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Abstract
Sartre’s late work – the Critique of Dialectical Reason – attempted to develop a new theory of praxis emphasizing themes that anticipate new materialist and biopolitical turns in the humanities. Specifically, Sartre stressed: (1) the “agentic” qualities of matter, insofar as matter reacts to human activity and alters its course; (2) the unintended and accruing consequences of human activity in the material world; (3) the fact that capitalism involves human subjects in relations of passive exigency that make them machines; and (4) the ways in which the biological matter constituting a human subject is systematically altered through practical activities performed in a particular milieu. The present article overviews new materialism and discusses affinities and divergences with Sartre’s Critique. It then presents Sartre’s social theory of ensembles, or assemblages, of human actors. This exposition demonstrates the potential of his theory to contribute to contemporary biopolitical and post-structuralist ideas about revolutionary collective action.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
I thank Bruce Baugh for his inspiration and assistance in interpreting Sartre’s Critique. Any errors of interpretation are certainly my own.
1 See Choat; Rekret.
2 See Coole and Frost, as well as Dolphijn and van der Tuin. Sartre only appears in these volumes secondarily, in discussions of Simone de Beauvoir. While this perhaps represents a missed opportunity, it is not altogether unfitting, given the extent to which de Beauvoir has unfairly lived in Sartre’s shadow.
3 See Noys; Kleinherenbrink and Gusman.
4 See Fox.
5 Specifically, Choat; Coole and Frost; Fox and Alldred; Gamble, Hanan, and Nail.
6 See Choat; DeLanda; Gamble, Hanan, and Nail.
7 In general, Sartre developed as a central thesis one of the key insights of historical materialism, namely the role of structural inequalities in shaping biological processes and public health. In anticipation of contemporary pandemics, Sartre wrote of the bubonic plague:
Its place, its scope, its victims, were determined ahead of time by the government; the landowners took shelter in their castles; the crowding together of the common people is the perfect environment for the spreading of the disease. The Black Death acts only as an exaggeration of the class relations; it chooses. It strikes the wretched, it spares the wealthy. (Search for a Method 163)
8 In fact, the Critique lends itself to biopolitical analyses of the historical construction of race, as well as climate change and environmental racism, important topics for new materialism. This has been recognized by Bernasconi, who has developed these insights in recent essays.
9 At most, it implies a commitment to distinguishing between organic and inorganic constellations of matter, as Hans Jonas has shown. See Cole for discussion of how the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari may be far more dialectical than is typically claimed.
10 As Mitchell points out, whether the late Sartre is a “humanist” largely depends on what one understands as “humanism,” which often goes surprisingly unarticulated.
11 This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the despotic machine (Anti-Oedipus 192–217).
12 Nail would refer to this as the build-up of social pressure against an oppressed group eliciting a counter-wave of pedetic force.