New Left Review I/37, May-June 1966
Andre Gorz
Sartre and Marx
A Marxist can approach the Critique de la Raison Dialectique, the most recent of Sartre’s works, in a number of ways. It would be possible to write a historico-critical essay on the complex dialectical relationship between Sartre and Marxism as a movement. Equally, it would be possible to write an essay on the history of philosophy which discussed Sartre’s place in contemporary thought, showing the internal logic which led a philosopher whose starting point was the ‘cogito’ of Husserl to move beyond this towards dialectical materialism, and studying the validity of this development and its compatibility with Marx’s method itself. [1] In spite of its embryonic character and limited scope, Nicos Poulantzas’s La ‘Critique de la Raison Dialectique’ et le Droit (Archives de Philosophie du droit, tome X, Sirey, Paris 1965) is a very interesting attempt of this kind. Finally, and best of all, it would be possible to do both at the same time—using the regressive-progressive method which Sartre himself recommends. In this case, one would start from Sartre’s work as the singular enterprise of an individual, and then proceed to situate it in the historical context which conditioned it, showing how Sartre grappled with the problems of his time in general and Marxism in particular. This would provide a critical reconstruction of his own particular way of surpassing his problems and of being surpassed by them.
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