We began this group by reading several foundational texts by Sartre, de Beauvoir, Heidegger and Marcel. We then explored Sartre’s debate with Marxism in the 40s and 50s. We then tackled the encounter between existentialism and postmodern philosophy in the 60s and beyond, with specific focus on language, writing, difference and the question of humanism.
Sartre's early work on nothingness, transcendence, language and the Other set out key themes that would preoccupy the next generation of French thinkers. Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida & co would take up the Sartrean critique of conformity, essentialism and totality. They would radicalize this critique by drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis and on transgressive writers such as Bataille and de Sade, and give it a decidedly linguistic turn through cross-pollination with Saussurean linguistics. By the 1960s, Sartre's newfound embrace of Marxist dialectics gave the postmoderns a focal point for critique and rebellion. Against his now dialectical view of history as a totalizing and unifying process, they would emphasize the independence of difference, the discontinuity of history and the primacy of the event – viz, the unknowable and unnameable that punctuates human experience and founds its significance.
French philosophy in the second half of the 20th century was a remarkably productive period, comparable in scope and creativity to German Idealism some 150 years earlier. The encounter between existentialism and (post-)structuralism lies close to the heart of this French philosophical event. We are tracing this encounter through several key themes - see the tentative reading list below:
The question of humanism
Foucault on the "death of the human" (interviews)
Foucault and Barthes on the death of the author
Sartre’s response to structuralism (interview)
Language, writing and difference
Sartre, “What is Writing?”
Sartre on existential project (from Search for Method, Pt. 3)
Sartre on analytic vs. synthetic method (from CDR, Introduction)
Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside”
Derrida, "The Outside and the Inside" (from Of Grammatology)
Derrida, "The Outside Is the Inside" and "The Hinge" (from Of Grammatology)
Deleuze on difference in itself (from D&R)
Deleuze on repetition and the eternal return (from D&R)
In what sense could French thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida be called ‘materalist’? Does Sartre anticipate the outline of their position in any way? What could it mean to talk about a ‘transcendental materialism’, and how is this different from materialism in a more traditional sense?
The theme of death preoccupies French thought inordinately, from ‘the death of the human’ right down to ‘the little death’. For his part, Sartre had explored the theme of nothingness at length in his early work, yet rejected the Heideggerian being-towards-death as well as the Freudian death drive and the unconscious. What can we make of Sartre’s stance here, compared to that of Foucault, for example? Can we use the categories of life and death as markers of basic philosophical outlook? If so, where should we place existentialism and postmodernity?
(Post-)structuralists tend to be quite critical of phenomenology, whether that of Husserl, Heidegger or Sartre (or even Hegel). What are their criticisms? Are these criticisms decisive, or can phenomenology be defended and resuscitated?
Postmodern thought emphasizes points of rupture, discontinuity and unknowability, calling such points “events”. How useful is this category for understanding our contemporary experience? How would an ‘evental’ epoch compare to the existentialist moment of the 30s and 40s, marked as it was by abandonment, ennui, despair, anxiety and meaninglessness?
Negativity and the fold
Deleuze, “He Was My Teacher”
Sartre on negativity
Merleau-Ponty on the fold
Deleuze on the fold
History
Sartre on materialist history (from CDR)
Althusser on the humanist controversy and ideology (reading TBA)
Foucault on history (reading TBA)
The other
Sartre on the Other (from B&N)
Levinas on the Other
Deleuze, “Michel Tournier and the World Without Others”
Sexuality
Sartre on sexuality (from B&N)
Bataille on sexuality
Foucault on sexuality
Lacan, "Kant with Sade"
Deleuze on masochism
The event
Sartre on the event (TBA)
Althusser on philosophy of the encounter (TBA)
Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event”
Badiou on the event (TBA)