Existential Psychoanalysis and the Aims of Marxism

Sartre's elaboration of this perspective culminated not in the derivative social theory of the Critique but in the "existential psychoanalysis" of his biographies, particularly his prolix tome on Flaubert's formative years, The Idiot of the Family . He had first announced the idea of an existential psychoanalysis in Being and Nothingness; there he identified such research with the recovery of a "fundamental project" that intelligibly unified any person's entire life into a coherent and meaningful whole. Flaubert figured as his example even in 1943. "To be , for Flaubert, as for every subject of 'biography,' means to be unified in the world. The irreducible unification which we ought to find, which is Flaubert, and which we require biographers to reveal to us—this is the unification of an original project, a unification which should reveal itself to us as a non-substantial absolute ."^[73] In his early biographies (such as Saint Genet ), Sartre attempted to reconstruct the central choice which a creative individual made of himself and his world. The existential psychoanalytic biography would reveal, concretely, how one person succeeded in making himself out of what he had been made.^[74]

As he developed his own variant of Marxism, he correspondingly expanded his notion of biography to include the social and historical dimensions of a person's life. Where in Being and Nothingness he had described the fundamental project as "purely individual and unique," in The Idiot of the Family he asserted that "a man is never an individual; it would be better to call him a singular universal. Totalized and, by the same stroke, universalized by his epoch, he retotalizes it while reproducing it within himself as singularity."^[75] But the primary focus remained the same as before: how one person, combining knowledge and passion in a fundamental project, worked through a situation at once unique (being his) and universal (being socially shared). From this perspective, the notions of internal struggle and external action became intertwined; a subjective "working through" always accomplished objective works, while "rational thought forges itself in action."^[76]The Idiot of the Family reconstructed Flaubert's particular path beyond an endured, irrational childhood of "passive activity" and inertia, to his moment of fundamental choice—his decision to become a writer. Although Sartre,

increasingly self-indulgent, let his biography ramble on at unconscionable length, we should not let his hermetic obtuseness obscure the rationale behind his project.

The approach of the Flaubert book was intended to complement Sartre's interpretation of dialectical reason in the Critique . According to the latter's social nominalism, "totalization" could only be a singular adventure. "Our critical experience represents nothing other than the fundamental identity of a singular life and human history."^[77] It therefore became a critical task for existential Marxism to reconstruct the richness of history starting from the uniqueness of a single individual; as Sartre emphasized in Search for a Method , "Nothing can be discovered if we do not at the start proceed as far as is possible for us in the historical particularity of the object."^[78] It was in this sense that Sartre called The Idiot of the Family the sequel to Search for a Method , even as he considered the latter essay an inquiry resting ultimately on the findings of the Critique . Dialectical nominalism would only be founded by a twofold movement: from the free individual to determining history (in a phenomenology of the social world) and from determining history to the free individual (in an exemplary and exhaustive sociopsychoanalytic existential biography). Yet while the rationale behind Sartre's biography was provocative, his choice of subject matter proved less resonant, at least from the standpoint of reorienting social thought: deciphering the enigma of the creative decisions made by an exceptional artist hardly made a compelling case for the universal applicability of a new method.^[79]

His biographical notion of the individual struggling through an "oriented life" nevertheless placed Sartre's thought in principle beyond the certainties of both positivist and rationalist Marxisms. "Complexes, a style of life and the revelation of the past-surpassing as a future to be created form one and the same reality: it is the project as an oriented life , as man's affirmation through action, and simultaneously it is that unlocalizable mist of irrationality, which is reflected from the future in our remembrances of childhood and from our childhood in our rational choices as mature men."^[80] Marxist rationalism assumed reason as much as it slighted passion; consequently Marxism, like any rationalism, tended to underestimate the importance of the individual's struggle against passivity and personal inertia.

These insights of Sartre's seem important, and, so far as they go, valid. Naturally, they have implications for radical theory. Beyond the critique of political economy and the analysis of social structure, beyond cultural criticism and the unmasking of ideologies, the individual's relation to a personal and social history merits reconsideration. Traditionally, Marxism has relied on causal assumptions to buttress its observations of correspondences between ideology and productive forces; similarly, it has anticipated a rational practice that would overcome irrational social forms. But for Sartre, after the theoretical and practical failure of both rationalism and positivism, the question of the individual's relation to history remained unsolved. How was the individual conditioned to passivity? How did he acquire rational initiative over the course of his life and the decisions he made? The complex of specific mediations between the particular individual and a universal meaning of history frustrated any easy answer to these questions.

Sartre's position also affected the shape of radical practice. As Search for a Method had argued, objective conditions only entered into an agent's acts insofar as they were meaningfully integrated in the project of a particular life. "If the material conditions which govern human relations are to become real conditions of praxis , they must be lived in the particularity of particular situations."^[81] The objective diminution of buying power, for example, did not of itself lead to discontent; it only spelled revolt when an agent felt a need had been unfairly denied. A central aim of radical practice thus became analyzing and identifying the impact of objective factors within a person's experience. If the individual was to change prevailing circumstances, he had first to experience those circumstances as an intolerable and unnecessary imposition.

Similarly, the objective possibility for socialism had to become a vital aspiration permeating existence; if the individual was to help combat the established order, he had to experience it as alterable in the direction of a palpably better form of life. Closely related to the attainment of this transcending social outlook was his acquisition of a transcending personal outlook, a vision of himself as an autonomous subject within society, an agent with freedom and initiative. Feelings of powerlessness, inertia, and passivity had to be confronted and overcome: any truly communist revolution had to be based on rational and free action.

Although he initially espoused a rather crude variant of Leninism

in The Communists and Peace , Sartre's later accent on subjective factors by implication argued against orthodoxy. Leninism would engineer socialism from without; a consistent Sartreanism would engender socialism from within. The individual would have to discover the social dialectic through his own decisions as a "rational transparency"; it was a discovery no party could make for the individual.^[82] Indeed, Sartre's utopia of the group-in-fusion pointed toward a messianic syndicalism more than an institutionalized Leninism.^[83]

He thus attempted, at the level of practice as well as of theory and history, to illuminate the relations between social circumstance and individual action. The question, How did a radical choose his project? paralleled the more general question, How did any man shape the course of his life? Both the Critique and the biographies represented attempts, from complementary standpoints, to grapple with such questions. "Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it," wrote Sartre in Search for a Method . "But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is contained in these two sentences. Marxism lacks any hierarchy of mediations. . . . " Existentialism by contrast "intends, without being unfaithful to Marxist principles, to find the mediations which allow the individual concrete—the particular life, the real and dated conflict, the person—to emerge from the background of the general contradictions of productive forces and the relations of production."^[84]

His aim dictated his approach.

Contrary to the synthetic movement of the dialectic as a method (i.e., contrary to the movement of that Marxist thought which goes from production and the relations of production to the structure of groups, then to the internal contradictions of the group, to the environment, and, in case of need, to the individual), critical experience departs from the immediate, i.e., the individual realizing himself in his abstract [in the sense of incomplete] praxis, in order to recover, through increasingly profound conditionings, the totality of his practical links with others, the structure of diverse practical multiplicities, and through the contradictions and their conflict, the absolute concrete: historical man.^[85]

It is the intransigent articulation of this aspiration, above all, that has made Sartre a central figure in contemporary Marxist philosophy. Indeed, despite the muddles of the Critique of Dialectical Rea -

son , his insistence on the individual's import for Marxism has raised a series of critical questions: What is the individual's ongoing role in sustaining oppressive institutions? How should a theory view such institutions: as mutable but reified human collectives, or as social "things," to be investigated and mastered by quantifiable methods of causal explanation? What are the possibilities for reasoned behavior in human beings, those creatures of habit, passion, and fear? What kinds of institutions, by cultivating the rational freedom of men. would promote "the integration of the free individual in a society conceived as the unity of the free activity of individuals?" Even if his answers to these questions have not always been satisfying, his persistence in posing them has had a salutary effect: although his elaborations may err, the philosopher has an eye for the essential.