THE MEANING OF BEING

We cannot rejoice at the death of a man, but we can be happy that his end testifies to the disappearance of an inhibiting phase of the development of men and women.

Sartre’s death reminds us that we have witnessed the end of those intellectuals who searched  for the revolutionary subject, the proletariat, those victims of an often poorly digested class ideology. He was not a prophet, but a general equivalent of impotence and a mirror of the impasse.

Yet we cannot accuse him of having maintained a grandiose image of himself, one capable of fascinating the crowds. He was often self-critical and declared that he had not understood anything. In Words, for example, he said, "I started eighty years late." And it is perhaps due to his delay, which he was never to make up for, that he owes the disproportionate impact that an era recognised in him whether in affinity or in repugnance. Was this because the social group that was contemporary with him was not contemporary with the social reality in which he lived?

With his characteristic delay, he joined all those intellectuals who, following the Russian revolution, discovered the proletariat and, unlike many who quickly abandoned the proletarian camp, he maintained his commitment right to the end. More than others, J. P. Sartre manifested the status of the intellectual, the product of communal or social decomposition, in search of a more or less illusory community.

He saw himself a member of a class – the petty bourgeoisie – and never managed to break away from it: that was his original sin. In a way, he was encumbered by his own being. He thought he could free himself by accepting another being: the proletariat. He felt inadequate to a certain order of the world, hence he sought his place, his concrete usefulness.

In the last century, the problem of the usefulness of intellectuals was, for a time, central to a debate among populists and slavophiles. They had realized that they were no longer an integral, organic part of the traditional community and that they contributed nothing to it: they were useless. Hence, if they rejected the policy of the Tsarist state and did not want to serve the autocracy, they had to find a justification for their existence, a simple reality, because it was quite clear that they arose out of the decomposition of the community, that their culture rested on the ignorance of the moujiks etc. It is therefore easy to understand why the theory of ‘going to the people’ was born. On the one hand, it was an attempt to get in touch with their roots, and on the other a mission to enlighten the ‘people’ and facilitate their emancipatory journey.

The same problem reappeared with the Worker’s Movement: intellectuals drew revolutionary energy from the masses, which provided them with the clarification they needed; or elements of propaganda, glorification, etc. All the theorising about the relationship of art and literature to revolution emerged from this.

History has shown that intellectuals cannot create a revolutionary art and literature. The revolutionary movement, worker or peasant, produced its own poets, writers, etc., as was the case with the Worker’s Movement in the last century, when it was still strongly marked by the presence of artisans and when, as a result, literary expression was more often the defence of a previous community than the manifestation of a future. In real, active revolutionary times, intellectuals are ultimately the propagandists of what is happening. And that’s when questioning ceases to  arise ( different in periods of retreat.) So, we quickly arrive at an autonomised discourse through which the intellectuals produce the revolutionary and the backward masses should act to justify this production. In both cases, they justify their existence because in each case they only confront the immediate. Indeed, what characterizes them is their immediatism, whether it be J. P. Sartre, A. Malraux, P. Istrati, N. Kazantsakis, A. Gramsci, H. Marcuse (to a lesser extent), Picasso, the Surrealists, etc., (important variants should be noted.) Hence their fundamental dependence on that which is posited as other, the proletariat, and on what is to come, because they are in the sphere of autonomisation and it is difficult to live in such a space.

Unless one becomes subservient to a one-time revolutionary movement by becoming one of its bureaucrats, it is easier to bind yourself to one of society’s poles of force, to a master, even if it means changing this when you discover a more suitable, gratifying alternative – as did A. Malraux who passed from the proletariat to de Gaulle. This subservience is not a novelty; we see it active in Ancient China with the training of literate mandarins. In reality, it was only by means of a profound abstraction that it was possible to escape the theme of justification and the practice of dependence. By recognising within the capitalist mode of production (CMP) a movement that tended to deny it, it was possible to take a position in favour of this movement and work to promote its becoming, despite what the proletarian class might immediately think (which should normally tend to abolish the capitalist order.) At this point we see that any member of existing society can participate in such a movement and, curiously, as K. Marx presents it, we find Ricardo’s attitude vis-à-vis capitalism: working for the development of the productive forces even if it is at the expense of the bourgeoisie.

Such was the behavior of Marx and especially that of A. Bordiga. That’s why, during the debate on culture in the Italian Socialist Party in 1912, he opposed those who believed that proletarians had to have a certain culture in order to be able to militate within the party. He asserted that what was essential was class revolt, class instinct, and so on. At the same time, he affirmed the essentiality of the theory, i.e. the representation of the emancipation movement of the class to which they belonged.

What was essential, then, was the movement to destroy capital that posited the possibility of another society. It was not the immediate moment, but something difficult to perceive, especially in a phase of retreat. Hence Bordiga’s assertions about basing action on a future event, on the invariance of the theory, as well as his characterization of K. Marx as one who spent his life describing communist society. Finally, this approach could only lead to the conception of the party-community.

Bordiga didn’t need to be part of a community; he was part of a community that was not immediate, not simply defined by a specific grouping of men and women struggling for a given objective, but a community that certainly postulated the existence of the latter but not strictly conditioned by it, since it included, in his words, the living, the dead and those to come!

 Ultimately, only intellectuals who are able to accept the phenomenon of autonomisation and think it through, without sinking into dependence on a class, can do essential work and operate within reflexivity, such as I. Kant, G.W.F. Hegel or T. Adorno. As far as the first two are concerned, it is easy to point out that they expounded the theory of the bourgeoisie and are therefore linked to it. This is undeniable, but what is important here, from the point of view of lived experience as well as from the point of view of the enterprise, is the behavior of these men: they lived in autonomisation. However, since this cannot be clearly clarified in the context of this study, we will leave it here, adding only that this does not exclusively concern Left-wing intellectuals but those on the right too.

Alongside the question of the usefulness of intellectuals, there is the question – which we will not tackle today because of its complexity – of the usefulness of art and literature for the revolution, and beyond that, we can ask: should humanity always produce art, literature?

However, we shall confine ourselves to considering intellectuals in relation to the debate in which they themselves appears as a fundamental substratum; that is, the debate concerning the relation between individuality and community, and here, as far as J. P. Sartre in particular is concerned, we can see that he contributes nothing. As has often been pointed out, the essential moment when this was tackled was when the heirs of G.W.F. Hegel clashed: L. Feuerbach, M. Stirner, E. Bauer, K. Marx, and, less visibly-linked, S. Kierkegaard. From that time on everything was in play and it was K. Marx’s work that provided the ultimate understanding of this relationship. It might be added that Marxism is a representation of this moment: the decomposition of the traditional community and the movement towards the constitution of a new one; that of the capital, which has been achieved and that of the revolutionaries which wasn’t. But what is J. P. Sartre’s project if not a potential? Marxism necessarily forms the basis of the representation of capital and all the subsequent philosophical and psychological theorisations of S. Freud, W. Reich, J. P. Sartre etc., only served to perfect it.

So, to judge the importance of J. P. Sartre’s work is it necessary to compare it with Marxism. It is true that existentialism, and especially its post-World War II works, is a resurgence of Marxism both in its scientific affirmation and with its libertarian assertions; it is so by exacerbating the fundamental data of the theory. But this process of reinvention also concerns structuralism, the genetic theory of J. Piaget's etc. As long as a mode of production has not been exhausted, there can be no appearance of another representation. What is apparently contradictory is that it was those who attempted to bring it down who produced the most adequate representation of capital.

With the emergence of capital in its industrialized form, which enabled it to achieve formal and real domination in production and then in society, a global process concerning the whole life of men and women took place; this process had to have its own more or less adequate representation so that men and women could find their bearings and orientate themselves. The development of the class struggle may have overshadowed the importance of representation that emerged from the 1940s onwards, but, as it was required by the community of capital it had to be reinvented. J. P. Sartre deserves credit for realizing that he was a reinvention. He was unable to go beyond this because it only allowed determinations linked to the socio-historical conditions peculiar to France to manifest themselves. In this way, his work bears witness to the phenomenon of politicization and generalisation that affects what the Germans first produced in theoretical form; because the existentialism of J. P. Sartre is no more than a hard-hitting variant of the one that M. Heidegger brought within everyone’s reach thanks to a political manifestation of the fundamental concepts.

If we study J. P. Sartre’s relationship to the two upheavals which sharply re-opened the question of the relation between individuality and community – that of the years 1917-1933 and that of the 60s – we realize the extent to which Sartre was outside the understanding of the future of the species and, consequently, the extent to which his work is inessential. It was already buried in the 60s with the triumph of structuralism. However, the post-May 68 movement sparked a renewal of Sartreism by reproposing an anti-fascist ideology that found its best formulation among the Maoists: the theory of the new resistance. J. P. Sartre’s belatedness gave theoretical backing to a historical aberration.

So why did Sartre have such an impact? Because he expressed the autonomization of being and its rebellion. In his strict philosophical research, we have the autonomisation of consciousness (posited as a being) and of being, as is clearly shown in The Transcendence of the Ego. In his more politico-scientific studies after World War II, he reasoned about the autonomisation of the proletariat, or more precisely, he helped to constitute it as an autonomous subject. In the course of his development we find that Being and Nothingness was a pivotal work between the two periods; it marked the transition from one autonomisation to another. J. P. Sartre wanted to escape abstraction and find a concrete domain in which to take root; he discovers the masses, the proletariat. But the being he attributes to them, by virtue of revolutionary presuppositions, has nothing to do with reality. It therefore stumbles-up against autonomisation.

This need for the concrete, for community too, can be seen in his desire to found an existential morality; but he is trapped from the outset because morality can only be conceived of as an individual conduct; it expresses from the get-go the individual-community disconnect. Moreover, for him, community does not seem to go beyond the definition of a group of men and women. It is only individual beings that he confronts, as is clearly evident in the sentence from Words that was regularly quoted after his death: "A whole man made of all men who is worth all of them, and anyone of them worth him” (this could be confirmed by an analysis of Critique of Dialectical Reason.) It clearly expresses the combinatoriality and indifferentiation [l'indifférenciation] that show that value and democracy are linked. At the same time, it more clearly reveals J. P. Sartre’s immediatism: he was never able to perceive the phenomenon of capital’s escape that underlies the autonomisations in which he lived: that of consciousness-being and that of the proletariat. He thought and perceived as a democrat and in terms of value, whereas capital had long since encompassed them and posited itself as a community. Democracy and value are two phenomena necessary for the production of combinatorics.¹

But what then is the meaning of Being that features so much in J. P. Sartre’s philosophy? Can his preoccupation with Being be our preoccupation?

Being is the expression of separation and autonomisation. It has become an operator, as can be seen from its study from Parmenides – where it is substance and the abstraction from community – up to J. P. Sartre where it is an expression of the atomisation [pulverisation] of the humano-feminine reality.

Sartre’s belatedness also manifests itself in this field because various recent scientific discoveries – for example, the development of mathematics (category theory, that of fuzzy sets, etc.), that of logic with plural logics – have highlighted how being is an operator. J. P. Sartre’s art was to be able to make the survival of philosophy credible, because the problematic of Being relates to a phase of human history that was already totally over by his time. Being and time are essential and are totally linked abstractions that form the basis of the representation of culture in the sense of a set of human behaviours that set the species apart from nature. By abstracting themselves from nature, men and women must seek other references for existence. That is why being and time are fundamental elements of anthropocentrism and the phenomenology of the state.

From the moment that the immediate community disintegrates and politics becomes autonomous, the question arises of defining, at almost every moment, what can endure and be found. Hence the searching after being and time. Being and time are linked to the State which is the product of a process of becoming (and which always becomes) that wants to put an end to it, precisely in order to be. The State had to define what the human being is; that is to say, not only its  nature as posited as external to nature, but also its life-time [temps de vie] and the way of distributing it in the unfolding of its  life. We need only analyse the relationship of the State to education, to time, to the various regulations of human life right up to the moment when Capital takes control (the invention of the clock presupposes the subjugation of men and their martyrology: Man is nothing, he is at most the carcass of time, said K. Marx in The Misery of Philosophy). If time is an invention of men incapable of love, being is an insufficiency of life.

As soon as life is no longer immediate, as soon as there is mediation, there is Being. It is not a question of returning to an immediacy that was probably never total for the species, it’s a question of completely getting-out of the autonomisation that posited Being (as well as time and value) as an absolute that made it possible to make everything equivalent (because there was Time and quanta of Time, Being and Beings, Value and quanta of Value.) Better still, it allows everything to be solved with word games because Being, a fundamental element of autonomized language, is suited to a variety of subtleties. Thus, in Being and Nothingness, J. P. Sartre highlights the role of questioning in reflections on existence. In particular, if he asks the question: does the ‘for-itself’ exist? We can answer ‘No.’ From then on negation, nothingness, arises! But to say that there is non-being is to affirm that the non-being is; being is then the essential affirmation of a being that can be posited as a hypostasis of being. Moreover, in studying what the very being of questioning is, the question arises as to whether the Being of interrogation coincides with the interrogation of Being and so on!

All these arguments are possible as long as we accept the autonomisation of language. J. P. Sartre was fascinated by it (see Words). He was a prisoner of a dead culture, which is compatible with our thesis: all philosophy is the philosophy of the State. The absorption of the State by the community of Capital meant the end of philosophy. It is thanks to his belatedness that J. P. Sartre was able to practice philosophy as it was aimed at a prior society. But, since we cannot escape the atmosphere of his time it was infested with a problematic which is a combinatorial of Being.

If Sartre's theoretical work is obsolete – any investigation of being is a futile quest, a path to failure (which fascinated him) – there perhaps remains an aspect of his life that could be important in making it last. This is the fact that he sided with the oppressed. However, here too we can no longer follow his example because the Christian, populist, Marxist themes of the relationship with the poor, etc., are no longer adequate , just as the myth of Prometheus which cannot be revived, is no longer adequate. This is not a question of denying that we must help those in need, those who encounter great difficulties, but we can no longer revive the thesis of supporting the oppressed because this would reinforce dependency and domestication.

The myth contains its own challenge. Prometheus will not be delivered by those for whom he was chained while he doubts the validity of his action, having a certain bitterness vis-à-vis the attitude of humans. Prometheus will be saved by Heracles, Zeus’s son, the one who had chained him. Will the proletariat be delivered by capital? In a certain sense this was achieved by ensuring a reserve for proletarians, by transforming them into consumers which delivered them from their condition ... to achieve a deeper domestication, reinforced by the persistence of a myth whose founding reality (in its modern version) has vanished.

Being, freedom, consciousness, elements of J. P. Sartre’s language and problematics, no longer have any meaning for us; they bear witness to a subsisting reality that is now over, energized by the combinatorics of capital. What we need now is the passion to live.

Translated by Howard Slater
Original text at http://www.revueinvariance.net/sartre.html