Jean-Paul Sartre by Andrew Leak

Author:Andrew Leak [Leak, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-86189-607-0
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2006-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

4

The Shock of the Real

The collapse of the RDR was a public failure but it was accompanied by a failure of a different order that was quite invisible to his contemporaries. In 1947–48 he had written hundreds of pages of an Ethics that was to be the continuation of L’Etre et le néant. The problem was how to pass from the ontological freedom defined in that work to a free commitment to collective action. Although his intellectual armoury had been strengthened by his absorption of Alexandre Kojève’s influential Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, he clearly felt that he lacked the ‘tools’ to go further; or rather that the tools he did possess condemned him to writing nothing more than ‘an ethics by a writer for other writers’. So, in 1949–50 he wrote virtually nothing, instead starting to immerse himself in further study: history – especially that of nineteenth-century France – economics, a rereading of Marx. Indeed, in terms of visible literary production at least, the decade between 1949 and 1959 was a relatively lean period: four plays, of which one was an adaptation, and the complete abandonment of the novel form. The bulk of his publications in this period – with the notable exception of the voluminous preface to the uvres complètes de Jean Genet in 1952 – were political. Although he never dictated the editorial policy of TM, the contents pages of that review closely mirror the vagaries of Sartre’s own preoccupations: the balance between articles devoted to literature and those devoted, broadly, to politics swings steadily in favour of the latter, such that, between October 1945 and February 1951 literature stood at 35 per cent and politics at 26 per cent, whereas by 1963 that proportion was reversed.1

The failure of the RDR affected Sartre more than one might expect, given the brevity of the experiment. Beauvoir quotes from Sartre’s unpublished notes: ‘The break-up of the RDR. A blow. A new and definitive education in realism. One does not create a movement.’2 In order to understand this, one first has to understand what the RDR had represented for Sartre in terms of personal opportunity. Above all, it represented the possibility of resolving his own contradictions. The first of these involved his uncomfortable position ‘with one foot in the camp of the bourgeoisie and one foot in that of the proletariat’. He was born a bourgeois and he exercised the most bourgeois of professions, but he had renounced that class and all of its works: having decided that the only ethical stance was to be unconditionally on the side of the oppressed, and having identified the workers as the victims of capitalist oppression, he must be with the masses. But the masses – insofar as they were represented by the PCF – did not want to be with him. The hostility of the PCF produced a second contradiction – an existential variant of the first. As Beauvoir remarks, the hatred of which Sartre was the object made it increasingly

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