Jean-Paul Sartre as social theorist of communication. A theoretical engagement with “Critique of Dialectical Reason”

2021 ◽  
pp. 177-204
Author(s):  
Christian Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Social Theorist ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Dialectical Reason

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Howells
Keyword(s):  
Collective Choice ◽  
Personal History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Dialectical Reason ◽  
History Of ◽  
Phenomenological Account ◽  
Material Conditions

Sartre was a philosopher of paradox: an existentialist who attempted a reconciliation with Marxism, a theorist of freedom who explored the notion of predestination. From the mid-1930s to the late-1940s, Sartre was in his ‘classical’ period. He explored the history of theories of imagination leading up to that of Husserl, and developed his own phenomenological account of imagination as the key to the freedom of consciousness. He analysed human emotions, arguing that emotion is a freely chosen mode of relationship to the outside world. In his major philosophical work, L’Être et le Néant(Being and Nothingness) (1943a), Sartre distinguished between consciousness and all other beings: consciousness is always at least tacitly conscious of itself, hence it is essentially ‘for itself’ (pour-soi) – free, mobile and spontaneous. Everything else, lacking this self-consciousness, is just what it is ‘in-itself’ (en-soi); it is ‘solid’ and lacks freedom. Consciousness is always engaged in the world of which it is conscious, and in relationships with other consciousnesses. These relationships are conflictual: they involve a battle to maintain the position of subject and to make the other into an object. This battle is inescapable. Although Sartre was indeed a philosopher of freedom, his conception of freedom is often misunderstood. Already in Being and Nothingness human freedom operates against a background of facticity and situation. My facticity is all the facts about myself which cannot be changed – my age, sex, class of origin, race and so on; my situation may be modified, but it still constitutes the starting point for change and roots consciousness firmly in the world. Freedom is not idealized by Sartre; it is always within a given set of circumstances, after a particular past, and against the expectations of both myself and others that I make my free choices. My personal history conditions the range of my options. From the 1950s onwards Sartre became increasingly politicized and was drawn to attempt a reconciliation between existentialism and Marxism. This was the aim of the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) (1960) which recognized more fully than before the effect of historical and material conditions on individual and collective choice. An attempt to explore this interplay in action underlies both his biography of Flaubert and his own autobiography.

Sixty years of Sartre’s Critique: Revisiting The Critique of Dialectical Reason today

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 072551362097848
Author(s):  
Robert Boncardo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
60Th Birthday ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Dialectical Reason

Despite being the work of one of the 20th-century’s most famous philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason has never been fully integrated into our collective philosophical consciousness. None of the book’s key concepts, from seriality to the group, have come to play an important role in other philosophers’, sociologists’, or political theorists’ work. Amongst Sartre scholars, while work on the Critique has increased steadily in recent years, in particular in France and Belgium, no critical consensus exists about the book’s overall meaning or value. On the occasion of the Critique’s 60th birthday, in this article I provide a summary of its main aims and concepts with a view to establishing a new basis for reading and discussing the book. I will argue that the Critique is a coherent and unique work of social theory that speaks to a world suffering an overwhelming wave of what Sartre calls ‘counter-finality’ in the form of climate change.

A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason

1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-34
Author(s):  
Bob Stone ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jean Paul ◽  
Dialectical Reason

A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Critique of Dialectical Reason'. Volume I: Theory of Practical Ensembles

1989 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 484
Author(s):  
Harold Wardman ◽  
Joseph S. Catalano
Keyword(s):  
Jean Paul ◽  
Dialectical Reason

AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT IS DECOLONIZATION? FRANTZ FANON’S THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE’S CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON*

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
BEN ETHERINGTON
Keyword(s):  
The Earth ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Dialectical Reason ◽  
National Bourgeoisie ◽  
The Relationship

This essay argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of “dialectical reason”, as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), had a decisive impact on the composition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The relationship between the two works has not before received a thorough textual exposition. Such an exposition, it is suggested, also entails revising the view of the nature of Fanon's work that has become entrenched in anglophone scholarship. Instead of a self-grounding theorist who more resembles the postcolonialists who would succeed him, this essay presents a view of Fanon as a situated theorist, drawing on those resources that could best help him to articulate the task at hand. The notion of “dialectical reason” allowed him to break from his previous understanding of decolonization as the attainment of reason through struggle, and see the “praxis” of revolution as, itself, self-realizing reason. To perceive this allows us better to seize on the thinking that guides his discussions of objectification under colonialism, anticolonial violence, and the role of the national bourgeoisie, and, thus, to clear up a number of controversies.

scholarly journals Freedom and domination through time: Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of the plurality of temporalities

2021 ◽  
pp. 019145372098787
Author(s):  
Matthias Lievens
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dialectical Reason ◽  
Nature Of Time ◽  
Machine Systems ◽  
Critical Social

The plural, impure or discordant nature of time has become an important theme in recent critical social and political theory. Against Althusser’s dismissal of Sartre’s presumedly Hegelian understanding of time and history, this article establishes Jean-Paul Sartre as a key figure in this debate on the plurality of temporalities. Especially in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre understands history and the social in terms of a multiplicity of uneven and non-synchronous temporalisations, rejecting an notion of time as a universal container within which events take place. The originality of Sartre’s approach is that it establishes a link between the notion of the plurality of temporalities and the problem of freedom and domination. His mature social and political theory allows us to understand temporalisation as a strategy for domination, and objective social temporality (e.g. the time of the economy or of machine systems) as key to a form of anonymous or structural domination. A reconstruction of this highly complex and sophisticated approach to thinking domination through time can also shed an original light on the temporal dimension of democracy and totalitarianism.

scholarly journals On the Intelligibility of our Present History: The Contemporary Relevance of the Critique of Dialectical Reason and some other Sartrian Texts

Labyrinth ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Peter Caws
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
English Version ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Dialectical Reason

Jean-Paul Sartre is the writer who gave the most trenchant formulation of existentialism and tried to do the same for a version of Marxism, and as a philosopher of history who got it wrong about history and then, in his last "philosophical manifesto" - volume III of the Idiot (English version volume V) - got it brilliantly right. But Sartre did not write the second volume of the Critique. Or, more exactly, he wrote it but he did not publish it. The Critique, as Sartre himself admitted, grew like a hernia on the body of the book on Flaubert, so that it had to be surgically removed and given a life of its own; but a sort of symbiosis persisted, and when it came to the continuation of the argument, Sartre seems to have sensed that volume II was a dead end, and that the route to the alternative would prove to lie after all in the Flaubert project itself. In order to understand Sartre's position, the author analyzes his conception of history, especially of the intelligibility of history by mean of the dialectical reason as a movement of totalization of practical seriality, and shows its actuality. 

The Cause of the People: Sartre's Encounter with Lacan in Badiou's Theory of the Subject

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-204
Author(s):  
Andrey Gordienko
Keyword(s):  
Mass Movement ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The People ◽  
Dialectical Reason ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Group Functions ◽  
The Masses

In one of his late interviews, Alain Badiou acknowledges that his concept of the event can be traced back to Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of the group-in-fusion, presented in the Critique of Dialectical Reason as a momentous historical irruption that dissolves the serial existence of the masses. Given the lack of engagement with Sartre in Being and Event, the present essay attempts to account for this unexpected admission by arguing that Sartre figures as Badiou's silent partner in Theory of the Subject. The centrality of Sartre to Badiou's first major philosophical work is evident in the mobilization of the category of destruction to supplement the structural dialectic developed by Badiou's other master, Jacques Lacan. In so far as the mass movement is said to effectively destroy the space of placement by forcing the evental presentation of the real, Theory of the Subject pre-emptively contradicts Badiou's subsequent attempts to deny political status to the group-in-fusion. The present article thus concludes that the Sartrean group functions as a veritable cause that commences the subject-process constitutive of politics itself.

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