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ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to theorize insurgent political action on the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. It reconstructs a Sartrean model of insurgency that prioritizes an insurgent group’s capacity for situated inventions. It argues that, similar to Fanon, Sartre theorized that groups that struggle against oppression and exploitation constantly invent novel conditions that steer society in unforeseeable directions. However, these inventions of insurgent action are never absolutely contingent but always take place in concrete situations which never cease to condition them. This paper analyses two concrete factors which condition the inventions of insurgent action: the seriality from which the group arises and to which it always threatens to return, and the actions of hostile groups. Taken together, this paper claims that Sartre provides a coherent and innovative account of insurgent political action.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure Statement
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Notes
1 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume 1. Henceforth, I will cite the first and second volumes as CDR1 and CDR2, respectively.
2 Ibid., 35; Marx, ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, 32.
3 This was Louis Althusser’s fundamental criticism of Sartre’s project, namely that one cannot establish the specificity of economic and political practices by grounding them in human praxis. We will not go into this criticism here. It suffices to mention that in this paper, we will develop the concept of insurgency as a political practice. See Althusser, For Marx, 117–28; Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France, 340–60.
4 Balibar, Citizenship; Kalyvas, ‘Democracy and the Poor’; Rancière, Dissensus; Vergara, ‘Populism as Plebeian Politics’.
5 Abensour, Democracy against the State; Breaugh, The Plebeian Experience; Del Lucchese, Frosini and Morfino, The Radical Machiavelli.
6 Balibar, Equaliberty; Negri, Insurgencies; Tomba, Insurgent Universality.
7 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, 165.
8 We can assume that Sartre had not read Fanon’s criticism of him in Black Skin, White Masks when he wrote the Critique. This however only underscores the fact that both writers shared a similar theoretical problematic. Sartre met Fanon in 1961, after the publication of the Critique, after which he wrote the preface to The Wretched of the Earth. See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 552–7.
9 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110–16.
10 Sartre and van den Hoven, ‘Black Orpheus’, 154.
11 Ibid., 181–2.
12 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 113.
13 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 394.
14 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112.
15 See, for instance, Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
16 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112.
17 Ibid., 112.
18 Ibid., 197.
19 Sartre, Search for a Method.
20 Ibid., 43–4.
21 Ibid., 151.
22 Sartre, CDR1, 128.
23 Jameson, Marxism and Form, 233.
24 Sartre, CDR2, 15.
25 Sartre’s introduction of the element of scarcity marks a fundamental transformation of his famous intersubjective account of struggle with other consciousnesses, expounded in Being and Nothingness. In the Critique, Sartre retains the conviction that struggle is constitutive of our human existence and that, in struggle, we attempt to turn the other into an object within our own project. However, struggle becomes a historical fact grounded in scarcity, insofar as it derives from our need to secure our material conditions of existence. The difference between the early and the later writings of Sartre lies in the increased importance of matter as an essential mediation between two “consciousnesses”. See e.g. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 364; Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, 20.
26 Sartre, CDR1, 133–4.
27 Ibid., 113.
28 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; Marchart, Thinking Antagonism. This point links to a long history in political philosophy, for instance in the writings of Machiavelli and Gramsci. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 181–2; Machiavelli, The Prince, 34–7.
29 Sartre, CDR1, 717.
30 Marx, Capital, 873–6.
31 Sartre, CDR1, 718.
32 Ibid., 721.
33 On the praxis of oppression of the colonizer, see Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 89–120.
34 Sartre, CDR1, 719.
35 Ibid., 723–4.
36 Ibid., 722.
37 Poster, Sartre's Marxism, 66–72.
38 Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, 169–73.
39 Sartre, CDR1, 277.
40 Ibid., 387–8. For a systematic study of the dimension of invention in Sartre’s later writings, see Basso, Inventare il nuovo.
41 Sartre, CDR1, 357–8.
42 Ibid., 192.
43 Ibid., 405.
44 Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, 72–84.
45 Sartre, CDR1, 420.
46 Ibid., 673.
47 Ibid., 691.
48 Ibid., 687.
49 Ibid., 687.
50 Sartre, CDR2, 96–7.
51 Sartre, CDR2, 96.
52 Wilder, Freedom Time.
53 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Both Césaire and Senghor became delegates from overseas territories to the French National Assembly. Césaire became mayor of Fort-de-France in Martinique and Senghor president of the Republic of Senegal.
54 Bernasconi, ‘Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth"’.