ideal labour regime in which workers were under the permanent apprehension not merely of dismissal but of expulsion.

It is remarkable that in a study ostensibly devoted to bringing the history of decolonization and Sartre’s philosophical oeuvre into closer correspondence, the colonial wars themselves—the major insurrections, battles and defeats; the parliamentary schisms, inquests and scandals they provoked; and the seemingly permanent menace of De Gaulle waiting in the wings—are rarely mentioned. Arthur leads one to suppose that Sartre entered the anti-colonial struggle gradually but ahead of time, his post-war literary engagement overlaying empirical encounters with race and racism in America and France. Humanism remains on the philosophical horizon for the next thirty years. Readers who wish to enter the history of Sartrean anti-

colonialism in their turn are, however, entitled to ask through which door Arthur proposes to invite them. he upshot of her initial formulation—that Sartre’s theory of colonialism relied on both ‘an analysis of the material (i.e. economic) forces at work in the development of structures of exploitation and an analysis of the phenomenological conditions of oppression that set individuals in asymmetrical relations of recognition’—is the disappearance of the first variable and the analytical dominance of the second.  

Arthur’s ethicization of Sartrean anti-colonialism is distortive in a double sense. It not only passes over his important economic analyses of exploitation in Algeria, Congo or Vietnam, it also ignores his intellectual and political modulations over time. Sartre’s methodological commitment to Marxism after 1952 implied decolonization as its praxis. When he wrote about responsibility or rebellion Sartre was generally not speaking in an ethical but in a political register, and it is the force of post-war circumstances which is too often missing from Unfinished Projects.

In 1950 the intensification of the Cold War made colonialism more, not less, central to intellectual debates in France. The editorial in Les Temps Modernes on the Soviet gulag (written by Merleau-Ponty and signed by him and Sartre) took the position that, while offering no indulgence to Communist crimes, ‘neither must we make pacts with its enemies’. To attack only the Soviet Union was to absolve the West and its own dismal record. ‘The colonies are—mutatis mutandis—our slave labour camps.’ ‘Perfectly indifferent to the 40,000 people killed at Sétif, the 80,000 murdered Malgaches, the famine and poverty in Algeria, the burned out villages of Indochina, the Greeks dying in their camps and the Spanish shot by Franco’, recalls Beauvoir of the climate at the time of Merleau-Ponty’s editorial, ‘Les Jours de Notre Vie’, ‘the hearts of the bourgeoisie suddenly burst when confronted by the misfortunes of the people imprisoned by the Russians.’ 

 In October 1955, five months after the war began, an article titled ‘Refusal to Obey’ described Algeria pointedly as a ‘colony . . . subject to the most obvious exploitation.’ Across November’s cover ran the headline: ‘Algeria is Not France’. In 1956’s ‘Colonialism is a System’ Sartre rejected all proposals for reform—that economic improvements could or should precede political ones, that educating the native population was even possible while ensuring Algeria’s profitability—as either neo-colonialist mystification or cynical stalling. ‘People who talk about the abandonment of Algeria are imbeciles’, he wrote, ‘there is no abandoning what we have never owned.’ In the preface to Henri Alleg’s The Question—published in L’Express in 1958 after the French state confiscated the entire print run of the book—Sartre wrote that, in 1943, under the German occupation, ‘only one thing seemed impossible to us: that one day, in our name, people would be made to scream.’ He continued: ‘If 15 years are enough to change the victims into torturers it is because circumstances alone dictate. Depending on the circumstances, anyone at any time will become a victim or a perpetrator.’ One struggles in vain to discern the code of ethical conduct hidden within this landscape of colonial determinacy.

The philosophical and political importance of armed struggle—essentialized as ‘violence’—is another issue that is abstracted from its historical moorings in particular Third World conflicts and given the ethical treatment. Though she urges the contextualization of the Fanon preface within the totality of Sartre’s work, Arthur’s mind is not untroubled. After defending Sartre’s understanding of violence as contingent and relational she ends up agreeing with Aron on normative grounds, ‘since Sartre never really described what imperative or norm (if any at all) violence ought to be called upon to defend’. Perhaps she finds it difficult wholeheartedly to endorse this preface which coolly observes of the colonial révolté, ‘to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, doing away with oppressor and oppressed at the same time; what remains is a dead man and a free man.’ Shocking rhetorical flourish, but Sartre was only reiterating the same position which fifteen years earlier had caused the editorial team to criticize Camus’s ‘Neither Victims nor Executioners’. ‘We must face up to that unexpected spectacle: the striptease of our humanism’, Sartre wrote in the seventh year of the war in Algeria, ‘it was nothing but an illusory ideology, a justification for pillage. The non-violent are looking pleased with themselves: neither victims nor executioners! Come on!’ Far from returning to a practice of ethicization—dismissed by Beauvoir as an illusion common to bourgeois intellectuals, and for which Camus had particular difficulty in finding a cure—Sartre’s writings, beginning in the 1950s, are characterized by an analysis of one form of imperialism as it transformed into another: neo-colonialism.

Patrice Lumumba was the victim of a metamorphosis from which it was still necessary to draw conclusions in 1963. Lumumba realized, as Sartre had been arguing since at least 1956 with respect to Algeria, that political independence needed to come first, and that economic reforms were simply not possible within the framework of colonialism. Lumumba’s mistake had been twofold, Sartre explained in his preface in Présence Africaine. On the one hand, he had misjudged his enemy, no longer a moribund, direct colonialism composed of small settlers and administrators, but an invidious and deft 

neocolonialism. Faced with the prospect of crises on the scale of Algeria, imperialist governments and large companies had decided to entrust nominal powers to natives—in this case the petty bourgeoisie of Belgian-trained employees and office holders—who would govern, more or less consciously, according to colonial interests. In the future, independence would no longer be sufficient, ‘without agrarian reform and without the nationalization of colonial businesses.’ The case of Lumumba held out another lesson. Independence in the Congo had not been won. It had been granted by the former colonial master, and this was not only an existential problem—'liberty is not given, it is taken’—but a political one. In Vietnam and Algeria, Sartre explained, ‘whatever their present difficulties, unity and centralization preceded independence and were its guarantee.’ Their leaders, Ho Chi Minh and Ben Bella, had taken power despite the metropolitan countries, borne along by armed movements which not only ensured their personal legitimacy but national sovereignty as well. In the aftermath of Lumumba’s betrayal, and the division of the spoils by the us and Belgians under cover of a un mandate, Sartre looked to the eventual emergence of a ‘Congolese Castro’ who might redeem Lumumba in the same way Castro had Martí.

The turn towards human rights, the influence of Levinasian ethics, the rise of the nouveaux philosophes and their critique of totalitarianism—all are mentioned, but since these all more or less explicitly rejected Sartre’s Third Worldism, how might they also represent his contemporary misuse? In fact, the silence around Sartre’s anti-colonialism has been more significant, and more enduring, than its caricature. Arthur herself suggests as much, though her way of doing so ends in the bathos of a complaint that he is not to be found in the pantheon of postcolonial thinkers and the syllabi of departments devoted to this vital branch of scholarship.

This obscure historiographical denouement is augured by one of several baffling mission statements, in which Arthur proposes that ‘an interpretation that takes Sartre strictly as an “anti”-colonialist would view his thinking and his politics concerning colonialism and its legacy as oppositional, and thus in some sense unable to escape old, colonialist categories.’ Perhaps this accounts for her own scholarly pacifism—a citational diplomacy which aims so squarely at recovering what is acceptable about Sartre that it often leaves whole chunks of him scattered behind enemy lines.

Saying that Sartre’s Third Worldism was related to his engagement with communism without being reducible to it, ‘particularly since this support often set him at odds with the Communist Party’, is a meaningless variation of the same distinction. Sartre spent far more time being called a hyena by the Party than working harmoniously at its flank. From 1952 to 1956 he regularly aimed barbs at L’Humanité, and admonished the party, in ‘Le Réformisme et les Fétiches’, to abandon idle polemicizing for the work of creating, in France, a living, breathing Marxism. In 1956 he condemned the Soviet repression in Hungary while assessing its meaning for the left in France: the pcf’s response to Budapest, and the sfio’s decision to launch France into an invasion of Suez at the same moment, revealed their institutional senility. Democratization, destalini­ zation, ‘the resumption of contact with the masses and their mobilization, first against the war in Algeria’—these, he concluded, in ‘Le Fantôme de Staline’, were the preconditions for a resurrected union of the left.

As late as 1961 Sartre still thought it impossible for De Gaulle to solve the crisis, and considered his ouster by generals a possibility should he propose negotiations or accept the resulting resolutions. The two bombs set for Sartre by the OAS in 1961 and 1962 are only the most spectacular evidence of the consequences of his kind of engagement. The fact that expressions of support for decolonization have become banalized as morally or historically inevitable is in part a result of positions taken by publications like Les Temps Modernes; it was not a transparent truth from which it has always been possible to gain intellectual purchasing power. More importantly, if the whole period of decolonization becomes a factor in political choices made about the us and ussr, the PCF, Gaullism, the legacy of the resistance and the memory of Vichy, then the very pantheon of exemplary intellectuals, and thus the field of ideas itself, will need to be re-examined. It is surely significant that the heroic figures of Judt’s The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century (1998) had either ambiguous or tortured relationships to decolonization in Algeria, or in Blum’s case, ended up prosecuting a war in Indochina while in office.

The Third World interested Sartre not solely, or even primarily, because in it he saw the local victory of the least favoured, but because its struggle for independence seemed to provide both the example and the spark for a much broader revolutionary solidarity. The ability of Cuba and Vietnam to resist the crushing blows of us military and economic might appeared to offer a similar opening to those in the West who would know how to seize the initiative. Instead of searching to exculpate him from the charges of eurocentrism, revolutionary naïveté or violence, we ought to accept that Sartre’s anti-colonialism retains all its topical force. Renewed imperial adventures in North Africa invite comparisons. Forced to explain why Sartre was released from custody in 1968 De Gaulle replied, ‘One does not arrest Voltaire.’ Today the task is simplified. France’s philosophes call for the jets which strafe Libya, and hold joint press conferences with the President of the Republic. Petitions carrying the signatures of dissipated belles âmes are drawn up by unpaid interns and digitally dispatched: Cohn-Bendit, Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Today it is the voice of Sartre that provides an antidote to easy-listening manifestos in favour of neo-colonial wars, and its irreducible acuity is the best argument against the intellectual surgeons whose unsteady hands wish to cut him in two.