Sartre’s reshaping of political philosophy for

post-revolutionary times

Inès Aït Mokhtar

Pembroke College, Cambridge

October 2021

This thesis is submitted to the University of Cambridge

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

1
Statement of Length and Declaration

This thesis is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work
done in collaboration except as declared in the preface and specified in the text.

It is not substantially the same as any work that has already been submitted before for any
degree or other qualification except as declared in the preface and specified in the text.

It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the PhD in Politics and International Studies
Degree Committee.

2
Abstract
Sartre’s reshaping of political philosophy for post-revolutionary times
By Inès Aït Mokhtar

Originated in a philosophical questioning on the French-Algerian postcolonial situation, this

thesis focuses on Sartre’s philosophy as an attempt to answer the theoretical conflicts inherited
from the French Revolution. I conceptualise the post-revolutionary era as a conflict between
ethics and aesthetics that gave birth to positivism, which was on the road to challenge political
philosophy in the twentieth century. I show that, at the very same time, Sartre was finding a
solution to the challenges posed to political philosophy by criticising positivism thanks to his
pursuit of a reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism. I analyse this pursuit as his own
attempt to reconcile ethics and aesthetics, that the French Revolution had pulled apart. In
Chapter 1, I lay down my interpretation of the meaning of the French Revolution for political
philosophy, and enunciate the premise of the role Sartre has in solving the theoretical conflicts
that emerged from it. It leads me to assess the role of subjectivity for him in Chapter 2, where
I suggest to shed light on it thanks to the unvoiced Sartrean concept of collective past. From
this original understanding of the connection between subjectivity and history, emerges an
interpretation of intersubjectivity that leads to a theory of recognition very specific to Sartre,
that I present and rebuild in Chapter 3. I the fourth and last chapter, I make the hypothesis that
the concept of recognition stands as the connecting link between ethics and aesthetics, and I
also give a full account of what aesthetics means for Sartre’s political philosophy. Sartre was
involved in this enormously ambitious philosophical work at the very same time that he was
politically involved in the anticolonial fight; throughout the thesis, I build a Sartre-inspired
network of concepts apt for understanding of the French-Algerian situation.

3
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Pembroke College, along with the Economic and Social Research Council,
for providing me with the material conditions necessary to the completion of this PhD.

My gratitude goes to my supervisor, Professor Duncan Kelly, for his kindness, his invaluable
advice and his continuous encouragements.

I am thankful to Matt, Alice, Tellef and Gareth for reading parts of this work and helping me
to rephrase my imperfect English. To them, and others, thank you for keeping me sane through
the wave of Paris lockdowns with regular video calls. Writing a PhD thesis in the middle of a
pandemic would have been even more difficult without them.

Finally, no thank you would ever be enough for expressing the love and gratitude I have for my
family. To my parents, for always supporting my decisions and giving me the means to pursue
my wishes; and to my brother, for the laughter and the joy.

4
Table of Contents
Introduction. Sartre’s philosophy and the contemporary French-Algerian
situation. ..................................................................................................................... 7
Chapter 1. The post-French Revolution era. Intellectual and historical perspectives
on French philosophy and French colonialism. ...................................................... 21
The French Revolution: the opening of a new intellectual era ...................................... 24
The French Revolution: creating the cultural conditions for positivism ................................. 24
The rationality of equality against transcendence .................................................................... 29
The Marxist transition ................................................................................................................ 31
The Third Republic, sociology and positivism ........................................................................... 32

Knowledge re-defined ....................................................................................................... 34

The “positivist generation” (Cheryl B. Welch) ........................................................................... 34
The phenomenological roots of the defiance vis-a-vis positivism: Husserl .............................. 35
Search for a method: the fight against positivism and the foundation for a renewed
conception of philosophy ............................................................................................................. 37

The “problem of political philosophy” .............................................................................. 41

The twentieth century: a dangerous time for political philosophy ........................................... 41
The French theory: a late French formulation of the “problem of political philosophy” ......... 44
Sartre: saving philosophy with “totalization” ............................................................................ 45

What the French Revolution has meant for the colonization of Algeria ....................... 51
French colonialism: positivism, universalism and the Third Republic .................................... 52
Republicanism, a colonialism ..................................................................................................... 54

Chapter 2. Subjectivity and the collective past. ...................................................... 58

The collective past: history and subjectivity .................................................................... 60
What is subjectivity?......................................................................................................... 61
The fundamental ontology of Being and nothingness ............................................................... 61
Subjectivity in Search for a Method and the 1961 Rome lecture .............................................. 64

The past and the collective fact: towards a concept of collective past ............................ 67
The meaning of the past for individual existence...................................................................... 68
The meaning of the collective fact for individual existence ...................................................... 72
The collective past ....................................................................................................................... 77

The “situation” and its emotional anchorage .................................................................. 79

A renewed vision of humanism ........................................................................................ 84
For a Sartrean reconstructive moment after the postmodern deconstruction......................... 84
Sartre’s ethical humanism: towards recognition ....................................................................... 89

Chapter 3. A Sartrean theory of recognition. .......................................................... 96

Ontology or ethics? The philosophical necessity for recognition .................................... 99
The contribution of ontology: the being-for-others ................................................................. 101
The look: a denial of recognition............................................................................................... 102

The philosophical, historical and political grounds of a Sartrean recognition ............ 105
The philosophical origins: the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel ................. 105

5
 The historical and political grounds: History in the making .................................................. 107

The “French tradition” of recognition: a critical reading of Axel Honneth’s Seeley

Lectures ........................................................................................................................... 117
The “Loss of Self”: a supposedly negative view of intersubjectivity ....................................... 117
A biased and incomplete reading of Sartre .............................................................................. 121
Post-revolutionary France, colour-blindness and recognition ................................................ 125

Recognition and cognition: the sketch for a criticism of positivist knowledge ............ 128
Recognition and freedom .......................................................................................................... 129
The understanding .................................................................................................................... 131

Chapter 4. Sartre’s solution to the post-revolutionary theoretical conflicts: the

reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism. ...................................................... 135
Sartre and aesthetics ...................................................................................................... 137
Hidden aesthetics in Sartre’s philosophy ................................................................................ 139
Ethics vs. Aesthetics ................................................................................................................. 142

Existentialism: transcendence for a post-revolutionary world .................................... 154

Existentialist humanism: an answer to the French Revolution............................................. 154
The obscuring effect of the domination of Marxism ................................................................ 155

The reconciliation of Marxism and existentialism: where ethics meets aesthetics .... 157

Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 163

Reclaiming transcendence, reclaiming philosophy ....................................................... 163
Sartre, a radical Modern: a political philosophy for a postrevolutionary, postcolonial
world ................................................................................................................................ 167
Towards the understanding of the French-Algerian situation .................................... 171
Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 174

6
 Introduction. Sartre’s philosophy and the
contemporary French-Algerian situation.

And since French lacks terms and concepts to define negritude, since negritude
is silence, these poets will use “allusive words, never direct, reducing
themselves to the same silence” in order to evoke it.
Sartre, Black Orpheus1

This thesis intends to produce a renewed understanding of Sartre’s political philosophy.

Yet, is driven by questions that are originally external to Sartre’s thought. The necessity to
understand the contemporary postcolonial French-Algerian situation, thematized as a social
question in contemporary France, was my first question.
In March 2003, French president Jacques Chirac went to Algiers on an official visit and
expressed his wish to establish a Pacte d’amitié franco-algérien – or Friendship Pact – between
the two countries, with the clear goal to appease conflictual memories. The content of this
project remained undetermined, until it was aborted in 2005, when a Bill suggesting the
existence of “positive effects of colonization” was proposed to the Assemblée Nationale by
members of Chirac’s party – the Algerian government considered this official re-writing of
history an affront justifying the end of this project. Coincidentally, the year 2005 also saw the
upsurge of urban riots in the French banlieues, almost immediately thematized as the
manifestation of postcolonial tensions, particularly acute in the case of the youth of Algerian
descent. With the election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, France then entered a troubled political
era characterized by a constant reflection on the definition of a “national French identity”. As I
write these lines, it is the year 2021, and president Emmanuel Macron asked historian Benjamin
Stora to write a Rapport on the Algerian question.2 In October of 2021, president Macron
invited a group of young French citizens who all have a personal connection with Algeria at the
Élysée Palace for discussing the issues raised by the Rapport Stora; on this occasion, he made

1
Sartre, J-P. (1965), Black Orpheus, in. The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, Issue 1., p. 26
2
Stora, B. (2021), Les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d’Algérie. Rapport public.
https://www.vie-publique.fr/rapport/278186-rapport-stora-memoire-sur-la-colonisation-et-la-guerre-dalgerie.
The use of the expression “Algerian question” is mine, and helps to pinpoint the problematic aspects of the
permanence of this French-Algerian history within French society.

7
distressing comments about the supposed non-existence of an “Algerian nation” before French
invasion, opening a diplomatic crisis with Algeria.
For the past twenty years, it is therefore fair to say that France has been haunted by the
Algerian question. On the one hand, some representants of political power – presidential power,
more specifically – have consciously worked towards the establishment of an appeased memory
of the conflictual and tragic history linking France to Algeria, constantly failing; on the other,
others weaponized the issue of a French national identity against French nationals of Algerian
descent. Whether they created diplomatic crises (like presidents Chirac and Macron) or imposed
a fantasised monolithic identity on a diverse country, they were never guided by a reflection on
what memory is for French-Algerians themselves.3 This necessary reflection would require two
intellectual movements. First, it demands to question the nature of history in regards with
subjectivity; strictly speaking, it demands a philosophical inquiry. Second, it involves to
interrogate the findings of this philosophical inquiry under the light of a specific history, that
of the French colonization of Algeria. This thesis is a plea for a return to conceptual creation,
or a philosophy anchored in historical reality.
What does it mean to be French when you are Algerian? Why is there a feeling of being
haunted by a past that you have not lived? How can one theoretically characterize the pain felt
by French-Algerians by virtue of this very identity? Why does the word “discrimination” feel
like it does not cover the entire truth of the reality it designates, that feels more like a denial of
respect? These questions are simple, not to say basic. They could very well be formulated by a
journalist, an artist, or an essayist. They are not embedded in a network of academic research,
they are not backed by already existing theories, and they do not immediately refer to one
theoretical paradigm. They may seem like intimate questions, and might not seem deserving of
theoretical research. Worse, they might seem imbued with a pathos not appropriate to research.
Nonetheless, addressing these questions is the necessary first step for helping to shed light on
the French-Algerian situation, which successive French governments have revealed incapable
to do. Understanding is a necessary preliminary to appeasing, which is why governments have
constantly tried to establish official relations with historians, like Benjamin Stora. Yet, I believe

3
I use the expression French-Algerians to designate citizens who were born in France from parents or grand-
parents with Algerian heritage and sometimes hold a dual citizenship but not always – doing so, I refuse the
phrasing French of Algerian descent. Looking at the US with suspicion, French intellectual and political elites
have little taste for hyphens, and their proclaimed universalism imposes that they characterize all French citizens
as primarily French. French-Algerians are systematically referred to as “Français d’origine algérienne” (French
of Algerian descent), which contributes to turn their connection with Algeria into a secondary feature. I choose to
break this accepted characterization, in a plea for a vocabulary change towards the expression “Français-
Algériens” (French-Algerians).

8
that history should be backed by philosophy. Because the concepts apt for thinking the French-
Algerian situation do not exist, creating them is necessary and philosophy can help with this –
more specifically, the philosophy of Sartre can help. By claiming these basic questions as the
departure point of my work, I hope to give them the very theoretical worth that they are lacking,
not because of a moral necessity, as one might think, but because of an epistemic necessity.
Indeed, addressing these questions seriously is the only serious answer to the French-Algerian
postcolonial situation; as such, it is the only serious way out of the standstill France has been
in for – at least – the past twenty years.
Nonetheless, and although these questions motivate the present work, they cannot be
addressed as such, because the right network of theoretical assessments and hypotheses is
lacking. This actually justifies the necessity to write a doctoral thesis, and not a political essay.
Simple questions like the ones I formulated cannot be the object of a doctoral thesis, but the
theoretical background necessary to their future seriousness can be. In this work, I intend to
make visible an intellectual history that can help to create a network of theoretical references
that can be a basis for a future reflection that, I fear, given its political content, can only be
written outside of academia; this academic text is a necessary first step. This disclosure
contributes to explain, I hope, the status of my thesis. In this work, I am not claiming to produce
the work of a Sartre scholar, I am not bringing a new stone to the building of postcolonial
studies, I am not writing a work of pure philosophy, and I am not offering the text of a standard
political thought and intellectual history thesis. Actually, my work falls right at the intersection
between those different fields, and its indetermination is not an eccentricity, it is required by
the topics and the questions I wish to address.

Since at least the 2005 riots,4 there is a general consensus on the fact that being a French-
Algerian living in France raises issues. One’s opinion on the nature of the issues raised by this
identity is usually influenced by one’s political views. The French left has a tendency to stress
the discriminations faced by a population that tries its best to be “integrated” into society, while
the French right usually underlines that “integration” to French society has failed because of
cultural differences impossible to get rid of. The spectrum of the views on the matter is large
and usually divides between both of these statements. Yet, French-Algerians themselves, as
well as well-informed observers, did not wait for 2005 to see that this very identity raises issues,
which are a direct outcome of colonization, and have little to do with the Republican destructive

4
Horvath, C. (2018), “Riots or revolts? The legacy of the 2005 uprising in French banlieues narratives”, in. Modern
and Contemporary France, Vol. 26, Issue 2: The Anti-Police of Mai ’68 Fifty Years On.

9
fantasy of “integration”. In this respect, they can be characterized as “postcolonial”, a
dimension almost systematically eluded in the French political discourse. By comparison,
French academia has slowly opened its door to a postcolonial prism of interpretation, although
the evolution has been slow. The wave of violence that emerged in 2005 followed the death of
two teenagers5 at the hands of the police and the proportions of the riots were such that a state
of emergency and a curfew in the districts concerned were decided, which was the first time
since the war of the Algerian Revolution (1954 – 1962). The riots provoked incomprehension,
in a country that still believed in the strength of its universalism. Only after this breaking point,
the idea of a “postcolonial” interpretation of social dynamics started to make its way through
French academia. This evolution was (and still is) rather slow, and it seemed to us, French
students of the 2010s, that in the face of an increasingly changing world, French academia had
built metaphorical walls around the Sorbonne. The air became suffocating and, as we started to
read and think for ourselves, something felt wrong. We came from a generation liberated from
the dogmas of the past, and we failed to understand the sometimes scornful attitudes of some
of our professors in the face of movements of thought that emerged in the Anglophone
academia, where we found incredible potentialities for thinking the world we were in. From
gender to race, our interests had changed from those of the generations that preceded us. The
truth of Marxism was not so much a concern for us. In my case, the space for thematising the
French-Algerian situation in French academia seemed rather small, and the Anglophone
academia seemed to offer more freedom of thought, which justifies and explains why I chose
to pursue this doctoral work on French philosophy as a French person in an English-speaking
university.
Breaking those metaphorical walls that I imagined were preserving the Sorbonne from
modernity led me to discover the field of what we call postcolonial studies. I navigated through
texts of various traditions, starting with the pioneers, from Edward Said’s Orientalism to
Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Obviously, there was something liberating in reading such
texts for the first time, and in witnessing the creation of concepts for thinking a world
transformed by the fact of colonization. Yet, I must say none of the concepts I came across
seemed helpful for providing an explanation for the French-Algerian situation. The fact that
French academia has remained suspicious of postcolonial studies for so long has nourished a
natural anglophone domination of the field that explains why the postcolonial situations that

5
Zyed Benna was 17 years old and Bouna Traroré was 15 years old. Their families respectively came from Tunisia
and Mauritania. Both were Muslims, and killed at the beginning of Ramadan, which contributed to the intensity
of the reaction.

10
emerged from the former British Empire are the source of so many different reflections and
theorizations. Haunting many founding postcolonial texts but wildly absent from today’s
postcolonial studies, the case of the colonization of Algeria and its aftermath must be given a
renewed interest in order to be understood. On this path, I discovered the philosophy of Sartre.
Although Sartre’s name is immediately associated with his anticolonial positions, his
specific historical anchorage in the French-Algerian situation is often eluded to the profit of a
wider postcolonial theory that would be a key for understanding postcolonial situations
everywhere. The lack of contemporary French scholarly research on the topic allows for a
strong presence of an anglophone shaping of the postcolonial research field, which prevents us
from understanding the very specific situation of France and Algeria. Colonies were not a block,
and neither were colonizers. A space for a specific theorization of localized postcolonial
situations should be open, and this is what I hoped to do with Algeria, when I realised that this
research would lead me to shed a new light not only on the French-Algerian situation, but also
on the status of Sartre’s philosophy in the global history of thought, as well as on the necessity
for a return to philosophy in political studies.
Indeed, another source of the intellectual frustration my readings put me in is the fact that
postcolonial studies, in the way they emerged in the anglophone academia, are closely related
to literary critique. The fact that the authors of French theory were firstly received in American
literature departments explains why critical theory of race, gender or colonization, found in
literary critique a welcoming home. Yet, authors of French Theory were philosophers first, in
the most rigid French tradition, and they had the defence of philosophy at heart.6 Without this
strong philosophical dimension, I believe it difficult to fully understand the scope of the
reflections of Derrida and Foucault for example. Without philosophy, I also believe it difficult
to produce a true critical understanding of French colonialism in Algeria and its aftermath. This
double obstacle that I was confronted with – the quasi absence of a question on the French-
Algerian situation in theoretical postcolonial literature, and the lack of philosophical
perspective – led me back to my original questions.
Rephrasing them and unifying them into an overarching problem, I could say that I am
occupied with the definition of a French-Algerian postcolonial subjectivity. The reason why I
believe my work still falls into the field of Politics is because this definition bears a political
dimension such that it has huge social and political consequences – the 2005 riots are a good

6
Cusset, F. (2018), French Theory. How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of
the United States, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

11
example of this. In many respects, there has been a before and an after the 2005 riots in France.
This range of violence and turmoil was unparalleled in contemporary France and appeared as a
shock for most of those who truly believed in the myth of a post-racist and appeased France.
The riots gave birth to some original research works, like the one conducted by Malika
Mansouri in Révoltes postcoloniales au cœur de l’Hexagone, published in 2013. This study is
interesting to my purpose insofar as it gives body to the theoretical questions that I wish to
formulate. Trained in psychology and psychiatry, Mansouri followed fifteen French-Algerian
teenagers for several years, starting after 2005. Some had taken part to the riots, some had not.
The interest of her work is double; first she thematized the riots as “postcolonial revolts”, and,
second, she proved this point through a psychiatric analysis. Claiming Fanon’s legacy, himself
a psychiatrist in Algerian hospitals in the 1950s and 1960s, she showed that the truth of a
political and social event of the magnitude of the 2005 riots can be understood by a focus on
the psyche. From her interviews and analyses, she showed that there still is such a thing as a
colonialist culture in French society that nourishes a social inferiorization of formerly
colonized people, fuelling anger and frustration. The content of her work is not groundbreaking,
and for sure its premises will sound rather trivial to someone who is used to see the world
through a postcolonial prism. Yet, in contemporary France, this was an original perspective,
and its merit lies in the focus she chose. Taking the individual being as a ground for
understanding wider political realities such as the aftermath of colonization is particularly
interesting for the situation I am interested in. Yet, the scope of Mansouri’s work is necessarily
limited and narrowed by the fact that it is mostly a commentary of the experiences told by the
fifteen chosen teenagers. Nonetheless, there is something such as a postcolonial French-
Algerian subjectivity that emerges from those pages, and only philosophy can help thematize
the concept for it to have a political meaning and impact.
My inquiry started with two main interrogations: how can one characterize the situation of
French-Algerians living in France? Why do history and sociology seem to miss central elements
of the equation, while philosophy deserted a terrain it only could shed light on? Through the
questions stemming from the necessity to understand the contemporary postcolonial French-
Algerian relationship, the texts of Sartre became central, and my research led me to re-introduce
them in a wider French history that begins with the French Revolution. When one thinks of
thinkers of colonization in a French context, the name of Sartre arises immediately, along with
those of Fanon, Césaire, Memmi, and a few others. Yet, my first reading of Sartre was not
motivated by the questions mentioned above. I came across Being and nothingness during the
first semester of my MPhil, at a lecture devoted to his influence in phenomenology. The more

12
I was reading his fundamental ontology, the closer I was to finding answers to the questions
surrounding a French-Algerian subjectivity – before even reading Sartre’s political texts.
How could phenomenological statements about the nature of being help to understand a
historical situation? Surprisingly enough, I found them closer to the concrete reality I was trying
to understand than many of the works in French sociology devoted to the same issues.7 Only an
inquiry such as Sartre’s, about what is at stake, existentially, between the past and the being,
could help to make sense of my own situation, as well as that of the other few million people
sharing the same historical situation as mine. It was only after going through Being and
nothingness at length that I moved to Sartre’s political texts, and realized how radical his
thought of emancipation was, in the French-Algerian context. Given how important this
historical situation had been for his political thought, I started to wonder why I had never come
across it during my studies, in high school and at university, where I heard so much about his
theatre and his literature. When writing this thesis, I often thought of what one of my philosophy
teachers said, leaving the whole class hilarious: “Sartre is dead”. His dramatic tone was the
source of our laughter because he said it like Sartre had died the day before. Yet, it was 2009,
and Sartre had been dead for a long while. What he meant – and I understood the depth of his
observation years later – is that Sartre’s influence had vanished. It took me years of reading,
studying, and observing how the wave of deconstruction with Derrida and Foucault, and the
rise to success of sociology with Bourdieu helped destroying the intellectual legacy of Sartre.
Because of that “parricide” – as Sophie Wahnich put it8 – Sartre was condemned to be presented
to generations of students as a communist philosopher who wrote theatre plays to demonstrate
the truth of communism. To most of us, Les mains sales or Les Mouches appeared as boring
and lacking consistency. Little did we know that the philosophy behind them had actually
produced the most radical theoretical tools for emancipation that French thought had known. It
is in that sense that Sartre was dead: his edge had died, and his name was that of a strange man
who wrote bad theatre that we had to study and that our literature professors seemed to be as
bored with as we were. In philosophy classes though, he was almost absent, and the link
between his phenomenological philosophy and his political commitments was never to be heard
of.

7
For instance: Amrani, Y. and Beaud, S. (2004), Pays de malheur ! Paris: La Découverte; Bidet, J. (2017),
“’Blédards’ et ‘immigrés’ sur les plages algériennes”, in. Actes de la Recherche en sciences sociales, 2017/3, No.
218; Beaud, S. (2018), La France des Belhoumi, Paris: La Découverte.
8
Wahnich, S. (2017), La révolution française n’est pas un mythe, p. 156.

13
 This is how Sartre has been seen in France for the last forty years: we know he wrote about
colonial oppression, but it is better to not dig too much into it. As a matter of fact, his
involvement in these topics is sometimes used as a proof that the wave of “postcolonial studies”
in France serves no real purpose. It is by calling on Sartre and Fanon that Jean-François Bayart
dismissed what he deemed a sad import of anglophone postcolonial studies in the French
context. Published in 2010, his book, Les études postcoloniales, un carnaval académique,
stirred a debate that has continued to resonate in the French academic sphere. Himself a
specialist of Africa, he intended to show that, in the French context, postcolonial studies made
no sense, and were the academic translation of resentment and frustration, while he advocated
that scholars should focus on facts and institutions, instead of extrapolating symbols and
representations. The word he chose to characterize them, carnival, is quite evocative of a
colourful and confused mixture of noisy and inarticulate voices; a real colonial imagery of the
Other, one would say… In spite of this prejudiced approach, Bayart believes himself to be on
the side of emancipation and he claimed that since there is a French tradition of thinking about
colonialism, it is nonsensical to import other traditions. In a nutshell, why should we say more
than has already been said about the French colonial domination in the 1960s by prominent
thinkers, including Sartre and Fanon? The point is not entirely wrong, and there is, for sure, an
Anglo-American domination of the field of postcolonial studies that can make it feel difficult
for a specifically French, or French-Algerian tradition, to find a voice of its own. Yet, the point
made by Bayart loses credit when he simply mentioned Sartre and Fanon, without calling for a
re-reading of their texts for our times. In that respect, this attitude is emblematic of generations
of French thinkers who believe the work on colonialism has been done by Sartre in the 1960s,
which magically requires from everyone to stop thinking about it, while at the same time never
advocating for a re-reading of this part of Sartre’s work.
In spite of the scholarly evolutions of the past forty years, there is a general tendency in
France to dismiss the theoretical value of what we now call postcolonial studies. In the wake
of the 2005 riots, several books and articles were published, aiming at understanding the reasons
for this upheaval through the prism of the French colonial past. Three historians published La
fracture coloniale9 and Bayart wrote his book partly as an answer to them. The idea of
understanding contemporary French society through the prism of its colonial history is still,
until today, a burning object of conflict. Due to the natural renewing of the academic staff, as

9
N. Blancel, P. Blanchard, S. Lemaire (2005), La fracture coloniale, Paris: La Découverte.

14
well as the pioneering research of French and American historians,10 universities slowly became
more and more open to it. As a consequence, it is political power itself that is now trying to
curb its evolution. In a non-sensical manner, the expression “islamo-gauchisme” has been
coined by the French far-right, and was so successful that the Minister for Higher Education
herself, Frédérique Vidal, used it in 2020, for characterizing what she believes is a danger
threatening French universities. Put simply, their claim is that there is currently an alliance
between the left and “Islamism” (or “Islam”, their thought is, to say the least, rather unclear).
Behind this essentialized figure of Islam, they actually include everything that has to do with
the non-French elements of the French society. Analysing them with them in one’s research, is
now seen as a threat to the French Republic.11 Over the summer of 2021, the Minister for
Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, found a new target: in his words, “wokism”. Very clearly
saying that this is a sad import from US universities, he formulated the necessity for French
universities to protect the country from this “dangerous ideology”. The common ground of
these perspectives and points of view, is that the thinking around colonialism, race, and cultural
difference is seen as a fundamentally non-French attitude, or even, anti-French attitude since it
is the very grounds of republican universalism that it is supposedly threatening. Likening the
views of Bayart to that of the current French government would be unfair, but there is an affinity
of views between those who believe that the idea of “postcolonialism” cannot be applied to the
French context. Nonetheless, and in spite of our differences, Bayart makes a convincing claim:
the very existence of a French tradition of thought about colonialism, with Sartre, Fanon,
Memmi, and others, should stand for a critical distance from the import of anglophone literature
on the topic in France.
It is an unsatisfaction from this state of things that triggered the present inquiry. From my
first reading of Being and nothingness to a deeper discovery of the rest of Sartre’s work, it
remained obvious to me that Sartre was a key figure for understanding the meaning of French
colonialism. Because it is the French-Algerian situation that I am interested in, it is French
colonialism specifically, and not the idea of “colonialism” that I aim at understanding. In this

10
Blancel, N., Blanchard, P., Vergès, F. (2003), La République coloniale. Essai sur une utopie, Paris: Albin
Michel; Shepard, T. (2008), The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Katz, E. (2015), The Burdens of Brotherhood. Jews and Muslims from North
Africa to France, Cambridge Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press.
11
Frédérique Vidal’s stance was seen as a dangerous political interference with the neutrality of academic research.
It created such a shock in French academia that 600 academics signed an article published in Le Monde in February
2021, demanding her resignation. The list included economist Thomas Piketty and sociologist Dominique Méda.
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2021/02/20/islamo-gauchisme-nous-universitaires-et-chercheurs-
demandons-avec-force-la-demission-de-frederique-vidal_6070663_3232.html

15
inquiry, Sartre is, to this day, the thinker who helped me uncover much more of the situation
than anyone else, and, for this very reason, I chose to devote my PhD thesis to his work. This
study led me to go further than I had imagined at the beginning, and I hope to be able to produce,
with this work, the premise of a philosophical and critical approach of French colonialism,
linked with a critical understanding of the history of contemporary French political philosophy.
When reading about the issue, it is striking to realize that there is no work of philosophy devoted
to the questions mentioned.12 Alternatively, there is a wide and fascinating academic literature
that focuses on the French-Algerian situation written by historians.13 As interesting as these
works are, works in history can leave one unsatisfied. Why is it that history or social sciences,
with the rigorous collection of historical facts and data, can leave one with the feeling that a
wide array of questions were left unanswered? Why is it that philosophy goes to places that
cannot be reached by positivist sciences? This question will be the other theme of this thesis,
which follows two main directions that I believe are intertwined: (1) what does a critical
approach of France and French colonialism mean today? (2) why is political philosophy
necessary, locally (for the purpose of our first questioning), as well as more broadly?
Before going further into the reasons why I chose Sartre as a focus point where my questions
converge, I must give a more precise idea of how this work hopes to be a critical study of French
colonialism thanks to the help of Sartre. His personal commitment against French rule over
Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s is well known, along with the preface he wrote for Fanon’s The
wretched of the earth. His political texts, published in various reviews, and reunited under the
different volumes of Situations are well known too. If this thesis was just a commentary of this
visible and most obvious involvement of Sartre against French colonialism, then it would teach
us very little about Sartre that we do not already know. And, more importantly, it would not
help us understand the shape of a contemporary French-Algerian subjectivity better.

I can start to explain the status of Sartre’s texts in my inquiry if I recall that it is through the
reading of his fundamental ontology that I found the tools for understanding the subjectivity of
a post-colonial being. Sartre’s very specific understanding of human subjectivity on the one
hand, and of the past on the other, will help me build a Sartrean concept of a collective past,

12
An exception must be noted. A book published in the Spring 2021, which I only discovered a few days before
submitting this thesis, proposes a fascinating philosophical understanding of French secularism as a consequence
of French colonialism. This analysis displays an argumentation anchored in both philosophy and history, necessary
to a true understanding of French colonialism. To my knowledge, it is the first published work of its kind in a
French context. Amer Meziane, M. (2021), Des empires sous la terre, Paris: La Découverte.
13
For instance: Katz, E. (2015), The burdens of brotherhood and Shepard, T. (2008), The Invention of
Decolonization.

16
which is the most useful concept I have found until now for giving a truthful and accurate
account of a postcolonial subjectivity in the French-Algerian context. Introducing Sartrean
concepts to the vocabulary of political thought seems necessary when it comes to understanding
French colonialism, and I would like to make that leap, with the awareness of that leap. In other
words, this work requires to assess the room one wants and needs to give to philosophy. In a
nutshell, I would like to make room for the philosophical anchorage of political thought and
sociology, and make it visible. The reasons for that are epistemological and stem from the idea
that only such a philosophical perspective can help formulate truths about the social world, but
they are also historical and directly linked to the critical approach of French colonialism that I
would like to initiate here. Indeed, one of my arguments will be to make more visible than it
already is the link between the aftermath of the French Revolution on the one hand, and a
colonial positivist Third Republic that established at the end of the nineteenth century the
driving principles of the French Republic until today. In other words, positivism as it rose to
success and gave its strength to sociology is not anecdotal, and stems from a specific French
intellectual history, that bloomed after the French Revolution, and bears affinities with French
colonialism. Moreover, among the concepts that I found useful for addressing my questions,
that of recognition imposed itself as central. Although fundamental in political thought today,
this concept has been subject to various attempts at a definition or theorization, but never
seemed to incorporate the theoretical aspects necessary to give account of the specifically
postcolonial relationship. Out of all the literature that tackled this concept, the philosophy of
Sartre arose as particularly meaningful for shedding light on a theoretical system of
understanding for today’s French Algerian relationship. Yet, although Sartre is often mentioned
as a thinker of recognition, his views on the topic are often judged minimal. Against this
perspective, one of the theoretical aims of this thesis is to demonstrate the existence of a
Sartrean theory of recognition, by building it from the intuitions and the philosophical tools he
left us with. As I dived into this research work, it became more and more obvious that Sartre’s
views on recognition were backed by a larger view on the status of philosophy. It is to this
intellectual history that I would like to contribute.
In order to do so, I will devote my first chapter to an assessment of a longer-term French
social and political thought, from the French Revolution. The difficulty that I find is the
following: in order to give a true assessment of the reach of Sartre’s philosophy, I must explain
how Sartre gives answers to a theoretical conflict that I believe was born with the French
Revolution. Showing what I believe Sartre brings to this intellectual history is dependent on my
interpretation of the French Revolution and its theoretical aftermath. For this purpose, I make

17
two hypotheses. The first one is that the attack on transcendence operated by the French
Revolution can be understood through an aesthetic prism: the Revolution was a fight between
equality and beauty. The second hypothesis is that the wave of rational positivism that the
French Revolution gave birth to backed the ideology of colonization, which leads me to
establish a link between the founding event of French political modernity, namely the French
Revolution, and French colonization. This hypothesis is backed by an important body of
postcolonial scholarship that makes this claim, in reference to the French Empire, but also other
imperial powers.14 Following this claim, I hope to show that the theoretical aftermath of the
French Revolution bears the seeds of a conflict between transcendence and immanence, which
can also be understood as a conflict between subjectivity and objectivity. This philosophical
conflict explains two important things. Philosophically, it explains why Sartre, intending to
resolve this conflict, gave so much importance to subjectivity. Historically, and for my purpose,
it explains the necessity to understand the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in
the field of social and human relations.
This is what I intend to do in the second chapter of this thesis, devoted to the understanding
of the links between history (as a figure of objectivity) and human subjectivity. Given how
embedded in history a French-Algerian postcolonial subjectivity is, it is only natural that how
history haunts subjectivity imposed itself as the driving question of my second chapter. Flowing
from the conclusions of my first chapter, and answering one of my initial questions, the issue
of how history is inscribed in subjectivity is the topic of my second chapter. The tone of this
second chapter will be more philosophical than historical, and I will not explicitly look for
defining the French-Algerian postcolonial subjectivity. Rather, I will establish the theoretical
grounds, from the philosophy of Sartre, necessary to do so in a future, non-academic work. The
key concept that I will try to build, from the intuitions left to us by Sartre in his texts, is that of
a collective past. After establishing how history, under the name of collective past, haunts us
as subjectivities, it will be necessary to assess how it haunts us as we connect with others: the
classical philosophical issue of intersubjectivity then arises.

14
See: Chakrabarty, D. (1995), “Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some Recent
Critiques of ‘Subaltern Studies’”, in. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 30, No. 14, pp. 751-759; Drayton, R.
(2000), Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World, New Haven: Yale;
Carey, D. and Festa, L., eds. (2009), The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-century Colonialism and
Postcolonial Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Tricoire, D. (2017), Enlightened Colonialism: Civilization
Narratives and Imperial Politics in the Age of Reason, New York: Springer Publishing.

18
 In the network of questions that are ours here, this issue can be thematized under the notion
of recognition, and this will be the topic of my third chapter. This concept, central to
contemporary political thought, is of paramount importance for my argument, for at least three
reasons worthy of being listed here. First, and in the most simple, obvious, and direct manner,
it is through the concept of recognition, or the lack of it, that many facts of discrimination and
humiliation proper to multicultural postcolonial societies are thought and thematized. Given
my original questions, that this concept arises here is no surprise. Yet, and this is the second
reason, attributing a real and constructed concept of recognition to Sartre is not that common,
and this is what I aim to do. Finally, and this is the third reason, the concept of recognition
sheds a different light on the issue of positivism, of which this thesis aims at providing a critical
understanding. I claim that the concept of recognition is like a ghost in Sartre’s thought: never
fully formalized but present everywhere.
Finally, Sartre’s understanding of subjectivity and of recognition imbues his late reflection
on the reconciliation of Marxism and existentialism, which will be the object of the fourth and
final chapter of this work. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of the two previous
chapters, it will interpret Sartre’s late initiative of reconciliation as an attempt at harmonizing
the theoretical and political conflicts inherited from the French Revolution and the nineteenth
century. Foucault once said that the Critique of dialectical reason was the “wonderful and
pathetic effort of a nineteenth century man for thinking the twentieth century.”15 How
incredibly unfair and wrong this statement is should not take our attention away from the fact
that he is right in calling Sartre a “nineteenth century man”. What Foucault missed though, is
that Sartre was also, radically, a twentieth century man. His philosophy is the direct proof of
this historical internal duality. In trying to reconcile Marxism and existentialism, Sartre tried to
reconcile the objective and the subjective, immanence and transcendence, or, in the way I
phrase it, beauty and equality. In analysing this Sartrean undertaking of reconciliation, I hope
to show what he brings to philosophy and, consequently to political thought, in solving conflicts
inherited from the French Revolution.
Although seemingly miles away from my original questions, the necessity to go on this
ground stemmed from them. It is because no existing theoretical framework seemed appropriate
to the understanding of a postcolonial French-Algerian subjectivity that I started researching
how Sartre could provide us with one. It appeared, then, that if the one Sartre provides us with
is relevant, it is because his critical work on the dialectical reason is a critical work on the

15
Foucault, M. (1994), Dits et écrits, vol. 1, p. 542.

19
theoretical and political modernity that helped creating the historical fact of colonization in its
French shape. In order to understand and create the premise of a critical approach of the French
postcolonial situation, it is necessary to first understand how theoretically revolutionary the
philosophy of Sartre was; this is what this the thesis is devoted to.

20
 Chapter 1. The post-French Revolution era.
Intellectual and historical perspectives on
French philosophy and French colonialism.

The French Revolution is a strange object: politically and intellectually, it has been equally
attractive and repulsive, and its evocation usually triggers intense reactions. Around 1989, the
celebrations of the bicentenary of the Revolution gave way to the publication of several works
and occupied the centre of the French intellectual scene for a few months, until it disappeared
again. For the past thirty years, and apart from a continuous scholarly interest in departments
of history, the French Revolution has not been a burning object for thought in French academia.
Yet, the French Revolution has not disclosed all of its mysteries yet, and it remains a central
event for the understanding of contemporary French society. In 1960, Sartre put it at the centre
of his reflections on a philosophy of history, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason,16 to the point
that Sophie Wahnich claimed that the French Revolution is a “Sartrean object”17. A historian
herself, and a recognized specialist of the French Revolution, Wahnich published a book in
2017, which she mostly devoted to the complex relation of Sartre to the French Revolution. She
underlined that she had not been familiar with Sartre’s work on the Revolution until very late
in her academic career. In Sartre’s Critique, the French Revolution is studied in detail, in an
attempt at creating a new theory of history. In her book, Wahnich analysed how Sartre turns the
French Revolution into a conceptual object.
In this chapter, my focus will be different. Given the highly philosophical dimension of the
Critique, to analyse it would require the use of a method and of a vocabulary not suited to the
present chapter’s inquiry.18 It would also imply to give a thorough account of the Critique,
which would necessitate a far wider room than allowed here, and would not serve this chapter’s
purpose. Yet, recalling the connection between the Critique and the French Revolution is
important because it is in the Critique – and more specifically in Search for a method, published
as an introduction to the Critique – that Sartre presents his attempt at reconciling Marxism and
existentialism. This reconciliation, which will occupy the fourth chapter of this work, is of

16
Referred to as the Critique for the rest of this thesis.
17
Wahnich, S. (2017), La Révolution française n’est pas un mythe, Paris: Klincksieck
18
The second and third chapters of this thesis will resort to the philosophical vocabulary at more length. The
present chapter can be read as an introductory historical panorama that lays the grounds for the rest of the thesis.

21
paramount importance to this thesis because I interpret it as the answer to the theoretical
conflicts born with the French Revolution. The event will not be studied as such in this chapter,
nor will Sartre’s analyses of it, for which Wahnich’s study already provides us with interesting
elements of interpretation.
This chapter is devoted to the presentation of a series of connections between the French
Revolution and the intellectual history that follows it. Rather than focusing on the events, or on
a theoretical history that is well known, my aim is to create a new symbolic meaning from this
intellectual history. In other words: the principles of the French Revolution are already well
known, and there is little to add to this history. This chapter manifests the double focus of this
thesis. First, it intends to interrogate the influence of the French Revolution on the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries: what did the event mean for thought, philosophy, and the evolution of
colonialism? Second, it underlines that the theoretical conflicts born with the French Revolution
converge towards a Sartrean resolution in the 1960s.
In order to lay the grounds for this general argumentation, contextualizing Sartre’s
philosophy within the history of French philosophy is necessary. From the 1930s to the 1960s,
Sartre occupied the intellectual scene like no one before. At his death, thousands of people
walked down Paris to the Montparnasse cemetery to pay their respects – such a scene had not
been seen since the death of Victor Hugo, almost exactly a century before. Albert Memmi,
whom I interviewed in 2013 a few years before his passing, for a then student radio, mentioned
to me how difficult it was for the young writer that he was to exist as an intellectual when you
were with Sartre; his aura captured all the attention. A young Jewish Tunisian intellectual
desiring to produce an intellectual understanding of colonization, Memmi had published The
Colonizer and the Colonized in 1957, and Sartre wrote the preface of the book. Although Sartre
had helped his intellectual career, Memmi chose to leave the group of “Saint-Germain des Prés”
to find a voice of his own. Many did not, and frustration, from his friends and acquaintances,
began to grow. This reputation of an aura like no other contributed to the creation of something
like a mythological figure, to the detriment of his thought. The generation of intellectuals
following him were determined to get rid of this figure: Bourdieu called him an “intellectual
total”, with a mix of admiration and mockery, while Foucault considered Sartre outdated. The
atmosphere surrounding him made it more difficult to actually assess what Sartre brought to
philosophy, and, more broadly, to human knowledge. I contend that Sartre belongs to an
intellectual moment which opened with the end of World War I and ended in the 1990s. This
period could be characterized by a growing interest in intellectual matters and in politics within
the elite youth all around Europe. In this context, philosophy became a field for social thought

22
and social progress, but also a battleground for a struggle for prestige, as shown by sociologists
of intellectuals, most notably by Louis Pinto19. This evolution was probably stronger in France
than anywhere else, a country where philosophy is, until today, not just a university subject, or
an area of research, but an element of the cultural struggle for prestige, and distinction, to use
Bourdieu’s vocabulary.20 A cultural trait proper to France until today is the way philosophy is
seen as the noble intellectual subject par excellence. In this area, Sartre played a role like no
other: he is seen, until today, as the embodiment of this very French approach to philosophy as
a way of life, stereotyped as the fact of speaking about philosophy while sitting at the terrace
of a café and leading a libertine life.21
The purpose of this thesis is to show that, in spite of this superficial perspective, which
tends to turn Sartre into a bourgeois intellectual only interested in ennui or angst, Sartre
fundamentally changed philosophy. He provided us with a renewal of knowledge of paramount
importance for social and political thought. The reasons why this moment tends to be
overlooked in the history of political and social ideas are various, but the stereotypical image
we have of him until today might explain a great deal of this omission. In this chapter, I want
to try and understand what the active period of Sartre (1930s – 1960s) meant for the modern
era that started with the French Revolution, politically and philosophically.
It is known how much of a breaking point the French Revolution has been, not only for
France but for European thought in general. I make the claim that the French Revolution is the
source of theoretical oppositions that lived on for at least the two following centuries. It
structured the political world,22 as well as political thought and philosophy. I do not intend to
study the French Revolution in itself, but to show how the values it intended to destroy and
those it aimed at promoting entered in a conflict which gave birth to the major theoretical
debates of the nineteenth and twentieth century. These debates are not only political and cannot
be seen as a simple opposition between conservatism and progressivism. They are properly
theoretical and epistemic, in the sense that they gave birth to – or at least provided the conditions
for – positivism, which is a key factor in the birth of sociology and social sciences. The French

19
Pinto, L. (2014), Sociologie et Philosophie: libres échanges; and Pinto, L. (2021), Sociologie des intellectuels,
Paris: La Découverte.
20
In spite of the very real crisis of the press, where most newspapers and magazines are declining, the review
Philosophie Magazine is in very good financial health.
21
See At the existentialist café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails (2016), where Sarah Bakewell explains
Sartre’s philosophy to a non-specialist audience. This is a good book with a clear outline of the key issues of
Sartre’s philosophy, and I believe this kind of book to be important. Yet, the approach sadly contributes to discredit
Sartre’s seriousness to a specialist audience. This clichéd approach of Sartre contributes to perpetuate a deep-
seated and long-lasting stereotype.
22
The notions of left and right originated from the French Revolution.

23
Revolution created, in the long run, an upheaval in the field of philosophy, the consequences
of which have not been fully understood yet. Only through situating this holistically, by taking
into account the historical and theoretical setting and conditions, can one start to understand the
true meaning of Sartre’s philosophical work. This can be seen as Sartre’s attempt at reconciling
historically conflictual values: when he tries to reconcile existentialism and Marxism, it is
another way of reconciling aesthetics and ethics, transcendence and the material world, or, as I
will try to show in my last chapter, beauty and equality.
The aim of the present chapter is to show how the French Revolution created the conditions
for positivism, but also for the slow demise of political philosophy, as well as for the expansion
of colonialism. The foundational questions of this work, presented in the general introduction,
require a specific attention to this colonial history, in order to try and understand that it is
intrinsically linked to a wider intellectual history of France, after the French Revolution.

The French Revolution: the opening of a new intellectual era

The French Revolution: creating the cultural conditions for positivism

An amusing story shows how much of an earthquake the French Revolution has been for
Europe: Kant is said to have had a very strict work schedule and to have been a very disciplined
man. Every day of his life, he woke up, ate, worked and went for a walk at the exact same time.
Twice in his life, he missed his daily promenade – once to go get a copy of Rousseau’s Social
Contract, which had just been published, and, once to go buy the newspaper on the day that the
Bastille was taken in Paris. This anecdotal story is like a symbol of the intellectual
reconfiguration European thought has gone through following the French Revolution.
Everywhere, philosophers and thinkers of all disciplines were trying to make sense of an event
which was nothing less than an upheaval of all values. Until then, philosophy had been occupied
with understanding the grand scheme of things: it was revolving around metaphysics, as well
as religious and scientific preoccupations. As such, Descartes and Leibniz for example, were,
in many respects, interested in how modern scientific discoveries could be understood without
challenging religious dogmas. Only with the growing anti-religious feeling of the
Enlightenment’s French thinkers, the possibility of a revolution such as the French one
occurred. After their thinking was embodied in this concrete historical event, it was not possible
for philosophy to keep revolving around science and religion anymore: slowly, politics and the
political nature of the things surrounding us became the centre of philosophical thought. It is

24
probably with Hegel that this evolution can be observed in the most clear and vivid way: a
philosopher in the old-fashioned sense of the term, aiming at creating a system of all things, he
was significantly interested in history and politics, and very little with physics and the natural
world. To him, knowledge was history. This shift, provoked by both the Enlightenment and the
French Revolution, was abundantly commented by Reinhart Koselleck. In Critique and Crisis.
Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society,23 he develops Carl Schmitt’s
understanding of the nature of politics and shows how this specific moment of French history
led to a de-politicization of politics. In creating a public sphere parallel to political power and
where moral authority was built, the Enlightenment contributed to shift the centre of discussion
in a way that was harmful to politics itself. In this regard, the French revolution can be seen as
a tremendously transformative event, both politically and intellectually.
Calling on Koselleck’s classic argument here was mostly destined to give body to the idea
of an unprecedented influence of the French revolution, but it is not to the same type of
influence that I am interested in in this section. The consequences of the French Revolution
were numerous, and I would like to draw attention on a specific aspect of the aftermath of the
French Revolution, which created the cultural conditions for the rise of positivism. The link
between the French Revolution and the rise of positivism and social sciences is often
underlined, and remains a rather common observation. In the Cambridge history of political
thought, Cheryl B. Welch devotes an entire chapter to the development of the “social science
from the French revolution to positivism”.24 She insists on the term “social science” – singular
form – because it was what thinkers of the nineteenth century were referring to. From reading
Cheryl B. Welch’s account of this period, one element is particularly telling: she approaches
this “social science” not only as a new tool for knowledge but also as an all-encompassing
system of thought which was backing a very specific politics. She defines this “social science”
as signalling “an attention to the natural facts affecting social life in opposition to a reliance on
religious or metaphysical dogma”, but also “an endorsement of the general will, the sovereignty
of the people, and the French Republic”. From the beginning, social sciences were born from a
political perspective and more or less inseparable from the belief in the French Republic, a
system which was probably the strongest ideological contribution of the French Revolution to
French society. This political and ideological system only came to fully blossom at the end of

23
Koselleck, R. (1988), Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
24
Welch, C. (2011), “Social science from the French Revolution to positivism”, in. The Cambridge History of
Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

25
the nineteenth century, with the birth of the Third Republic. In France, the nineteenth century
was a seemingly never-ending fight between the ideals of the French Revolution on the one
hand, and the pre-revolutionary forces still resisting to it on the other. From the analysis of
Cheryl B. Welch, two elements can be underlined: first, that the social science is the first step
towards positivism, which in turn influences social sciences; second, positivism was finally
victorious in the field of knowledge precisely when the Third Republic itself gained strength
and won the fight led by Republicans since the French Revolution started in 1789. It took a
whole century of intense debates and fights for the French Republic to gain solidity. The French
Revolution opens up a century-long theoretical and political fight that has an end with the
victory of Republican ideas. Although positivism was born later than the Revolution, and was
formalized by Auguste Comte in the 1830s, the fact that it gained strength while the Third
Republic came to life is not anecdotal.
I want to make three hypotheses, which can be interpreted as three types of consequences
of the French Revolution: (1) the existential consequences, (2) the aesthetic-normative
consequences, and (3) the philosophical consequences.
First, an event of the grand proportions of the French Revolution was to turn European
thought upside down. If the certainty of a monarchy founded in God was not so solid anymore,
then what was? By taking down the king of France, most revolutionaries were merely fighting
for their right to a decent life, and yet, the consequences for philosophy were to be immense.
By attacking the supreme value, namely God behind the figure of the king, the French
Revolution did two intertwined things: first, it paved the way for the growth of atheism (in the
French society and elsewhere) and, second, it made the concept of “values” itself somehow
vague, which led to this concept losing significance throughout the following decades. In this
respect, Nietzsche’s intellectual undertaking, which can be summarized as an attempt to turn
European values upside down, stems from this inaugural event. Because of this, it can be said
that the French Revolution created the emotional and cultural conditions for the loss of faith in
any transcendence. Indeed, by attacking the religious transcendence, it also attacked everything
that was not part of the immanent world, and, little by little, the area of things that was
considered an appropriately serious topic of inquiry, became the immanent world only, which,
little by little, came to being identified with material things. Incidentally, Marxism understood
as a materialism can be seen as a direct offspring of this very attitude towards things. It cannot
be said that the French Revolution, through the concrete events that took place between 1789
and 1805, promoted atheism in itself: the movement was too heterogeneous, and historians have

26
shown how complex the relationships of revolutionaries to religion has been25. What must be
underlined here is not this historical complexity of facts and diverse opinions, but rather, from
a conceptual perspective, how strongly the fact of destroying privileges and killing the king
allowed space for the idea of transcendence to lose credit all along the nineteenth century.
Transcendence was continuously attacked until it was formally rejected by the Republican
leaders of the Third Republic (with a particular emphasis between 1870 and 1914). This
evolution is what paved the way for the birth of an allegedly “French spirit”, which explains,
until today, the will to mock anything religious, or, in effect, transcendental26. By
“transcendental”, I mean any value that sees man as a creature that strives for going beyond
oneself. Step by step, the story of post-revolutionary France became the story of learning how
to not want too much, and how to not think too much of oneself: justice cannot suffer
superiority. Consciously or not, Sartre is directly fighting this idea while elaborating his
existential thought.
Second, the French Revolution can be primarily understood as a war on privileges. Very
explicitly, the French Ancien Régime was founded in the legal existence of “privileges” that
maintained an unfair state of things. The system of privileges was well organised between three
clear orders: the clergy, the aristocracy and the third estate. It was justified in the belief in a
superior force, God, as well as the status of the king as the head of it all. In order to fight the
objective injustice faced by thousands of hungry people, it became necessary to actually
deconstruct the values justifying it. It was a value shift, and an ethical reconfiguration. Yet, by
doing so, it went far enough for the idea of any hierarchy to be considered wrong, and this is
the very point I want to focus on here. By a sad irony of history, privileges and hierarchy became
associated with difference, and the very strong belief in universalism, conceptualized during
the Third Republic a century after the Revolution, became an absolute norm. The difficulty,
and even the impossibility, for the French political and public sphere to accept the contemporary
debates on race directly stems from that strength of universalism, that finds its roots in the fight
against privileges. The French national narrative can be seen as the history of a place where
privileges were destroyed for good, and a system that is grounded in the destruction of

25
Tackett, T. (1986), La Révolution, l’Église, la France, Paris: Cerf; Le Goff, J. and Rémond, R. (1991), Histoire
de la France religieuse, Paris: Seuil; Vovelle, M. (1988), La Révolution contre l’Église. De la Raison à l’Être
Suprême, Bruxelles: Complexe
26
The essence of the political reaction to the horrendous terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo in 2015 was the
following: Charlie Hebdo is France because mocking religious symbols is what makes France what it is. Soon
after the attacks, the idea of a distinctively “French spirit” made its way in the public debate. I believe this
identification of a French identity to the right to mock transcendence can be traced back to the theoretical conflicts
the French Revolution gave birth to.

27
privileges, so much that even today, it sounds unacceptable for yet a large part of the political
and intellectual elites to hear the idea of a “white privilege” for example. This evolution, as
known and talked about as it is, has never been characterized properly. It is often the topic of
informal conversations, or paper articles, yet it is never taken seriously enough by academics
or from an intellectual perspective. This state of things can be characterized as a social and
cultural blockage. I also claim that it must be characterized as an aesthetic-normative
transformation. The fact that the nineteenth century was the century of romanticism in literature
is not anecdotal, and the insistence on a romantic subjectivity tamed by the fight against
hierarchy is full of meaning, but the fact that it found in literature and poetry its primary
expression is even more telling. I contend it created a stigma weighing on aesthetics as part of
daily life. It also created a stigma weighing on any discourse that aims at being transcendental.
A century later, the stigma had lived on, and Husserl himself wrote that “natural human
understanding and the objectivism rooted in it will view every transcendental philosophy as a
flighty eccentricity, its wisdom as useless foolishness.”27
All these evolutions converge in a final evolution: the attack on subjectivity, or the
philosophical consequences. What is positivism if not an objectivism? Auguste Comte started
to formalize his thought in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the normative conflicts
born after the French Revolution were shaking the country, politically and intellectually. About
the theoretical aftermath of the French Revolution, Cheryl B. Welch writes that “although never
explicitly stated, the logic of the connection between the positive fact of psychological equality
and equality in civil and political rights seemed obvious to Condorcet”28, and, we might add,
to many other thinkers. The political necessity of a civil equality promoted by the French
Revolution was associated with “psychological equality”. The “science sociale”, to which
Welch refers, was actually seen as a tool for understanding and also helping to shape the newly
born society after the Ancien Régime was destroyed. Yet, if it were to rise on the grounding
principles of equality promoted by the Revolution, it had to be grounded in “psychological
equality”. It means that all behaviours, emotions, actions and reactions could be understood
from the laws of psychology that could be found and examined by the social scientist. It means
that one individual’s reaction, if it manifests into the world in the exact same way as another
individual’s reaction, can be explained thanks to the same natural causes. By suppressing the
legitimacy of the metaphysical world, it suppressed the possibility for metaphysical causes and

27
Husserl, E. (1954, [1970]), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An
Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 200.
28
Welch, C. (2011), “Social science from the French Revolution to positivism”, p. 17.

28
explanations. In doing so, it reduced individuals to the same set of actions and reactions in
regard to the social scientist’s explanations. With this, subjectivity became a simple illusion. In
this sense, the call for equality in the midst of the French Revolution paved the way for the idea
of an objective approach to society and social behaviours, which discredited de facto the
possibility for a subjective action with a meaning independent from the natural laws of society.
This evolution was backed even more by the loss of faith in metaphysical causes, which, little
by little, trapped human subjectivity in pure immanence. This is how the French Revolution, in
spite of its great complexity, can be seen as the founding moment of a social science that was
to become positivism, and then social sciences. It had one particularly enormous effect on
philosophy in the long term: the death of metaphysics. These evolutions are especially visible
in the works of Durkheim, for whom psychology or individual motives fail to be sources of
explanations; it is instead social facts that those who want to understand human affairs must
look at.
My claim is that France is still, theoretically and politically, dealing with the long-lasting
conflictual effects of the French Revolution. I claim that Sartre provided the key for a way out
of this conflict but was never seriously taken into account.

The rationality of equality against transcendence

Against the theological and mystical foundation of the Ancien Régime monarchy, the
French Revolution brought to life the rational principles of the French Enlightenment, Les
Lumières. Based on a criticism of royal absolutism, the Lumières went as far as deconstructing
the whole set of values that supported the king’s absolute power, including the belief in
transcendence. The history of the French Revolution and the Lumières is incredibly complex,
and I do not claim to give an account of it. It is not on the diversity of views held by the various
historical actors of the event that I wish to focus, but rather on the general spirit of the event, of
which Hegel managed to see the great lines. Never losing his enthusiasm for the French
Revolution, Hegel found in the event theoretical affinities with his own thinking, including both
the assertion of a rationality of reality on the one hand, and the refusal to believe in a
transcendence on the other: the world is an immanent rational reality, and this is, according to
Hegel, the greatest assertion of the French Revolution.29 With his philosophical system, Hegel

29
Granier, J. (1980), “Hegel et la Révolution française”, in. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 85e Année, No.
1 (Janvier-Mars 1980), pp. 1-26

29
intended to theoretically produce an “immanentization” of the world, to match what the French
Revolution had already done in the facts. He clearly formulated the necessity to get rid of the
old metaphysics, that had been made possible by the French Revolution itself. In his 1980
article, Granier underlined that, for Hegel, the French Revolution was the victory of empiricism
over metaphysics. Out of all the things that the event brought to world, Hegel also singles out
“liberty”, that can never go without “equality”. In many respects, the normative shift that
happened during the French Revolution was such an upheaval that very few values resisted the
change and “equality” became the leading value of the country for the two following centuries,
until today. I am not intending to lead a study into the French Revolution per se, but rather to
study the effects it had on the French cultural milieu until today, and how the French Revolution
helped to destroy the idea of transcendence in its quest for equality. In doing so, it did not only
put an end to a monarchy founded in God, but it also created suspicion around old hierarchies
and old values. Hegel reads the French Revolution as a moment when transcendence, along
with old metaphysics, was finally destroyed. He praises this evolution, paralleled by the rise of
the value of equality. He found a direct connection between the French Revolution and his own
speculative philosophy, where he established the identity between immanent reality and
immanent rationality. Within the frame of this Hegelian reading of the Revolution, one can
claim that this destruction of transcendence took the whole nineteenth century to fully bloom
and give way to the domination of rationalism and the birth of positivism, as I mentioned in the
first subsection of this chapter. Yet, positivism can also be seen and understood as analytical
thinking, as opposed to dialectical thinking. In this respect, it is not possible to relate it to
Hegel’s thought, and I do not make that connection.
With transcendence, it is a whole ensemble of old values that were destroyed. This claim is
not original and has been made before, often from a conservative point of view, believing the
French Revolution destroyed an ancient world that was better than the one we live in.
Nonetheless, I contend this viewpoint must be de-solidarized from this politically oriented
perspective. It can and must exist as a properly intellectual assessment of the Revolution,
insofar as it backs a renewed understanding of French colonialism. Before engaging into this
matter, I must evoke a key moment of this intellectual history, which I call the Marxist
transition. Marxism solidified in the realm of thought what had already been made in the
concrete world. In many respects, and even more than positivism, Marxism is a theoretical
embodiment of the French Revolution.

30
The Marxist transition

The idea of an indissoluble link between the French Revolution and Marx is often alluded
to, and has been a privileged object for thought in the French academia all along the twentieth
century. Jean Bruhat30 made a thorough analysis of how the French Revolution was central to
the very creation of Marx’s thought. Through an analysis of diverse articles, as well as his
correspondence with Engels, Bruhat showed that Marx’s materialistic theory of the class
struggle was informed by his understanding of the French Revolution. This is why the French
Revolution operated as a founding event of French political modernity on two levels: first, it
created the conditions for a rational positivism that structured both the principles of the French
Third Republic and that of the newly born discipline of sociology; second, it imbued the mind
of a young Marx who was to create a theory of society that had, in return, a social and theoretical
global influence unseen in history before. Bruhat, in his 1966 article, claimed that, thanks to
Marxism, the French Revolution was having a new youth, and a new momentum. Indeed, in
the 1960s, and at least until the 1989 celebration if the bicentenary, the French Revolution
became a fashionable research topic. With the decline of Marxism following the fall of the
USSR, the French Revolution started to wane in interest and slowly became irrelevant for
understanding contemporary society in the eyes of many researchers, more occupied with the
new world emerging from the end of the Cold War. While this focus is understandable given
how embedded in global logics France is, it remains possible to draw the parallel national
theoretical history of how the French Revolution imbues the culture – and it is especially
important when the necessity to understand postcolonial logics as a consequence of a very long
term history arises.
In the 1960s, while he was politically involved in the fight against colonialism and
intellectually involved in redefining Marxism, Sartre focused on the French Revolution in the
Critique, to the point that historian Sophie Wahnich claimed that the Revolution was a “Sartrean
object”.31 It is not anecdotal that he chose the French Revolution to support his theory of history
while he was also involved with redefining Marxism. In many respects, Marxism worked as a
theoretical mirror for the French Revolution. Out of the various theoretical outcomes of the
French Revolution, Marx’s materialism is probably the most successful one, along with
positivism. Although different, there has been a tendency to liken them. Because Marx’s theory

30
Bruhat, J. (1966), “La Révolution française et la formation de la pensée de Marx”, in. Annales historiques de la
Révolution française, No 184, pp. 125 – 170.
31
Wahnich, La Révolution française n’est pas un mythe.

31
of class struggle is a materialism, it is seen as an immanentism that opposes the pre-
revolutionary beliefs in transcendence. Given how strongly embedded in this position
positivism is itself, there has been a general tendency, from the mid-twentieth century until
today, to conflate Marxism with positivism. Yet, the words of Marx about positivism were
harsh ones, and he deemed this then new movement of thought a rather sad one compared to
Hegel’s philosophy. Mentioning Comte in his correspondence, Marx wrote that the latter is
seducing more and more intellectuals in France and in Britain at the time of his writing, because
of the encyclopedic aspect of his thought but, in regards with Hegel’s truly encyclopedic
philosophy, Marx deems Comte’s positivism “pitiful”32.
Nonetheless, it is difficult to assess the links between Marxism and positivism because, in
spite of Marx’s severe judgement, Marxism became a movement of its own after the death the
Capital’s author, to the point that Sartre, in the 1960s (along with other commentators), stated
that Marxism had become something different from Marx’s original thought. This kind of shift
is common with successful theorists, but rare are those whose thought has been as successful
as Marx. Although Marx himself was not convinced by the original principles formulated by
Auguste Comte, the disciples of both thinkers, after their deaths, contributed to the creation of
two schools of thought that went beyond their creators’ expectations: positivism and Marxism
became independent from their origins. Through the rise of sociology over the course of the
twentieth century, there has been a tendency to conflate them.

The Third Republic, sociology and positivism

The birth of sociology in France is indissociable from the beginnings of the Third Republic.
In many respects, the school of thought that started with Durkheim is both an influential force
on the new regime and an outcome of it. From 1878, the successive governments of the new
and unstable Republic believed it necessary to change and reform higher education in order to
strengthen the “scientific mind” (esprit scientifique). In France, the words used to designate the
field are various and the characterization remained rather loose in the late nineteenth century:
behind the word “social sciences”, were included sociology, ethnology, anthropology, and all
disciplines following a scientific method in order to decipher society and human affairs. These
social sciences were strongly associated with the republican ideology.33 Durkheim himself

32
Pérignon, S. (1968). “Marxisme et positivisme”, in. L'Homme et la société, No 7, pp. 161-169.
33
Weisz, G. (1979). “L'idéologie républicaine et les sciences sociales. Les durkheimiens et la chaire d'histoire
d'économie sociale à la Sorbonne”, in: Revue française de sociologie, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

32
presented his intellectual program for the rise of sociology as a political program for preventing
society from disintegrating after the revolutions and changes France had been through over the
nineteenth century. He claimed that sociology had a “social mission”, that of making people
realize that they belonged to society, and were not “an empire inside of an empire”, he said,
paraphrasing Spinoza. Although trained in philosophy, and finding in the seventeen century
Dutch philosopher an inspiration for his program, it is against philosophy itself that Durkheim
directed his institutional battle for the recognition of sociology. In this fight, he did not claim
the legacy of Auguste Comte, but was adamant that a scientific spirit should gain all fields of
knowledge. This is why his sociology has been seen as positivist by some observers. This helps
to understand why the word “positivism” came to designate something different than the letter
of Auguste Comte’s texts. When I use the concept in this thesis, I do not specifically refer to
Comte’s system but rather, to the application of scientific methods to the understanding of
society and human affairs. When Sartre targeted positivism in Search for a method, he did not
specifically refer to Comte’s principles; rather, he defined positivism as a system of thought
based on analytic reason, and oriented towards the observation of concrete facts and the
collection of data. When one thinks of the importance given to statistics by Durkheim in the
newly created French sociology, then the characterization Sartre gives of positivism could very
well be applied to Durkheim’s sociology. Because it is Sartre’s answer to what he calls
positivism that I am interested in here, I must follow his loose understanding of the concept. It
is in order to show how deep Sartre’s observations are on the matter that I deemed necessary
this short presentation of how embedded in the Republican ideology French sociology and
positivism were.34
When Sartre presented his critical views on positivism and on what he called “vulgar”
Marxism in the 1960s, he was actually making a synthesis of the French intellectual history of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to provide an answer to what he understands as
artificial conflicts. When he claimed that existentialism is the true meaning of Marxism, he
pinpointed the artificial nature of these conflicts. With the panorama I gave of the links between
sociology and the Third Republic, as well as the way Marxism worked as a theoretical mirror
of the French Revolution, I hope to have given a glimpse of these conflicts. From Hegel’s
philosophy to Marx’s synthesis between German idealism and British political economy, the
nineteenth century has been one of a change that goes towards the immanent and material world,

34
Mauger, G. (2008) “Sociologue et Marxisme”, in. Duncange, J-N. et al., Marx, une passion française, Paris: La
Découverte; Chatriot (2009), “Réformer le social sous la Troisième République”, in. Revue d’histoire moderne et
contemporaine,, No 5, pp. 40 – 53

33
an evolution that culminated in positivism and in the rise of a combative sociology aiming at
showing the irrelevance of philosophy. This theoretical conflict is not only intellectual but bears
the political conflicts and oppositions born with the French Revolution.
When the Third Republic started in 1870, Republicans were in charge of the country and
they did claim the legacy of the French Revolution. After almost a century of instability and
revolutions, royalists were still threatening them, which nurtured their fears and drove them to
try and ground the Republic scientifically. The strong investment in education and the official
support for sociology was justified by a desire to bring France into modernity. Modified and
adapted for their times, this rhetoric is directly influenced by the ideology of a rationality of
equality born from the French Revolution. The redefinition of knowledge that France has been
through over the nineteenth and twentieth century is a direct consequence of a political event
that changed human thinking, along with the world.
This proclaimed rationality is also what drove colonial plans and the conquest of Algeria;
“civilizing inferior people”, as Jules Ferry put it, is justified in the faith in the superiority of a
Republic grounded in science. I am not claiming that French sociology was scientist, or that
sociology itself is the source of colonization. Rather, I am trying to draw a network of
theoretical and political connections between elements that co-influence one another.

Knowledge re-defined

The “positivist generation” (Cheryl B. Welch)

Theorized and constructed in the nineteenth century, the idea that there can be such a thing
as a “human science” derives from the idea that human behaviours can be analysed and
explained through the establishment of causal links. Although diverse and sometimes in
theoretical conflict, all human sciences can be subsumed under one concept: that of positivism.
The father of this idea as well as its content, is the French thinker Auguste Comte, who
published The Course in Positive Philosophy, between 1830 and 1842. From this moment,
positivism expanded, rose to success and gained support within political spheres, so much that
the end of the nineteenth century is the peak of positivism in France. It leads Cheryl B. Welch
to talk about a “positivist generation”.35 Completely embedded in the faith in the Republic,
positivism became the motto of a whole generation who believed it was the only acceptable
future method for knowledge of the social world. In order to change the world, one must

35
Welch, C. (2011), “Social science from the French Revolution to positivism”

34
understand it scientifically: this is what drove this generation. From the very beginning of
positivism though, the idea of applying analytical methods similar to natural sciences to the
human world was in opposition with the argument of freedom. The first to have theorized the
impossibility to explain all human behaviours with scientific methods is Dilthey who, from
Germany, observed Comte’s philosophy with suspicion. He famously opposed explaining with
understanding, and believed only the latter could be applied to the human mind and psyche.
Explaining should be limited to the natural world. Dilthey’s views are very well known, and
belong to history books in today’s research, but I believe it important to take him as an example
in this thesis because Sartre will have a very concept of understanding. Sartre’s concept of
understanding can only be accounted for if linked to his concept of recognition, which will be
the object of the third chapter of this thesis. It is interesting to recall the nature of Dilthey’s
opposition to positivism in order to shed light on the source of Sartre’s criticism, that I will start
to present here, but will only give a full account of in the third chapter of this work. Sartre’s
position cannot be understood without a presentation of the influence of Husserl’s
phenomenology.

The phenomenological roots of the defiance vis-a-vis positivism: Husserl

Sartre said multiple times that Husserl was one of the biggest influences on his thought.
Simone de Beauvoir, in her memoirs, even recalls that when he first read Husserl he said “he
discovered my own ideas before I could!”. Sartre’s defiance towards positivism owes a lot to
Husserl’s analysis of a “crisis” shaking European sciences at the beginning of the twentieth
century. I believe that what Husserl said of natural sciences and the flaws of positivism which
applied to them, Sartre later brought to social sciences. In order to make this parallel even
clearer, I must give a presentation of Husserl’s argument in his Crisis of European sciences.36
The most striking words used by Husserl to describe his views on positivism are that the
latter “has beheaded philosophy”. He explains and outlines more clearly than ever made before
the actual consequences of the rise of positivism for philosophy. He very clearly sees positivism
as a force of destruction for philosophy, and the reason for that lies in his understanding of
positivism: it is because positivism is an objectivism that it has lost sight of self-reflection and
the importance of subjectivity that it is slowly destroying philosophy. As Dermot Moran puts

36
Husserl, E. (1954, [1970]), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An
Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

35
it,37 “there is a strong sense of a philosopher with a mission to defend the very relevance of
philosophy itself in an era defined both by astonishing scientific and technological progress and
by political barbarism”38. In this book, Husserl reflects on the political trouble Germany was
brewing in the 1930s and conceptualizes it as a crisis of values directly linked to a crisis of the
sciences. With the immense ambition proper to Husserl’s philosophy, he actually aims to show
that these crises are the manifestation of a deeper crisis – namely the crisis of European reason,
or the crisis of the West.
In spite of Comte and the positivist generation’s efforts and will to impose positivism as
the one true way to understand society around the end of the nineteenth century, there has
always been opponents to this attitude of knowledge. Yet, the sharpest and most interesting
opposition came from Husserl. The German philosopher who created phenomenology as a new
school of thought did not pay much attention to positivism in his early texts. Yet, in the Crisis,
he pinpoints it as the main cause for the cultural crisis the West is going through in the 1930s.
Dermot Moran highlights that “the Crisis offers a devastating critique of the problems imposed
by an overly narrow promotion of the natural scientific outlook in all areas of life.”39 After
having spent all of his life shaping the principles of phenomenology, Husserl observes how far
from his perspective the dominant paradigms of knowledge are. When subjectivity is
overlooked to the profit of a natural objectivist view on things, we run the risk of taking illusions
for absolute truths. Subjectivity is part of the world; it shapes the world, and overlooking this
leads to a rise of scientific and technological progress with no self-reflection, which is a central
element of moral progress as well. Husserl characterized the crisis of the West in the 1930s with
a criticism of positivism. For the purpose of clarity, I recall that Husserl’s greatest finding in
his phenomenology is the idea of “intentionality”. The conscience is a thing of the world in the
very same way as any other thing of the world, and all attempts at knowing these things must
take this into consideration. In other words, being is always being perceived. All phenomena of
the world are perceived by a living conscience, or a living subjectivity, that helps to make sense
of it all. This is what Husserl calls the “functioning subjectivity”. According to him, sciences
pertaining to the positivist paradigm overlook these subjective conditions and run the risk of
not understanding much. The two sciences he observes the most are physics and psychology.
He is particularly critical of a positivist psychology, which does not understand the very nature

37
Moran, D. (2012), Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
38
Moran, D., Husserl’s Crisis, p. 1.
39
Moran, D., Husserl’s Crisis, p. 14.

36
of subjectivity and intentionality. Because of this lack of understanding, this type of psychology
cannot understand the things of the world, things which can only make sense to a human
conscience to the extent that they are “synthetized” (and perceived) by this conscience. In many
respects, when Sartre insists on the necessity of “totalization” in his texts on history, it will be
a way of applying the conscience’s synthesis not just to worldly things that the conscience is in
direct contact with, but to the whole of history; Sartre developed Husserl’s findings to the point
of creating a new theory of the knowledge of history aimed at replacing a misled positivism.
Husserl’s philosophy is entirely grounded in the idea that subjectivity must be taken into
account in the knowledge of the world. Phenomenology is a “transcendental philosophy”
because it goes beyond the frame of the purely natural conditions of things. The conditions for
true knowledge in the perspective of phenomenology take subjectivity into account, and
subjectivity, or the conscience, bears a transcendental element. This is why true knowledge can
only be transcendental. Although Husserl focuses on physics and psychology in his analysis of
the crisis brought about by positivism, he aims to show that this is applicable to all fields of
knowledge, and, in many respects, this is what Sartre will do in his quest for true knowledge of
the social and political world.

Search for a method: the fight against positivism and the foundation for a renewed
conception of philosophy

The criticisms Husserl lodges against positivism, and the problems he underlines, are
epistemic as opposed to moral. My claim here is that Sartre goes further, and uses Husserl’s
conception of subjectivity to criticize positivism applied to the social and political world, while
introducing a moral perspective. It is existentialism that will help him accomplish this. In the
long-term intellectual history, which I have tried to reveal from the French Revolution until
today, Husserl’s phenomenology appears like a transition that helps Sartre go further,
introducing a moral and aesthetic criticism that was lacking. In a way, Husserl can be seen as
the heir of Dilthey’s reluctance to accept positivism, for epistemic reasons, while Sartre resorts
to Kierkegaard’s philosophy, the founding principles of existentialism. Kierkegaard wrote in
reaction to Hegel’s systemic philosophy and used faith as a protection for subjectivity against
what he saw as a destructive systemic approach. Although his active period overlaps with the
rise of positivism, he was not interested in it and did not direct his opposition and criticism
towards it. Yet, while voicing his worry in the face of Hegel, Kierkegaard formulated the
founding principles of a philosophy for subjectivity, existentialism, thanks to which Sartre was

37
able to formulate a strong ethical attack against positivism. Consequently, Sartre can be seen
as the great synthesizer of these diverse schools of thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, providing an answer to the theoretical conflicts born with the French Revolution. The
most complete text in this respect is Search for a method.40 Primarily seen as an introduction
of the Critique, the text was later on published separately and can be studied as an independent
work.
In this text, Sartre’s main target are Marxists. Engaged in a work that tries to give us the
tools to understand history, he gives us his thoughts on the best method possible in order to
grasp it. Very directly anchored in a work of social and historical epistemology, Search for a
method makes the synthesis of Husserl’s phenomenology and Kierkegaard’s existentialism in
order to produce a method for knowing history that is both closest to produce truth and ethical.
Himself a proclaimed Marxist, he believes true Marxism has been perverted by an objectivist
view on things that are far from Marx’s texts’ real meaning. Because of that, Search for a
method is an attack on all forms of positivism, because in order to criticize Marxist objectivism,
he must underline how anchored in positivism it is. Ultimately, he demonstrates that
existentialism is the true meaning of Marxism. In this undertaking, his targets are Marxists, as
well as sociologists of the 1960s, including Kardiner.
Sartre wants us to stop focusing on structure and start paying more attention to human
subjectivity: this is the meaning of the concept of “mediations”. He alludes to the dialectic
between subjectivity and objectivity in the text, without developing it in great length. He does
this a few years later in a conference given in Rome and published recently, that I will focus on
in the second chapter. In Search for a method, his developments are still elliptical, and it is
enough for now to observe the fact that, for him, there is always an interiorization of objectivity
before objectivity is then produced by a human conscience: the human individual is always the
mediation that helps us understand history. Yet, this human individual is a living subjectivity.
This is why, according to Sartre, it is impossible not to take individual actions, and the meaning
of subjective choices into account when trying to understand history. This is a direct influence
of Husserl. However, as will become clear, the influence of Kierkegaard will most likely
complicate things.
If what is at stake was simply to understand subjective choices and subjectivity by intending
to know this given subjectivity, things would be simpler than they actually are. In Search for a
method, Sartre writes that “we are not only knowers; in the triumph of intellectual self-

40
Sartre, J-P. (1968), Search for a Method, New York: Vintage.

38
consciousness, we appear as the known. Knowledge pierces us through and through; it situates
us before dissolving us. We are integrated alive in the supreme totalization”.41 Later on, he adds
that “Kierkegaard is led to champion the cause of pure, unique subjectivity against the objective
universality of essence, the narrow, passionate intransigence of the immediate life against the
tranquil mediation of all reality, faith, which stubbornly asserts itself, against scientific evidence
– despite the scandal”. There is an ethical resistance to subjectivity being known. Sartre lays
down the problem by referring to the old quarrel between Hegel and Kierkegaard, that can be
seen as another form of a contemporary ethical issue. He reminds us that Kierkegaard refused
to be called a philosopher and aimed at acting in favour of religion against the Hegelian system
that he saw as the destruction of Christianity. For Kierkegaard, subjectivity is where faith is
expressed, and because of that, it cannot be integrated into the Hegelian system, as a mere
moment of total knowledge. Kierkegaard’s intellectual undertaking is ethical before it is
philosophical. Sartre became indebted to this Kierkegaardian fight, as he developed the full
philosophical consequences of it, without ever accepting the religious premise. He de-
theologizes Kierkegaard and stays faithful to the ethical core of the Danish thinker’s intellectual
works. In Search for a method, Sartre writes that, “in fact, the subjective life, just insofar as it
is lived, can never be made an object of knowledge”.
Of Search for a method, one can say that Sartre writes in the shadows of both Husserl and
Kierkegaard. Following the path of Husserl, Sartre shows that positivism applied to history and
the social world misses the true meaning of what it aims to explain. Following Kierkegaard, he
will go further than this epistemic statement, and formulate an ethical one: subjective life cannot
be an object of knowledge because “knowledge pierces us through and through”. Being made
an object of positive knowledge in the non-natural aspects of our beings is simply non-ethical.
This sheds new light on the ethics debate sociology students and researcher are familiar with.
Being faithful to a set of ethical principles while conducting interviews, or in the context of
other “qualitative methods” is a research requirement. Yet, at no point is the fact of conducting
interviews itself ethically questioned. This is what Sartre does. Sartre suggests that perhaps the
subjective life of one individual should not be known because (1) one can never actually know
it (2) it is against existentialist ethics. Later on in the thesis, I will propose a study of Sartre’s
conference “Existentialism is a humanism”. Sartre’s philosophy is ethical before it is anything
else, and an ethics founded in the irreducibility of human subjectivity to knowledge is what
drives all of his work: it is the strongest philosophical justification for humanism.

41
Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 9.

39
 Subjectivity must not be made an object of knowledge in the eyes of Sartre, and it is a very
clear and strong statement in Search for a method. Yet, one must admit that the ethical reasons
for this remain vague for now. The core ethical reasons remain unsaid, and have been analysed
as a strong but mysterious relationship of Sartre to theology, by Kate Kirkpatrick and others.42
They will be developed throughout the thesis. The epistemic reasons for the defence of
subjectivity are clear though, and can be seen as a direct legacy of Husserl’s phenomenology,
as exposed in the previous section. Therefore, Sartre’s opposition to positivism actually has two
direct sources: the first one is obvious and is his attachment to Husserl’s phenomenology, and
the second is more surprising and has to do with a secular belief in the necessity to respect
subjectivity. It is the first time that I mention this idea of respect. It is never used by Sartre, and
it is nowhere to be found in the texts of Kierkegaard. Yet, I believe it is the notion that
encapsulates with the greatest accuracy what is at stake in the treatment of subjectivity by
existentialism. Subjectivity should not be known, but respected, and actually, recognized, as I
will elaborate in Chapter 3.
For now, it is enough to draw two conclusions from this first contact with Search for a
method. First, Sartre’s attachment to the irreducibility and spiritual independence of the living
subjectivity can be interpreted as an attempt at reconnecting with pre-revolutionary values in a
Marxist context. Second, this original reaction to positivism paves the way for a creative
approach to the understanding and the making of politics. This opening to creativity is
manifested through Sartre’s attempt at giving room to the expansion of subjectivity through
history, through his “existential biographies”. When he wrote about the lives of Baudelaire,
Flaubert and Genet, he manifested his choice of a method for understanding the expansion of
creative subjectivities in the field of history and art. Yet, his method itself was creative and
artistic; only art can help get closer to the true meaning of a living subjectivity one never met.
Yet, it has another consequence for direct human relationships, or “intersubjectivity”. If the
living subjectivity cannot be an object of knowledge, then it means that I cannot know the Other,
actually, I must recognize them thanks to the understanding, as which I will reflect on further
in the third chapter of this work.
The content of the “method” Sartre suggests in Search for a method must now be developed
and will be the object of the second half of the next section. It is interesting to underline already
that this “method” is a way of saving philosophy from the attacks slowly rising from the French
Revolution until mid-twentieth century positivism. By implying the aesthetic aspect of the

42
Kirkpatrick, K. (2007), Sartre and Theology, London and New York: Bloomsbury.

40
understanding of the living subjectivity, Sartre situates philosophy between art and science,
reconnecting with ancient texts without ever phrasing it. Actually, my claim is that there is in
the twentieth century a “problem of political philosophy” that Sartre solves without ever
pinpointing it, and thanks to a rebirth of philosophy almost two centuries after the French
Revolution, including inside of the philosophical discourse its original enemies. Sartre’s
thought, as radical as it is, is actually a thought of reconciliation and historical and theoretical
peace.

The “problem of political philosophy”

In this section of my thesis, I analyse the 1950s and the 1960s as a time of very high risk
for the existence of political philosophy, which some anglophone philosophers pinpointed very
clearly. Because of this I claim that there is such a thing as a “problem of political philosophy”,
which is a direct offspring of positivism, and in the very long run, of the French Revolution.
Without ever designating it clearly, Sartre intends to address this problem. The reasons why the
anglophone philosophers I mentioned specifically designate it while Sartre remains vague about
it while giving it a solution may actually be of a political nature. Indeed, Laslett and Strauss for
example, are openly conservative while Sartre was a proclaimed Marxist. Because of these
different political orientations, it might have been easier for conservative philosophers to
underline that political philosophy was in danger; they saw it as a value of the past that needed
to be protected against modernity. Interestingly enough, Sartre suggests another way, that fully
embraces modernity, and cannot see it as a threat to philosophy. For many French sociologists
of the second part of the twentieth century, Sartre was defending the “conservative” values of
philosophy.43 I want to show here that philosophy should not be seen as conservative or
progressive, but simply as certain attitude towards knowledge. Sartre has been misunderstood
all along. In order to show how Sartre addresses this very real problem of political philosophy,
I must first explain how it was understood by the anglophone thinkers I mentioned, before
tackling Sartre’s approach in a second moment.

The twentieth century: a dangerous time for political philosophy

In 1956, Peter Laslett made the following statement, that remained famous: “For the
moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead” (Philosophy, Politics and Society, vol. 1). Three

43
For instance: Pinto, Sociologie et Philosophie.

41
years later, Leo Strauss published a collection of texts under the title What is political
philosophy? – in the first chapter, he gave a precise definition of the field of political
philosophy, by differentiating it from political thought, political theology, and political science.
In this chapter, he wrote: “Today, political philosophy is in a state of decay and perhaps
putrefaction, if it has not altogether vanished”. Strauss and Laslett’s arguments, even if they do
not completely overlap, converge towards the idea that political philosophy in its traditional
shape, was weakened by the assault of political science. In the 1950s and 1960s, the existence
of political philosophy started to become a cause for concern, particularly in the Anglophone
world. At the same time, in French philosophy, no such concerns seemed to bother
philosophers, who were engaged into other kinds of debates, mainly around Marxism, but still
within the field of political philosophy, without questioning its legitimacy. Yet, political science
existed in France as well, and before it, sociology had been trying to secure a legitimate place
in the field of knowledge, since Durkheim at the least. All these intellectual events tended to
undermine philosophy as an independent approach to politics. So, why is it that the post-war
French philosophical world is less concerned about the existence of political philosophy?
I argue that Sartre answers this question without naming it, and in doing so, he helps to
reshape political philosophy, by giving it a new impulse. It is here necessary to evoke briefly
the definition Strauss gives of political philosophy, because it is the traditional and classic
definition of it, in the clearest way possible. In the text evoked earlier, Strauss defines political
philosophy by defining political action. According to him, every political action seeks to
conserve or to change: when we wish to conserve, we wish to hinder a change towards worse,
and when we wish to change, we wish to better the situation; that is why all political actions
are guided by a thought of what is worse and better, hence by a thought of what is good, and
that is how political philosophy arises. It thus arises from action itself. From that, a series of
features stem, among which what constitutes the core of political philosophy: defining the
nature of political things, in order to guide action towards what is considered good. Strauss then
states that political philosophy has been threatened since its beginnings from the outside by
alternative approaches to knowledge, and offers a panorama of what he calls the two solutions:
the classical solution (with Plato and Aristotle), and the modern solution (with Machiavelli).
The solutions Strauss refers to aim at reconciling the universality of philosophical definitions
and concepts with the necessary relativity of the contexts in which the political things defined
actually stand. Yet, the attention to contexts is precisely what gained importance in Western
thought, roughly over the past two centuries, and, along with the idea that societies could be a
subject for a knowledge constituted as a science, it gave birth to what has been called positivism.

42
Yet, positivism is Strauss’s main target, in afore-mentioned book and other texts. He associates
it with historicism, and sees both positivism and historicism as the main threats to the existence
of political philosophy: positivism because it calls for the exhibition of cold data, and
historicism because it undermines the universality of philosophical concepts. In a way, it is as
if the tension within political philosophy, the one that exists since the beginning, presented itself
under a new form in our modernity, and we found ourselves unable to find a solution for it, at
least after reading texts in the vein of Strauss and Laslett. It is now interesting to underline that
positivism is also Sartre’s main target, as he clearly formulates it. He offers an original solution
to the issue political philosophy faced. The answer is to be found in his approach of history.
Instead of being concerned with history possibly undermining philosophy, as Strauss was,
Sartre aimed at incorporating it inside of the philosophical discourse. As mentioned earlier, the
Critique is an undertaking that aims at giving a proper foundation to a new type of reason, the
“dialectical reason”, that can also be called “historical reason”. The “critique” of “dialectical
reason” presents itself as the new critical undertaking, after Kant, for whom a “critique” is the
research of rationally elaborated principles. This dissertation makes the argument that this new
critical movement aims at renewing knowledge (and, to some extent, philosophy) after the birth
of social and human sciences, that is to say after the birth of the idea according to which man
had to be studied scientifically because he is to be found into a network of determinations. The
awareness around the “problem” of political philosophy started to rise in the middle of the
twentieth century, but the seeds of the problems were sown far before that, with Comte’s
positivism, and the wake of scientism that followed in the field of human knowledge.
In the eyes of Sartre, this foundational work does not only matter for the preservation of a
philosophical attitude, but it matters for the approach of politics and for the practice of politics
itself. At that time, Sartre was involved in two main projects: a theoretical project, and a
political project. In the Critique, he exhibited his theoretical project as an attempt at reconciling
Marxism and existentialism, in other words history and subjectivity. In Search for a Method,
which has often been seen as an introduction to the Critique, Sartre identified his main
theoretical enemy, namely positivism. The way he targeted positivism shows that he was aware
of the issues raised by Strauss, and probably shared some of his concerns. As philosophers,
both were worried that positivism might undermine a more authentic path to knowledge. One
might see Sartre’s choice as an attempt at maintaining and even reactivating political
philosophy for his times. Stressing this point requires to understand how Sartre’s theory of
history is actually a theory of knowledge. Indeed, he approached history as a new figure of total
knowledge (the concept of “totalization” being central to that issue). It is exhibited throughout

43
the whole Critique with a very informed study of the French Revolution, with which Sartre
intended to produce a work in “anthropology”. His methods were very far from the methods of
the existing discipline of anthropology, and it would be more accurate to say that Sartre used
the word “anthropology” as a philosophical concept designating the attitude that aims at
knowing “man”. His work remained that of a philosopher, and he used “anthropology” as Kant
did before him. Sartre proposed an anthropology of the French Revolution, turning this event
into a philosophical concept.

The French theory: a late French formulation of the “problem of political

philosophy”

Some conservative thinkers of the anglophone academic world started to formulate the idea
that political philosophy was running the risk of disappearing with political and social science
finally gaining legitimacy after half a century of a fight for intellectual prestige.44 However,
most French philosophers were not concerned with this evolution, and it can be explained by
the strength of Marxism in the French context, a Marxism which nourished political philosophy
in the 1950s and 1960s. It is fair to say that most prominent French philosophers were Marxists,
except from Raymond Aron who, although not convinced by the Capital’s author, was one of
the best specialists of his works. Making sense out of Marxism was the main preoccupation of
most French philosophers, and it explains why the status of political philosophy was not
questioned: they were practicing it and did not feel threatened by political science and
sociology. Yet, the affinities some commentators saw between Marxism and positivism were
preparing the ground for a decline of political philosophy that truly started in the 1970s, with
two parallel evolutions: the successful rise of Bourdieu’s sociology and the development of
what has later been referred to as the French theory. As François Cusset explains in his
monograph, the authors of the latter (including Derrida, Deleuze or Foucault) were attached to
the idea of philosophy. He shows that one should very clearly separate the French theory from
its later uses.45 In spite of their differences, authors of French theory are usually put together
because they have in common to use literature and the literary commentary to create a new
philosophical language that acknowledges the disappearance of metaphysics and the necessary
fragmentation of truth and any discourse on truth. It is a philosophy of the “fragment”46. This

44
Pinto, Sociologie et Philosophie
45
Cusset,, French Theory.
46
Ankersmit, F. (1996), Aesthetic Politics., Redwood City: Stanford University Press.

44
newly emerging understanding of philosophy was to be reintroduced in the context of a
“conflict of the faculties”, according to Cusset, who used Kant’s expression to designate the
relationship of philosophy with other disciplines. The focus on the fragment comes from an
understanding of reality (social reality, political reality, literary reality, etc.) as an ensemble of
stories: everything can be understood through an analysis of language and its structuration. As
such, it can characterized as a new relativism for Cusset. It is interesting to stress that relativism
is precisely what was seen as the biggest threat to philosophy by Strauss and Laslett. The birth
of this new philosophy infused with literary commentary can be seen as an attempt at saving
philosophy by accepting the premise of its opponents as its own premise.
All born around 1930, authors of French theory (Derrida, Foucault, etc.) or figures of a
newly legitimised sociology (Bourdieu), were the generation coming after the intense Marxist
debates of the 1950s and 1960s. Although creating different paths, they all have in common to
accept the premise of a relativity of truth and a necessity to escape metaphysics. It led Bourdieu
to formulate the principles of a determinist sociology and to explicitly fight philosophy, which
he criticized, externally, as a tool for power used by dominant classes. It led Derrida to try and
save philosophy by introducing relativity in its heart; everything had to be deconstructed like
narratives are. It led Foucault to claim the death of man, a logical follow up to the nineteenth
century death of God, in a world where truth became a matter of perspective. On the contrary,
Sartre had refused the premise of a relativity of truth.

Sartre: saving philosophy with “totalization”

When Sartre starts to get involved with Marxism in the 1950s, it is not only a political
movement that finds its expression in the French communist party that he discovers. It is, most
and foremost, one of the most debated school of thought in the French intellectual sphere back
then. Very quickly, he becomes aware of the flaws of the dominant interpretation of Marx’s
texts, to the point that he believes Marxists have lost the profound meaning of Marxism. Before
undertaking the writing of the Critique of dialectical reason, these are the issues he is dealing
with. Of all the issues of the dominant interpretations of Marxism back then, there was a very
strong idea of determinism that tended to turn Marxism as a tool for understanding the world
into a new positivism. Against that, Sartre called on the founding principles of his philosophy,
to be found in existentialism. The Critique has been assessed as an attempt at reconciling
Marxism and existentialism while Sartre believed that there was no need for reconciliation in
the sense that existentialism was the true meaning of Marxism. By undertaking this, Sartre also

45
used the contributions made by the social sciences and introduced them into philosophy. In
other words, he was trying to save philosophy.
The “Introduction” of the Critique is an exposition of the reasons why Truth actually exists,
and one has to be looking for it. Looking for Truth is actually the quintessential quality of
philosophy, another sign that Sartre is renewing political philosophy. It is also a text where he
establishes why a dialectical reason exists. My main argument is that Sartre intends to renew
(political) philosophy with the Critique. Doing so, he intends to take back what has been
withdrawn from philosophy throughout the two centuries that precede him. The most significant
sign of that is his insistence on the possibility of truth, against positivism and its relativism.
What he calls “the relativism of positivists” is one of his main targets.
Originally, philosophy was a discourse on truth. It was defined as a work of the mind that
aims at establishing true propositions about the world. An important sign showing that Sartre
was committed to a work that aimed at protecting philosophy as a source of knowledge was
how he insisted on the fact that we must claim the possibility of truth against relativism. If we
want to show why and how Sartre intends to support philosophy, then we have to study the
centrality of truth in the Critique. According to him, relativism refuses the idea of a “total truth”,
as he writes in the first part of the Introduction to the Critique:

And it must be understood that relativism rejects not only vast historical syntheses, but also
the modest assertions of dialectical Reason: whatever we may say or know, however close
we may be to the present or past event which we attempt to reconstitute in its totalising
movement, Positivism will always deny us the right. It does not regard the synthesis of all
knowledge as completely impossible (though it envisages it as an inventory rather than as
an organization of Knowledge): but it considers such a synthesis impossible now. It is
therefore necessary to demonstrate, in opposition to Positivism, how, at this very moment,
dialectical Reason can assert certain totalizing truths – if not the whole Truth.47

47
Sartre, Critique of dialectical reason, p. 23. Original text: “Et qu’on m’entende bien, le relativisme ne s’oppose
pas seulement aux vastes synthèses historiques mais au moindre énoncé de la Raison dialectique : quoi que nous
puissions dire ou savoir, si proche de nous que soit l’événement présent ou passé que nous tentons de reconstituer
dans son mouvement totalisant, le positivisme nous en refusera le droit. Ce n’est pas qu’il juge la synthèse des
connaissances tout à fait impossible (encore qu’il y voie plutôt un inventaire qu’une organisation du Savoir) :
simplement il la juge impossible aujourd’hui ; il faut établir contre lui comment la Raison dialectique peut énoncer
aujourd’hui même sinon, certes, toute la Vérité, du moins des vérités totalisantes”, Critique de la raison
dialectique, p. 143.

46
 According to Sartre, defending the possibility of truth equates defending the possibility of
“totalizing truths”, and thanks to the paragraph just mentioned, we can try and define this
concept. When he criticizes positivists, Sartre stresses their conception of knowledge as “an
inventory rather than as an organisation”. According to him, the problem of positivists is that
they believe they can just collect data, put one fact next to another, and present that recollection
as a “truth”. This relies on the idea that knowledge and truth exist outside of a human mind,
that they have an existence that is independent from human beings. Sartre implicitly argues
that, on the contrary, knowledge can be found in totalising truths, which actually means an
“organisation of knowledge”. By saying that, Sartre defines the work of the dialectical Reason:
organising knowledge. Facts, seen and known, are not enough in and of themselves – one has
to organise them. Without the intervention of human reason, namely the dialectical Reason,
facts remain facts and data remain data. One has to organise them by introducing a certain order
in them rather than stating them plainly. Depending on the order one introduces, a certain
meaning emerges. In the extract just quoted, Sartre evokes “events”. It is very clear that he is
writing on the possibility of making sense out of history. When he mentions the “totalising
movement” of an event, it is a way of underlining the fact that in one event, several elements
are intertwined in a movement that the human mind has to grasp. When studying an event, it is
not enough to deconstruct and examine every single fact one by one. What must be done is to
actually seize the whole movement at one time. This movement alone will give the actual
meaning of the event. Without stating it explicitly, he remains faithful to the phenomenological
perspective, that consists in seeing the truth as what happens between a conscience and the
world. There is no reality outside of the sole connection between a conscience and its
surroundings. Sartre draws the consequences of that metaphysical position for the study of
history: positivism is an absolute contradiction to phenomenology. Stating that truth can be
found and should thus be looked for, Sartre intends to define dialectical Reason as what can
actually catch that truth. That leads him to a strong position on the place of methodology in
works of knowledge:

The dialectician, on the other hand, locates himself within a system: he defines a reason and
he rejects a priori the purely analytical Reason of the seventeenth century, or rather, he
treats it as the first moment of a synthetic, progressive Reason. It is impossible to see this
as a kind of practical assertion of our detachment; and equally impossible to make of it a
postulate, or a working hypothesis. Dialectical reason transcends the level of methodology;
it states what a sector of the universe, or, perhaps, the whole universe is. It does not merely

47
 direct research, or even pre-judge the mode of appearance of objects. Dialectical reason
legislates, it defines what the world (human or total) must be like for dialectical knowledge
to be possible; it simultaneously elucidates the movement of the real and that of our
thoughts, and it elucidates the one by the other.48

If dialectical Reason is what should be used by the mind of those who reflect on things, and
if methodology is of little interest for that type of reason, then it means that methodology should
be of little importance for whoever is looking for the actual meaning of events, in the past and
in the present. A series of telling expressions are used by Sartre in this paragraph: “postulate”,
“working hypothesis”, “direct research”. They are all part of what a rigorous scientific
methodology should be. What is methodology? An ensemble of rules and principles that should
lead the scientific work of a researcher. What Sartre is targeting here is actually the assimilation
of all knowledge to science. He claims the impossibility to reduce knowledge to
methodologically led science. It is not the work of dialectical Reason to “merely direct
research”. For anyone who knows how intellectual work is organized today in universities, this
passage is quite striking. It is today commonly accepted throughout all disciplines that
intellectual work is called “research” in universities, and it is as if Sartre had predicted this
coming evolution and criticized it. In many respects, the words he chose help us question our
own practices.
Sartre is actually deconstructing what positivism in the political and historical sciences has
constructed and is asking human knowledge to be more ambitious. For that, one must use the
dialectical Reason, and hence accept to “legislate”. The use of this verb (“légiférer”) is
particularly interesting in the sense that it stresses the normative and creative aspect of the
dialectical Reason. Legislating literally means “creating laws”, and it is in that respect that the
dialectical Reason is normative. As I already showed, it is an attitude that consists in organizing
facts to give them a meaning; now I can go further and assert that it is an attitude that is looking
for the laws of organization of these facts. Sartre always insists on the fact that each object of
knowledge provides the right method of study for who knows how to see it. Consequently, it is

48
Sartre, Critique of dialectical reason, p. 20. Original text: “(…) le dialecticien, lui, se place dans un système :
il définit une Raison, il rejette a priori la Raison purement analytique du XVIIe siècle ou, si l’on veut, il l’intègre
comme le moment premier d’une Raison synthétique et progressive. Impossible d’y voir une sorte d’affirmation
en acte de notre disponibilité ; impossible d’en faire un postulat, une hypothèse de travail : la Raison dialectique
dépasse le cadre de la méthodologie; elle dit ce qu’est un secteur de l’Univers, ou, peut-être, ce qu’est l’univers
entier ; elle ne se borne pas à orienter les recherches, pas même à préjuger du mode d’apparition des objets : elle
légifère, elle définit le monde (humain ou total) tel qu’il doit être pour qu’une connaissance dialectique soit
possible, elle éclaire en même temps et l’un par l’autre le mouvement du réel et celui de nos pensées”, Critique
de la raison dialectique, p. 140.

48
not so much a creation of connecting laws out of the imagination of the one who studies than a
patient and attentive observation of what is or has been, followed by an ability to seize its
meaning as a whole. For all these reasons, the use of a pre-established methodology and a set
of methodological principles while studying historical and political facts and events is a
misunderstanding of what knowledge and truth are according to Sartre. The word “science” is
never actually formulated in those lines, but it is actually what the introduction of the Critique
is about. By aiming to define and defend the dialectical reason, Sartre defines his theoretical
enemies. Doing so, I contend that he releases thought from the ties that “science” had started to
surround it with (and has successfully continued since then).
If the idea of a methodology is to be fought according to Sartre, he does not call for a total
wandering, and his text, Search for a method, is revealing of his questioning. Yet, the “method”
he is looking for is characterized by its openness: it is not a recollection of scientific principles,
but rather a certain theoretical perspective on things, and actually a metaphysical perspective
on things. It might be important here to recall that the original title of this text is “Questions de
méthode”. The English translation, Search for a method, can be misleading if one is led to
believe that Sartre is actually looking for a specific method. Rather, he is merely asking
“questions” that are traditionally related to what people call “method”. He evokes several
possible methods, including the “progressive-regressive” one, but his conclusion is much more
open. It has to do with seizing the spirit of the time and with the profound meaning of
philosophy, as the following paragraph shows:

In our view Philosophy does not exist. In whatever form we consider it, this shadow of
science, this Gray Eminence of humanity, is only a hypostatized abstraction. Actually, there
are philosophies. Or rather – for you would never at the same time find more than one living
philosophy – under certain well-defined circumstances a philosophy is developed for the
purpose of giving expression to the general movement of society. So long as a philosophy
is alive, it serves as a cultural milieu for its contemporaries. This disconcerting object
presents itself at the same time under profoundly distinct aspects, the unification of which
it is continually effecting.49

It is actually Sartre’s reflection on what philosophy is that leads him to call for a
reconciliation of Marxism and existentialism. This only makes sense if we are reminded of two

49
Sartre, Search for a method, p. 3.

49
things: first, Marxism was considered by Sartre the “unsurpassable horizon of our times”, and
second, existentialism could be considered the most authentic meaning of Marxism. The first
point helps making sense of the idea that a philosophy gives expression to “the general
movement of society”. If Sartre’s “method” is concerned with understanding the movement of
his time, and Marxism seems to accurately understand it, then it makes sense that Marxism has
an important place in his “method”. More importantly, and that is the second point, the notions
used by Marxism to describe “our historical society” (exploitation, alienation, etc.) are those
that are the most related to the fundamental structures of existence50. Consequently, when Sartre
is defining his approach as an existentialist Marxist, he actually believes that he is seizing the
“cultural milieu” he is living in.
What arises from these reflections is that the idea of a methodology, when it comes to seek
knowledge on human events or theories, is not only useless but might also be harmful to a real
understanding. Only dialectical Reason, to the extent that it aims at totalizations, is apt for a
real understanding. This position of Sartre echoes what Joseph S. Catalano says of his work in
Reading Sartre: “What is required of the sympathetic reader is not a corresponding haste, but a
holistic perspective that aims at comprehending large segments of writing regardless of
subdivisions”51. Joseph S. Catalano invites Sartre’s readers to adopt a “holistic perspective” on
the text of the Critique. In doing so, he is faithful to Sartre’s views and one could say he
transposes it to the study of texts. Sartre writes about the study of historical events and says one
should approach one event as a whole instead if deconstructing each micro phenomenon. In the
same way, Catalano explains that a faithful reading of Sartre should not pay too much attention
to the “subdivisions” of his text but should rather intend to understand the general direction.
This will be my perspective and for that reason, the rest of my thesis will be less oriented
towards a history of philosophy than actual theory. My main objective is to understand the spirit
of Sartre’s text, and to draw the consequences of it for us, today. Before engaging into this
work, going back to my original questions is necessary, in order to ground this work even more.
The brief panorama I gave of the way the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth
century is influenced by the French Revolution was aimed at drawing the lines of the framework
of understanding for Sartre’s philosophy, which flows throughout the thesis. Yet, the
introduction of this work explicitly stated that my purpose here is double: understanding how
Sartre’s philosophy aims at saving philosophy by trying to solve the theoretical conflicts born
with the French Revolution and understanding how going through this intellectual history is

50
Sartre, Search for a Method.
51
Catalano, J.S., Reading Sartre, p. 118.

50
necessary to an understanding of the French-Algerian postcolonial situation. Understanding this
situation requires the help of concepts drawn from Sartre’s texts and establishing these concepts
will be the purpose of my second and third chapter. But this understanding also requires a
panorama of the links I establish between the French Revolution as the founding event of
contemporary French intellectual history and French colonialism as the foundation of the
postcolonial situation I am interested in. This is the object of the following section.

What the French Revolution has meant for the colonization of Algeria

After the First World War, and at a time when French rule over Algeria was solidified, and
embodied in a specific legal system that separated the population between French citizens and
“Muslims” with no legal status, movements emerged within the “Muslim” population, starting
to ask for equal rights, and the rhetoric of the French Revolution was used. This culminated
after the Second World War, when soldiers from the colonies helped to liberate France from
Nazi occupation – returning home, they asked for the same liberation for themselves. When
Paris celebrated the Libération on May 8th 1945, an Algerian revolt was violently repressed in
the city of Setif, a day now remembered as the “Setif Massacre”. It is a very well-known and
documented history,52 and so are the claims, by Algerians of the time, that they deserved the
same freedom as the one the French Revolution advocated for. Ferhat Abbas, a future
government member of an independent Algeria, and an important figure of the intellectual fight
for independence, explicitly used the principles of the French Revolution in his pro-
independence rhetoric. He explained it in his book La nuit coloniale,53 where he compared the
Algerian people of the 1950s to the French “Tiers-Etat” of 1789. Many historians even claim
that the “principles of 1789” inspired the national Algerian movement.54 Messali Hadj himself,
another leader of the fight for independence, was a reader of Rousseau, a philosopher of the
Lumières that inspired the French Revolution. The conceptual apparatus of the Lumières was a
tool used against French colonizers by pro-independence Algerian intellectuals, as shown in the
collective book Rousseau, les Lumières et le monde arabo-musulman.55 This book, directed by
historian Pascale Pellerin, puts together several studies of the influence of the French
Enlightenment, Les Lumières, first theoretical source of the French Revolution, on various

52
Vétillard, R. (2008), Sétif, mai 1945 : massacres en Algérie, Paris: Les Éditions de Paris; Planche, J-L.
(2010), Sétif 1945, Chronique d’un massacre annoncé, Paris: Perrin.
53
Abbas, F. (1962), La Nuit Coloniale, Paris: Julliard.
54
Pervillé, G. (1989). “Les principes de 1789 et le mouvement national algérien”, in. Revue française d'histoire
d'outre-mer, No 76.
55
Pellerin, P. (2017), Rousseau, Les Lumières et le monde arabo-musulman, Paris: Classiques Garnier.

51
moments of the intellectual history of what they call the “Arabo-Muslim world”, from the
eighteenth century to the “Arab Spring”. A few chapters are devoted to the question of Algeria
and the movement for independence. All are oriented towards the establishment of a link
between the political culture of France and the intellectual and political culture of an area that
was broadly colonized by France. It is a common statement to assert that the French Revolution
and the theoretical movement that inspired it, the Lumières, presents affinities with anticolonial
movements of the twentieth century. I want to challenge this statement. From this problematic
point of view, the French Revolution is not seen as anything else than a movement for true
emancipation and the universality of freedom. In this perspective, French colonialism is seen
as a betrayal of the original principles of the 1789 Revolution. Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas
Blancel claim that the choice made by Republicans to intensify the colonial conquest while the
Third Republic was settling during the 1870s, was in fact an “epistemic turn” (“rupture
épistémologique”), as it went against the original Republican principles.56
When looking at how to understand the connection between the founding moment of French
political modernity – the French Revolution – and the colonialist dimension of the French
republic, the tendency has been to either underline how much of a betrayal of the Revolution
colonialism was, or to stress that 1789 was an inspiration for Algerian anticolonial thinkers.
Yet, given on the one hand, how strongly influential the scientific positivist spirit was on the
colonial conquest, and on the other, how the French Revolution plays a part in the genesis of
positivism, as I tried to show in the first section of this chapter: what can we say of the French
Revolution in regards with colonization, anticolonialism, and their theoretical embodiments?

French colonialism: positivism, universalism and the Third Republic

The first critical historical research on French republicanism and its links with colonialism
was produced by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Blancel and Françoise Vergès in La République
coloniale in 2003. It was followed by La Facture coloniale in 2005, written with Sandrine
Lemaire. Both books are part of a series of intellectual works that immediately preceded or
followed the 2005 riots. As mentioned earlier, this period is an important one for French
academia and intellectual spheres, because only then the idea to understand society through the
prism of colonization emerged. As far as these works went, they never questioned the French
Revolution itself. Rather, they showed how republicanism changed in order to adapt to colonial

56
Blancel, N., Blanchard, P. (2005), “La fondation du républicanisme colonial. Retour sur une généalogie
politique”, in. Mouvements, No 38, pp. 26 – 33, Paris: La Découverte.

52
ideology. In their 2005 article, Blancel and Blanchard address the association of colonialism
and republicanism, which they deem a “cursed couple” or “couple maudit”.57 The authors claim
that the epistemological turn that amounted to the creation of this weird association can be
dated to 1885, when the Republic became colonial. They explain this by the fact that the
colonial project was in harmony with the cardinal republican values: progress (Comte’s
positivism being at the root of it, stress the authors), equality and national grandeur.58 They then
demonstrate how positivism influenced and justified the “civilization mission”. Due to the
perception that science proved how superior France was, then it was only natural that the
Republic followed the mission to civilize “inferior races”, as Jules Ferry put it in his Parliament
speech in 1885. With the historical research mentioned here, it becomes clear how positivism
on the one hand and universalism on the other were the driving forces of French colonialism.
Yet, if one follows this argument, then one understands how French colonialism was possible
by showing that it was born from self-betrayal: it is by betraying the original values of the
French Revolution that positivism led to a misunderstood universalism that became a
“universalism for Whites”.59 The basis of this argument is to produce a criticism of French
colonialism while still preserving the ethical dimension of the French Revolution; the founding
principles of French political modernity, in other words, live to see another day.
In the first section of this chapter, I have shown how the French Revolution, as a moment
when the fight of immanence against transcendence became embodied in the political reality,
created the conditions for the rise of positivism a few decades later. Seeing how strongly
influential in the colonial conquest positivism has been, I then interrogate the French
Revolution itself. I would like to make the following hypothesis, phrased as question: can
French colonialism be seen as an offspring of the French Revolution? If so, then, isn’t the use
of a rhetoric inspired by the French Revolution in an anticolonial context contradictory? By
phrasing these questions, I am trying to make visible another thread of the intellectual and
political history of contemporary France, where the sacrality that still surrounds the event of
the French Revolution can sometimes blind the possibility of criticism.

57
Blancel et al., “La fondation du républicanisme colonial. Retour sur une généalogie politique.”
58
Blancel et al., “La fondation du républicanisme colonial. Retour sur une généalogie politique.”
59
Blancel et al., “La fondation du républicanisme colonial. Retour sur une généalogie politique.”

53
Republicanism, a colonialism

The first section of this chapter has shown part of what the French Revolution has brought
from a theoretical point of view: the scientific mind through the ideal of a rationality of equality,
which also imbued the beginnings of Marxism. In a nutshell, the French Revolution paved the
way for positivism and Marxism, both being sometimes pitted against one another and
sometimes seen as theoretically close. One of the hypotheses formulated earlier is that both
these theoretical movements emerged from an attack on transcendence prepared by the
Lumières, and achieved with the French Revolution. As I argue in my fourth chapter, this can
be understood as an aesthetic conflict, insofar as transcendence can be understood in aesthetic
terms, as beauty. I will demonstrate this connection in my fourth chapter; but already, this
aesthetic perspective, or attachment to beauty, can be part of the explanation for the ambiguous
attitude of Napoleon III towards Algeria. This lesser known moment of the colonial history of
France is interesting for my argument because it can help to shed light on the colonial aspect of
republicanism, by difference.
When France first invaded Algeria, it was 1830, and the conquest was not as intense as in
the 1870s. It can be said that between 1830 and 1870, Algeria was a thorn in the side of the
successive French governments. They did not know what to do with it. It is only when the Third
Republic was solidified, in the middle of the 1880s, that the French colonial project as we know
it emerged. Here is not the place for recalling the details of the government instability France
went through over the nineteenth century, but it is enough for the purpose of this analysis to
stress that Napoleon III, after being democratically elected in 1848, staged a coup and
proclaimed the Second Empire in 1852. From then, and under the shadow of his late uncle’s
Egypt campaign, Napoleon III tried to envisage a future for the newly conquered territory, and
conceived the possibility of a strange Arab kingdom.60 This moment of French history is not
well documented, and to our knowledge, no historical monograph devoted to it exists. Yet,
some academic articles and chapters of books with other focuses mention it, and, from them, I
can grasp the radical originality of the political project of Napoleon III. In a chapter of La
France en terre d’islam, Vermeren explains it, and shows how important the dialogue of
Napoleon III with his adviser, Ismayil Urbain, was. The latter, an illegitimate son of a French
man, whose mother had ancestors among freed slaves, converted to Islam and settled in the

60
Vermeren, P. (2016), La France en terre d’islam. Empire colonial et religions, XIXe-XXe siècles, Paris: Belin.

54
newly conquered land of Algeria. He advocated for a recognition of the rights of the Muslim
population and had the ears of the emperor.
In the legacy of his uncle Napoleon 1st – who showed a surprising interest in Islam when he
invaded Egypt61 – Napoleon III showed an understanding face to Algerians. Obviously, this
was part of an imperial conquest aimed at expanding the strength of the French Empire.
Nonetheless, it is interesting for it shows striking differences with the Republican colonial
rhetoric. Napoleon III inherited a land conquered by the French army long before he arrived to
power, and he imagined an extension of the French empire that would have its own governor
and would be an Arab kingdom. Under the influence of Urbain, Napoleon III was tempted to
formalize an empire of which he would be the head, and in which all populations, from France
and Algeria, Muslims or not, would be equal subjects to the emperor. Under the pressure of the
most radical colonialists in France, this idea was quickly abandoned. Yet, the fact that it was
possible to even conceive it within the frame of a Napoleonic rhetoric helps to make the
difference with republicanism even more visible. Urbain was himself a close friend to many
rich Muslim families of Algeria. His ideas, although well received by Napoleon III, were
attacked by French settlers, and French politicians of the time. In 1865, they were abandoned
with a law proclaiming the inferior legal status of Muslims, stating that Muslims should
abandon their religion and traditions if they wanted to access the same rights as French settlers.
The romantic ideas of Urbain and Napoleon III are imbued with orientalism and colonial
paternalism; yet they show something important for my argument.
The interest of Urbain and Napoleon III for Islam or the local cultures of Algeria could
hardly be matched by contemporary Republicans, precisely because the republican political
culture was the heir of a loss of faith in transcendence. The imperial interest of Napoleon III for
Islam manifests a fascination for a foreign culture that no positivist Republican could have. The
friendships of Urbain with rich Muslim families shows that the solidarity that would have been
created in this Arab kingdom that never existed would have been a class solidarity. On the
contrary, the French republican rhetoric was inherited from a French Revolution that aimed at
destroying barriers between the different classes of society: the Republican colonization of
Algeria was, in that respect, a way of finding a new criterion of separation, which was not class
anymore, but race and culture. This is not to wish to praise the imperial idea of an Arab

61
Mohamad Amer Meziane shows that Napoleon 1st built his imperial ideology on a secularism that imposed to
turn the Empire into an Islamic Empire first. On his visits to Egypt, the emperor claimed he was the Prophet
himself. For Amer Meziane, this was the first step of an imperial strategy: making the Other’s religion ours before
forcing the Other into secularization. See: Amer Meziane, M. (2021), Des empires sous la terre, Paris: La
Découverte.

55
kingdom, which would have amounted to a different kind of occupation and colonization; not
to say that it would have perpetuated an unfair social system. Yet, it is possible to make the
hypothesis that the racism and humiliations imposed on Algerian populations would have been
expressed differently. This matters because it helps to stress the existence of a racist colonialism
at the heart of republicanism itself.
In that respect, and because it is colonization in its concrete French shape that I am
interested in exploring and understanding here, the example of what a Napoleonic colonization
would have been helps to show how influential the political culture of the regime involved is
on the characteristics of colonization itself. This short example serves to nuance the idea
according to which colonialism was alien to the principles of the French Revolution. The
principles of the French Revolution converged towards a universalism that was founded in the
belief in the superiority of the political system found in the late eighteenth century. Moreover,
it created the conditions for the rise of a scientific mind that was strongly influential in
colonization. For these reasons, I claim that the French Revolution fathered a Republicanism
which was also a colonialism.

I started this inquiry with a series of questions independent from academic research and
independent from Sartre’s philosophy, oriented towards the understanding of a French-Algerian
postcolonial subjectivity. With the developments of this first chapter, I intended to lay the
premise of a renewed understanding of French colonialism, which required an understanding
of the development of positivism over the nineteenth century, and which the chapter carried
out. Going back to Algeria and its concrete history in the last section of an otherwise rather
theoretical chapter can seem surprising. Yet, it gives a new ground to the philosophical topics
that will be the objects of the next two chapters.
This first chapter was devoted to two main things: (1) explaining the genesis of the decline
of political philosophy due to the strength of positivism and (2) showing how influential this
intellectual history has been in the fate of Algeria and colonialism. Laying these foundations
helped create a network of connections between themes that are usually not seen as related, and
serves the purpose of explaining the depth of Sartre’s philosophy all along this thesis. Sartre
was at the same time involved in a redefinition of philosophy grounded in a criticism of
positivism and in an intellectual fight against colonialism; this parallelism is not anecdotal. By
reconciling Marxism and existentialism, Sartre re-introduced transcendence in an emancipatory
perspective on the world, while the French Revolution had separated these perspectives.

56
 The fourth and last chapter of this thesis will deepen this understanding of Sartre’s
philosophical work. Before engaging into this, chapters 2 and 3 are necessary steps for laying
the premises of this understanding. Sartre’s reconciliating movement can only be explained by
the centrality of subjectivity in his philosophy. Coincidentally, a thinking of subjectivity is also
necessary to a thinking of postcolonial France. For these reasons, the next chapter is devoted to
the issue of subjectivity, before the third chapter addresses the question of intersubjectivity
through the concept of recognition.

57
 Chapter 2. Subjectivity and the collective past.

In September 2019, a television series was produced and released on the French television
channel Canal +. Its evocative and ambiguous title, The Savages (Les Sauvages) echoes the title
of the literary tetralogy it was adapted from. Between 2012 and 2014, Sabri Louatah published
the four volumes of this long political fiction about two Algerian families living in France. The
writer then wrote the screenplay of what would become this six episodes long political thriller,
along with film director Rebecca Zlotowski62. In addition to the breathtaking suspense of the
show, its metaphorical and theoretical dimension is remarkable. Sabri Louatah imagined a
character, Idder Chaouch, who would be the first French president of Algerian descent. His
daughter, Jasmine, is romantically involved with a famous actor, Fouad, who is himself coming
from an Algerian family living in the unprivileged areas of the city of Saint-Etienne. In the first
episode, Fouad brings his younger cousin, Krim, to Paris. A classical pianist, Krim has an
audition there on election day. The end of the opening episode leaves the spectator speechless
as the young Krim shoots the newly elected president. From this traumatic opening, follows an
investigation, that turns into a metaphor for an intellectual investigation into the situation of
Algerian people in post-colonial France. In the midst of numerous and evocative micro-events,
the president survives and the young shooter kills himself. The final minutes are devoted to a
speech delivered by president Idder Chaouch, who finally reached the Elysée, after a health and
political struggle.
Although fictional, this speech is the perfect embodiment of what a Sartre-inspired political
narrative interested in tackling the issue of a French-Algerian subjectivity. Given the theoretical
accuracy with which it approaches the situation of Algerian people in France, it could
realistically be the speech of an actual president. The intuitions evoked in it are particularly
relevant, and are close to those I expressed in the introduction of this thesis and which constitute
the premise of this doctoral work. As explained at the beginning of this study, it is to a
construction of the theoretical tools necessary to the understanding of a French-Algerian
postcolonial subjectivity that this thesis is partly devoted. A burning social issue, it infuses
many cultural works produced over the past few years. Art and cultural production occupy a
field that philosophy seems to be less interested in and as such, they can provide us with

62
French film director, who directed, among other movies, Grand Central (2013) and Planetarium (2016).

58
invaluable intuitions. In this very case, they match and join the ones that are at the basis of this
thesis:

I am coming from this other French history. My ancestors did not become French by choice,
but through force, violence, and massacres. I would like to talk about the colonial fact and
the unsaid truths that poison us, these truths that, because they’re untold, became mortal. I
would like to speak to you about a young man, a young man who took his own life, a French
man, a French man from our times, here and now. He was a musician. Two contradictory
voices opposed one another in his mind. One voice told him that everything was possible,
that he was the main actor, the only true protagonist of his destiny. And another voice told
him that everything was written in advance for him, that he would never be happy, or free,
not for as long as he would not carry the burden of humiliations suffered and exercised by
men he never met. These two voices, these two visions, and that is our tragedy, both bear
an element of truth. Yes, we are free, and yet we are determined.63

The final sentence leaves the spectator quite surprised as it is admittedly rare to witness on
television words that sound like Sartre-inspired political speeches. “We are free, and yet we are
determined” is the closest account of Sartre’s ethics. One could even go further and say that we
are radically free and radically determined at the same time. In Being and nothingness, Sartre
elaborates on this idea through the concept of “situation”. Yet, another element of this speech
is striking for someone familiar with Sartre’s philosophy: the idea of a burden constituted by
the pain suffered by people we have never met. In psychoanalytical terms, it has to do with the
transmission of traumas. As such, it has to do with the intersubjective transmission of historical
and political dynamics, and the idea of a past that haunts us is at the centre of some of Sartre’s
ontology in Being and Nothingness. The two main intuitions I want to focus on here are the
following: first, the idea of a collective past that haunts us, and second, the living combination
of freedom and determinism. From them, and thanks to the philosophy of Sartre, I hope to bring
useful concepts to the forefront, starting with that of a collective past.

63
Les Sauvages (2019), Canal +, Episode 6.

59
The collective past: history and subjectivity

In the speech mentioned above, the fictional newly elected president explains the intimate
dilemma that a young French-Algerian man is confronted with. While one of the voices tells
him he is free, another voice tells him he has to carry the burden of the humiliations exercised
by French men and suffered by Algerian men in the past. Some of these men might be his
ancestors, but he is not related to most of them. More importantly, he does not know and has
never met any of them. His behaviour is thus influenced by a psychological awareness of a
historical situation that no longer exists: colonization. And yet, he feels responsible for them,
and for the traumas inflicted and suffered. He feels like he has to do something about it, without
knowing why, and that will end up in a tragedy. How his emotional subjectivity is shaped by
history is the most interesting element of the brief analysis given by the fictional president.
Although the connection between the social world and subjectivity may seem obvious to a
reader familiar with sociology (Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is a classic example of that
connection), the one between history and subjectivity did not call for the same attention from
twentieth century thinkers.
The mechanisms that lead to inscribing history in an individual subjectivity are mysterious:
it is the mystery of a haunting history. Understanding them involves to understand the emotional
constitution of a human being. For that purpose, I chose to rely on the philosophy of Sartre.
There are several reasons for choosing this theoretical frame of analysis. On the one hand,
traditional perspectives on the philosophy of mind, following Descartes and Kant, focus on the
structures of our inner mind, without paying attention to the external social and historical forces.
On the other, social sciences tend to study the influence of these external structures on
individuals, but without paying enough attention to the internal life of subjectivity. Faithful to
the phenomenological promise, Sartre aims to theorize this connection between the self and the
world, without sacrificing either of them in his explanations. When it comes to the links
between subjectivity and history, he offers us the foundations of a philosophy of the mind,
insofar as the mind is emotionally affected by history. This thesis aims to contribute to the
creation of a phenomenological concept of a collective past, based on a reading of Sartre.
At first glance, there is no need for a concept of a collective past, insofar as the concept of
history already exists. Yet, three main reasons call for this formulation. First, the idea of a
collective past insists on history as it is emotionally lived by individuals. Second, the concept
of history has been so central to the philosophy of the past two centuries that it is overloaded
with various meanings and connotations, sometimes even contradictory, but always weighing

60
on it. Third, the idea of a collective past directly stems from Sartre’s philosophy, specifically
from his ontology of the past on the one hand, and from his ontology of the collective existence
on the other. In that respect, it is necessary to distinguish history from “collective past”.
Developing this concept will help to shed light on the political and intimate realities that we
still have difficulties grasping. Indeed, it seems obvious that history has an influence on
individuals, on an emotional and political level. Nonetheless, complex emotions tend to be
evacuated from the explanations of political behaviours in general, and it is particularly the case
for French-Algerians. Helping to understand a paradigmatic historical figure of a French-
Algerian subjectivity would mean stressing the complex dynamics at stake in this historical
figure. To our knowledge, then, we have very few theoretical tools that would help us
understand the emotional anchorage of history in one’s subjectivity. The intimacies of those
who suffered historical traumas are more directly political than others and the general social
and intellectual awareness around these issues today is to be welcomed. Yet, in the French
context, this awareness did not lead to the creation of new concepts, apt for giving an account
of the nature of the emotional effects of the colonial undertaking and its aftermath. It is this
conceptual void that a Sartre-inspired concept of “collective past” could fill. Paying attention
to Sartre’s phenomenology of beings in Being and nothingness is a first necessary step. How
can the philosophy of Sartre help us understand the spectral presence of a past that we never
lived and can yet haunt us? American scholar Thomas Flynn characterizes Sartre’s fundamental
philosophical undertaking as follows: “Sartre continues to face the same problem of unifying
and ordering a past which, in some sense, is discovered or ‘given’”64. The past, for Sartre, is
indeed “given”. In fundamental phenomenological terms, it is a “given” of the world. It belongs
to what subjectivity is faced with. Because subjectivity is at the centre of the primary questions
of this work, as well as that of the main argument of this chapter, defining it more precisely is
now necessary.

What is subjectivity?

The fundamental ontology of Being and nothingness

One of Sartre’s first philosophical works targets the problems raised by what he calls a
“philosophy of immanence”. He believed that French philosophy had given in to a misleading
“psychologism” that ends up in believing that interiority is the centre of all knowledge. Finding

64
Thomas Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, p. 44.

61
in Husserl what he thinks is a true understanding of the world, Sartre intends to destroy the
traditional notion of the “subject.”65 One of the first philosophical works he published in the
1930s is an article on Husserl, then acclaimed as the first contribution to the twentieth century
movement of the “death of the subject”, or the “death of man”. In spite of the visible similarities
between Sartre’s intentions and the attempts at destroying the subject that came later (with
Foucault), one cannot compare them. In fact, little by little, Sartre’s philosophy will blossom
into a humanism and become a frankly opposite philosophical proposition to the promise of a
“death of man”. Even though he refused the notion of “subject” in La transcendence de l’ego,
Sartre does it so that he can preserve a true understanding of man, rather than diluting it: he
safeguards the notion of “subjectivity”. On that point, his position will remain constant, up until
the 1960s, when he opposes a certain approach of Marxism that forgot about subjectivity. Early
in his philosophical career, he is interested in a tension between exteriority and interiority, that
leads him to drop the notion of the “subject”, but he will never abandon this fruitful tension and
choose the path of the “death of man”. He will keep on working on that fruitful relation between
the living subjectivity and the external world. In his early article, he intends to destroy the
primacy of the subject over the object, while preserving “subjectivity” as a source of meaning.
He explains that the Ego cannot be a thing of the world in the same way as the other things of
the world, and he will later on develop the ontological consequences of that specific mode of
being of the Ego, in Being and nothingness.
This problem will be solved by the delimitation of two distinct ontological spheres: the in-
itself and the for-itself. The for-itself is a way to designate the only possible mode of being of
the existing human being. It is effectively another word for designating conscience or, put even
more simply, for a human being. It is literally for itself in the sense that it aims at itself without
ever reaching itself. There is an irreducible distance to oneself in human existence, which
explains the presence of nothingness inside of every one of us. The for-itself is quite literally
for this self that it tends to be but never actually is. It is the only way a human being can exist.
It is the fundamental human condition. The self cannot be the object of a real experience, and
can only be a being towards which a subjectivity tends. Without the self, there would be no
subjectivity. The self is the ground that allows for subjectivity to exist. In his quest for the
“ontological foundation of the human conscience”, Sartre discovers the for-itself, which reveals
a fundamental instability of the existence, navigating between a full identity and a distance with

65
Sartre, “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl”, in. Situations I.

62
oneself. In Being and nothingness, he creates the conceptual tools that help to understand the
ambiguity of the human existence.
In summary the for-itself is Sartre’s way to name human subjectivity. Characterised by
what it is lacking, subjectivity is inhabited by nothingness, which explains why it is perpetually
looking for this full being it can never be. A human being is constantly looking for that: the
being of the self. Sartre will name that being the “value”. The value is synonymous with this
self we all aim for. The value haunts the for-itself:

Now we can ascertain more exactly what is being of the self: it is value. Value is affected
with the double character, which moralists have very inadequately explained, of both being
unconditionally and not being. Qua value indeed, value has being, but this normative
existent has no being precisely as reality. Its being is to be value; that is, not-t-be being.
Thus the being of value qua value is the being of what does not have being.66

In this text, Sartre identifies the being of the self with value because of the correspondences
he finds in their respective ontological structures. Value, on the one hand, is and is not. The
self, on the other, is and is not. The way Sartre assimilates both remains quite mysterious and
could make the reader think he is giving in to pure formalism. Yet, there is something deeper
occurring here, hidden between the lines, and that has to do with the notion of “human-reality”.
A bit later in the text, he writes that “Value is beyond being”67 and that “These considerations
suffice to make us admit that that human reality is that by which value comes to the world”68.
Borrowing this expression to Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre will use the notion of “human-
reality” frequently, and the above quoted sentence is the first iteration of the notion in the book.
One could go as far as asserting that, for Sartre, there is an identification between value and
human-reality that transcends ontology and has to do with his ethics, the driving orientation of
his philosophy. Whilst I will return more fully to that point later, Sartre, in these passages of
Being and nothingness, explains that, without human-reality, there would be no value. Value is
“beyond being”, and this idea reminds us of the for-itself, always at a distance from being, and,
in a way, beyond it. In both cases, the idea is that of something that surpasses things: Sartre

66
Sartre, J-P., Being and Nothingness, p. 117. Original text: “Nous pouvons à présent déterminer avec plus de
netteté ce qu’est l’être du soi : c’est la valeur. La valeur, en effet, est affectée de ce double caractère, que les
moralistes ont fort incomplètement expliqué, d’être inconditionnellement et de n’être pas. En tant que valeur, en
effet, la valeur a l’être ; mais cet existant normatif n’a précisément pas d’être en tant que réalité. Son être est d’être
valeur, c’est-à-dire de n’être pas être. Ainsi l’être de la valeur en tant que valeur, c’est l’être de ce qui n’a pas
d’être”, L’être et le néant, p. 129.
67
Being and Nothingness, p. 117.
68
Being and Nothingness, p. 117.

63
defines value as the unifying force of all “surpassings” [dépassements]: “Since value is always
and everywhere the beyond of all surpassings, it can be considered as the unconditioned unity
of all surpassings of being.”69 Because value is a perpetual surpassing, it “makes a dyad with
the reality which originally surpasses its being and by which surpassing comes into being – i.e.
with human reality.”70 There is a unity between value and the human reality, and Sartre
understands subjectivity as a perpetual tension towards value. He understands it as a
fundamental mystery, and it is where logical argumentation is paused and gives way to a simple
assertion: the mystery of human freedom. Behind this “absolute value” Sartre refers to, there is
the mystery of a freedom that haunts every human conscience. It is a mystery because it cannot
be explained, it is simply given to us. Sartre later writes: “In this sense haunts being as being
founds itself but not as being is. Value haunts freedom.”71 And this cannot be explained.72 The
impossibility of explaining freedom makes the theological inspiration of Sartre’s atheist
philosophy tangible,73 and the way subjectivity will occupy the place of transcendence, left
empty by the death of God, is a key element for assessing the originality of his thinking.
Because I wish to show the continuity of the theme of subjectivity in Sartre’s philosophy, I will
now propose a reading of two works Sartre produced almost twenty years after Being and
Nothingness.

Subjectivity in Search for a Method and the 1961 Rome lecture

Search for a Method was initially published in 1957, while Sartre was writing the Critique
of dialectical reason. In 1960, both texts were published together, the former standing as an
introduction of Sartre’s project. This text is interesting for our concerns in many respects.
Mostly, it constitutes the clearest example of Sartre’s attempt at reconciling Marxism and
existentialism. Indeed, contrary to public opinion, Sartre never gave up on the fundamental
intuitions of existentialism. He deepened them to such extent that he found affinities with
Marxism. The third chapter of Search for a Method is interesting to our purpose: it is devoted
to the presentation of the “progressive-regressive method”, that Sartre intends to use when it
comes to studying social and historical facts. It is worth noting that he starts with an
acknowledgment of his debt to Marx. His viewpoint is to be read as a wish to nourish Marxism

69
Being and Nothingness, p. 117.
70
Being and Nothingness, p. 117.
71
Being and Nothingness, p. 117.
72
Pierre Verstraeten summarized this point as follows: “Là effectivement s’arrête l’intelligibilité” [“There, in fact,
intelligibility stops”]. Verstraeten, P. (1991) “Sartre et Mallarmé”, in. Revue d’esthétique.
73
Kirkpatrick, Sartre and theology.

64
by shedding light on the actual complexity of Marx’s thought, which is often overlooked by
more conventional Marxists. In the first pages of this chapter, Sartre underlines the tendency
Marxism has to understand human facts as fully determined by the material conditions
surrounding them. He intends to show that, however important these conditions might be,
human action is precisely what is able to go beyond them.74 This statement is in harmony with
the results of Being and Nothingness, where Sartre used the concept of “transcendence” to
designate this tendency of human subjectivity (the “for itself”) to be directed towards external
things. To understand the true complexity of Marxism, Sartre believes it necessary to introduce
his text by recalling the centrality of the issue of subjectivity in relation to the world. He
considers that Marxism, at his time, only focused on social structures, i.e. external conditions
of the human praxis in order to understand it. While it pretends to be materialistic, it becomes
a pure idealism since it has no ground in the true experience of life: living is “feeling”, and, as
Sartre will assert later in his text, “feeling” is the beginning of any revolutionary praxis. It is
clear in this text that the notion of subjectivity is a key to a Sartrean understanding of Marx. He
criticizes Marxists of his time to the extent that they were unable, according to him, to
understand human subjectivity. Furthermore, he adds:

I cannot describe here the true dialectic of the subjective and the objective. One would have
to demonstrate the joint necessity of “the internalization of the external” and “the
externalization of the internal”. Praxis, indeed, is a passage from objective to objective
through internalization. The project, as the subjective surpassing of objectivity toward
objectivity, and stretched between the objective conditions of the environment and the
objective structures of the field of possible, represents in itself the moving unity of
subjectivity and objectivity, those cardinal determinants of activity.75

Sartre acknowledges that Search for a Method is not the place for a description of the “true
dialectic of the subjective and objective poles”. He alludes to that relation, and summarizes it
by designating it as a “passage from the objective to the objective through interiorisation”, and
that relation is precisely what we call praxis. As mentioned, of Sartre’s first texts76 was devoted
to a presentation of Husserl’s philosophy, that he had discovered in Berlin in 1933 after

75
Search for a Method, p. 97.
76
Sartre, J-P. La transcendance de l’ego, précédé de Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl :
l’intentionnalité.

65
Raymond Aron advised him to look at this new school of thought called phenomenology. Then
a young philosopher eager to criticize what was wrong with the French philosophical milieu he
had been trained in, he argues in this early text that subjectivism leads to a standstill. Sartre
found in Husserl’s intuitions the means of criticizing the tendency to understand everything
through the prism of interiority.77 This tendency, according to Sartre, leads to a
misunderstanding of our relationship to the world, and exteriority in general: it prevents us from
seeing how this exteriority affects us. Yet, exteriority affecting us is the fundamental situation
of human life on earth, which is what Sartre inherits from phenomenology. In order to
understand this more accurately, one might return to a lecture Sartre gave in Rome in 1961,
recently published as What is subjectivity?78 In spite of its technical and speculative aspects, its
highly political dimensions should not be overlooked. The lecture, indeed, was part of a meeting
between Sartre and the Italian Communist Party.
In this text, one finds what is only evoked in Search for a method, that is to say the
explanation of the “true dialectic of the subjective and objective poles”. Sartre defines
interiority as a “material system”, characterised by a certain type of internal relations. Interiority
is thus an element of reality that can be split into different elements that cannot be tied to one
another without being actually related to the whole system. Sartre then evokes man who, as an
interiority, is in himself a specific material system, an organic system affected by inorganic
elements. This distinction between organic and inorganic elements is what allows Sartre to
introduce the process of interiorising exteriority, which is precisely the core of the “true
dialectic” Sartre is talking about in Search for a Method. An organic being is for Sartre a living
entity, composed of elements that are not in themselves different from those composing
inorganic beings. The difference lies in the interiority link that tie those elements with one
another, and lead the way to the “interiorisation process”. An organic being is always partly
inorganic, and what makes it organic is its peculiar status as the place where exteriority is
interiorised. Interiority is not a fixed entity, it is always a process of interiorisation. Here, Sartre
is faithful to the first philosophical intuitions of his youth, when he criticized the centrality of
interior subjectivity as an autonomous being in the subjectivist philosophies of his professors.
Human life, as embodied by human subjectivity, and characterised as a process of
interiorisation, is thus defined as a movement towards an exteriority of which the boundaries

77
His explicit target was Léon Brunschvicg, a Sorbonne professor who had an enormous influence in the 1930s.
A respected figure for an entire generation, Brunschvicg supervised the doctoral thesis of Raymond Aron, as well
that of Jean Cavaillès. Sartre was dissatisfied with Brunschvicg’s teaching, which led him to write his first
philosophical texts.
78
Sartre, What is subjectivity?

66
are shaped within this movement. Exteriority is at the same time delimited and assimilated.
Sartre then evokes two types of exteriority: “l’extériorité du dedans” (the exteriority of within)
and “l’exteriorité d’au-delà” (the exteriority of beyond).79 The first kind is defined as “a type
of exteriority whose crowning feature is organic status, from which death can return us to the
inorganic”, and the second one “reflects what this organism finds in front of it as a work object,
a need and the mean to satisfy it, in order to maintain its status as an organism.”80 The second
type of exteriority is what will interest Sartre the most, precisely because it helps him better
understand the relation between any subjectivity and worldly elements. This relation has to be
understood as a dialectic with three terms:

This requires us to describe interiorisation of the exterior by the organism, in order to

understand its capacity to re-exteriorise in transcendent being, in carrying out an act of work
or determining a need. So there is only one moment called interiority, which is a kind of
mediation between two moments of transcendent being.81

The interiority of a living subjectivity is thus the second moment of a dialectical movement
that goes from transcendence to transcendence. As a mediation, it receives exteriority, makes it
its own, and then exteriorise it through praxis. Subjectivity is revealed to us as the place where
exteriority is in transition. Yet, history and society are dimensions of exteriority. That is where
the link between politics and fundamental ontology appears. Historical and social events, or
elements, are parts of the exteriority which is interiorised and re-exteriorised by human
subjectivity. The 1961 Rome lecture can therefore help to understand the dialectic of exteriority
and interiority that Sartre only alludes to in Search for a Method.

The past and the collective fact: towards a concept of collective past

The conscience is in a relationship with the Other and with the external things of the world82.
These things constitute what Sartre calls the exteriority of conscience. As such, this conscience – or
for-itself, or, again subjectivity – enters in contact with the things in the world and they affect it. For

79
What is subjectivity?, p. 9.
80
What is subjectivity?, p. 9.
81
What is subjectivity?, p. 9.
82
I hope the reader will excuse the use of this seemingly basic use of words. The “things of the world” is used
here as a phenomenological concept, framed by Husserl and then Heidegger after him. It designates the world in
the most simple way. An heir of phenomenology, Sartre makes this concept his.

67
Sartre, the past and the collective realities are example of these exterior things. In Being and
nothingness, Sartre mentions history through historical examples, which give body to his
philosophical arguments, but does not focus on it as a theme in itself. His preoccupation is the past.
It is why I choose to create a concept of a “collective past”, instead of using “history”. The former
bears different connotations, and helps to shed light on the connection with subjectivity. If one were
to simply use the word “history”, not only would it be not specific enough, but it would also
contribute towards dissolving the specificity of Sartre’s philosophy into generic philosophical
language. On the contrary, there is a uniqueness to his philosophy regarding these issues, and it is
necessary to formulate things in a specific way if one wants to understand this uniqueness.
Moreover, the concept of “history” will be so important in his later texts, including the Critique of
dialectical reason, that it is necessary to distinguish it from the concept of “collective past”, that I
am trying to explain here.
From Sartre’s analyses of the past and of the collective realities can be traced the ontological
origins of his understanding of history, through a concept drawn from Sartre’s own analysis: the
concept of a collective past. This collective past is much more than the mere reunion of the past on
the one hand and collective realities on the other. Yet, I believe that understanding it implies to
focus on each of these notions separately first. The hypothesis I will demonstrate is the following:
the collective past is inscribed in individual existence and contributes to determining its affective
structure, as well as its relationship to the world. The main purpose of the following argument is to
understand how and why each and every one of us is related to a collective past that haunts us.

The meaning of the past for individual existence

Each of us has the experience of a persisting past. The past is what has been and is not
anymore. Yet, it persists, inside of us, as an object for thought or for affects.83 In Being and
nothingness, Sartre reflects on the permanence of the past. Faithful to the phenomenological
perspective of Husserl, he aims to seize the past through intuition, and it is the reason why he
devotes a long passage of his book to a “Phenomenology of the three temporal dimensions”.
According to him, in philosophy, no one has truly asked the only important question: “Once

83
My use of the word “affect” is sensibly different from the one we find in contemporary Affect Theory. Born
within experimental philosophy after the publication of Affect Imagery Consciousness by Silvan Tomkins in 1962,
this theory follows a standardized and mechanical understanding of human emotions imbued with positivism. On
the contrary, the way I use the word “affect” is free from existing theories: it simply designates the concrete
manifestations of human affectivity. Affects can be understood as emotions. One of the contributions of this thesis
is to claim the right of political philosophy to discuss emotions, insofar as they are political.

68
and for all we must raise the question: what is the being of a past being?”84 He wants to
reconnect the past to the present, which has been broken by most existing theories. Two are
interesting instances of the theoretical perspectives that Sartre distances himself from: (1) one
that denies any ontological status to the past, and (2) one that believes the past has an “honorary
existence” (it ceases to be active). In both cases, there is a renunciation to understand why the
past can haunt us: “But we have not provided any reason for this organization and this
interpenetration; we have not explained how the past can ‘be reborn’ to haunt us, in short to
exist for us”85. Sartre is interested in what unites us to the past. His main reproach to previous
philosophies is their breaking of connection between the past and the present. Far from being
an abstract ontological link, this connection actually is the main connection we have to the past,
precisely because the present is the existence. Breaking the link between the past and the present
amounts to breaking the link between the past and the existence. The past is irremediably linked
to a present existence: “it is an ontological relation which unites the past to the present. My past
never appears isolated in its ‘pastness”; it would be absurd even to imagine that it can exist as
such. It is originally the past of this present. It is as such that it must be first elucidated.”86
Ontologically, the main problem raised by the past is the original connection that links it to the
present. The past cannot have an independent existence, because if it were to exist in such a
way, it would lose its meaning. The past is always the past of something. Consequently, it
appears quite clearly that it is me that makes the connection between my past and my present.
The human reality, or the subjectivity, insofar as it exists, makes this connection. This
connecting nature of human subjectivity makes it a central element in harmonizing the different
temporal dimensions. At an ontological level, it helps us to understand better why the past can
“exist for us”, us who are present. Sartre intends to understand it through an identification of
the for-itself and the temporality: he shows that time is an ontological structure of the for-itself
and that the for-itself can only be temporal. There is no autonomy of the past, and temporality
must be envisaged as a totality.
Sartre notices that temporality is what he calls a “separation that unifies” (“séparation
unificatrice”). It is a separation to the extent that it induces a distance from the being. As a

84
Being and Nothingness, p. 131. Original text: “Il faut donc poser une bonne fois la question: quel est l’être d’un
être passé?”, L’être et le néant, p. 143.
85
Being and Nothingness, p. 131. Original text: “Mais nous n’avons pas pour autant rendu raison de cette
organisation et de cette interpénétration ; nous n’avons pas expliqué que le passé puisse “renaître”, nous hanter,
bref exister pour nous”, L’être et le néant, p. 144.
86
Being and Nothingness, pp. 133 – 134. Original text: “[...] c’est un rapport ontologique qui unit le passé au
présent. Mon passé n’apparaît jamais dans l’isolement de sa “passéité”, il serait même absurde d’envisager qu’il
puisse exister comme tel : il est originellement passé de ce présent. Et c’est là ce qu’il faut élucider d’abord”,
L’être et le néant, pp. 145 – 146.

69
result, it is because of time that I find myself outside of myself. Indeed, past, present and future
are considered ek-static dimensions of time, and ek-stasis literally means being outside of
oneself. Sartre writes that “time separates me from myself, from what I have been, from what I
wish to be, from what I wish to do, from things, and from others.”87 Because of time, I am
outside of myself, and I am therefore affected by an internal scission. This internal separation
is an original one though, because while it separates, it also “unifies”, it is as it is at the same
time a force of unification. Separation and unification are two parallel characteristics of time,
and Sartre explains this paradoxical nature of time by recalling that temporality is actually
internal to being: “temporality is a dissolving force but it is at the center of a unifying act”.
Later in the same paragraph, he adds: “it is necessary to conceive of temporality as a unity
which multiplies itself; that is, temporality can be only a relation of being at the heart of this
same being”88. Temporality is defined as a “rapport d’être”, an expression difficult to translate,
that Hazel E. Barnes89 chose to articulate as “relation of being”. For Sartre, time is an
ontological category and can only be understood in its relationship to the other fundamental
structures of existence. Temporality is defined as a “relation of being at the heart of this same
being”. As such, it is a certain configuration of the being itself. Yet, if one goes back to the
ontological categories of Being and nothingness, one sees that the for-itself is precisely what is
at distance from oneself. Sartre thus intends to solve the paradox of what separates and unites
at the same time by understanding it through his fundamental ontological categories. To the
extent that the for-itself temporalizes itself by its movement towards the being that it cannot be,
the for-itself actually is the very source of temporality. The nature of the for-itself is to
temporalize and to be at a distance from itself at the same time. Temporality cannot exist
independently from the for-itself. The paradox of a temporality that unites and separates at the
same time is effectively solved by the identification of temporality with the structures of the
for-itself. In summary, Sartre writes: “Temporality is not, but the For-itself temporalizes itself
by existing.”90
After showing that temporality is a certain structure of the for-itself, Sartre shows the
reciprocal proposition, according to which the for-itself can only be on a temporal mode, that
is to say in relation to time. He calls on his definition of the for-itself, defined as follows: “The

87
Being and Nothingness, p. 154. Original text: “le temps me sépare de moi-même, de ce que j’ai été, de ce que je
veux être, de ce que je veux faire, des choses et d’autrui”, L’être et le néant, p. 166.
88
Being and Nothingness, pp. 158 – 159.
89
Hazel E. Barnes was an American philosopher who contributed to popularize existentialism in American
academia. She produced the first and – to this day – only translation of Being and Nothingness, published in 1957
90
Being and Nothingness, p. 159. Hazel E. Barnes chose to capitalize the notion of For-itself. I choose to follow
Sartre and keep the word without a capital letter, simply as for-itself.

70
For-itself […] can and must at the same time fulfil these three requirements: (1) to not-be what
it is, (2) to be what it is not, (3) to be what it is not and to not-be what it is – within the unity of
a perpetual referring”91. The first point is particularly interesting because it allows for a more
precise seizing of the mechanisms of the inscription of the past in individual existence. In fact,
if the for-itself must “not be what it is”, it means that it must not be this past that yet it is. As
demonstrated earlier, I am my past, I don’t have it. This past is in the manner of the in-itself,
and, as such, I cannot modify it. Yet, Sartre claims that I must be this past as if I had the
possibility to change it. I can be what I am, but only in the past tense, because the past is in-
itself, and yet I cannot be this past in the present moment, because I was this past. It is why
there is what Sartre calls an “absolute distance” between me and that past that I am. The past is
haunting me like an “original contingency”, like the unnecessary foundation of my for-itself,
and of my existence. It is the very reason why Sartre believes the past carries a “heaviness”,
which is “heaviness” of the being; it weighs on one’s existence and haunts it. The for-itself
never is what it is, it is perpetually “surpassed” (“dépassé”).
It would be absurd to approach a for-itself without its past, because the for-itself always
goes beyond what it is, and there is a temporal relationship that explains it. It is characterized
by an irreducible distance from its own self, and this self persists in it, like a haunting ghost.
This past self is always there, “behind”, like the “fog” that weighs on Lucien Fleurier when he
talks with his father, in the short story L’enfance d’un chef, published by Sartre in 1939.92 In
this literary text, Sartre tells us the story of young Lucien. Growing up as a sweet young boy,
Lucien does not understand what it means for him to be a leader, until a breaking point where
he becomes the member of an antisemitic league in the 1930s and understands his fate, that of
being “leader”. This short story has been interpreted as the story of how education can turn an
innocent child into a monster. In the context of the 1930s, it is indeed interesting. Yet, the
internal logic of this short story can be found in many other texts written by Sartre.93 Almost a
Bourdieu-like sociological analysis of the mechanisms leading to learning one’s own habitus,
L’enfance d’un chef asks the question of how one’s family’s history weighs on one’s life
trajectory. One scene of the short story is particularly evocative. Lucien is having a conversation
with his father. Behind his father, there is a strange fog, and Lucien does not understand what

91
Being and nothingness, p. 160. Original text: “Le pour-soi […] peut et doit à la fois : 1° ne pas être ce qu’il est
; 2° être ce qu’il n’est pas ; 3° dans l’unité d’un perpétuel renvoi, être ce qu’il n’est pas et ne pas être ce qu’il est”,
L’être et le néant, p. 173.
92
L’enfance d’un chef (1939), Galllimard. It was translated as The Childhood of a Leader, for a screen adaptation
in 2015 by movie director Brady Corbet.
93
In particular, Sartre’s “existential biographies” follow a similar logic. For instance, in L’Idiot de la Famille, he
explains the trajectory of Flaubert, and in Saint-Genet, he focuses on the path of Jean Genet.

71
this fog is. From Sartre’s writing, the reader understands that this fog is a metaphor for Lucien’s
family’s legacy, or his family’s past, a past which he has to identify with. This past weighs on
Lucien and haunts him.
Man exists, while he wishes to simply be, but being demands to be in-itself, and the nature
of existence is to be for-itself, which prevents man from joining the in-itself. It is from behind
that the being seems to bear the highest solidity because the past fixes my acts: “my essence is
to be in the past, it is the law of its being.”94 The being is what I am, and what I am distant from.
Being at a distance, I cannot change the being that I am, and yet I have to be in a relationship
of freedom with it, which means that I must admit it as being me, as if I could still change it.
Sartre summarizes this idea with these words: “En somme, je dois l’assumer”, which means
“In a nutshell, I must take responsibility for it.”95 Consequently, there is a mystery of a past that
haunts us and “exists for us”. It would remain a confusing mystery if one did not take into
account that the past and the present are linked from an ontological perspective. Once this
ontological observation is made, the path is open for clarity.

The meaning of the collective fact for individual existence

In understanding the meaning of the past for human subjectivity through the prism of
Sartre’s ontology, it became clear that the past arrives in the world through the mediation of an
existing subjectivity. Yet, something remains unexplained: the persistence, in the world, of the
past lived by one individual in spite of this person disappearing from the world; in other words,
the persistence of this person’s past inside of other living subjectivities. This fact can easily be
experienced, especially in the case of historically inflicted traumas transmitted to younger
generations, but it remains difficult to understand from a theoretical perspective. Doing so
would imply pinpointing the fact that the past can be the object of a shared experience.
Studying the collective fact, or collective experiences, in the early texts of Sartre is not a
common perspective. The scholarly literature tend to agree on the fact that a thinking of
collectives emerges in Sartre’s thought only at the end of his philosophical career, in the
Critique. The treatment of collective experiences in Being and Nothingness is indeed minimal
and this ontological inquiry gives shape to the book of a philosopher mostly interested in

94
Being and Nothingness.
95
In her translation, Hazel E. Barnes chose to translate the French verb “assumer” by the English verb “assume”.
I believe it would be more accurate to translate it by the expression “to take responsibility for”. The English verb
“to assume” primarily means “to suppose”. Although “taking responsibility” can be one of its meaning, it is not
the first and obvious one. For this reason, I choose to translate “assumer” by “to take responsibility for”, which
directly encapsulate the meaning of Sartre’s choice of verb.

72
individual freedom. That collective realities are secondary in the early years of Sartre’s
philosophical career is a fact. When he discovered Marxism later in his work, he reoriented his
reflection, and it is with the Critique that Sartre shifted towards more social considerations.
Although partially true, this common assessment of Sartre is anchored in a misperception.
Collective experiences are indeed tackled by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, even if briefly.
He does it through the concept of a “nous”, which can be translated as the “us”. From this
concept of “nous”, can originate a wider concept of a collective past, which is this chapter’s
main theoretical claim. Only in Being and Nothingness can this original philosophical
connection be found, which is why the properly social and political nature of Being and
nothingness should be reclaimed by Sartre scholars, through the perspective of showing the
conceptual consistency and continuity of his early and late works. There is a renewed interest
in collective realities in the Critique, but this text does not give a full account of the richness of
the concept of a collective past, insofar as it is inscribed in individual subjectivity. In this
respect, the existential biographies Sartre wrote, about Gustave Flaubert (L’idiot de la famille)
or Jean Genet (Le Saint Genet) are a direct application of the theoretical findings of Being and
nothingness. If we are to understand the full depth of these existential biographies, we must
endeavour to explore the fundamental existential ontology of Being and Nothingness.
What I call the past and the collective fact are two elements of the world exterior to
subjectivity (we might say, of objectivity) and yet there is a fundamental asymmetry between
the centrality of the past and the marginality of the collective fact. In Being and Nothingness,
the past has an ontological anchorage that the collective past does not have. In the passage of
the book devoted to the us,96 Sartre clearly distinguishes his us from the “collective conscience
of sociologists”97: “In addition it is clear that the ‘we’ is not an inter-subjective consciousness
nor a new being which surpasses and encircles its part as a synthetic whole in the manner of the
collective consciousness of sociologists.”98 Thus, the “we” – as Hazel E. Barnes translates the

96
Being and Nothingness, p. 434.
97
When Sartre mentions the “collective conscience of sociologists”, he probably refers to late nineteenth century
and early twentieth century French sociology. Durkheim was the most prominent figure of French sociology at
that time. In The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim defines the collective conscience as follows: “the states
of the collective conscience are of a different nature than the states of individual conscience; they are
representations of another kind. The mentality of groups is not that of individuals; it has its own rules”. Personal
translation from: “les états de la conscience collective sont d'une autre nature que les états de la conscience
individuelle ; ce sont des représentations d'une autre sorte. La mentalité des groupes n'est pas celle des particuliers
; elle a ses lois propres” Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique, “Préface à la seconde édition”, PUF,
Quadrige, p. XV.
98
Being and Nothingness, p. 436.

73
“nous” – or, the “us”, as I would say99 does not have an autonomous conscience, because it
exists inside and through subjective consciences. It is an us that is lived and felt. Sartre offers
a very singular vision of the collective fact because the us only exists to the extent that it is felt
by an individual conscience. Consequently, there is no collective fact without a conscious
feeling of the collective. This conscience is not necessarily clear and distinct and Sartre leaves
room for the possibility of an inscription of the collective fact in the individual existence, in a
manner one would call “unconscious” (even if Sartre refuses the Freudian notion of the
unconscious100). Without giving way to the Freudian theory, Sartre admits the possibility of
different states of conscience.
Another important point of Sartre’s analysis of the us is that it has to be situated in the
continuity of his analysis of the for-itself. In Sartre’s reading, there is no ontological difference
between both situations. The us is a specific case of the for-itself. But, more importantly,
Sartre’s analysis of the collective fact through the concept of us leads to a fundamental
distinction between two types of us: the us-subject and the us-object. According to him, they
are “two radically different forms of the experience of the ‘we’, and the two forms correspond
exactly to the being-in-the-act-of-looking and the being-looked-at, which constitute the
fundamental relations of the Fot-itself with the Other.”101 Here is another confirmation that,
ontologically, the collective fact is just an enrichment of the two term-relationship. It is thus
necessary to pay attention to the concept of the being-for-others, that I will analyse to the extent
that it helps to understand the division of the us between the us-subject and the us-object. The
collective fact, according to Sartre, is just an enrichment of the two-term relationship at stake
in intersubjectivity.
A first important element about the “for-others” is that it is not an ontological structure of
the for-itself. It is not an ontological necessity, and it is rather a factual necessity.102
Furthermore, the Other emerges for me, in the world, through the look, and brings a self-
awareness of myself. Two cases are then possible : (1) the Other looks at me and gives me
awareness of my “object-ness” [objectité], that is to say of my “object” status for him/her, as I

99
Hazel E. Barnes chose to give two translations to Sartre’s concept of “le nous”. Under her pen, it’s alternatively
the “we” or the “us”. She justified this choice with a very personal translation of the introduction Sartre wrote for
the section of “le nous”. Because Sartre insists on two dimensions of “le nous”, one which is active and the other
which is passive, Hazel E. Barnes believed the existence of two English words apt for expressing this dichotomy.
I believe it only adds confusion to an already complex text. For this reason, I choose to translate the concept of “le
nous” with one word only, the “the us”.
100
Tomès, A. (2013), “La critique sartrienne de l’inconscient”, in. Les Temps Modernes, No 674. Gallimard: Paris.
101
Being and Nothingness, p. 436. Original text: “deux formes radicalement différentes de l’expérience du nous”
et qui “correspondent exactement à l’être-regardant et à l’être-regardé qui constituent les relations fondamentales
du pour-soi avec l’autre”.
102
Being and Nothingness, p. 276.

74
am a being-looked-at [être-regardé], (2) I look at the Other and I reach awareness of my
“subject” status, I am a being-in-the-act-of-looking [être-regardant]. The for-others is lived as
an alienation of the for-itself because it implies that the for-itself takes responsibility [assumer]
for what it is in the eyes the Other. If the us is only an enrichment of the for-others, then Sartre
envisages the two types of us evoked above: the “us-subject” and the “us-object”. The “us-
subject” corresponds to the experience of a community of individual consciences, where each
conscience is aware of being a subject amongst others. It amounts to drawing the limits of the
for-itself by a definition of its exteriority. In the same way, on the collective level, it is through
the awareness of making something exist outside in the world that I am aware of the existence
of an us-subject. Yet, Sartre believes that it is only a specific psychological experience. The us-
subject, for him, does not lead to a fundamental experience of human existence. It can be sought
after, as a symbol of unity, but there is no real ontological unity behind it: the subjectivities
remain isolated from one another. As for the us-object, it is a challenge, or a test. It requires
that I am in a situation of conflict with another human (conflict is not a specific relationship to
the Other: it is the original ontological relation to the Other), and furthermore that a third person
appears:

I am engaged in a conflict with the Other. The Third comes and on the scene and embraces
both of us with his look. I experience my alienation and my object-ness. For the Other I am
outside as an object in the midst of a world which is not ’mine’. But the Other whom I was
looking at or who was looking at me undergoes the same modification.103

The upsurge of a third person allows for the emergence of a new look that fixes me in place
at the same time as it fixes the second Other. I then stand in solidarity with the one with whom
I was originally in conflict: we both become objects for the third person. The overall situation
changes to the extent that, as I am objectified, I see my possibilities of freedom dying, as well
as the possibilities of the second Other. Our powerlessness is fixated in the objectivity of the
world of the third person. A solidarity is born. It is the solidarity of an objective world that is
external to me. It constitutes what Sartre calls an outside-being [être-dehors]. The Other and
myself must both face an outside world that implies a common responsibility:

103
Being and Nothingness, p. 439. Original text: “Le tiers survient et nous embrasse l’un et l’autre de son regard.
J’éprouve corrélativement mon aliénation et mon objectité. Je suis dehors, pour autrui, comme objet au milieu
d’un monde qui n’est pas “le mien”. Mais l’autre, que je regardais ou qui me regardait, subit la même
modification”, L’être et le néant, p. 457.

75
 Thus what I experience is a being-outside in which I am organized with the Other in an
indissoluble, objective whole, a whole in which I am fundamentally no longer distinct from
the Other but which I agree in solidarity with the Other to constitute. And to the extent that
on principle I assume my being-outside for the Third, I must similarly assume the Other’s
being-outside; what I assume is a community of equivalence by means of which I exist
engaged in a form which like the Other I agree to constitute. In a word, I assume myself as
engaged outside in the Other, and I assume the Other as engaged outside in me.104

Hazel E. Barnes chose to translate the French verb “assumer” by the English equivalent
“assume”. I would rather articulate it with the expression “take responsibility for”. It is an issue
of responsibility that Sartre engages with: this fact of taking responsibility [assomption] is the
foundation of the us-object, which is the only scenario in which a true community can exist for
Sartre. The us-subject, on the contrary, is nothing but a psychological experience. This
responsibility [assomption] is the birth of any real community. The existence of a community
implies an act of responsibility [assomption]. It comes to the world through a double process
of exteriorization from oneself in the Other and the interiorization of the Other in oneself. It
would be inaccurate to assert that a space is created between the other and me because it would
take us back to the “collective conscience” of sociology that Sartre refuses. It is better to see
that I am the outside of the Other and that he/she is my outside, in a mutual and reciprocal
welcoming. In this welcoming, the solidary responsibility of the situation is at stake. The birth
of an us implies including the Other within a space for which I am responsible: “I carry the
fundamental assumption of this engagement before me without apprehending it; it is the free
recognition of my responsibility as including the responsibility for the Other which is the
experience of the Us-object.”105 The us-object engages us in taking responsibility [assumer] for
the other’s responsibility. Responsibility, in Sartre’s thought, involves carrying the nothingness
that puts me at a distance from the being. For Sartre, I only exist, but I cannot be, which is why
the being is at a distance, and this distance is precisely nothingness. If the ontologically
conflictual relationship that I have with the other does not disappear in the community, then the
community leads to a new level of being in which the structure of my relation to the other has

104
Being and Nothingness, pp. 439 – 440. Original text: “ [...] je m’assume comme engagé dehors en l’autre et
j’assume l’autre comme engagé dehors en moi”, L’être et le néant, p. 458.
105
Being and Nothingness, p. 440. Original text: “[...] c’est cette reconnaissance libre de ma responsabilité en tant
qu’elle inclut la responsabilité de l’autre qui est l’épreuve du nous-objet”, L’être et le néant, p. 458. Hazel E.
Barnes mistakenly chose to translate épreuve by experience. Yet, Sartre’s “nous-objet” is an “épreuve” in the sense
that it is a test, or a hardship, rather than a simple experience.

76
affinities with the structure of my relation to myself: in both cases, the stake is responsibility
[assomption]. These similarities come from the solidarity of being between me and the Other
inside of the community that emerges in the us-object. The latter, according to Sartre, is neither
known, nor felt. It is in the responsibility [assomption] itself that it appears, and there is in that
sense a “necessity” to take responsibility for the situation in which I find myself, and on which
my freedom depends. My freedom can only be freedom if it is responsible [assumante], and it
is part of its nature to take responsibility for the Other in a situation of solidarity if it emerges.
In the situation where a community aware of itself emerges, which means an us-object, each of
its members will have to take responsibility for the others in the movement of his/her own
responsibility.

The collective past

Sartre does not explicitly formulate the notion of a “collective past’ in Being and
Nothingness, and yet his thoughts on the past on the one hand and on the collective realities on
the other anticipate such a concept. If it is necessary to resort to this theorisation, it is because
it insists on the fact that history can be inscribed and hidden in the emotional selfhood of a
human being. If the for-itself is haunted by its past, and can at the same time be put in a situation
of solidarity with another for-itself, then he/she might as well become haunted by the past of
this other for-itself. This is why a community of the past can emerge, and gain autonomy until
it constitutes a collective past. As we have seen with the shaping of the us-object, it has more
reality than the us-subject. This is interesting because it means that a community that has been
objectified has more tangible reality than a community that has been preserved from external
predatory objectification. In concrete terms, objectification can be many things, but Sartre
primarily refers to humiliation and belittlement. The example he gives is that of the working-
class as he tries to understand what Marxist class awareness means. Going further, and thinking
about the contemporary situation of Europe, it seems like there are as many us-objects as there
are histories of colonization, racism and immigration today. Precisely because of this, a Sartrean
concept of the collective past is pertinent to the understanding of our current epoch. Yet,
political theory, and political science at large, rarely engages with the understanding of the
emotional constitution of European citizens who possess a background of colonization and
racism.
A good example can be the return and the rise of Islam in France over the past two (or four)
decades among the younger generations of French-Muslims. Many political scientists are

77
interested in the situation106 but very few philosophers are. In the better examples, sociologists
and political scientists are able to connect this surge of a new and mainly artificial identity to a
history of colonization and humiliated identity. It is a rather common opinion in French political
science that, after trying to be as French as everyone else in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and
seeing that post-colonial racism was still effective, the children of postcolonial immigrants
turned to a strong identity defined as un-French, that was located in Islam. This reasoning can
seem rather convincing, and bears an element of truth. Yet, what seems to be missing from the
equation is the political understanding of the pain that this shift is coming from. Only a full
understanding of how their subjectivities were shaped by their daily lives but also by the past
of their parents and grandparents can provide an accurate understanding of their situation.
In many ways, a Sartrean concept of a “collective past” helps to reintroduce pain, emotions
and affects into political theory. How indeed is it possible to understand the behaviour of
citizens if we do not understand them as human souls and consciences who have certain
emotional structures? When Rousseau was building his theory of a “social contract”, he was
also thinking about the depths of the human soul, and so were most of the political philosophers
of his time. Little by little, humans simply became “citizens” in the eyes of political theorists
and politicians. Even if emotions are sometimes evoked in order to understand some voting
behaviours (how anger might lead to populism for example), they are not systematically used.
It is interesting to note that the only recent example of the use of emotions in order to understand
a political situation is that of populism. Political analysts in France have attributed the surge of
the Front National to the alleged “pain” and “anger” of French citizens for now over a decade.
Yet, it is much less common to try and explain the phenomenon of urban riots (as occurred
famously in the French banlieues in 2005) because of these same emotions. There seems to be
an asymmetry in the understanding of political behaviours themselves on a large scale. In order
to erase that asymmetry, it would be useful to collectively acknowledge the fact that emotions
play a role in all cultural and political behaviours, and that they can sometimes be influenced
by the heaviness of a collective past that exists in subjectivity and yet remains unsaid and
unthought of on a public level. Going back to the philosophy of Sartre in order to help
contemporary political science and political theory to be more accurate and respectful of the

106
Képel, G. (1987) Les Banlieues de l'islam. Naissance d'une religion en France, Paris: Seuil ; Rougier, B. (2021),
Les territoires conquis de l’islamisme, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France ; Langar, S. (2021), Islam et école
en France, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon.

78
interior lives of citizens (or human subjectivities) is not an eccentricity, it is an epistemic and
political necessity.

The “situation” and its emotional anchorage

Until now, my work was to try and show the meaning of both the past and the collective
past for subjectivity. They are two dimensions of exteriority to the self, and, as such, they are
inscribed in the lived subjectivity. Yet, as mentioned, there are situations where the past that
gets inscribed in one person’s lived subjectivity is not lived by the person herself. In the very
same way, the exteriority of the collective fact is usually the result of a long sedimentation.
Consequently, there is a specificity of the collective past that draws on the structures of the
presence of lived subjectivities within the frame of a certain human situation. The concept of
situation, central to Sartre’s thought, helps to give a Sartrean frame to the results of the
preceding analyses. The status of the notion is not easy to establish given that Sartre himself
gave multiple understandings of it. Its phenomenological formulation, in Being and
nothingness, is what encapsulates best the various connotations of the concept. It spontaneously
emerges in Sartre’s writing within an argumentation destined to better understand the concept
of freedom:

Thus we begin to catch a glimpse of the paradox of freedom: there is freedom only in a
situation, and there is a situation only through freedom. Human-reality everywhere
encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created, but these resistances and
obstacles have meaning only in and through the free choice which human-reality is.107

The situation gathers together all the elements of the world against which freedom is
fighting. The notion is particularly interesting for it allows us to understand the relation of a
living subjectivity to a collective past. In Being and nothingness, Sartre gives an overview of
it but he remains rather vague. He shows that the “situation” is the entirety of the conditions
under which freedom can be lived, but does not underline the highly historical dimension of the
situation, or rather, does it only implicitly. One might say it was still an underdeveloped

107
Being and Nothingness, p. 511. Original text: “Ainsi commençons-nous à entrevoir le paradoxe de la liberté :
il n’y a de liberté qu’en situation et il n’y a de situation que par la liberté. La réalité-humaine rencontre partout des
résistances et des obstacles qu’elle n’a pas créés ; mais ces résistances et ces obstacles n’ont de sens que dans et
par le libre choix que la réalité-humaine est”, L’être et le néant, p. 534.

79
philosophical intuition, even though it was present. In Notebooks for an ethics, one can find
more clarity in the formulation of the historical heaviness of the “situation”:

What makes the situation more complex is that it is historical, which precisely means it is
already lived and thought by other For-itself for whom I exist before I was born, and who
have pretentions on my freedom. In other words, I am a mortgaged freedom. By surpassing
their situation, the For-itself have assigned a future to me: they have already defined me as
French, bourgeois, Jew, etc. they have already determined my salaries, my obligations, my
chances, they have already made the world meaningful […]. In a word, they defined me as
a nature. I am born with my nature because other men came before me. And this nature is
very insidious because, insofar as it is an idea, it penetrates me and flows into my
transcendence […]. Therefore, the situation reaches me to my heart. And, in societies,
surpassing of the situation involves surpassing of myself, that is to say of myself insofar as
I am object for the other and interiorized object (through education) for myself. The
surpassing is actually inevitable: whether I accept my nature or whether I deny it or assume
it, I surpass it in the three cases; whatever happens, it is my past. In a word I am always part
of the situation that I must surpass.108

In this text, the situation is characterized as historical, to the exact extent that one individual
(or living subjectivity) is inheriting part of it when he/she is born. Being born means being born
in a certain specific social and historical situation. This idea is rather common and
unrevolutionary to a twenty-first century reader familiar with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.
Yet, far before the French sociologist coined the concept of habitus, Sartre suggested a similar
theoretical idea with the concept of situation. In both cases, the aim is to designate this process
through which the external world will become a second nature for a human being. In the case
of Bourdieu, the external world is identified with the social world and properly social logics.

108
Personal translation for “Ce qui complique la situation, c’est qu’elle est historique, c’est-à-dire justement
qu’elle est déjà vécue et pensée par d’autres pour-soi pour lesquels j’existe avant de naître et qui élèvent des
prétentions sur ma liberté. Autrement dit je suis une liberté hypothéquée. En dépassant leur situation, les pour-soi
m’ont assigné un avenir : ils m’ont déjà défini comme Français, bourgeois, Juif, etc. ils ont déjà déterminé mes
salaires, mes obligations, mes chances, ils ont déjà rendu le monde signifiant […]. En un mot, ils m’ont défini
comme nature. Je nais avec ma nature parce que d’autres hommes sont venus avant moi. Et cette nature est très
insidieuse parce qu’étant idée, elle pénètre en moi et se coule dans ma transcendance [...]. Ainsi la situation
m’atteint en plein cœur. Et, dans les sociétés, dépassement de la situation implique dépassement de moi-même,
c’est-à- dire de moi-même en tant que je suis objet pour autrui et objet intériorisé (par l’éducation) pour moi. Le
dépassement est d’ailleurs inévitable : que je me résigne à ma nature, que je la renie ou que je l’assume, je la
dépasse dans les trois cas ; elle est quoi qu’il arrive mon passé. En un mot je fais toujours partie de la situation que
j’ai à dépasser”, Cahiers pour une morale, pp. 63 – 64.

80
In the case of Sartre, exteriority is more open and this openness is the first specificity of Sartre’s
concept: it can be social but also historical. More importantly for the theoretical purpose of this
doctoral thesis, the second specificity of Sartre’s concept of situation is that the historical
exteriority affects a human being on a deep and emotional level. He insists on the mechanism
through which the social and historical situation is going to turn into nature for the one who
inherits it, and how it will directly touch his/her heart (“en plein coeur”). In the very same way
that the Other “reaches me to my bones” (“m’atteint jusqu’aux moelles”) in Being and
nothingness, the historical situation gets inside of me, and becomes my own nature to the point
that it shapes my emotional states and affects. With the concept of habitus, Bourdieu aimed to
show how different behaviours can be explained by socially constructed norms and values that
become a second nature: the exteriority made internal influences behaviours. With the concept
of situation, Sartre includes the reality covered by Bourdieu’s later concept, while also claiming
another reality: he aims to understand how emotions and human sensitivity can be influenced
on a deeper level; moreover, he includes history (or, in my own words, collective past) in the
influencing exteriority. Sartre is interested in the relation between the situation and the human
as he/she is affected by it. The situation affects the living subjectivity, precisely in the sense
that it gives a certain tone to the emotions that will constitute his/her relationship to the world.
For that very reason, one can say that any collective past is lived by a subjectivity, or by a living
for-itself. The concept of situation bears affinities with that of collective past, because they both
manifest ontological affinities. The situation has multiple dimensions, but it is its historical
dimension that I am interested in, and it corresponds to the ontological content I chose to give
to the concept of collective past: an ensemble of facts, actions, affects, that are shared by a
human community that perpetuates itself in time. In other words, the collective past is part of
the situation. The historicity of the situation is constituted by it, and Sartre writes about the
situation that “it is historical, that is to say that it is precisely already lived and thought by other
For-itself. I exist for them before I am born.”109 The choice left to man is multiple : giving up
on freedom (se résigner), taking responsibility for the situation (assumer), or going further and
surpassing it (dépasser). Sartre insists on the fact that it is a fundamental structure of the human
existence in the sense that each of us is affected by the situation in which they are born, a
situation resulting of the sedimentation of social characteristics produced by others. Sartre gives
for that plenty of examples, that he finds in the social archetypes of his time: the prolétaire, the
bourgeois, etc. There is a historical example that was of particular interest for Sartre, and that

109
Personal translation for “elle est historique, c’est-à-dire justement qu’elle est déjà vécue et pensée par d’autres
Pour-soi pour lesquels j’existe avant de naître”, Cahiers pour une Morale, p. 63.

81
remains interesting for my argumentative purpose because it announces further developments
of my work: the movement of Négritude.
In Black Orpheus, a preface he wrote for a collection of poetry published under the direction
of Léopold Sedar Senghor, Sartre wrote that négritude is a “a certain emotional attitude towards
the world.”110 In the Notebooks for an Ethics, he also wrote: “From one end of the earth to the
other, black men - separated by languages, politics and the history of their colonizers – have a
collective memory in common.”111 As long as the past is lived without any particular reflection,
it remains passive. Yet, one can make the hypothesis that the collective past has an effect on
the relationships between different human subjectivities. It is precisely why is must be
“retaken” (repris) : “The past only acts if it is retaken and it is the present which will give it its
meaning, but there is a heaviness proper to the past, once it is retaken.”112 What does it mean
to “retake” the past? Even if the formulation is slightly different, another extract from the
Notebooks seems to explain a similar idea: “Each new historical fact brings with itself its past,
which means that its nature is to go back in order to interpret the past. It is because man, hence
History, has to be his own past.”113 Reminding us that a human has to be his/her own past,
Sartre describes the particular relationship that each human ties with the world. The past is an
object for interpretation and reflection. To retake the past, or a specific past, is to operate a
reflexive return on this past, which will have a specific meaning in regard to the nature of the
present. It is how the past will start to weigh : “there is a heaviness specific to the past once it
is retaken”. Because it is a living subjectivity that retakes it, this subjectivity is a source of
meaning for this past, haunting the present of subjectivity. If one applies this idea to the
négritude movement, then one notices that the roots of this movement can be found in a past of
humiliation and devalued culture: the stake is precisely to give greatness to what was
humiliated. It gives birth to a new relationship to the world, completely redefined. Here is a
retaken past that bears a certain heaviness:

It could not be more explicitly stated that negritude is neither a state not a definite ensemble
of vices and virtues or of intellectual and moral qualities, but rather a certain affective
attitude towards the world. [...] We know that a feeling is a definite way of establishing our

110
Black Orpheus, p. 36.
111
Black Orpheus, p. 44.
112
Personal translation. Original text: “Le passé n’agit que s’il est repris et c’est le présent qui lui confère son sens,
mais il y a une lourdeur propre du passé une fois repris”, Cahiers pour une Morale, p. 83.
113
Personal translation. Original text: “ Chaque fait nouveau historique apporte avec lui son passé, c’est-à-dire
qu’il est dans sa nature de revenir en arrière pour interpréter le passé. C’est d’abord parce que l’homme, donc
l’Histoire, a à être son passé”, Cahiers pour une Morale, p. 80.

82
 rapport with the world around us, that it involves a certain comprehension of this universe.
It is a tension of the soul, a choice of oneself and of another, a way of going beyond the raw
facts of experience; in short, a plan quite like the voluntary act. To use Heidegger’s
language, Negritude is the Negro’s being-in-the-world.114

Retaking the past will give meaning to a certain relationship to the world, which will be
lived by unique subjectivities, independently from the group. Sartre also writes: “Thus when
the black man goes back to his principal experience, it is suddenly revealed to him in two
dimensions: it is both the intuitive seizure of the human condition and the still-fresh memory
of a historic past.”115 These lines show that Sartre is always concerned with reconciling
universality with specificities: in our relationship to our collective past, we can grasp a feeling
of the whole human condition, as well as our own specific conditions, insofar as we are
members of certain communities. Sartre’s philosophy, from the beginning, was following the
objective of transcending traditional dualisms, and it shows with a accuracy in this passage. He
aims to be as close as possible to the reality of the human life, and his early understanding of
belonging to a historical community is another example of that. It is actually worth noting that
in the text quoted above, Sartre evoked the figure of “the black man”, and not “the black men”
as an organized community. Sartre is referring to one only man who can find within himself a
whole “historical past”. The fundamental experience of this man in the world amounts to reveal
to him a history that was collectively lived and experienced. It is inside of an intimate region of
the subjective life that a historical past is hiding, and haunting. In Black Orpheus, history almost
has a conceptual status in the sense that Sartre draws the frame of a dialectical history:

[...] suffering carries within itself its own refusal; it is by nature a refusal to suffer, it is the
dark side of negativity, it opens onto revolt and liberty. The black man promptly transforms

114
Black Orpheus, p. 36. Original text: “[...] la négritude n’est pas un état, ni un ensemble défini de vices et de
vertus, de qualités intellectuelles et morales, mais une certaine attitude affective à l’égard du monde [...] Nous
savons qu’un sentiment est une manière définie de vivre notre rapport au monde qui nous entoure et qu’il
enveloppe une certaine compréhension de cet univers. C’est une tension de l’âme, un choix de soi-même et
d’autrui, une façon de dépasser les données brutes de l’expérience, bref un projet tout comme l’acte volontaire. La
négritude, pour employer le langage heideggérien, c’est l’être-dans-le-monde du Nègre”, “Orphée Noir”, in.
Anthologie., Introduction, p. XXIX.
115
Black Orpheus, p. 44. Original text: “Ainsi lorsque le noir se retourne sur son expérience fondamentale, celle-
ci se révèle tout à coup à deux dimensions : elle est à la fois la saisie intuitive de la condition humaine et à la fois
la mémoire encore fraîche d’un passé historique”, “Orphée Noir”, in. Anthologie., Introduction, p. XXIX.

83
 himself into history in as much as the intuition of suffering confers on him a collective past
and assigns to him a goal in the future.116

This is one of the rare texts where one can find the expression “collective past” penned
directly by Sartre. I contend that it flows directly from the fundamental ontology of Being and
nothingness. The concept is already present in the existentialist sum, but Sartre is only able to
formulate it when he is analysing a concrete historical situation. In many ways, the time when
he wrote political texts and was involved in the fight against racism and colonialism was a time
when unvoiced concepts of his early texts could finally bloom. It is as if he created in advance
the ontology that would help saying the colonial world with the highest accuracy. The fact that
the expression “collective past” can be found in his writing about the Négritude movement, is
in that sense particularly telling. Moreover, the revealing dimension of suffering should be
stressed: suffering is what makes the “collective past” appear to the individual conscience. In
this necessary specification, one can find a fundamental element of Sartre’s thought: the
exteriority of the collective past is interiorized through pain and suffering, and, as such, it is
inscribed in the subjectivity, which then reveals it to the conscience through an emotion, a
feeling of pain. Human emotions are the source of a revelation: the revelation of the permanence
of a historical past within oneself. The heaviness of a collective past is hidden in the knots of
individual affectivity. The situation is inscribed in the emotional life of an individual. The
situation is everything that surrounds me, and limits my actions and moves in the world. This
concept is the perfect example of Sartre’s attempt at a reconciliation of traditional philosophy
and a practical reflection on the world of his times.

A renewed vision of humanism

For a Sartrean reconstructive moment after the postmodern deconstruction

With Sartre’s vision of subjectivity, emotionally shaped by the collective past, subjectivity
(or the “human-reality”, in phenomenological terms) is seen under a new light, more vulnerable
than what mainstream positivist human sciences tend to see. Philosophy can sometimes pave

116
Black Orpheus, p. 46. Original text: “ [...] la souffrance comporte en elle-même son propre refus ; elle est par
essence refus de souffrir, elle est la face d’ombre de la négativité, elle s’ouvre sur la révolte et la liberté. Du coup
il s’historialise dans la mesure où l’intuition de la souffrance lui confère un passé collectif et lui assigne un but
dans l’avenir”, “Orphée Noir”, in. Anthologie., Introduction, p. XXIX

84
the way for new possibilities in the humanities, or the “human sciences”. In the case of Sartre’s
ontology of the subjective being, powerful potentialities for a renewed understanding of
subjectivity can be drawn. Because it holds together the subjective (subjectivity) and the
objective (collective past) dimensions of human existence, Sartre’s ontological proposition can
be characterized as already dialectical. Of course, the Critique will deepen this feature of his
philosophy, but one must stress that it is present from the beginning of his philosophical path.
Sartre was already targeting scientist positivism before he even started to write the Critique.
This helps to assess the outreach of the contribution that Sartre can make to political thought.
This contribution would be to open a new space for a truly dialectical approach of history, that
would help us getting out of what I contend is a standstill of post-modernism.
This standstill can be characterised as a dead end of political thought, which easily finds
itself between scientist positivism, and cold structuralism or “post-modernism”. The latter
includes a group of very different sets of theories, but which can easily be identified as
constituting a certain zeitgeist, around the ideas of “deconstruction”, or around Foucault’s
authority in an impressive range of fields. What these two dominant paradigms bear in common
is a rejection of a dialectal thought. Given that the whole project of Sartre was to find and
legitimize a “dialectical reason”, it is quite reasonable to say they both rejected Sartre. After
the era of deconstruction, one might believe it helpful to re-construct. The necessity to rebuild
positive concepts, or simply build new positive concepts is the one that drives this thesis.
Indeed, and to recall the premises of this work, exposed in the general introduction, they follow
the wish to help create a network of intellectual connections that would be an accurate
framework for the emergence of a French-Algerian postcolonial subjectivity.
How can we reflect upon values and beliefs after postmodernism destroyed any possibility
for a discourse on truth? In the wake of Foucault, there is indeed a general tendency to be
suspicious of discourses today: everything might be corrupt, so one is intellectually safer at a
distance from intellectual assertions and grand theories. Yet, how can we build meaningful
values that can help shape political discourses in these circumstances? It seems like activism
and direct political action is doing it in action, but this general movement for rebuilding
societies has not reached philosophy yet. On the one hand it can explain the feeling of emptiness
of new progressive generations citizens and older working-class citizens, who feel abandoned
by the left in France (and have felt so for a few decades).117 On the other, it might explain the

117
Pialoux, M. and Weber, F. (2002), “La gauche et les classes populaires. Réflexions sur un divorce”, in.
Mouvements 2002/4; Braconnier, C. and Mayer, N. (2015), Les inaudibles. Sociologie politique des précaires,
Paris: Presses Universitaires de Sciences Po.

85
success of what we call “populist” movements, which is an understatement – the adjective
“populist” often being used to characterise tendencies one would have called nationalist, or
racist, a few decades ago. The result of the discrepancy mentioned above is the following: post-
modern philosophers left us with no actual theoretical tool to grasp the world and to give it a
meaning, because the idea of “meaning” itself is seen as something to be rejected. It leads to
misunderstandings, and, while political activism tries here and there to produce new discourses,
philosophy remains surprisingly timid. The Western world has thrived on colonisation and an
unfair vision of the world for some time, and we live in a world that is a direct result of that
state of things. Yet, now that the status of “values” has lost credit with the strength of
postmodernism, philosophy finds itself generally speechless in the face of a new era of history
it should have a lot to say about. Because of that, it is necessary to give a renewed importance
and centrality to subjectivity, or the human-reality, as a source of value.
I contend that Sartre helps to reply to the very problems postmodernism pretended to face,
before it even happened. It is worth stressing that, in the spirit of continuity I assume here
regarding Sartre’s works, the Critique is the last stage of Sartre’s thought, the one in which he
tries to integrate all the results of modern knowledge into his fundamental philosophical
intuitions118. Yet, the Critique is not only the last important work of Sartre, it can also be seen
as the last philosophical work of the “moment of existence” in French philosophy: that is the
argument of Frédéric Worms. In La philosophie en France au XXe siècle, the latter reshapes
the traditional perspective on the history of French philosophy. Instead of following a classic
chronological order, he insists on the importance of looking at the history of philosophy as a
history of “moments”. A moment, to him, is a phase during which all philosophical questions
were organised around one key concept. According to him, the twentieth century was made of
three essential moments: the moment of “spirit”, the moment of “existence”, and the moment
of “structure”. In the introductory chapter devoted to the third moment, Worms focuses on the
Critique, and particularly on the debate it triggered between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss. According
to him, this debate is what led French philosophy from the “moment of existence” to the

118
Foucault corroborated this perspective, in an interview he gave in the 1970s, which is quoted by Jean-Baptiste
Vuillerod in a 2017 article entitled “Hegel et ses ombres Foucault” (in. Les Temps Modernes): “Or il me semble
qu’en écrivant la Critique de la raison dialectique, Sartre a en quelque sorte mis un point final, il a refermé la
parenthèse sur tout cet épisode de notre culture qui commence avec Hegel. Il a fait tout ce qu'il a pu pour intégrer
la culture contemporaine, c'est-à-dire les acquisitions de la psychanalyse, de l'économie politique, de l'histoire, de
la sociologie, à la dialectique.” [“It seems to me that by writing the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre has
somehow put a final point, he closed the parenthesis on all this moment of our culture that starts with Hegel. He
did everything he could for integrating contemporary culture, that is to say the contributions of psychoanalysis,
political economy, history and sociology, to the dialectic”].

86
“moment of structure”. At that time, existence was not relevant anymore, and debates moved
to the idea of “structure”. This dissertation follows this hypothesis and analyses the Critique as
the moment of a major change: what, in the Critique, was holding the stems of a fundamental
conceptual change? And why is it a series of criticisms towards the Critique that has led to such
a change? Worms’s book gives a hint of that change but does not precisely focus on the reasons
why it happens.
Within the narrow field of French philosophy, Sartre’s Critique thus led to a conceptual
paradigm change. Yet, this dissertation tries and addresses the issue of its relationship with
political philosophy at large, especially in the Anglophone world. It seems that the outreach of
the Critique is often reduced to a debate between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss, which marked the
end of an era. Nonetheless, the purpose of this work is to try and determine the wider impact of
the Critique, on political philosophy. My hypothesis is that Sartre, with the Critique, intends to
answer the concerns surrounding the very existence of political philosophy, and his answer lie
in the status of history
The rejection of Sartre’s philosophy by the generations of philosophers that followed him,
including Foucault, must be analysed. There is something of an opposition between the thinkers
of what has been called “deconstruction” or “structuralism” and the Marxist and humanist
existentialism of Sartre. This opposition is not anecdotal because the generations of thinkers
who were opposed to the importance Sartre gave to “man” precisely built their own path and
thought on this opposition. The combative attitudes of Lévi-Strauss and Foucault against
Sartre’s theory of history are due to their belief in the possibility of human sciences – their aim
was admittedly to “dissolve man”. My argument is that Sartre’s philosophy was answering the
problem of the dissolution of man, which was already happening with the rise of positivism,
before Lévi-Strauss or Foucault even formulated it. In some respect, it is possible to claim that
French postmodernism, while it faced the growing strength of positivism, chose to dive into its
consequences, rather than seeing it as a particular moment that could be fought and overcome.
By doing so, it did not only reject traditional philosophy as a space for the discussion on the
essence of things and the creation of values, it also rejected part of its own history. This is the
argument of Sophie Wahnich, a French historian and a specialist of the French Revolution. In
2017, she published La Révolution française n’est pas un mythe, in which she dealt with the
debate that took place between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss.
She shows how and why the French Revolution is what she calls a “Sartrean object” (“un
objet sartrien”). In six detailed chapters, she explains why Sartre got interested in the French
Revolution, which is according to her the perfect “situation laboratory” (“laboratoire

87
situation”) for someone who is interested in reconciling a Marxist humanism and existential
truths. In the second part of her book, she addresses the debates that the Critique gave birth to,
and she puts a specific emphasis on what one could identify as the two main debates: first, the
explicit and famous discussion between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss (which Worms focused on),
and second, the implicit combative debate, which never happened directly, between Foucault
and Sartre. She shows that the era of structuralism was precisely born from the ashes of Sartre’s
humanism, which was seen as a dead concept to forget, but she shows how it actually helped to
kill it. Using terms of psychoanalysis, and referring to Sartre as “the father”, she asserts that
“Foucault has committed a parricide, and killed the father, as well as the father’s object”119, the
“father’s object” being the French Revolution. Her point of attention is the French Revolution
itself, and her theoretical efforts are directed towards the demonstration of the following
argument: the status of the French Revolution in social imaginaries, and especially French
imaginaries, is shaped by philosophical and scientific discourses, more than by historians
themselves. According to her, historians remain dependent on these social and collective
images, and should be aware of that when doing their own work. In the unsaid violent
theoretical destruction Foucault engages in with Sartre’s work, he also lessened the primordial
role of the French Revolution for the understanding of French thought. In many respects, the
French Revolution is a historical source for all the values that the French Republic claims to be
lying on. The consequence was then double: at the very same time the event was made
uninteresting, values as such were made irrelevant by the wave of Foucault-like
postmodernism. The two consequences are intertwined, but, while the first is only relevant for
the French context, the second has had a huge impact on philosophy at large.
This dissertation aims to bring the two following contributions: (1) the importance of the
collective past in the understanding of the co-constitution of the social and the individual, hence
of intersubjectivity and recognition, (2) the ethical content of a new humanism inspired by
Sartre. The first point will be the object of the third chapter, and can only be introduced by an
inquiry into the second point, which gives its direction to the following section.

119
“Foucault a ainsi opéré un parricide et tué le père et l’objet du père”, in. S. Wahnich, La Révolution française
n’est pas un mythe, p. 156.

88
Sartre’s ethical humanism: towards recognition

From Sartre’s thoughts on humanism, Elizabeth Butterfield calls for a “post-humanist

humanism”120. In her book, published in 2012, she acknowledges the frustration of
contemporary philosophy in the face of a postmodernism that dissolved man, and deconstructed
everything to the point that we are left concept-less. She engages in a study of Sartre’s
reconciliation of the social and the individual in order to lay the foundation of this new
humanism. She shows how, thanks to Sartre’s philosophy, it is possible to produce a
reconceptualization of the individual and the social. Her main object being humanism, she
shows how the traditional humanism of the Enlightenment was too essentialist, and ended up
being a “humanism for rich white men” (in her own words). She then shows how this discontent
with a blatantly flawed approach of humanism led to a deconstruction of it, during the
intellectual phase of postmodernism. It led to the exact opposite, namely anti-essentialism,
where man was not considered like a real and existing thing. It is particularly visible in the
thought of Foucault, for whom “man” is a pure abstraction. Yet, if it is so, then there is no
ground for humanism, and it is precisely what Foucault aimed to do: destroying humanism,
which was for him a new and contingent idea. It is why Butterfield calls for a “reconstructive
moment”. And she believes the philosophy of Sartre is particularly useful for that.
She writes that we need “a new framework for understanding the human that can move
beyond the extremes of essentialism and anti-essentialism to reconceptualize the human being
beyond traditional dichotomies. We must find a way to think both individual and social together
in dynamic interrelation, without privileging one term as primary or reducing one to the
other.”121 In her book, she makes a presentation of the philosophical and political issues
constituting the intellectual panorama we are left with today, independently from the
philosophy of Sartre. She then shows how his philosophy can be useful to answer them.
Elsewhere, she writes that she is ready to accept the limits of Sartre’s philosophy because it is
not what interests her in the first place. In many respects, this dissertation follows a similar lead.
Her whole argumentation relies on showing how Sartre produces a theory of a co-constitution
of the social and the individual. Drawing on the notion of situation, that I have presented in a
previous section, she shows that this co-constitution is fundamental for anyone who wishes to
escape the deadly alternative between essentialism and anti-essentialism. Although Butterfield
lays the foundations for a post-humanist humanism inspired by Sartre, the conclusion of her

120
Butterfield, E. (2012), Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism, Bern: Peter Lang.
121
Butterfield, Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism, p. 11.

89
book seems to be lacking the humanism it promised to build. I contend this dimension is absent
because Butterfield did not engage with Sartre’s ontology directly. In order to present the
characteristics of a Sartre inspired humanism, it is necessary to interrogate this humanism’s
ontological grounds. For this purpose, one must engage in a reflection on the concept of value.
The most famous occurrence of the concept of humanism in Sartre’s works is the conference
he gave in 1946, later published under the title Existentialism is a Humanism. This conference
has mistakenly been taken as a condensation of Sartre’s philosophy, which was supposedly
enough to understand it. Nonetheless, Sartre was intending to address a large and non-specialist
audience in this conference. Consequently, he did not mention the ontological background that
justifies his views humanism, and which can be found in Being and Nothingness. In contrast,
he does not mention the idea of “humanism” in Being and Nothingness. These two texts are
equally helpful in understanding Sartre’s humanism, and yet that are radically different in terms
of methods and accessibility. They two facets of the same medal. I will present the conference
later in this thesis. First, it is necessary to show that the reasons why existentialism precisely is
a humanism are to be found in the developments of Being and Nothingness devoted to the idea
of “value”.
The necessity of a moral viewpoint stems from Sartre’s ontological inquiries. When Sartre
is looking for the source of value in Being and Nothingness, it is not anecdotal or peripherical.
“Value” is precisely what has been destroyed by the movement of modernity around the end of
the nineteenth century; this movement is connected, broadly speaking, to the “death of God”
thematized by Nietzsche. In his youth texts, Sartre worked on destroying the domination of the
subject on the object, as I showed. He was untying the links that had formerly been established
between life and interiority. Sartre explained that the Ego can only exist in the same way as all
worldly things do, and does not have its own specificity. The for-itself is a means to designate
the only possible mode of being of the “existant”, characterized by a “presence to oneself”
(présence à soi), which implies a distance from oneself. The for-itself, or conscience, is
characterized by a distance from a “self” that is out of reach. This “presence to oneself” implies
that there is not such a thing as a full coincidence with oneself. Such a coincidence is
characteristic of the in-itself, which is precisely what the for-itself is looking to reach. The for-
itself is literally for itself, as it exists to the exact extent that it is aiming at itself. Sartre insists
on the fact that this mode of being is the unique way through which the human subject can exist:

In fact the self cannot be apprehended as a real existent; the subject can not be self, for
coincidence with self, as we have seen, causes the self to disappear. But neither can it not

90
 be itself since the self is an indication of the subject himself. The self therefore represents
an ideal distance within the immanence of the subject in relation to himself, a way of not
being his own coincidence, of escaping identity while positing it as unity – in short, of being
in a perpetually unstable equilibrium between identity as absolute cohesion without a trace
of diversity and unity as a synthesis of a multiplicity. This is what we shall call presence to
itself. The law of being of the for-itself, as the ontological foundation of consciousness, is
to be itself in the form of presence to itself.122

The words “real existent” and “subject” show that Sartre is interested in reality insofar as
it is subjectively lived. The self is not part of this reality, because it can only be that towards
which a human subject aims. Nonetheless, Sartre writes that “the self is an indication of the
subject itself”. Without the self, there would not be a subject, which means that there would not
be a human being. In this respect, the self is what makes the existence of the human subject
possible. Yet, this subject only exists as a for-itself, characterized by a distance from the self
that is impossible to make up for. In Being and nothingness, as Sartre is looking for an
“ontological foundation of consciousness”, he discovers a fundamental instability of this
consciousness – otherwise called human-reality, or for-itself – which is perpetually oscillating
between a full and solid identity (that of the “self”) and a distance from itself. Sartre underlines
the fundamental ambiguity of human existence and creates concepts apt for giving account of
this ambiguity.
Sartre also pinpoints the existence of an ontological tension which produces in every human
being the woe of tearing, which Sartre formulates by borrowing the Hegelian expression
“unhappy consciousness”: “The being of human reality is suffering because it rises in being as
perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without being able to be it, precisely because it
could not attain the in-itself without losing itself as for-itself. Human reality therefore is by
nature un unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state”123. The

122
Being and Nothingness, p. 101. Original text: “En fait, le soi ne peut être saisi comme un existant réel : le sujet
ne peut être soi, car la coïncidence avec soi fait, nous l’avons vu, disparaître le soi. Mais il ne peut pas non plus ne
pas être soi, puisque le soi est indication du sujet lui-même. Le soi représente donc une distance idéale dans
l’immanence du sujet par rapport à lui-même, une façon de ne pas être sa propre coïncidence, d’échapper à
l’identité tout en la posant comme unité, bref, d’être en équilibre perpétuellement instable entre l’identité comme
cohésion absolue sans trace de diversité et l’unité comme synthèse d’une multiplicité. C’est ce que nous
appellerons la présence à soi. La loi d’être du pour-soi, comme fondement ontologique de la conscience, c’est
d’être lui-même sous la forme de présence à soi”, L’être et le néant, p. 113.
123
Being and Nothingness, p. 114. Original text: “La réalité-humaine est souffrante dans son être, parce qu’elle
surgit à l’être comme perpétuellement hantée par une totalité qu’elle est sans pouvoir l’être, puisque justement elle
ne pourrait atteindre l’en-soi sans se perdre comme pour-soi. Elle est donc par nature conscience malheureuse,
sans dépassement possible de l’état de malheur”, L’être et le néant, p. 126.

91
for-itself is the only mode of being that is accessible to the conscience. The for-itself is like a
synonym for the subjectivity, or living subjectivity. It is characterized by a lack of being, and it
is engaged in a perpetual quest for a full and complete being. Sartre then names this being of
the self, and calls it value. Therefore, the value is synonymous with this self towards which
subjectivity is directed, without ever being able to reach it. This value, at the same is and is not.
It is not because it is not here for us to reach, but it is to the exact extent that it haunts us; the
value haunts the for-itself.

I can now start to reach the conclusion of this inquiry into Sartre’s humanism by also laying
the grounds for the conclusive argument of this chapter. I choose to do so by recalling the
developments that I started this chapter with. I introduced this inquiry into Sartre’s concept of
subjectivity by voluntarily orienting my argument around the Sartrean concept of value. Now
that the end of this inquiry is approaching, and in order to give way to more moral
considerations – namely, the concept of “recognition” – Sartre’s use of the value is helpful. For
more clarity, here follows the extract from Being and Nothingness that the reader found at the
beginning of this chapter:

Now we can ascertain more exactly what is being of the self: it is value. Value is affected
with the double character, which moralists have very inadequately explained, of both being
unconditionally and not being. Qua value indeed, value has being, but this normative
existent has no being precisely as reality. Its being is to be value; that is, not-to-be being.
Thus the being of value qua value is the being of what does not have being.124

In this extract, Sartre identifies the being of the self with the value because of the
correspondences that can be found in their ontological structures. The value, on the one hand,
is and is not. The self, on the other, is and is not. These correspondences imply that they have
the same mode of being, but why would they actually be the same thing? Two things can have
the same mode of being without being one and only thing. Why is Sartre going that far, crossing
a line one would not cross so easily? The reasons for Sartre’s boldness are unclear from the
strict point of view of the argumentation. Nonetheless, they can be explained by the emergence
of the concept human-reality (“réalité-humaine”, the hyphen being particularly evocative here).

124
Being and Nothingness, p. 117.

92
Until this point of Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s argument had been that of pure ontology;
his thoughts were exclusively focused on abstract notions of being, without any reference to
humans in the flesh. With the introduction of the concept of value, it will reveal necessary for
him to also introduce the notion of human-reality, which Sartre inherits directly from
Heidegger. The human-reality merely designates a human being. Sartre writes: “human-reality
is that by which value comes to the world.”125 With this sentence, Sartre contends that, without
the existence of humans, value would not exist. It is through human-reality that value appears
in the world. Sartre writes that value is “beyond being” (“par delà l’être”), because it is the
emerging effect of the existence of the human-reality, which is “beyond being” itself, insofar
as it is at a distance from the being, the self (for the purpose of clarity, I recall here that in
Sartre’s ontology, the human-reality is the same thing as the for-itself, or the conscience – the
three expressions are used for designating the same reality from different ontological
perspectives).
Sartre therefore pinpoints that the value is perpetually beyond things, which explains why
it can be identified with the human reality. There is a fundamental unity between both. The
value is consubstantial to the for-itself (or human-reality). The for-itself is haunted by the value.
The value is immanent to the for-itself, and thus to the human-reality. This immanence is
grasped by Sartre through the vocabulary of mystery. For emphasising the proximity between
the value and the human-reality, Sartre asserts it more than he proves it resorting to rigorous
argumentation. Far from being a flaw or a weakness of Sartre’s argument, this lack of
argumentation contributes to explain the obscurity of his writing in some passages. This
obscurity is not superficial or due to the philosophical vanity some people see in Sartre’s
writing. On the contrary, I hold this obscurity for necessary; it necessarily stems from the
mystical bond that unites the value to the human-reality.
Value is linked to human existence, not in a trivial way that would explain that humans
create values, but on a more fundamental level that has to do with the ontological structure of
human existence. This fundamental mystery is not theological and yet Sartre uses the
vocabulary of theology, when he evokes a “supreme value”, or an “absolute being”. This
mystery is actually that of human freedom. Indeed, Sartre later writes: “In this sense value
haunts being as being founds itself but not as being is. Value haunts freedom”126. With this
sentence, Sartre specifies the conditions under which the value haunts the for-itself, or the
human being. Value haunts us insofar as we are our own foundation; we are thus free. Freedom

125
Being and Nothingness, p. 117.
126
Being and Nothingness, p. 118.

93
is the key concept for understanding Sartre’s views on humanism. For Sartre, humanism must
defended to the exact extent that it is within human freedom that value can be found.
Therefore, I found in Being and Nothingness the conceptual keys that help to understand
why Sartre asserted that “existentialism is a humanism”, in the famous conference he gave in
1946. In this conference, his main concern was to defend existentialism against the widespread
misinterpretations of the thought he elaborated in Being and Nothingness in 1943. Yet, beyond
this immediate objective, this conference and its title state explicitly what remained implicit in
Being and nothingness. Asserting that existentialism is a humanism stems from the long
argumentations of Being and Nothingness devoted to the search for value within the boundaries
of human-reality itself. If it is within human-reality that value exists, then human-reality is the
source of all value, which puts humans at the heart; this is why Sartre’s philosophy is a
humanism.
I hope to have shown that the assertion according to which existentialism is a humanism is
not a vague statement. It is the fundamental truth of Sartre’s existentialism, to the extent that it
is grounded in the idea that value, ontologically, can only be found in the human-reality. Sartre
creates a new understanding for the word humanism, adapted to his time while anchored in
abstract ontology. Broadly defined, humanism refers to a vision of the world that focuses on
Man as the main actor. Commonly, it is said that humanism was born at the same time as
philosophy, in Ancient Greece, and was then forgotten for centuries, until the Renaissance.
Official history, as taught in secondary schools for example, refers to the Renaissance as the
time of humanism. The content of this humanism remains vague; very heterogeneous cultural
productions are folded under the banner of humanism. Nonetheless, the word “humanism” itself
was coined during the nineteenth century, and did not exist before. In Dits et écrits, Foucault
asserts that not only the word itself is modern, but the idea as well. For Foucault, it is wrong to
say that humanism was born in the Renaissance; humanism coincides with the epoch of
secularization. Because God is no longer the supreme value, the space for value is left empty,
and people intended to fill it with the idea of” human”. Whether Foucault’s point is true or not
is not what occupies my argument here. Sartre, after all, did not provide us with a historical
panorama of humanism for thematizing it, and I do not believe this contextualisation to be
ethically interesting. Yet, the strong desire of Foucault to date the birth of humanism later than
official history follows a specific argumentative line of combat. The substance of Foucault’s
anti-humanist argument is: because humanism has never been precisely determined, and has
not existed for so long, humanism has to end.

94
 For Foucault, there is a generalized indeterminacy of the concept of humanism itself.
Foucault considered it was too vague and inaccurate and, as such, could not provide a satisfying
normative horizon. However, it seems that this judgment cannot not apply to Sartre. As
discussed, Sartre’s views are anchored into a precise and solid ontological inquiry. His
humanism comes from the following ontological discovery: value can found within the for-
itself, hence within the human-reality. There is no value in the world outside of human beings.
Human beings are the source of all value as such. It is an argument for both moral philosophy
and ontology. This is the strength of Sartre’s argument; it is at the same time moral and
ontological. This is what Francis Jeanson shows in Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre
(which Sartre himself considered to be the best interpretation of his thought). According to
Jeanson, Sartre’s ontology is moral from the beginning, and it would be impossible to separate
both areas of his philosophy. This singles out Sartre’s humanism, in the midst of other forms
of humanisms. The singularity of Sartre’s humanism relies on its philosophical foundation, and,
as such, protects it from attacks à la Foucault. Contrary to what Foucault implied, humanism is
not a naive statement; from Sartre’s perspective, humanism the logical consequence of both
ontology and moral philosophy.
Sartre sees in the human-reality, or Man, the supreme value, not because he did not find
anything else to replace God, but in virtue of Man’s very own nature; this is not a light
statement. Sartre’s humanism can be identified as being trapped between, on the one hand, the
success of anti-humanism, which came after him, and, on the other, what we could call a « legal
humanism ». The latter designates here all the modern forms of humanism that were formalized
after the war in the « rights of man ». With them, there is a risk of losing the asperities of
humanism, which Sartre underlined clearly. If, according to Sartre, value appears in the world
through the human-reality, then it means that there is an element of normativity in the
ontological structure of human existence.
The presence of normativity in the ontological structure of human subjectivity leads to
interrogate the presence of a normative element within intersubjectivity itself. Roughly defined,
intersubjectivity is a classic concept of phenomenology that designates the space situated
between two subjectivities. In other words, it designates the field of human interactions. It is a
philosophical concept for identifying the logics of the social world. Wondering how ethical
normativity can influence intersubjectivity in a Sartrean perspective now leads to the emergence
of a concept of recognition.

95
 Chapter 3. A Sartrean theory of recognition.

Car il aurait fallu fouiller davantage cette notion de reconnaissance

Sartre, Cahiers pour une morale127

On December 4th, 2020, French president Emmanuel Macron gave an interview in which
he intended to clarify his views on laïcité, Islam and discriminations. Aiming to respond to
growing anger across society, he resorted more than once to the concept of recognition. He
stated several times that France had failed to recognize all of its citizens, before saying: “I want
to tell this youth, I recognize you” (“Je veux dire à cette jeunesse: je vous reconnais”) . Given
his close bonds with late philosopher Paul Ricoeur, for whom the concept of recognition was
important, it is very likely that Macron did not choose the word recognize by chance. Even if
not conceptualized, the concept of recognition was, for the first time, used by a French president
as a tool for understanding the cultural and racial divisions tearing the country apart. Ahead of
this political use, political theory and philosophy have focused on the concept for decades now,
so much that it has become a fundamental paradigm for understanding cultural issues in
Western postcolonial societies. Thinkers as different as Judith Butler, Axel Honneth or Charles
Taylor have made it a core concept of their thoughts. There usually is an agreement on the fact
that it originated in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel described
a “struggle for recognition” between an abstract “master” and an abstract “slave”. The
philosophers who can be attached to this tradition are clearly identified and Sartre is often
quoted as one of them. Yet, he is always given very little to say, and it is widely thought that
Sartre’s views on recognition are limited. This chapter aims at demonstrating the existence of
a theory of recognition in the works of Sartre. Even if it is not systematized as such, his texts
provide us with all the conceptual elements to build an autonomous and rich theory of
recognition.
Axel Honneth, in his main book on recognition,128 evoked Sartre’s works as an unfinished
theory of recognition. More than twenty years later, in his “Seeley Lectures”,129 he argue that
not only are Sartre’s views unfinished but they also convey a negative understanding of

127
Sartre, Cahiers pour une morale, p. 103
128
Honneth, A. (1997), The Struggle for Recognition, Polity Press
129
Series of lectures given at the University of Cambridge in the Spring 2017.

96
recognition. I would like to strongly qualify this statement. Because Sartre never referred to
“recognition” as a central conceptual element of his otherwise systemic philosophy, Honneth’s
reading is accurate, but only superficially: at first glance, there is no such thing as a fully
constructed theory of recognition within Sartre’s work. Yet, Honneth’s views are narrowed by
a biased choice of texts when it comes to Sartre. A quote from a long and unpublished
manuscript of Sartre is enough to prove that he gave thought to the matter. In Notebooks for an
ethics, indeed, he notes: “We should have searched more into this notion of recognition.”130
Situated in a text written between 1943 and 1948, this sentence might appear as a writing
program for the future, which Sartre followed, even though not in a classical philosophical way.
In his political texts about racism, antisemitism and colonialism, Sartre displayed an impressive
conceptual understanding of the existential matters at stake in these specific historical
situations. He foresaw the stakes of our contemporary postcolonial situations, and built
intellectual tools of high interest for us, today. As such, they are part of an unvoiced theory of
recognition.
Even if the concept was already known and talked of then, it only became central in political
philosophy as the world changed, and it became necessary to understand it. Charles Taylor uses
the paradigm of recognition because it is particularly apt for reflecting on multiculturalism, and
Judith Butler resorts to it precisely to the extent that it helps her understand gender dynamics.
As social change happened and certain elements of multiracial societies became more visible,
the concept of recognition became more central to current debates. At the time of Sartre, these
were not yet pressing questions and Sartre stressed them, showing an impressive ability to
distance himself from the Marxist paradigm he was still an advocate of. In spite of the not
entirely finished aspect of Sartre’s views on recognition, there is more to it than what Honneth
writes.
There is a such a thing as a full recognition theory that can be drawn from Sartre’s works.
It is not directly given to us, but must be reconstructed from the clues he left us. His intuitions
about recognition, combined with his intuitions about the collective past, are actually helpful
for a contemporary understanding of politics. Recognition, even though it dominates large parts
of political theory, has often been criticized and opposed to redistribution by thinkers who
believe that putting the emphasis on recognized identities contributes to avoid economic

130
Personal translation. Original text: “Car il aurait fallu fouiller davantage cette notion de reconnaissance”,
Cahiers, p. 103.

97
issues.131 “Identity politics” as a movement has been dismissed for being an inaccurate
understanding of the real power relations at stake in the world. Notwithstanding such attacks,
“identity politics” seems to never fully disappear, and remains a driving element of
contemporary activism. From the global antiracist movements that followed the death of
African-American George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, to the still enduring
strength of right-wing populism in Europe, “identity” is still a concept that rings true for people,
be they activists or voters.
Sartre never referred to the concept of “identity” as such, but he tackled the very reality that
“identity” actually covers. More importantly, he provided us with a very profound frame of
analysis for understanding it. Because of that, his philosophy, and his original way of
understanding “recognition”, are indispensable tools for our times. If one considers the many
diverse histories of migrations across Europe, and the fact that each and every one of them is
unique, the frame offered by Sartre is loose enough to help understand them. They are historical
instances of what he calls an “us-object” being shaped by the “look” of others. There is no direct
cultural content in his views on the “collective past”: it remains philosophical, conceptual, and
general. His political texts and activities, though, had a very determined content, and he looked
at issues as diverse as blackness, French colonialism or antisemitism. The genesis of Sartre’s
theories about recognition and collective past is to be found in his involvement with anti-
colonial movements. The modern history of Europe is that of colonization, and even if each
history is different, there are domination relationships that are still effective today in modern
racism and discrimination. How these domination relationships shape the emotions and
affectivities of citizens from diverse cultural backgrounds is something that still remains little
thought of from a philosophical perspective in Europe. Sartre gives philosophical foundations
to this very specific fact of history.
This chapter will question a common assessment of Sartre’s philosophy, namely the idea
that his understanding of intersubjectivity was negative.132 Axel Honneth, among others,
believes that there is the sketch of a Sartrean theory of recognition, but because it is negative,
it is a weak and minimal recognition. Those comments are grounded in the reading of Being
and nothingness. Yet, Sartre’s most interesting insights on the reality that recognition
designates can be found in other texts, starting with his politically committed texts in favour of
antiracism and anticolonialism. The theoretical grounds for them can be found in his Notebooks

131
Honneth, A. and Fraser, N. (2003), Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange,
London: Verso.
132
By a “negative understanding of intersubjectivity”, I mean a conflictual approach of interpersonal relations.

98
for an ethics. I will try and show that, from these texts, it is possible to draw a positive, sharp,
and original Sartrean theory of recognition. Being and nothingness is still a central point of
interest for my demonstration, but I want to suggest a reading that is not purely ontological.
With the knowledge given to us by Sartre’s later political and ethical texts, I argue that we can
understand his ontology as irremediably leaning towards ethics. As a matter of fact, I believe
that his ontology is ethical, as Francis Jeanson wrote.133 Because of that, and with the
retrospective knowledge of later texts, I will first suggest a reading of the analyses of
intersubjectivity in Being and nothingness that aims to show that recognition naturally stems
from Sartre’s theory of the look. Before even involving the major political and ethical texts that
go in that direction, I want to show that the idea of recognition exists from the beginning in his
thoughts. The next step of my argumentation will be to go further in those political texts and
assess the influence of the political and historical mutations Sartre went through on the
betterment of his understanding of recognition. From this reading and the results of our analyses
of the first chapter, devoted to history and subjectivity, I will try and show that Sartre gives us
the key for a politics of recognition and reconciliation in a postcolonial world. Before giving
room to the full developments of this idea, I will discuss in further length the views of a leading
figure of the recognition studies, Axel Honneth. The Seeley Lectures he gave in Cambridge in
2017 are devoted to recognition and I will focus on his understanding of what he calls the
“French tradition” while opposing his choice to include Sartre in it. Drawing the conclusions
from my analyses of Sartre’s theory of recognition, I will try and show how it can also be seen
as a theory of social knowledge, and directly challenge positivism, before envisaging the
possibility of a politics of recognition from that.

Ontology or ethics? The philosophical necessity for recognition

As discussed at the end of chapter 1, there can be no such thing as a divide between Sartre’s
ontology and his ethics because his ontology is ethical from the beginning. As Jeanson argues
in Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre, Sartre is, first and foremost, a moral philosopher,
and ethics infuses his whole philosophy. Published while Sartre was still alive, this book
received much praise from him, who considered it to be the best account of his philosophy. An
ethical reading of his ontological analysis in Being and nothingness is necessary for developing
the premises of a theory of recognition.

133
Jeanson, F. (1965), Le problème morale et la pensée de Sartre, Paris: Seuil.

99
 In Sartre’s ontology, each of us is part of the existence of others, while at the same time
posing a threat to them. The for-others is a fundamental ontological dimension of the for-itself,
and contributes to angst, which arises from the potential limitation of my freedom in the Other.
As explained in the first chapter, the past triggers that kind of angst to the extent that it poses
limitations on my freedom. The fundamental difference in the case of the Other is that the angst
is mutual. That reciprocity lays the foundations for an inevitable conflict, which Sartre
considers to be inherent to human relations. When the Other looks at me, does she/he create an
effective limitation to my freedom? If her/his look is able to limit my freedom, then it says a
lot about a Sartrean concept of freedom: it is not a bare freedom to act, it is the freedom of a
transcendent conscience towards the world. On the one hand, the apparition of the Other
provokes shame, as Sartre claims, and this shame seems close to that triggered by a denial of
recognition. On the other, the Other’s transcendence is a limitation to my own, and
consequently, to my freedom. Because of that, a denial of recognition affects my freedom. The
feeling of being denied as a transcendent conscience goes with the feeling of one’s freedom
being denied.
Compared to other theories of recognition, Sartre brings a focus on the lived subjectivity,
that is to say on people as they are subjectively and emotionally affected by it. By contrast,
traditional treatments of recognition in political theory appear more abstract. Recognition is
usually discussed from a more “macro” level, from the perspective of society at large and public
policies. This more abstract or removed vantage point might explain why recognition appears
out of touch with reality to many in the French theoretical and political debate. One would have
to prove what history really makes to individuals in order to understand everything that has
happened over the past forty years, and why recognition is seen as a necessity for minorities.
Perhaps to better reflect the need for subjective considerations some adopt the vocabulary of
trauma, which stems from the psychoanalytic tradition. Because it was introduced by Freud and
gained great theoretical legitimacy, it is seen as an acceptable and legitimate theoretical
framework. But in my opinion, it is lacking a political orientation, that Sartre (as a philosopher)
and Fanon (as a psychiatrist) have. Focusing here on Sartre, I want to show that only and
existential understanding of the self can lead to a true justification for recognition as a political
necessity in our societies. Recognition is a fundamentally moral orientation that stems from an
existential understanding of subjectivities. At no point Sartre makes it the content of a potential
public policy, but I believe that only his views can truly back these recognition policies that are
theorized today. In order to show this, it is necessary to go back to his fundamental ontology
and see how it was ethical from the beginning.

100
 The contribution of ontology: the being-for-others

Sartre’s philosophy is famous for the negativity with which it approaches the relations
between beings. In Being and nothingness, Sartre approaches intersubjectivity from such a
conflictual angle that Axel Honneth argued that: “the perspective of a reconciliation between
men is excluded, almost ontologically.”134 However, Honneth’s assertion must be qualified, in
at least two respects. First of all, it is not obvious that Sartre only discusses ontology in Being
and nothingness, even though that Honneth’s claim. Second, even if reconciliation between
human beings may be difficult to find, and does not seem to interest Sartre much in the text, it
is not “excluded”. Nonetheless, even if Honneth’s position misses this subtle difference, it bears
an element of truth. Being and nothingness proposes a relation to the Other characterized by
conflict, a singular proposition in the sense that this original conflictual nature of
intersubjectivity very rarely amounts to an effective violence: conflict is contained. Anchored
in the ontology of the for-itself, it is particularly visible in the look, that turns the looked one
into an object. One can contend that the objectification at stake in the look, the fundamental and
primary relation with the Other, is a “denial of recognition”. This expression is very famous in
political philosophy today, partly thanks to Honneth, but it was not at the time of Sartre.
Nonetheless, my claim is that it is what Sartre aimed at formulating without directly naming it
a “denial of recognition”.
Where Sartre writes that the Other is always “the one that looks at me”, he is trying to
conceptualize the experience of being looked at. Being in contact with the Other means being
looked upon and then being aware of that, with no protection against that look. The look of the
Other gives me knowledge of my own possibilities: “Thus the look is first an intermediary
which refers from me to myself.”135 This observation, that the look of the Other leads me back
to myself, helps in understanding the role of intersubjectivity in the perception of the self, and
of the self in the world. From that, we might derive what it means for the living subjectivity.
The irruption of the Other in the world is important precisely because it reshapes the relations
I have with the world, which then ceases to be my world. I am robbed of my own world. The
for-others is a fundamental dimension of existence, in the same way as the for-itself. It is a
“region” of being (in phenomenological terms) where I am, quite literally, for others. As such,

134
Personal translation. French translation of the original text : “la perspective d’un état de réconciliation entre les
hommes se trouve exclue pour ainsi dire ontologiquement”, A. Honneth, La lutte pour la reconnaissance, p. 262.
135
Being and Nothingness, p. 282. Original text: “Ainsi, le regard est d’abord un intermédiaire qui renvoie de moi
à moi-même”, L’être et le néant, p. 298.

101
meeting the Other can have destructive effects on me. I can feel a danger, and this danger is not
accidental, it is the permanent structure of my being-for-others. Sartre writes:

I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at the center of a freedom which is
not mine and which is the very condition of my being. In so far as I am the object of values
which come to qualify me without my being able to act on this qualification or even to know
it, I am enslaved.136

Meeting the other provokes a dependence which is internal to my being. There is no link of
external dependency that would preserve my interiority. In fact, for Sartre, the autonomous
interiority is nothing but a myth, and one has to fight the idea of a substantial subject. One must
recognize the existence of a subjectivity that exists on the mode of a conscience, which means
its ability to be affected. In the case of the emergence of the Other, I am affected by another
freedom that fixates and limits my possibilities by looking at me. I can feel my own “facticity”
(facticité) when I am in contact with another transcendence, and my relationship to everything
is thus modified. The world, as it is known to me, is subject to change because I am looked
upon in the same way as the world is looked upon. The emergence of the Other is thus the
emergence of another conscience, which means another living subjectivity that has a mode of
being similar to mine. A duality emerges in my own being, since I discover myself as an object
for the Other, and I discover that my own transcendence finds its potential limit in the Other.

The look: a denial of recognition

The concept of the “look” has a central place in Sartre’s ontology of intersubjectivity. In
Being and nothingness, it is through his/her look that I discover the Other. I am looked at by
the Other, and it puts me in a situation where I feel my freedom is limited. This has frequently
been construed as fundamentally negative approach to intersubjectivity, and with reason. From
his theatre works and his ontology, one would be tempted to believe that Sartre sees the Other
as an exclusively negative force. His views are often summarized with a reference to a sentence
he wrote for one of the characters of No exit: “Hell is other people”. However, it would be
unfaithful to Sartre’s philosophy to reduce his views on intersubjectivity to a line penned for

136
Being and Nothingness, p. 291. Original text: “je suis esclave dans la mesure où je suis dépendant dans mon
être au sein d’une liberté qui n’est pas la mienne et qui est la condition même de mon être”, L’être et le néant, p.
307.

102
one character in a play. In addition, even though Sartre’s views on the idea of the look are
central to his arguments about intersubjectivity, this is not all he has to say about the presence
of the Other. This idea of the look might be seen as the first step of any encounter, but the entire
encounter cannot be reduced to that first step. And yet, it is how many commentators choose to
characterize Sartre’s thoughts on intersubjectivity, including Axel Honneth, who contends that
Sartre’s approach to intersubjectivity, and to recognition, is fundamentally negative.
Intersubjectivity has to do with recognition for Sartre, and is ethical from the beginning. The
theoretical claim of this section is that what Sartre describes as the look could be understood as
a denial of recognition. When the Other looks at me, Sartre writes, I feel my possibilities
shrinking, I feel looked upon, hence unable to act in a manner different to the image the Other
has of me. By doing so, the Other gives limitations to my own freedom: the Other does not
recognize my freedom. A full theory of recognition drawn from Sartre’s texts implies a
recognition of humanity, and most and foremost, of human freedom.
The aridity of the vocabulary of ontology could at first glance make the reader think that
Being and nothingness is of little interest to my purpose, given my primary point of interest,
namely the ethical relationships between human beings. Yet, when it comes to the description
of the look, the presence of the word shame and of a lexical ensemble close to it, indicates that,
on the contrary, the ontological analyses of Sartre have a wider reach. Sartre evokes the status
of shame in the discovery of the Other as follows: “It is shame or pride which reveals to me the
Other’s look and myself at the end of that look. It is shame or pride which makes me live, not
know, the situation of being looked at”137. Shame can be defined as a feeling of humiliation.
Shame appears when one’s own self-perception is affected by the perception of one’s self by
someone else. Shame cannot be defined independently from other ethical notions, such as pride
or dignity. Because of that, the ethical nature of Sartre’s analyses becomes obvious. His
ontological views cannot be summarized to a purely disembodied ontology. His philosophical
investigation aims at thinking of human existence precisely as it is lived, in the flesh.
Sartre’s abstract ontological depiction of intersubjectivity is significant because it makes one
think of the experience of racism, insofar as racism is informed by history (such as a history of
colonization, for example). My second chapter discussed the ways in which history and culture
can affect one’s subjectivity. In the case of a history of slavery or colonization, the descendants
of those who were the colonizers or slave owners and of those who were colonized or slaves

137
Being and Nothigness, pp. 284 – 285. Original text: “c’est dans la honte (en d’autres cas dans l’orgueil) que je
le découvre [autrui]. C’est la honte ou la fierté qui me révèlent le regard d’autrui et moi-même au bout de ce regard,
qui me font vivre, non connaître, la situation de regardé”, L’être et le néant, p. 300.

103
see their respective subjectivities informed and shaped by this shared history, or “collective
past”. Because of what we could call an intimate determinism, the relations between
subjectivities, or intersubjectivity is highly affected by these past relations. They are not just
past, they haunt the present, as the Sartrean ontology of the past explained in my first chapter.
Because of that, the look of the Other takes on another dimension. This look, this act of
conscience is itself informed and shaped by a specific history. For example, in contemporary
postcolonial France, racism against North Africans can manifest in various behaviours, from
direct verbal abuse to physical assaults, sometimes leading to murders and loss of life.138 More
commonly, in this context, racism can be defined as the prejudiced perceptions of those
perceived as being of North African descent. In France, clichéd stereotypes associated with
North Africans are commonplace and saying “they are all thieves” for example, is a cliché of
vulgar racism that still pays off in public opinion;139 but this case of a conscious stereotype used
for the description of others is not relevant to my argument here. The type of racism that Sartre’s
ontology helps to understand is a more quiet, more subtle, and unconscious one. An equally
common example of prejudice might be a situation in which a French person of French descent
is surprised by the positive achievements of a French person of North African descent for
example, and voices it in a positive way. Although the first person might intend this as a
compliment, in effect they are diminishing the possibilities of the person in front them. Their
behaviour says “I am surprised and impressed that you did something so great”, which is very
different from “I am surprised and impressed that someone like you did something great”. The
second sentence is a more obvious example of conscious prejudice: I associate you with a group
of people, who are like you and I reduce the whole of you to a certain prejudice. The first
sentence does not reduce the person to a prejudice associated to a group of people that are like
them; it directly targets this very person, and yet implies an invisible link to a greater group of
people. This illustrates the continuing close and intricate relationship with one’s collective past,
as discussed in chapter 2. It is so much a part of one’s identity that no reference to it is necessary
for the Other to have his/her views influenced by it.

138
The word “arabicide” was even coined by Italian writer Fausto Giudice in order to describe the functioning of
the French police since the 1970s. He claims that the Fifth Republic has its origin in a founding crime: the mass
arabicide, which allowed to perpetuate in times of peace the crimes committed during the Algerian war (the
historical conflict from which De Gaulle created the institutions of the Fifth Republic in 1958). See: F. Giudice,
Arabicides. Une chronique française, 1970 – 1991.
139
For instance, the French television channel, C-News, close in tone to the American Fox News, has become
extremely successful over the end of the 2010s. It thrives on daily expression of racism, and yet is at the centre of
political debates.

104
 Just as one’s subjectivity is shaped by the collective past, intersubjectivity is also shaped by
it; consequently, a denial of recognition through the look of the Other can very well be
influenced and shaped by this “collective past”. In many respects, the look of the Other becomes
the look of society. In the analyses of Being and nothingness, it is as if Sartre was giving
ontological grounds to a philosophy of historical and social determinism, for which the look is
a metaphor.
Because his concepts are particularly apt for describing denials of recognition at stake in
modern racism, Sartre’s theories on intersubjectivity provide us with a new paradigm for a
theory of recognition, that is particularly attuned to dealing with interracial dynamics in
postcolonial societies. The fact that Sartre’s theories on recognition were so fully determined
and shaped by his analysis of social and historical changes may in fact be the reason why they
are viewed as so weak in the eyes of Honneth. The latter is not very interested in recognition
as a tool for advancing multiculturalism. His views on recognition might be characterized as
disembodied and a-historical – not in the sense that they would not acknowledge the evolution
of the recognition theories through history – they do – but in the sense that they do not fully
integrate the major social and historical changes of gender reflection and multiculturalism.
These changes are mere examples for Honneth, they are not what motivates theoretical change.
I claim that Sartre’s views on recognition were fully determined and shaped by the social and
historical changes happening while he was writing. Furthermore, he is very much influenced
by Hegel and his dialectical thought, from Being and nothingness and onwards, which is very
interesting if one goes back to the genesis of Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave. Susan
Buck-Morss has shown how Hegel takes the philosophy of freedom outside of abstraction.
According to her, it is likely that the Haitian Revolution influenced Hegel’s thinking. It led him
to formulate his idea of a master and slave dialectic, and, ultimately, to our modern
understanding of recognition. I contend that Sartre continues this work, and I must now show
how influenced by both Hegel and history in the making his thought on the matter is.

The philosophical, historical and political grounds of a Sartrean recognition

The philosophical origins: the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel

In 1948, Sartre began work on a philosophical project that was supposed to be a study of
ethics and his second philosophical masterpiece, after Being and nothingness. The manuscript
would not be published until after his death under the title Notebooks for an ethics, and even

105
though it was not organized as a book, its length and density continue to draw attention. It is
therefore all the more notable that Notebooks for an ethics draws substantial inspiration from
Hegel and dialectical thought. As Thomas Flynn summarizes, “(…) the chief interlocutor in the
Notebooks appears to be Hegel as interpreted by the French Hegelians, Alexandre Kojève and
Jean Hyppolite.”140
In the 1930s, Kojève gave a series of lectures about the Phenomenology of Spirit in Paris,
that was followed by a group of young philosophers who were to become the most prominent
figures of French philosophy, including Lacan, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss.
Sartre did not attend the lectures himself, but they would have such a strong impact on the small
Parisian philosophical milieu at the time that he was influenced by them nonetheless. He found
himself immerged in never-ending discussions about the new existential interpretation of Hegel
suggested by Kojève. In the Notebooks, Kojève’s name appears repeatedly, and he quotes long
passages from the lectures, which were later published as a book. It is not known whether Sartre
was aware of Kojève’s interpretation when he wrote Being and nothingness, but there are
certainly parallels between his thought and Kojève’s existential understanding of Hegel. In the
Notebooks, Sartre is interested in showing that the ontology he developed in Being and
nothingness leads to a moral philosophy that has much in common with a Kojevian
understanding of Hegel. The main novelty of Kojève’s interpretation of the Phenomenology of
Spirit is to focus on the fourth chapter, where Hegel presents the “dialectic of the master and
the slave”. For Kojève, this chapter holds the key to understanding Hegel’s philosophy, and
Kojève’s interpretation of this dialectic would give birth to twentieth century theories of
recognition in political philosophy. In many ways, Sartre had already laid the foundations for
such a theory, and Sartre saw Kojève’s interpretation as advancing the development of the
ontology he had presented in Being and nothingness.
In the beginning pages of the Notebooks, Sartre engages in a long commentary of Kojève,
focusing in particular on the possibility of a “de-alienation” (désaliénation). In order to do so,
he tackles the possibility of a “negation” at the individual scale. He shows that the negation has
a role in the shaping of the for-itself (pour-soi). For Sartre, the for-itself is always at a distance
from the in-itself – it is literally at a distance from oneself, it negates oneself. Negativity is part
of the ontological nature of the for-itself, of the human being. The in-itself is the fixated being,
and, as such, given to the look of the Other.

140
Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and historical reason, p. 24.

106
The historical and political grounds: History in the making

The “Jewish question”

In The Struggle for recognition, Axel Honneth141 stresses that the Reflections on the Jewish
question are a turning point of Sartre’s theoretical perspective. Published in 1946, three years
after Being and nothingness, Reflections on the Jewish question might be considered the first
instance (with many more to follow) in which Sartre uses direct political polemic to shape an
unvoiced theory of recognition. The subject matter deals with one of the strongest social issues
in France in the 1940s: antisemitism. Even though anchored in reality, his analysis is haunted
by the vocabulary of Being and nothingness. In many respects, Reflections on the Jewish
question is like the application of an ethics to a social context, albeit an ethics that had not yet
been formalized – and never would be, at least not in Sartre’s lifetime. The conclusion of Being
and nothingness states that with the ontology complete, the next step would be the writing of
an ethics, which he did do in the subsequent years. However, this giant of philosophical work
would never be published, and would remain lost, until an 800 pages manuscript was published
posthumously, under the title Notebooks for an ethics. It is as if, confronted with the harshness
of reality, Sartre was unable to formalize his ethics philosophically, and instead built it step by
step, in his political texts. His Reflections on the Jewish question can be seen as the foundational
stone of this building. Being and nothingness is the primary frame of analysis for understanding
the Reflections. Yet, the Reflections also brings forth its own set of theoretical arguments, which
advance the intuitions of Being and nothingness. This is particularly true for the theme of
recognition which, even if never explicitly mentioned, is essential for understanding the
Reflections.
Antisemitism is for Sartre a passion for hatred. Sartre opens the book with the following
remark: an antisemitic person’s hatred does not respond to any offense. He underlines that
hatred is usually triggered by a malignant behaviour, and yet in the case of antisemitism, it is
not. On the contrary, antisemitism distorts reality to the point that a new alternative reality fuels
its passion.142 Sartre contends that antisemitism is not only an attitude towards Jewish people
but also “vis-à-vis men in general, history and society”. He shows that the relationship between
two persons is mediated by history. The relation between an antisemitic person and a Jewish

141
Honneth, A. (1995), The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Polity Press.
142
“La passion antisémite ne saurait avoir un tel caractère: elle devance les faits qui devraient la faire naître, elle
va les chercher pour s’en alimenter, elle doit même les interpréter à sa manière pour qu’ils deviennent vraiment
offensants”, Réflexions sur la question juive, Folio Essais, p. 19.

107
person is directly affected by stereotypes forged before either of them were even born. Sartre
says that the antisemitic man believes in his superiority because of the supposed legitimacy
given to him by history. Sartre calls that a “de facto irrationalism”, where the antisemitic man
believes he is the past against the present. To illustrate this point, Sartre imagines a rebuttal
from the antisemitic man on the question on language and authenticity: “This Jew might speak
a purer French than I do, he might know syntax and grammar better than me, he might even be
a writer: it does not matter. This language, he has spoken it for only twenty years while I have
for a thousand years.”143 This is interesting because it corroborates the thesis of chapter 2, where
we I demonstrated that Sartre stressed the strength of history as it is inscribed in subjectivities.
Clearly, in this example, there is a pathological relationship to history, which is also specific
because it is conscious, but it shows how history can be a source of normativity in social and
political situations according to Sartre.
More than that, this text’s most interesting edge is that it illustrates a denial of recognition
from the antisemitic man, in the way that he shows “disdain” towards Jewish people: “all the
enemies of the Jew do not publicly demand for his death in broad daylight, but the measures
they suggest are aimed at his belittling, his humiliation, his ban; […] they are symbolic
murders.”144 The attitude of the antisemitic man is a movement towards the negation of the
Jewish man, of the Other. The words Sartre chooses are particularly evocative (belittling,
humiliation, banishment). It is as if the antisemitic person wants to take Jews down a notch, to
a level that might be characterized as sub-human. It is no less than a negation of humanity at
stake. From a Sartrean perspective, it is a denial of recognition.

The Negritude movement and “Black Orpheus”

In 1948, two years after the publication of the Reflections on the Jewish question, the writer
and future president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor gathered poems in what he named the
Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. Sartre was already famous by then, and
publishers sometimes asked him to write prefaces for the texts of unknown authors – like

143
Personal translation. Original text: “Peut-être que le Juif parle un français plus pur que je ne fais, peut-être
connaît-il mieux la syntaxe, la grammaire, peut-être même est-il écrivain : il n’importe. Cette langue, il la parle
depuis vingt ans seulement et moi depuis mille ans”, Réflexions, p. 27.
144
Personal translation. Original text: “[…] tous les ennemis du Juif ne réclament pas sa mort au grand jour, mais
les mesures qu’ils proposent et qui, toutes, visent à son abaissement, à son humiliation, à son bannissement ; […]
ce sont des meurtres symboliques”, Réflexions, p. 53.

108
Senghor at the time, or Fanon a few years later. Sartre agreed and wrote a text which was to
become an autonomous piece, under the title of Orphée noir, “Black Orpheus”. The style of the
piece follows that of typical French literary analysis. What makes the text so interesting is the
strong stance Sartre takes in denouncing racism, and, more than that, white eurocentrism.
Tracing back the history and the relationships between blacks and whites, Sartre starts by
stressing the original offence made by the latter, and envisaging it as a negation of the dignity
of the Other: quite literally, he refers to what can be called today a denial of recognition. The
freedom deprivation imposed on black people through slavery is interpreted by Sartre as a
denial of recognition of the highest degree. At its root, this denial is an act of disdain that
manifests as a disdain of the value of their human existence. Elaborating on this idea, Sartre
believes that the Négritude movement145 can only exist through the assertion of new values,
and specifically aesthetic values. This is why poetry can be seen as the epitome of liberation.
The notion of the look (le regard), and the concept of intersubjectivity underlying it, is also
central to Sartre’s arguments in “Black Orpheus”. Sartre opens Black Orpheus as follows:
“Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you – like me – will feel the shock
of being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing
without being seen; he was only a look.”146 These opening sentences are important on several
levels, and worth exploring in their distinct parts. First, we can see in their conception and
syntax a foreshadowing of the now well recognized and theorized concept of “white privilege”.
Considering that it was penned in 1948, half a century and more before such concepts were
widely in use, it is truly revolutionary. Later in the text, Sartre likens the look to a denial of
one’s dignity: “Formerly Europeans with divine right, we were already feeling our dignity
beginning to crumble under American and Soviet looks.”147 To understand this application of
the look, we should recall Sartre’s argument in Being and nothingness, that the “look” tends to
turn the Other into an object: when looked upon, one’s possibilities are dead and one’s freedom
is momentarily taken away. Sartre applies that to the relationships between nations after World
War II. The change in the geopolitical dynamics means that the universal look is not the
European look anymore and because of that, Europeans see their dignity crumble. Dignity in

145
Black francophone movement of intellectual liberation created by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire
146
Black Orpheus, p. 13. Original text :“Voici des hommes noirs debout qui nous regardent et je vous souhaite de
ressentir comme moi le saisissement d’être vus. Car le blanc a joui trois mille ans du privilège de voir sans qu’on
le voie ; il était regard pur”, Orphée noir, in. Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (PUF), p. IX.
The original text is useful in this case. The official translation articulates “regard pur” as “only a look”, which I
believe it should be articulated as “pure look”.
147
Black Orpheus, p. 14. Original text: “Jadis Européens de droit divin, nous sentions déjà notre dignité s’effriter
sous les regards américains ou soviétiques”, Orphée noir, in. Anthologie, p. X.

109
this case might be defined as the awareness of one’s own worth: when I am looked at by others,
there is a risk that my own worth will be belittled. Connecting these concepts together helps to
better understand what Sartre meant by a “pure look”. By pure look, he means that it is the one
and only source for judgment and worth. All criteria of worth and value emerged from it. It is
significant that Sartre understands in his texts the Négritude movement as a specific moment
of a dialectic that actually is a dialectic of mutual recognitions close to the one Hegel described:

In fact, Négritude appears like the up-beat [un-accented beat] of a dialectical progression:
the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of
Negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment us
not sufficient in itself and these black men who use it know this perfectly well; they know
that it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization of the human being in a raceless
society.148

Sartre follows the exact path of the Hegelian dialectic while explaining the history of
racism, white supremacy and the growth of antiracism and emancipation. The moment of
negativity is only negative in regard to the dialectic. In itself, and ethically, it is an absolutely
positive moment because it is the assertion of one’s own worth. Sartre later writes that black
people respond to the disdain of white racists by opposing them a “black subjectivity”. A few
decades before “black power” became so strong in the US and before the growth of black
culture, Sartre had theorized this very moment. His preface aims at introducing a series of
poems written by black poets, a series of black poems : in this, it is the assertion of a black
culture. This black culture is important for emancipation to the very extent that it manifests a
black subjectivity. This might be viewed as an example of the themes of chapter 1: human
subjectivity is always intimately affected by history and culture, and only through the
knowledge of this history and the artistic sublimation of this culture will it deliver emancipation.
Lastly, it is worth exploring what Sartre meant when he defined the Négritude movement
as a “certain emotional attitude towards the world”. In order to respond to the negation of their
own dignity, black people can strongly assert their own subjectivity, that is to locate the place
where they derive their worth. If the look of white racists has tried to turn them into objects,

148
Black Orpheus, p. 41. Original text: “En fait, la Négritude apparaît comme le temps faible d’une progression
dialectique : l’affirmation théorique et pratique de la suprématie du blanc est la thèse ; la position de la Négtitude
comme valeur antithétique est le moment de la négativité. Mais ce moment négatif n’a pas de suffisance par lui-
même et les noirs qui en usent le savent fort bien ; ils savent qu’il vise à préparer une société sans races”, Orphée
noir, in. Anthologie, p. XLI.

110
then their subjectivity stands in opposition to this. This very specific subjectivity is an emotional
attitude towards the world, but any subjectivity is. Here Sartre displays one of the most
interesting elements of his analyses of human subjectivity: one should not forget that
subjectivity is primarily emotional. This should be taken into account when one comes to assess
the foundations of a politics of recognition. Because it is a struggle for recognition that Sartre
has described until this point, this attitude of positive assertion of one’s own self-worth is an
act of emancipation that leans towards a demand for recognition. Even though it is not explicitly
formulated as such, the explicit use of the Hegelian dialectic makes the recognition reference
clear.

Colonial ghosts: Fanon, Sartre and recognition

Fanon’s writings can now provide with an additional example of the historical anchorage
of Sartre’s philosophy. Fanon was a psychiatrist and never called himself a philosopher but his
writings were always influenced by philosophy. He studied both medicine and philosophy, and
attended the lectures given by Merleau-Ponty in Lyon. This original meeting with philosophy
gave a theoretical direction to his texts. Yet, his aim was always practical, and he explicitly
wrote that his goal is to “de-alienate the Black man” (“désaliéner le Noir”).
Before entering Fanon’s argument, one must enunciate a preliminary precaution. The
intellectual connection between Sartre and Fanon is well known. So is Fanon’s criticism of
Sartre’s views in “Black Orpheus”. In Black skin, white masks, Fanon underlines Sartre’s
misconception of what Négritude is. By making it a tool to the service of revolution, Sartre
“forgets that the black man suffers in this body quite differently from the white man”149. In spite
of Fanon’s respect for Sartre’s thinking and political views, he expressed a more nuanced
approach to Sartre’s understanding of Négritude. The disagreement between both authors
should be mentioned as an introductory precaution making clear that this section does not aim
to evade the points of tension between them. Nonetheless, Fanon’s criticism of Sartre is not
relevant to the argument of this section, for two main reasons. First, Fanon targets Sartre’s
comments of Négritude and his understanding of blackness, not his ontological
phenomenology. It matters because Fanon remains inspired by Sartre’s fundamental
philosophy, as I will show. Fanon’s criticism, for right as it is, does not affect his Sartrean
influence. It does not affect Sartre’s philosophical propositions either, especially the ones he

149
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 86

111
makes about the nature of intersubjectivity, which are of such high importance for Fanon in
Black Skin, white masks. One could claim that Sartre’s short-sightedness on the topic of
blackness, as exposed by Fanon, was due to an incapacity to emotionally connect with the
concrete situation of black people, because of his white privilege. It was not due to a limitation
of his philosophy. The second reason why Fanon’s criticism of Sartre cannot pose a threat to
the relevance of my argument is that there is a co-influence between Sartre and Fanon, as I will
demonstrate further in this section. In Notebooks for an ethics, the change in Sartre’s views on
the oppression of black people – they become sharper, deeper, more nuanced – is certainly due
to his intellectual exchanges with Fanon, and most probably to the latter’s remarks about “Black
Orpheus” in Black skin, white masks. This introductory precaution now enunciated, I invite the
reader to follow my understanding of Sartre and Fanon’s intricated and nascent theory of
recognition, starting with the book afore-mentioned.
The last chapter of Black skin, white masks is entitled “The Negro and Recognition”150,
including a section called “The Negro and Hegel”. In his book, Fanon intends to understand
what it means to be and to exist as a black man. He wants to analyse the conditions of the
existence of black people. Using the Hegelian schema of the “master” and the “slave”, Fanon
brings these concepts to a concrete reality, that of slavery. There is no abstract theorization on
the “master” and the “slave” in his text. The master is always a master as he is white, and the
slave is always a slave as he is black. After the historical abolition of slavery, Fanon still sees
the “black man” as a “slave”, that is to say a man to whom recognition is refused, to the extent
that racism still exists. Fanon aims at producing a phenomenological and psychoanalytical
analysis of the experiences of humiliation lived by Black people. He interprets them as denials
of recognition, and wonders what the conditions of an authentic recognition could be. From the
analysis of the section “The Negro and Hegel”, Fanon’s theory of violence is the final result of
him introducing corporeity in the Hegelian dynamic. Nonetheless, that violence is not the
horizon of Fanon since he envisages a future of reciprocity through recognition.
That the chapter “The Negro and Hegel” is the last one in the book Black skin, white masks
is meaningful for two reasons. First, it gives a political slant to what otherwise reads more as
the book of a psychiatrist. He draws the schema of a struggle, and asserts that action has to
come after reflexion, laying the ground for political action. Second, this text shows the
fundamental role of the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave in moving toward political

150
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 163.

112
struggle. Fanon comments on that dialectic, transforms it for his own purpose, and interprets it
through the prism of other readings, namely that of Sartre, itself being influenced by Kojève.
In the text, there is a reflexion on the existential meaning of the abolition of slavery, through
the parallel commentary of that specific situation and the text of Hegel. Fanon’s aim here is to
show that the abolition of slavery was not a proper and authentic recognition in the Hegelian
understanding of the word. The recognition of a specific legal status does not imply a true
recognition, which leads to the following question: what is a true recognition? According to
Fanon, it is a recognition of the humanity of the Other. In order to show this, he quotes Hegel,
and stresses the importance the latter gives to the notion of reciprocity: “At the foundation of
Hegelian dialectic there is an absolute reciprocity which must be emphasized. It is in the degree
to which I go beyond my own immediate being that I apprehend the existence of the other as a
natural and more than natural reality.”151 The role of desire is central to the extent that it is my
own desire that shows my humanity, according to Fanon, precisely because desire shows that I
am not a thing: “As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-
now, sealed into thingness.”152 The problem that Fanon stresses is that, with the abolition of
slavery, freedom was given and not conquered, according to him. It was not the result of a
struggle in which the slave could have confronted the refusal of the master: “Historically, the
Negro steeped in the inessentiality of servitude was set free by his master. He did not fight for
his freedom. […] The Negro is a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master.
The white man is a master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table.”153 Since freedom was
given to him, it is not his. In Hegelian terms, Fanon considers that the former slave did not
become an independent conscience. The use of the word “attitude” shows that this freedom
only has the appearance of freedom. The “Negro” as a historical character did not transform
himself. Yet, appearances are that of freedom, which makes it all the more difficult to actually
struggle for authentic freedom. Since slavery was abolished, a legal recognition was given, and
the only thing that remains is a bitter feeling of incompletion. After this moment of a false
recognition, frustration grows according to Fanon. He explains that the black man is frustrated
when the white man tells him “brother, there is no difference between us. The black man knows
that there is in fact a difference and he would want the white man to acknowledge and recognize
this difference. It shows that the black man, according to Fanon, wants his otherness to be
acknowledged because it was not deleted, it was only made less visible. Yet, it still exists. In

151
Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Masks, p. 169.
152
Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Masks, p. 170.
153
Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Masks, p. 171.

113
other words, political freedom did not lead to existential freedom, and the feeling of being
recognized. According to Fanon, this can only be the result of a fight. In this respect, Fanon
agrees with Sartre, who writes: “Freedom is not given, it is conquered […] A conceded
independence is just an arrangement of servitude.”154
One of the reasons why a truly human recognition did not happen, is because the master is
twice a master. The white man is not only the one who dominates the concrete reality of the
black man, he is also the one who dominates his imaginary. In the manner of the psychiatrist
that he is, Fanon argues that the white man constitutes the superego of the black man himself.
When he gave him his “freedom” by abolishing slavery, he gave him a white freedom. He did
not recognise the human being in the black man. Giving him a white freedom, he denied his
blackness. This is precisely why Fanon writes that the black man “knows that there is a
difference. He wants it.” Since he was negated as a black man, he has to be recognized as a man
being black. There is a historical failure of the abolition of slavery, that has to do with the fact
that blackness itself was not recognized according to Fanon. Humanity remains associated with
whiteness, which leads the black man to desires of whiteness. In the chapter devoted to “The
Man of colour and the white woman”, Fanon writes: “Out of the blackest part of my soul, across
the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be
acknowledged not as black but as white. Now—and this is a form of recognition that Hegel had
not envisaged—who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am
worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man.”155 The incidental remark
made by Fanon about Hegel here is interesting: he refers to “a form of recognition that Hegel
had not envisaged”. Fanon intends to enrich the conceptual framework of Hegel. He envisages
the possibility of a recognition that is in itself a source of alienation. There is an internal
separation inside of the “slave”, who wishes to be recognised as white, hence as “other”. The
dreams of emancipation of the “slave” (black man) are dreams of identification to the other
(white man) in its corporeity. That raises the question of Fanon’s reading of Hegel through the
prism of the concepts of “body” and “corporeity”. Fanon’s reading of Hegel helps to give body
and corporal incarnation to Hegelian concepts. Behind the black man, there is the black body.
For Fanon, the black man wants to be recognised as being black, as being a black body. Yet, he
is also trapped inside his own body, and that is the paradox in Fanon’s thought. On the one
hand, he agrees with Kojève that Hegel helps us to think about overtaking corporeity (the black

154
Personal translation, from “La liberté ne se donne pas, elle se prend. (…) Une indépendance concédée n’est
qu’un aménagement de la servitude », Sartre, “La pensée politique de Patrice Lumumba”, in. Situations, V.
155
Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Masks p. 45.

114
slave is also a slave of his body, and his recognition implies an overtaking of his body), while
on the other, he insists that the black slave has to be recognised as black for a true recognition
to happen. In a situation of structural racism, the body is highly symbolical, and Fanon
understands that this symbolical body will have a role to play in emancipation. That is why he
envisages a bodily struggle. This necessarily violent struggle is a struggle for practical
recognition. Where Hegel evoked a “struggle for recognition”, Fanon wants to make sure it is
practical, concrete and real. This bodily struggle is part of Fanon’s theory of violence, which
occupies a central role in his texts, and which has to be replaced in the context of anticolonial
wars of independence. Yet, violence is not the ultimate horizon for Fanon, who tries to show
that recognition processes have to be seen as acts of love, putting an end to violent struggle. In
The struggle for recognition, Axel Honneth underlines the fact that “love is for Hegel the first
degree of reciprocal recognition.”156 In the youth texts of Hegel, the notion of “love” is also
central, as well as in some passages of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The importance Fanon
gives to romantic relationships in Black skin, white masks must lead us to interrogate the role
he gives to love in recognition relations. At the beginning of the chapter entitled “The woman
of colour and the white man”, Fanon writes: “Left far, far behind, the last sequelae of a titanic
struggle carried on against the other have been dissipated. Today I believe in the possibility of
love; that is why I endeavour to trace its imperfections, its perversions.”157 Throughout his
analysis of romantic relationships between blacks and whites, Fanon seeks the possibility of an
authentic love. Aware of the possibility of inauthentic relations that end up in domination by
the reproduction of traditional structures of domination, Fanon tries to assess the conditions
under which an authentic love is possible. Yet, this gives the direction to a more general search
for authentic recognition, if recognition is to be an act of love. He foresees the possibility of a
reconciliation between former masters and former slaves through an act of love, as shown by
the following sentence: “On the battlefield, its four corners marked by the scores of Negroes
hanged by their testicles, a monument is slowly being built that promises to be majestic. And,
at the top of this monument, I can already see a white man and a black man hand in hand”158.
After the struggle happened on the “battlefield”, then the possibility of love arises, as it was
clear at the beginning of the book itself: “Man is motion toward the world and toward his like.
A movement of aggression, which leads to enslavement or to conquest; a movement of love, a

156
Personal translation from “l’amour représente pour Hegel le premier degré de la reconnaissance réciproque”,
A. Honneth, La lutte pour la reconnaissance, p. 162.
157
Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Masks p. 28.
158
Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Masks, p. 173.

115
gift of self, the ultimate stage of what by common accord is called ethical orientation.”159 After
the violent struggle takes place, then a community of love arises, and in that respect, violence
can be seen as the condition of an authentic act of love in the eyes of Fanon. This importance
given to love is like bringing back to Hegel’s first intuition, after introducing what was lacking
in his theorization, the necessity of violence given the necessity of stressing the centrality of
bodies.
Both Fanon and Sartre were influenced by Hegel, and also influenced each other. The
influence of Sartre on Fanon’s work is very well known and acknowledged while Sartre being
influenced by Fanon is less generally evoked. Yet, I believe that the discovery of the racial
question by Sartre is fundamental to his views on recognition. It is present from Notebooks for
the ethics, written in the late 1940s, where a whole section is devoted to “the Black question in
the US” to his introduction of Fanon to a French literary milieu at grips with the Algerian war.
From the Jewish question to the race issues surrounding Blackness and colonialism, Sartre
focused on what are the origins of our current political issues today. While the rest of his peers
were almost exclusively interested in defining socialism and Marxism,160 he engaged with
burning issues that he considered constitutive of his political and moral situation while the
majority of the intelligentsia disregarded them as temporary inconvenience. The only important
matter in those days in intellectual Paris was Marxism. Although Sartre’s commitment with
communism is well-known, and he contributed to this debate (probably more than anyone else),
he did not disregard race and colonial issues, to which he gave a paramount importance.
Looking at our world today, it seems that defining the content of a left-wing policy in the West
is still an object of debate, but Marxism is not anymore. The dominant burning political
questions have changed and they now have to do with cultural differences, Islam, race,
postcolonial racism.161 In other words, our situation, in Western postcolonial societies, is the
direct consequence of a history that we do not enough reflect upon, and Sartre foresaw how
important they were to become, giving them such a theoretical importance that he was led to
pursue Hegel’s work of a dialectical work between theory and reality, and shape the boundaries
of an idea of recognition that is useful for us today. I believe Sartre’s intuitions on recognition

159
Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Masks, p. 28.
160
Louis Althusser, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lefort, etc.
161
I do not include gender and sex-related discriminations and issues here, although they have the same importance
today, because I do believe they are part of another set of theoretical questions, that would imply a further reading
of Simone de Beauvoir. In many respects, Sartre and Beauvoir’s works are part of the same theoretical building.
She tackled gender and sex related issues, but she was also still working with Sartre on his own texts, a work for
which she was not credited, which is a sign of an intellectual masculine domination that was still very much alive
then, even among the most progressive. The other burning political issue not mentioned here is surely environment,
something very few saw coming in the 1960s intellectual Paris.

116
are often overlooked because the issues he dealt with (racism, antisemitism, colonialism) are
often overlooked. This explains why Honneth thinks so little of Sartre’s philosophy, and I
would like to suggest a reading of the latter’s Seeley Lectures now. I hope this reading can help
deconstruct the arbitrary distinction he makes between the French, British and German
traditions which I believe harms a true understanding of all the twentieth century thinkers
evoked by Honneth, and particularly of Sartre. The idea of distinct British and French traditions
in the eighteenth century make sense, and that of a specific and original German one in the
nineteenth century does too. Yet, in a post-revolutionary world turned upside downs by World
Wars and cultural modernity, this distinction bears very little interest in our view, and Sartre’s
active period coincides precisely with a post-World War Two globalized world, where ideas
were circulating more than ever. In many respects, Sartre owes much more to the nineteenth
German tradition than to the pre-revolutionary French one, and, because of that, including him
in a so-called “French tradition” leads to a complete misunderstanding of his theory of
recognition, let alone his philosophy.

The “French tradition” of recognition: a critical reading of Axel Honneth’s

Seeley Lectures

The “Loss of Self”: a supposedly negative view of intersubjectivity

In his Seeley Lectures, Axel Honneth engages into a “historical reflection” on the concept
of recognition, which “has become a crucial element of our political and cultural self-
understanding.”162 To justify this statement, Honneth mentions the central position of the
concept of recognition in the works of three paramount figures of contemporary philosophy:
Rawls, Butler and Taylor. He also stresses that it is an important conceptual tool to which
activists tend to resort to. These precisions can be seen as sociological: Honneth characterises
the social positioning of the concept of recognition. Nonetheless, his intellectual objective is
rather different, and, one might say, broader. Indeed, his Seeley Lectures aim to expose the
theoretical grounds of our understanding of recognition. Honneth proposes an investigation into
European philosophy through the prism of three traditions he deems distinct: the French
tradition, the British tradition and the German tradition.

162
Honneth, A. (2020), Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

117
 The French tradition of recognition is the least interesting for Honneth, who devotes his
explanation to drawing parallels between Rousseau and Sartre: according to Honneth, they are
the only two figures of a French tradition of recognition, which is characterized by a “negative
anthropology.”163 Going through Honneth’s argumentation, the reader can be surprised by what
one could call an asymmetrical treatment of Rousseau and Sartre; the author of the Social
Contract is, indeed, offered a long and balanced assessment of his philosophy. Honneth then
abundantly mentions the French moralists (La Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, La Bruyère) in a
surprising attempt at finding in their texts a theory of recognition. Then, only by the end of the
chapter devoted to this French tradition, does the name of Sartre appear, in an elliptic manner
which leads to the following question: why is the title of the chapter “From Rousseau to Sartre”?
Moreover, what does Sartre have in common with Rousseau, the Swiss thinker, and the French
moralists, apart from their language? I believe that Sartre is more inspired by Hegel and the
German tradition than he is by Rousseau and the French moralists. The reason for that is
historical: Rousseau and the French moralists are pre-revolutionary thinkers. Yet, as this
doctoral thesis intends to show, Sartre’s philosophy is an answer to the French Revolution and
entirely belongs to the post-revolutionary era. In this respect, Sartre remains a Hegelian
philosopher, and the themes and methods of his philosophy are mostly alien to the thinking of
Rousseau and the French moralists. Given how central Honneth is to contemporary political
thought in general, and recognition theories in particular, debunking the myths his analysis
tends to create around Sartre is necessary to a serene and fair assessment of Sartre’s
understanding of recognition. Presenting Honneth’s arguments must be the first step of this
undertaking. The French tradition is “negative” according to Honneth, because when I look for
the recognition of the Other, I run the risk of losing myself. He summarizes this idea as follows:

A kind of “negative anthropology” quickly emerged in the wake of the question concerning
the foundation of the individuals’ position within society, ascribing to such uncertain
subjects the desire to be regarded as “better” or “more” than they truly are. Recognition
therefore had to be viewed as a very risky enterprise in which it could never be clear whether
it really captured the “true” essence of others. My claim is that up to the present day, this
pervasive, implicit suspicion would come to accompany the discourse on recognition in
France like a malignant shadow.164

163
Honneth, A., Recognition, p. 13. Here, Honneth follows the lead of Karlheinz Stierle, considering the
anthropology of French moralists as “negative”.
164
Honneth, A., Recognition, p. 13.

118
 Honneth contextualizes the birth of a French conception of recognition and traces it back to
a pre-revolutionary Paris, when the royal court was animated by a fight for admiration and
prestige. When it became clear to members of the nobility that they were involved in this fight
and that they should strive for a certification of superiority, a concept of recognition started to
make its way to the French thinkers. Honneth writes: “The birth of the theory of recognition in
French thought was the moment members of the nobility began to suspiciously eye each other’s
techniques of showing off and currying favour in the royal court.”165 From this assessment, the
reader can make two important conclusions about Honneth’s perspective. First, a French theory
of recognition was born in a pre-revolutionary competitive social world. Second, “French
thought” supposedly captured this social evolution in words and theoretical claims. The first of
Honneth’s claims can be qualified for one important reason. The French Revolution did not
change everything, but it certainly destroyed the social dynamics at the heart of the royal court
which Honneth believes are at the basis of the French tradition of a theory of recognition. Dating
this tradition back to a pre-revolutionary society is problematic. He actually pinpoints the
existing logics of social prestige and social value as recognized by others. He draws the portrait
of a superficial society where people were aware of the importance of the vision others have of
them. The problem with Honneth’s second claim is that the French moralists can hardly be
referred to as “philosophers” or “political theoreticians”. La Rochefoucauld, for example,
whom Honneth quotes a lot, is an interesting historical figure who tells us a lot about jealousy
and competition at court. Nonetheless, he obviously lacks the theoretical solidity of Rousseau
or Sartre. Honneth acknowledges this intellectual difference. Yet, he still resorts to his writing
in his argument, to the very extent that they supposedly influenced Rousseau: it is how Honneth
draws the idea of a French “negative anthropology” that leads to a negative understanding of
recognition.
Against that, I contend, first, that the influence of the “French moralists” on later French
political philosophy is minimal; second, that contrary to what Honneth claims, there might be
a positive understanding of “recognition” in Rousseau’s works; third, that Sartre belongs to a
post-revolutionary social world, where the idea of “recognition” designates a very different
reality than in the eighteenth century.
Honneth draws on the classical distinction made by Rousseau between “amour-propre” and
“amour de soi”. Both could be translated into “self-love”, yet with two distinct connotations.

165
Honneth, A., Recognition, p. 16.

119
Nonetheless, Honneth goes as far as translating “amour-propre” into “desire for recognition”,
which is a very strong and radical theoretical leap. For the purpose of explaining what “amour-
propre” means when penned by Rousseau, I might recall that Rousseau believes that each one
of us has an “internalized observer”, which makes us want to be superior to our peers. Honneth
writes: “For Rousseau, as soon as an individual feels the judging look of its peers, it will strive
to appear better or more valuable than others”. Because of this, Honneth believes that the
intersubjective relations described by Rousseau are fundamentally flawed, to the point that
Rousseau himself would condemn the desire for recognition, inasmuch as it is nothing less than
a desire for being recognized as better than one truly is. Rousseau is indeed known for his sharp
criticism of society. Yet, and in spite of this, Rousseau also envisaged the possibility of a
positive desire for recognition. By choosing to translate “amour-propre” into “desire for
recognition”, Honneth creates an artificial obstacle to a true understanding of Rousseau. The
“desire for recognition” can be found elsewhere than within the “amour-propre”. For Rousseau,
self-love defined as “amour de soi” is a mere desire for self-preservation, and a natural one.
While “amour-propre” is a pathological creation of a corrupt social state, “amour de soi” is not
only acceptable but also natural and good. In this respect, there is nothing wrong in desiring a
recognition of oneself for what one is, and it is what Rousseau expresses in Emile, or on
education, as underlined by Théophile Pénigaud de Mourgues.166 In this text, Rousseau shows
that Emile knows who he is, and does not need any confirmation from the outside. Yet, because
of positive self-love (amour de soi), he wants others to learn from him who he is. What we
know is good about ourselves, we want others to know and recognize it; but at no point should
we mimic qualities that are not ours in order to be recognized as “better”, because that would
be a pathological, and indeed negative, desire for recognition. This contradicts Honneth’s
conclusions about Rousseau: if there is indeed a negative understanding of recognition for
Rousseau, it is only the pathological one that stems from “amour-propre”, and Rousseau makes
room for another one, stemming from the possibility of a positive self-love, or “amour de soi”.
When others do not recognize my inherent qualities, it is an injustice in the eyes of Rousseau:
social recognition is social justice.
Rousseau’s views on intersubjectivity, and possibily on recognition, are not necessarily
negative, and this is an argument against Honneth’s assessment of the French tradition of
recognition. That negativity inhabits all possibilities for recognition in the texts of La
Rochefoucauld might be true, but for no reason should this peripheral writer’s conclusions be

166
“Amour-propre et opinion dans Rousseau”, in. La reconnaissance avant la reconnaissance, ENS Editions,
2017.

120
extrapolated to the rest of the “French tradition”. In many respects, Rousseau was dissatisfied
with the social logics animating the French royal court and he foresaw what the world would
be once cleared of these pathological dynamics: a post-revolutionary society. With a closer
look, the negative approach to intersubjectivity and the pathological desire for recognition are
concepts suitable for the understanding of the pre-revolutionary court society. Honneth himself
writes that “nowhere else in seventeenth-century Europe was the “representative publicness”
of the feudal nobility so strongly concentrated in the royal court as in France, the place where
La Rochefoucauld wrote his maxims”. Even though Honneth is very aware of the context in
which this negative approach to recognition originated, he does not stress the radical effects of
the French Revolution on social thought. If such a thing as a negative concept of recognition
emerged from the pre-revolutionary French feudal society, then why would one believe that
this understanding of recognition lived on after this very society was dismantled? In a world
where equality has been proclaimed as a cardinal value, the idea of “recognition” cannot but
acquire a new meaning. One could oppose that the basic social logics of “distinction” (to use
Bourdieu’s vocabulary) animating this court society can be seen as an abstract “ideal type” (to
use Weber’s vocabulary) of all intersubjective relations. Yet, I believe they are not enough to
give a full and accurate account of what recognition means in a post-revolutionary society,
especially today.
No other nineteenth century political philosopher is more of a post-revolutionary thinker
than Hegel, and because he re-evaluated intersubjectivity under the light of a newly proclaimed
institutional equality, he was led to create the very concept of recognition. Honneth chooses to
separate the “French” tradition from the “German” one, but I believe that twentieth century
French philosophers – and, especially Sartre – take more from Hegel than from Rousseau, and
belong to a tradition radically different from the one initiated by the French moralists. For this
reason, I believe Honneth’s classification is flawed, which explains why he gives so little room
and so little credit to Sartre in the construction of a theory of recognition.

A biased and incomplete reading of Sartre

There is no such thing as a theory of recognition in Being and nothingness. Nonetheless,

Sartre’s ontology is anchored in ethics. As the conclusive words of Being and Nothingness
show, ontology can only be a preliminary to ethics: “Ontology itself cannot formulate ethical
precepts. It is concerned solely with what is, and cannot possibly derive imperatives from
ontology’s indicatives. It does, however, allows us to catch a glimpse of what sort of ethics will

121
assume its responsibilities when confronted with a human reality in situation.”167 In those final
lines of Being and Nothingness, the ethical perspective of Sartre’s philosophy is clear. By virtue
of its nature and purpose, ontology cannot make normative claims. It makes indicative
propositions, and therefore gives data on the nature of things. As such, it provides the frame in
which those normative claims can be made: from the knowledge of how humans are, one can
induce how humans should behave. Ontology gives a future ethics its colour. Unfortunately,
Sartre’s systematised work of ethics was never formalized for publication, and we are left with
Notebooks for an Ethics, a long manuscript lacking organization but manifesting intuitions that
can be corroborated by his published political texts – as a section of this chapter, devoted to
showing the historical anchorage of a Sartrean theory of recognition, has shown.
Surprisingly, Honneth purely and simply dismisses the complexity and the richness of
Sartre’s intellectual production, only to take Being and Nothingness as a summary of his
thinking. In his published Seeley Lectures,168 Honneth mentions Sartre with a striking brevity,
only to assert that the French phenomenologist, “like Rousseau, takes an extremely dark view
of our dependence on others.”169 According to Honneth, the main difference between Sartre
and Rousseau would be that the Genevan philosopher gave in to a naïve view that led him to
believe he could objectively separate what is natural from what is social. Honneth underlines
that, on the contrary, Sartre, because he was so influenced by phenomenology, proposes an
investigation into intersubjectivity from the point of view of consciousness, which helps him to
avoid Rousseau’s imperfect approach. Honneth claims that, apart from this methodological
divergence, Rousseau and Sartre, on the topic of recognition, have similar views. In an attempt
to justify this statement, Honneth presents Sartre’s fundamental ontology of the for-itself and
the in-itself. He follows Sartre’s argument step by step, until he mentions, to the reader’s
surprise, “Part III of his book”170. The way Honneth phrases his analysis is curious to a reader
familiar with Sartre’s philosophy. The abundance of Sartre’s writings makes it difficult for
anyone to pinpoint one book which would be his book. The title, Being and Nothingness, is not
even mentioned in the body of the text, and the reader can only find it in a brief footnote. Not
only does Honneth give a very short account of the existential sum, but he also suggests that
Sartre’s philosophy can be reduced to his first book. His misconception of Sartre’s philosophy
goes as far as leading him to mention a supposedly Sartrean concept of “being-with-others”,

167
Being and Nothingness, p. 645.
168
Honneth, A., Recognition.
169
Honneth, A., Recognition, p. 41.
170
Honneth, A., Recognition, p. 43.

122
designating intersubjectivity. An attentive reader can only stress it as an unfortunate translation
error. To designate the ontological area of intersubjectivity, Sartre phrased the concept of être-
pour-autrui, which Hazel E. Barnes rightly articulated as “being-for-others”. Indeed, “being-
with-others” would be more apt for translating Heidegger’s Mitsein. This translation error leads
Honneth to suggest that Sartre used Heidegger’s concepts without admitting it, stealing the
nerve of his philosophy. One can only hope that Honneth’s translation error is fortuitous, insofar
as it leads him to take a strong historical and intellectual leap: emptying Sartre’s philosophy
from its original content. Only two things can help qualify this superficial view: first, Sartre
always recognized how indebted to both Heidegger and Husserl he was, and, second, only a
close reading of his political texts (on the “Jewish question”, Blackness, colonialism, etc.) and
Notebooks for an ethics can help to understand the ethical meaning of Being and nothingness.
Honneth therefore takes Being and nothingness for a full and definitive account of Sartre’s
philosophy. He presents Sartre’s description of the encounter of the Other through the look: for
Sartre, the subject takes two things into account while it is looked at – or viewed, as Honneth
inadequately translates regardé. First, the subject is a for-itself among others, hence it is free;
second, the subject is limited by the look of the Other. Honneth therefore claims that “Sartre
concludes that being observed or spoken to necessarily entails both recognition and reification,
the affirmation of our own “being-for-others” and the failure to recognize it as such”171. Indeed,
Sartre describes a subject who is fixed and limited by the look of the Other. Yet, this ontological
description cannot be taken for the substance of Sartre’s views on intersubjectivity, let alone on
recognition. Indeed, at the beginning of this section, I recalled that Sartre sees the ontology of
Being and Nothingness as a necessary first step towards a broader ethical philosophy. The
description of intersubjectivity from an ontological point of view must be completed by the
description of intersubjectivity from an ethical point of view. Furthermore, Sartre does not
mention the word recognition in Being and Nothingness. Honneth suggests that Sartre’s concept
of recognition can be understood as follows: I recognize my own freedom, insofar as I recognize
myself as a for-itself looked-at by the Other. This involves a strictly subjective nature of
recognition: for Honneth, Sartre’s recognition is a relation I have with myself.
In Honneth’s opinion, it is as far as Sartre went on the topic of recognition. Indeed, it is
difficult to blame Honneth if Being and nothingness is the only text he grounds his analysis on.
Not only does this lead him to misunderstand Sartre’s recognition as a negative, but it also leads
him to include Sartre in a “French tradition” difficult to define. Honneth’s attempt at giving

171
Honneth, A., Recognition, p. 45.

123
account of a “French tradition” of recognition can only be approximative, because the thinkers
he is interested in have very little in common. This appears even more clearly when he mentions
the “post-structuralist” thinkers, especially Althusser and Lacan, whose proximity to Sartre is
more than dubious. In his Seeley Lectures, he insists on affirming that Sartre and Althusser
have in common with Rousseau to view recognition as a “constitutive dependence primarily as
a threat to our “authentic” relationship-to-self”172. Honneth himself claims that his point is “to
distill the most general and shared features of recognition from all the culturally specific
shadings in the characterization of our dependence on others, thus arriving at the three different
current interpretations of recognition.”173
Establishing the existence of three different traditions of recognition is an intellectual
undertaking one can only praise, as it helps to bring clarity to the topic. Nonetheless, the
problem with Honneth’s characterisations is that they do not follow conceptual similarities, but
they rely on national belongings. This leads Honneth to include Sartre in a tradition alien to his
thought, and amounts to a profound misunderstanding of his philosophy. Honneth’s accounts
of the British and the German traditions are convincing, but his analysis of the French tradition
is more difficult to grasp and agree with.
In the characterisation of this French tradition, Honneth gives a central importance to
Rousseau. I hope to have shown that Honneth’s analysis are short-sighted insofar as there is a
possibility for a positive intersubjective encounter for Rousseau. More importantly, I disagree
with the idea that the premises of a modern theory of recognition can be found in Rousseau’s
philosophy. As a matter of fact, I claim that, before the French Revolution, it is not possible to
conceive of such a concept, which only starts with Hegel – which does not surprise the reader
familiar with the triggering role played by the French Revolution in Hegel’s philosophy. Sartre
belongs to this tradition, which Honneth calls the “German tradition”. Rousseau is a pre-
revolutionary political thinker while Sartre is a twentieth century phenomenologist. As such,
their views on intersubjective encounters can hardly be compared. Sartre is influenced by a
Hegelian understanding of recognition. There is something fundamentally modern in Hegel and
Sartre’s views, modern because post-revolutionary. In regards to this tradition, Rousseau’s
views, as interesting as they are historically, belong to a completely different social world and
cannot teach us much about our contemporary social world. The concept of recognition can
only be useful to us if it is anchored in a social and political reality close to ours.

172
Honneth, A., Recognition, p. 134.
173
Honneth, A., Recognition, p. 138.

124
 I argue that Honneth is missing this necessary aspect of a useful concept of recognition. It
leads him to dismiss the role that the French Revolution and French colonialism both played in
changing how an idea of recognition in a French context must be understood.

Post-revolutionary France, colour-blindness and recognition

In his Seeley Lectures, Honneth makes the following claim: “the birth of the theory of
recognition in French thought was the moment members of the nobility began suspiciously to
eye each other’s techniques of showing off and currying favor in the royal court.”174 This
statement is partially true, under the condition that the recognition mentioned here is clearly
distinguished from the recognition one can hope to conceptualize in the early twenty-first
century. Indeed, the kind of recognition Honneth alludes to has nothing to do with the one
suggested by Sartre, which could be a useful tool for reflecting on postcolonial multicultural
societies. This is worth noting because I contend that the confusion surrounding Honneth’s
analyses of the diverse understandings of recognition is a common confusion; it contributes to
the relatively low acceptability of the concept of recognition in a French context. Recognition
understood as a concept stemming from pre-revolutionary royal court logics brings one back to
a time before the elaboration of the “sacred” principles of the Republic; in this respect, it can
explain the French resistance to such a concept. Going further, it can even explain the reasons
for the strength of colour-blind Republicanism.
Since the French Revolution has taken place, the idea of universalism has structured the
way France sees itself. Because the Republic has a vocation to universality, it does not see race
or colour: French citizens are not White, Black, Arab or Asian, they are French and only French.
This French specificity has often been pinpointed by English-speaking journalists, who
regularly express their surprise in the face of such a curiosity.175 This confusing rhetoric has
also been analysed as a tool for maintaining a racist status quo by social scientists.176 In the
published version of the first important conference held in France about the concept of
whiteness – in 2018 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) – Mathilde
Cohen and Sarah Mazouz show that French colour-blindness is always proclaimed in reference

174
Honneth, A., Recognition, p. 16.
175
For instance, the reader can look at Donadio, R. (2019), “France Is Officially Color-Blind. Reality Isn’t”, in.
The Atlantic; or “Racism tests France’s colour-blind model”, in. The Economist, Jan. 14th 2021.
176
Simon, P. (2019), “L’antiracisme et la race: colorblindness et privilège blanc”, in. Les Possibles, No. 21.

125
to the universality of Republican principles.177 From this strange association, they argue that
the Universal Republic is a White Republic. I want to invite the reader to go a bit further in
analysing the intellectual reasons for this claim to universality. In postrevolutionary France, if
a citizen refuses the universal and abstract identity imposed on him, he/she is surrounded with
the following suspicion: he/she wants to be different, hence he/she is a threat to equality. As I
argue in the fourth and last chapter of this thesis, French republican principles can be seen as
set of aesthetic points of view on the social world. Threatening universality with one’s objective
difference amounts to challenge this aesthetic economy. I will develop this point further but I
must now show how the shadow of pre-revolutionary values prevent contemporary French
society from acknowledging denials of recognition, as well as the possibility of recognition.
For the reasons afore-mentioned, a discourse on dignity or respect often inspires defiance
in post-revolutionary France. I argue that this defiance stems from the fact that these values are
associated with pre-revolutionary values of the nobility. The French word for nobility is
noblesse. It can be used in expressions such as noblesse d’âme, which can be literally translated
as nobility of the soul, and which means “goodness or greatness of the soul”. As such, the French
word noblesse presents a semantic ambiguity. It can be interpreted as an illegitimate attempt at
claiming a greatness one does not have and cannot have, in a re-enactment of the logics of social
distinction of the royal court, which Honneth described. Post-revolutionary France is a place
where equality cannot suffer superiority.
It is in this cultural configuration that one can understand the contemporary French
reluctance to hear the calls for “respect” or “dignity” emanating from the youth of African
descent. These calls are real, even though I must admit it is difficult to target a specific example
of these calls and demands. There two main reasons for this: first, the lack of political
organisation of this youth; second, the fact that their desires and wishes is politically captured
and voiced by left-wing parties that are still attached to Republican universalism.178 Calls for
respect and dignity are present in popular culture (especially among musicians, and stand-up
artists179) but they rarely make it to the heart of academic and intellectual reflection. When

177
Mazouz, S. (2017), La République et ses autres, Lyon: ENS Lyon ; Cohen, M. and Mazouz, S. (2021), “A
White Republic? Whites and Whiteness in France”, in. French Politics, Culture & Society, New York, The
Institute for French Studies at New York.
178
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of left-wing party France insoumise, who obtained a significantly positive score
at the 2017 presidential elections, is famously attached to Republican universalism, so much that analysts describe
the rise of race issues within his party as the source of internal tensions.
179
The reader can refer to the interview French black comedian Fary gave to Christiane Amanpour for CNN in
June 2020, after antiracist demonstrations agitated France for a few weeks. Fary said: “They will never respect us,
at least not in my lifetime.” The present thesis is theoretical and, as such, not based on empirical research, but I

126
French citizens of African descent ask for “respect”, their claims are often discredited as archaic
in public opinion; there should be no specific “respect” given to them, because all citizens are
equal under the banner of the Republic.180 This is a side-effect of the political myth of colour-
blindness. More than the blatant racism hidden behind colour-blindness,181 the taboo
surrounding ideas of respect and dignity in France explains why calls for respect can be
dismissed. Honneth underlines that there is such a thing as a recognition concept that originated
from pre-revolutionary royal court social logics; in post-revolutionary France, this pre-
revolutionary stigma is a stain on recognition. Honneth falls into this trap when he claims that
the royal court was the premise of a French theory of recognition.
I argue that there is another French tradition of a recognition. Honneth makes a mistake due
to historical short-sightedness when he conflates Sartre’s views on recognition to the pre-
revolutionary idea of recognition. This mistake is grounded in a strange dismissal of the French
Revolution as transformative event, but also comes from Honneth’s own blindness to post-
colonial themes. For a contemporary thinker of recognition, Honneth is surprisingly blind to
themes that are central to recognition theories, namely post-colonial, race, and gender issues.
In his account of a French theory of recognition, Honneth fails to mention this huge part of the
modern history of France; this partly explains why he misunderstands Sartre’s views. Indeed,
as discussed in the previous sections of the present chapter, Sartre’s theory of recognition can
only be understood in relation to its historical anchorage in antiracist and anticolonial fights.
Although Honneth misses the full reach of Sartre’s philosophy, his analysis helps to
thematise the reasons for French colour-blindness. Indeed, there is something of an old quarrel
between the nobility and republicanism that haunts the French debates around recognition. This
echoes my analysis of the first chapter, devoted to theoretical aftermath of the French
Revolution. By opening up a space for positivism to expand, the French Revolution also gave
way to a cognitive approach of citizens from the part of political leaders. A Sartrean
understanding of recognition, insofar as it is a driving force of Sartre’s criticism of positivism,
opposes an ethical understanding of others (hence, of citizens) to this cognitive approach
embedded in the faith in scientific explanation. It is the starting point of Sartre’s criticism of
positivism.

believe this statement gives an idea of the diffused feelings of not being respected among the youth of African
descent in France.
180
Mansouri, M. (2013), Révoltes postcoloniales au cœur de l’Hexagone.
181
Cohen, M. and Mazouz, S. (2021), “A White Republic? Whites and Whiteness in France”.

127
Recognition and cognition: the sketch for a criticism of positivist knowledge

Although this section will not pursue a further analysis of Honneth’s error, one element of
Honneth’s assessment Sartre’s theory of recognition is useful for introducing its theme; Sartre’s
theory of recognition would be purely “cognitive”. Disregarding the ethical content of Sartre’s
ontology, Honneth claims that recognition in a French context tends to be more cognitive than
normative, and he hastily includes Sartre in this tradition. From this perspective, recognizing
someone means rationally agreeing on who he/she is, rather than recognizing his/her worth or,
in Sartre’s words, “value”. Honneth underlines that the French word for knowledge
(connaissance) forms part of the French word for recognition (reconnaissance). This would
explain why the French meaning of recognition is mostly cognitive. I argue that this semantic
remark proves nothing. Nonetheless, it provides with a perfect occasion for starting an inquiry
into the matter, which is of paramount importance for showing how a Sartrean theory of
recognition is the first step of a criticism of positivism.
Pursuing this perspective leads to analyse the outreach of Sartre’s ethics, namely Notebooks
for an ethics. Written after the publication of Being and Nothingness, it was published only
after Sartre’s death, thanks to the help of Sartre’s legal heir, Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre. As
mentioned earlier in this thesis, the conclusion of Being and nothingness expressed the need for
a work in ethics, which would be the natural follow-up to Sartre’s ontology. This work became
Notebooks for an ethics and remained unpublished, hence disorganized (the eight-hundred
pages are like a daily philosophical diary with no section and no chapter). From Sartre’s
philosophical perspective, ethics became more and more connected to politics while the world
was changing under his eyes. Sartre is said to have voiced his regret of not having joined the
Resistance during World War Two. While the world was collapsing around him, Sartre
remained focused on his philosophical ambitions and gave his energy to the writing of Being
and Nothingness. He regretted this, and the eagerness to not repeat the mistakes of his past
might explain why he did not pursue Notebooks for an ethics until publication; the world was
calling him. Sartre was looking for an ethics that could be anchored in history rather than based
solely on philosophical abstraction. In the preface of Vérité et existence, Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre
recalls Sartre’s words: “I am looking for the ethics of today… I am trying to elucidate the choice
a man can make for himself and for the world in 1948.”182 Sartre did not conceive of an inquiry
into ethics without a connection to the present times. This necessity for a historically grounded

182
Personal translation for “Je cherche donc la morale d’aujourd’hui... J’essaie d’élucider le choix qu’un homme
peut faire de soi-même et du monde en 1948”. Sartre, Vérité et existence, p. 1.

128
ethics might explain why he left his manuscript of Notebooks for an ethics unpublished. At the
time of his writing, Sartre’s interest into politics was growing. In 1945, he founded Les Temps
Modernes, along with Simone de Beauvoir. From then, he was a central actor of French public
life, a role he never gave up, until he contributed to the creation of the still successful newspaper
Libération, in 1973. His involvement with politics culminated with the anticolonial fight, and I
have shown earlier in this chapter how a Sartrean theory of recognition must be understood as
being historically informed. From this quick historical panorama, I can claim that Notebooks
for an ethics did not remain unpublished because Sartre did not think of them as faithful to his
thinking. If that had been the case, Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre would not have published them. On
the contrary, Sartre’s legal heir mentioned in her preface that Sartre saw the Notebooks as a
project bursting with philosophical intuitions that he hoped to see developed by future readers.
This is what I hope to do with in this section.
I contend that, before the Critique was even conceived, there was already the premise of a
program for a criticism of positivist science applied to human existence. The reason why I
devoted this entire chapter to the genesis of the idea of recognition is because I believe this
premises lies in the very notion of recognition. Understanding why implies to show the three
following propositions: (1) a Sartrean recognition is a recognition of the Other’s freedom in
history, (2) recognition is connected with an understanding of the other’s freedom and its limits,
(3) even though the notion of understanding includes a cognitive dimension, it is, first and
foremost, the spontaneous emanation of a “non-knowledge” of the Other.

Recognition and freedom

In Notebooks for an ethics, Sartre often expressed his views through sharp and concise
remarks merely resembling sentences, like the following: “more profound recognition and
reciprocal understanding of freedoms (dimension B.N. is lacking).”183 From this quote, it seems
like Sartre judged the flaws of his precedent book, Being and Nothingness, by underlining the
dimension it lacked. Actually, he answered in the Notebooks the criticism Honneth expressed
more than half of a century later – had Honneth taken the time to pay attention to the Notebooks,
he would not deem Sartre’s theory of intersubjectivity negative so hastily. Sartre was aware of
the fact that this could be an interpretation of his philosophy, and in the Notebooks, he seemed
determined to address this issue. Instead of a threat, the encounter with the other could be the

183
Personal translation for “reconnaissance plus profonde et compréhension réciproque des libertés (dimension
qui manque dans l’E.N.)”, Cahiers pour une morale, p. 430.

129
occasion for understanding each other’s freedoms. When evoking this possibility, Sartre
directly used the word reconnaissance (recognition).
There is a Sartrean possibility for a positive intersubjective encounter. For understanding
how, resorting to history is necessary. Sartre’s ontology is ethical, as I have shown, but the
ethical premises of Being and Nothingness do not bloom to their full potential until Sartre
introduces the reality of historical matter in the Notebooks. The Other can be a source of
alienation insofar as the Other, by looking at me, limits my possibilities and my freedom.
Nonetheless, there can be a way out of this negative circle. In the Notebooks, Sartre wrote:
“Thus, the human moment, the moment of ethics, is that of Apocalypse, that is to say of the
liberation of oneself and of the other in a reciprocal recognition.”184 This choice of words is
surprising. An explicit theological reference, the word Apocalypse also stands for a metaphor
for the Hegelian idea of the “end of History”, which Sartre also mentioned in the same text.
Indeed, Sartre envisaged the possibility of recognition as an “end of history”. Far from
designating the effective end of history like Fukuyama did many years later, this “end of
history” is metaphorical: “the end of History is the birth of Ethics”185. Later he wrote: “the end
of History is like disarmament: everyone waits for the other to start”186. The choice of the word
“disarmament” is ironical in a Cold War context, yet it says something very profound about the
nature of ethics according to Sartre: accepting to leave the sphere of conflict, even though
conflict is the natural state of intersubjective relations. In other words: yes, my possibilities are
fixed and limited by the Other’s look, and yes, we mutually alienate each other – but there is a
way out of it in life and human praxis throughout history. Freedom as a tool for emancipation
is possible and recognition is the key. There is a dependence on the Other, but it is not a negative
one: intersubjectivity can be positive insofar as it allows space for mutual recognition, which is
the only path towards emancipation and freedom.
As abstract as these descriptions are, it is difficult not to conceive of this theoretical and
conceptual apparatus as the very prism through which Sartre later understood anticolonial and
antiracist fights (as I recalled, Sartre started working on the Notebooks in 1948, and got involved
in active anticolonialism about a decade later). Sartre’s almost systematised theory of
recognition in the Notebooks is very close to the account Fanon gave of recognition in Black
skins, white masks, which sounds like a political program for a postcolonial world. Very much

184
Personal translation for “Ainsi, le moment humain, le moment de la morale est celui de l’Apocalypse, c’est-à-
dire de la libération de soi-même et d’autrui dans une reconnaissance réciproque”, Cahiers, p. 430.
185
Personal translation for “La fin de l’histoire, ce serait l’avènement de la Morale”, Cahiers, p. 95.
186
Personal translation for “Il en est de la fin de l’Histoire comme du désarmement : chacun attend que l’autre
commence”, Cahiers, p. 96.

130
anchored in the debates agitating the 1950s, Sartre’s views can be seen as a reactivation of
Hegel’s intuitions, adapted to Sartre’s times. It truly was the “ethics of today” that he aimed at
producing.
If freedom is the end and purpose of mutual recognition, Sartre implied that freedom itself
was the stake of recognition. In the process of recognition, I recognise the other’s freedom while
he/she recognises mine. Nonetheless, my previous inquiry into subjectivity taught us that
subjectivity is always pierced and influenced by external forces. In this respect, at the heart of
Sartre’s theory of recognition, there is a freedom “in situation”, rather than an abstract and
disembodied freedom. In recognising the other’s freedom, I must understand how his/her
freedom is affected by society, history and culture. In this respect, recognising someone means
knowing him/her. Therefore, Honneth’s misled judgement about a supposedly strictly
“cognitive” aspect of Sartre’s theory recognition can be excused. Nonetheless, the notion of
understanding [compréhension], helps to explain the nature of this knowledge: it is a
knowledge that is a non-knowledge. As such, the understanding at the heart of the process of
recognition helps to see that the concept of recognition is the premise of a criticism of positivist
knowledge for Sartre.

The understanding

Understanding is the implicit basis for any true recognition. It is interesting insofar as it
helps to pinpoint the epistemic dimension of a Sartrean recognition. In fact, I argue that Sartre’s
theory of recognition is part of a broader theory of knowledge of the social world (which is a
theory of non-knowledge of subjectivities).
Recognizing someone means recognizing their freedom insofar as it is shaped by
determinist forces (like the “collective past” is, as I showed in my first chapter). It means
understanding the dialectic between their own freedom to create their goals on the one hand
and the way history and culture determine limit this very freedom on the other. Recognizing
someone means understanding what makes them exist. A historical example taken from the
questions from which this thesis stems can help understand what it means. If Sartre aimed at
finding an ethics for his days, we should be looking for an ethics for ours, and try and understand
where his texts lead us today, in post-colonial societies, especially in a France that sees itself
as “post-racist” while it is not. The notions of “understanding”, “the demand” (l’exigence) and
“the call” (l’appel), developed in the Notebooks, are particularly interesting for that.

131
 Sartre defines the “demand” as something addressed to the Other insofar as the Other is a
pure freedom, without understanding it as a freedom in situation.187 He then defines the “call”
as a specific type of “demand” that takes into consideration the nature of the freedom involved,
which is a “freedom in situation.”188 In an intersubjective encounter, both the demand and the
call can possibly emerge. Yet, only the “call” amounts to asking a true recognition, inasmuch
as it relies on the mutual understanding of each other’s situational freedom.
In the course of my second chapter, I developed, after Sartre, the idea of a “freedom in
situation”. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre conceptualizes the notion of “situation” as the
ensemble of external things (personal history, psychology, collective past, social situation, etc.)
weighing on one’s freedom. With this concept, he aimed to balance his statement of radical
freedom: for Sartre, we are both radically free and radically determined. The idea of a “freedom
in situation” designates this paradoxical nature human subjectivity. In this respect, it is only if
I fully understand how the Other is situated that a true recognition can happen. The “call” is
thus seen by Sartre as the necessary historical step for getting out of the original conflict
between consciences exposed in Being and nothingness.189 There can be a reciprocity of calls:
I call for the recognition of my situated freedom, while the Other calls for the recognition of
his/her situation freedom. In this case, the call is a pure gift according to Sartre, insofar as it is
motivated by no personal interest: it is a “free call”. Because it is free from personal motive, it
is ethical. Sartre offers us the possibility for a true dynamic of recognition.
In this dynamic, there are several steps, and the call is one of them. This is why I chose to
start this section by introducing this concept. The step following the call is that of the
understanding. In the Notebooks, Sartre wrote: “in fact, concretely recognizing the freedom of
the other is to recognize it in its own ends, in the difficulties it faces, in its finitude; it is
understanding it.”190 The object of this understanding is clear: one must understand the
limitations imposed on the Other’s freedom. In the dynamic of mutual recognition, I call for
the recognition of my situated freedom, which means that I call for the Other to recognise both
my freedom as a radical freedom, and the objective limitations that the social, cultural and
historical exteriority oppose to this radical freedom. While I make this call, the other makes the

187
“L’exigence s’adresse à l’autre comme pure liberté sans tenir compte de ce qu’il est liberté en situation”,
Cahiers, p. 225.
188
“L’appel est demande par quelqu’un à quelqu’un d’autre de quelque chose au nom de quelque chose. Sa
structure est donc du type de l’exigence. Seulement ici commencent les différences : l’appel est reconnaissance
d’une liberté personnelle en situation par une liberté personnelle en situation”, Cahiers, p. 285.
189
“Il y a d’abord le refus de considérer le conflit originel des libertés par le regard comme impossible à dépasser”,
Cahiers, p. 293.
190
Personal translation for “en réalité reconnaître concrètement la liberté de l’autre c’est la reconnaître dans ses
fins propres, dans les difficultés qu’elle éprouve, dans sa finitude, c’est la comprendre”, Cahiers, p. 294.

132
same call. Follows a mutual understanding, which is, ideally, the ability to understand and
accept the contradictory nature of subjectivity: I accept that I am both radically free and
radically determined, while at the same time I understand that the other is similarly radically
free and radically determined. This is the Sartrean dynamic of recognition, which leads to the
historical realisation of ethics.
These reflections are abstract. In the Notebooks, Sartre’s analysis are even more abstract.
Yet, historical examples can help to explain them. An interesting contemporary example for
this is the structuration of the antiracist movements and the Black Lives matter movement in
the United States, in the Spring 2020. As a white person, recognizing a black person means
recognizing his/her freedom insofar as it is limited by a social and historical context. I recognize
the value – to use another of Sartre’s concepts – of his/her life and, in doing so, I understand
that his/her freedom is limited in ways that mine is not (e.g. the risk of racist physical assault,
or murder, because of the stigma that a long history of oppression has associated with the colour
of their skin). Yet, my understanding of this person’s freedom is not a strictly cognitive
understanding. A strictly cognitive understanding would not be enough to fully understand the
extent of the oppression this person lives under. A clearer formulation of this position is given
by Sartre in Search for a Method. In this text, Sartre is occupied with the defence of an
existentialist Marxism which would take all dimensions of life into account. Using the claims
of Kierkegaard for preserving the rights of subjectivity, Sartre explicitly opposes subjectivity
to “intellectual knowing”: “Kierkegaardian existence is the work of our inner life – resistances
overcome and perpetually reborn, efforts perpetually renewed, despairs surmounted,
provisional failures and precarious victories – and this work is directly opposed to intellectual
knowing.”191
Reading statistics on the probability that a black person has to be discriminated against
while looking for a job, or while simply walking on the streets, will never give me a full account
of the emotionally charged feeling of oppression that limits their freedom from an existential
point of view. This is what this political slogan means: “I understand that I will never
understand, however I stand in solidarity”. Over the Spring 2020, this sentence flourished in
activists’ movements, becoming a slogan for white people trying to act as what we now call
allies to the cause of BLM. In many well-informed and expert eyes, this sentence turned into a
social media post was laughable because it supposedly stood as an empty fashion trend. On the
contrary, I contend that it bears a very profound dimension that seizes the meaning of Sartre’s

191
Search for a Method, p. 12.

133
idea of understanding the other. In fact, understanding the other means to recognize that there
are things about him/her that I simply cannot understand, and this is the very truth encapsulated
in this the slogan.
This is what Sartre does when he opposes the Erlebnis (the lived experience, in the flesh)
to the coldness of scientific knowledge. In the Notebooks, he asserts that there are
“incomprehensible situations”192 and he gives a list of examples, including the situation of the
soldier for the civilian or that of the tuberculous for the healthy man. Sartre pinpoints the
impossibility to fully understand the situation of pain or oppression the Other has to face if I
never lived it. Therefore I must recognize my own non-knowledge, and trust the Other. This
non-knowledge is itself an understanding of the Other, which can paradoxically be deemed a
non-understanding; this is exactly what the BLM slogan means: “I understand that I will never
understand.”
This shows that political action and political change do not necessarily lie in the scientific
“knowledge” of the human, social and political sciences. When it comes to issues related to
racial and/or colonial oppression, understanding the existential situation of the Other is the key.
I hope to have given a glimpse of the reality Sartre described with the short evocation of the
American Black Lives Matter movement. In many respects, Sartre foresaw the evolutions that
a postcolonial world would go through (post-slavery in the case of the US). In fact, seeing
Sartre’s complex theory of recognition unfold almost 70 years later in the vocabulary of
American activism is another proof of the relevance of Sartre’s political philosophy for our
times.
Sartre’s concept of recognition is important for the purpose of this thesis for two main
reasons. First, and as just discussed, it is an accurate and relevant concept for reflecting on our
postcolonial world, which helps to follow the thread of a reflection on the French-Algerian
situation, that I started to weave in the introduction of this thesis. Second, Sartre’s concept of
recognition is interesting because it can be understood aesthetically. Ethical concept par
excellence, recognition can also be seen as aesthetic and, as such, be part of the answer I contend
Sartre gave to the conflictual intellectual history born with the French Revolution.

192
Personal translation for “situations incompréhensibles”, Cahiers, p. 296.

134
 Chapter 4. Sartre’s solution to the post-
revolutionary theoretical conflicts: the
reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism.

In late August 2021, historian and sociologist Pierre Rosanvallon published a book in which
he calls for a change of paradigm in the way we envisage the social world. Right at the start of
the French presidential campaign, his book, Les épreuves de la vie, has been given to several
declared candidates who were asked to give their opinions on this theoretical and political
proposition in the columns of Le Monde. The professor at the Collège de France believes that
the knowledge of social structures, statistics, data and the “objective interests” of citizens is not
enough anymore for whoever pretends to be in government. The mention of objective interests
is a direct reference to Marxism while that of statistics and data refers to positivist social
sciences. Formulating the idea of épreuve – which can be translated as a test or a hardship –
Rosanvallon claims that policy-making should be inspired by the understanding of the different
tests citizens go through all along their lives, including experiences of disdain and humiliation,
which can be understood as denials of recognition, following the theoretical framework of my
previous chapter.
Rosanvallon seems to be making a synthesis of the evolutions of the past two decades,
politically and theoretically. Introducing the findings of recognition theory into his rather
traditional French political thought, he calls for an epistemic turn, from the objective social
world, to the subjective experience of it. The reasons for this choice are not ethical but properly
epistemic: he presents this shift as a better way to know society, after the series of mutations
that affected society over the past few decades (from the demise of workers’ unions to the
growing multicultural aspects of French society). Usually seen as a rather consensual thinker,
close to governments, and far from being on the radical side of the political spectrum,
Rosanvallon introduces some elements of recognition theory and critical theory into classic
political thought. With him, the idea of paying attention to subjectivity enters a rather
mainstream area of thinking and the political debate itself. Published as I bring a final point to
this doctoral thesis, I welcome it as a confirmation of the intuitions leading my work, but I do
not pretend to go further into Rosanvallon’s analysis. Doing so would prevent my thesis from
exhibiting its central argument, which has more to do with Sartre and the reconstitution of a
forgotten intellectual history.

135
 With the help of Sartre, I hope to give more ground, historically and theoretically, to the
idea that subjectivity should be at the center of political thought’s reflections on certain topics,
specifically on that of colonization and its aftermath, in the case of the French-Algerian
situation. Before Rosanvallon called for a distance from Marxist superstructures and positivist
statistics, Sartre put subjectivity at the center of political reflections. I have shown what links
can be established between subjectivity and history (or, in my conceptual framework, collective
past) in the second chapter of this work. I have shown what it means for social relations in the
third chapter, through the construction of a Sartrean theory of recognition from the clues Sartre
left us with. Going back to the questions formulated in the first chapter is now necessary. It will
help to draw the consequences of Sartre’s philosophy for the history of political knowledge in
a French context. By introducing subjectivity at the heart of his political reflections, Sartre
introduced existentialism at the heart of Marxism, or, rather, in his own terms, he found
existentialism already lying at the heart of Marxism.
At the beginning of this inquiry, I analysed the French Revolution as a disruptive moment
for human thought, which contributed to create a stigma around aesthetic statements on the
social and political world. I showed that the growing conflict between ethics and aesthetics is
what paved the way for positivism to deploy its strength and gain theoretical credit. At the end
of my third chapter, and after showing the existence of a Sartrean theory of recognition, I
formulated the following hypothesis: recognition is not only ethical, it is also aesthetic. In order
to assess this hypothesis more clearly and to determine whether recognition can be seen as a
connecting link between aesthetics and ethics, I must now engage into an analysis of aesthetics.
This concept must be defined more clearly, in itself, insofar as it is applied to politics, but also
and more specifically in its Sartrean meaning. This chapter ultimately aims at providing with a
definition of aesthetics applicable to politics. Policy-making must emancipate from the
narrative stating that solely statistics and empirical data on the social and political reality should
provide content for policy-making. On the contrary, policy-making should strive for creating
this very reality, and this is the deep meaning of Sartre’s praxis, understood as political
creativity. My claim is not that political philosophy should replace political science, but rather
that it should help to give meaning to the results of political science. The stake here is not to
provoke an ideological shift, but rather to give our values a constantly renewed meaning that
can help shape policies or influence them (always keeping the social questions raised by the
French-Algerian situation at the heart of my reflections).
Behind meaning, there is value, hence there is beauty. These concepts, along with the idea
of metaphysics, are persona non grata in contemporary political practice and political thought

136
because they supposedly bear the ghosts of pre-rational times. Yet, what we consider rational
today is a restricted and narrow field of what is actually rational. The concept of reason itself
is subject to interpretation, and with the idea of a “dialectical reason”, Sartre offers a re-thinking
of what is rational for post-revolutionary and post-transcendence times. The Sartrean key
concept for understanding this reorganization of knowledge through a dialectical reason is
totalization, because all meaning is always referred to a greater set of political connections, a
totalized entity.
These matters belong to the field of fundamental philosophy (at least in a “continental”
context), and approaching them within the frame of a political thought thesis bears risks. Fully
understanding and giving account of a philosophical text as rich and complex as Sartre’s
Critique would involve to follow the method of linear and step-by-step textual commentary.
Given the size of the text, it would require a doctoral thesis in itself (and actually probably more
than this). This is why I do not claim to give a thorough account of the Critique. Rather, I intend
to seize Sartre’s argument of the necessity to reconcile existentialism and Marxism. From this,
I hope to show how this reconciliation answers the problems I thematized all along this thesis.
Doing so requires to start with an assessment of the role of aesthetics in Sartre’s philosophy,
independently from my research questions.

Sartre and aesthetics

In this section, I hope to challenge two common ideas. The first one is a prejudice on
aesthetics, independent from Sartre: aesthetics supposedly is a domain of philosophy
exclusively dedicated to the study of art and artistic beauty. I want to show that, on the contrary,
aesthetics exists outside of art, and, as such, can be a prism of understanding for the political
world. The second prejudice that I hope to tackle stems directly from the first one: it is the idea
that Sartre’s aesthetic views are limited to his thoughts on literature, and can be reconstructed
from his texts on the matter. I want to show that Sartre’s thought of reconciliation and
totalization is backed by a strongly aesthetic dimension, which has to do with the concept of
value, and has a theoretical existence, independent from reflections on art.
Sartre is often – and rightly – seen as a systematic philosopher. With Being and nothingness,
and later with the Critique, he provides us with philosophical systems. But Sartre was also a
cryptic thinker. The sharpness of his thought can sometimes be found in unexpected places. It
is the case for the notion of value. Unlike fundamental metaphysical concepts in Being and
nothingness (like being, conscience or otherness), or political concepts in the Critique (like

137
praxis or groups), the concept of value never receives a systematic philosophical treatment by
Sartre, and yet it haunts all of his works. In some places, he refers to value as beauty.
In the second chapter of this thesis, I showed that value is also the name with which Sartre
designates what the for-itself is looking for: in its quest for a coincidence with one’s being, the
for-itself is in quest for value, or, actually, beauty. This may look peripherical at first sight, and
one would hastily attribute this strange connection between value and beauty to Sartre’s love
for words and literature, which would make his philosophy less rigorous. Nonetheless, I
contend that this connection holds a very deep truth of his philosophy, and a very deep truth
about the status of aesthetics in his political and ontological views.
In order to show this, this section must engage into a reflection on what value is. In fact, it
might just be this reconciliation of ethics and aesthetics (or morals and beauty), of which the
reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism itself is an image. Sartre never produced a
systematized written aesthetics, in the same way that he never produced an ethics. Even though
he was planning on doing both, he left us with thousands of unpublished pages. In many
respects, aesthetics and ethics hold a similar status in his philosophy; they are never tackled as
such, and yet they infuse and haunt his works. The deep meaning of Sartre’s philosophy can be
found in this ghostly presence of ethics and aesthetics, to the extent that it helps him come to
terms with the political modernity that emerged from the French Revolution. Before engaging
further into the matter, an inquiry into the status of aesthetics in Sartre’s philosophy is
necessary.
Sartre’s understanding of the concept of beauty can help stressing the aesthetic aspect of his
political thinking. Since he never wrote a systematic book on aesthetics, there is no fully formed
definition of the notion of beauty that would fit a general theory of aesthetics. In the very same
way as Sartre missed the opportunity to write a systematic theory of ethics when he renounced
to publish Notebooks for an ethics, he never focused on aesthetics as such. Nonetheless, he
wrote several novels, plays and analyses about specific works of art or literature.193 Therefore,
there is an academic tendency to take his own literary writings and his commentaries on
literature and art for his theory of aesthetics.194 Denying Sartre’s strong interest in art would
not be faithful to what his intellectual path has been. Sartre has spent his life tirelessly
conceptualizing an impressive range of themes, and art was one of them. As Aliocha Wald-

193
For example: Sartre, J-P. (1948), What is literature?
194
Wittman, H. (2001), L’esthétique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels, Paris: L’Harmattan ; Contat, M. (2008),
Pour Sartre, Paris: PUF ; Berthet, D. (2013), Pour une critique d’art engagée, Paris: L’Harmattan ; Astier-Vezon,
S. (2013), Sartre et la peinture. Pour une redéfinition de l’analogon pictural, Paris: L’Harmattan.

138
Lasowski recalls, Simone de Beauvoir herself claimed that “Sartre had an unconditional faith
in Beauty, which he did not separate from Art.”195 Beauvoir’s personal memory is evocative of
Sartre as the living man that she knew and shared a life with, not of Sartre’s philosophy as such.
Indeed, and in spite of the dominant academic interpretation of Sartre’s aesthetic, I contend that
Sartre’s own literary production and art criticism are not even close to encompassing his views
on aesthetics. Making this claim leads to the path of a theoretical reflection that finds its grounds
in Sartre’s philosophy, but which tends towards theoretical self-sufficiency. In other words, this
chapter is hoping to develop theoretical potentialities present in Sartre’s philosophy, without
attributing them to him to the point of distorting his thought. The balance this chapter aims to
find is one of intellectual honesty: making connections between unconnected areas of Sartre’s
philosophy, while drawing the conclusions of these connections in making clear that they are
mine and not Sartre’s.

Hidden aesthetics in Sartre’s philosophy

On beauty

As discussed in previous chapters of this work, value is the conclusive concept of Being and
Nothingness. At the heart of the ontological reflection of this book, the reader can also find
beauty. Between both concepts, there is a striking parallelism. In Part II of Being and
Nothingness, more specifically in the third subsection – called “Transcendence” – Sartre
addresses the concept of beauty in a deflected way, through the prism of the ontological desire
of the for-itself to merge with the in-itself; in other words, through the prism of the ontological
human desire for being. In the perpetual tension between two ontological areas (namely, the
for-itself and the in-itself) that cannot be united and yet strive for unification, beauty is a force
of synthesis and totalization. Sartre phrases this movement as follows:

This perpetually indicated but impossible fusion of essence and existence does not
belong either to the present or the future, it indicates rather a fusion of past, present and
future, and it presents itself as a synthesis to be effected of temporal totality. It is value
as transcendence; it is what we call beauty. Beauty therefore represents an ideal state of
the world, correlative with an ideal realization of the for-itself; in this realization the
essence and the existence of things are revealed as identity to a being who, in this very

195
Wald Lasowski, A. (2011), Jean-Paul Sartre, une introduction, Paris: Agora.

139
 revelation, would be merged with himself in the absolute unity of the in-itself. This is
precisely because the beautiful is not only a transcendent synthesis to be effected but
because it can be realized only in and through a totalization of ourselves. This is
precisely why we desire the beautiful and why we apprehend the universe as lacking the
beautiful to the extent that we ourselves apprehend ourselves as a lack.196

Sartre’s ontology understands life as the awareness of ourselves as a lack. This is a lack of
being: the conscience is always affected by the awareness of something missing, namely, being.
This is the reason why Sartre explains life as an effort to fill this lack by trying to be. In the text
afore-quoted, a singular aspect of this human effort appears: when one realizes that one is a
lack, one actually realizes that the world is lacking beauty. The act of creating beauty is
explained as an attempt to fix our ontological void. It is only through a “totalization of
ourselves” that we can realize and create beauty. Beauty is the purpose of this totalization, or
synthesis.
This text is sometimes used to help explain some of Sartre’s other texts on literature and
painting. If beauty is the imaginary realization of the fusion of the for-itself and the in-itself,
then, through the work of art, the artist aims at operating this fusion. It is, for example, a
common interpretation of Sartre’s analysis of Tintoretto in What is literature?197 The
understanding of beauty as an attempt to totalize is therefore reduced to literary and artistic
comment, which I hold for a dangerous reductionism. In the text afore-quoted, Sartre was not
primarily interested in defining beauty. His approach cannot be interpreted as an attempt to
define beauty, which resorted to his ontology. On the contrary, it is while he was involved in
the analysis and definition of what the ontological desire for fusion and being means that the
notion of beauty emerged. In fact, the concept of beauty served a purpose in his ontology that
can be seen as independent from the definition of beauty itself.
I interpret this spontaneous emergence of the concept of beauty in the middle of an
ontological analysis of being as an underlying aesthetic dimension of Sartre’s ontology. More
than informing the reader about what art is, this Sartrean concept of beauty informs the reader
about how our ontological reality is fundamentally aesthetic. The desire for being is a desire for
beauty. Since the desire for being is a quest for a synthesis between the for-itself and the in-
itself, it can be seen as the ground for the concept of totalization, which occupies a place of
paramount important in the Critique, published seventeen years after Being and Nothingness.

196
Being and nothingness, p. 217.
197
Wald Lasowski, Jean-Paul Sartre.

140
The aesthetic nature of philosophy: the dialectic as totalization

In the Critique, Sartre aims at exposing the dialectical reason as the one true way for knowing
the social and political world. His “dialectical reason” could also be called a “historical reason”.
In many respects, it is resulting from Sartre’s philosophy’s movement towards the integration
in itself of the founding principles of the historical and social sciences. As discussed in my first
chapter, Sartre is involved in an attempt to save philosophy. I wish to invite the reader further
here, and to analyse the necessity for a dialectical reason as a necessity for totalization. Sartre
used the concept of totalization as the all-encompassing concept of the Critique. Defined
simply, totalization is both a practical and a theoretical necessity. It is practical because actions
find themselves contributing to a greater fate (effective totalization): it is the role of the praxis,
as a totalizing activity. It is theoretical because reason must grasp the truth of a seemingly
heterogeneous reality. Our reason must operate a synthesis. This synthesis has a lot in common
with the ontological and phenomenological synthesis exposed in Being and nothingness, and it
is important to underline it, as it belongs to one same Sartrean movement. In Being and
nothingness, Sartre explains that the human conscience (for-itself) is always looking for the
ontological serenity of being, of which it is always at a distance. Even though this distance is
irreducible, it is in the very nature of the human conscience to try and close this gap. The
necessity for totalization, and unification, is there from the origins in Sartre’s philosophy: it is
the necessity to unify the for-itself and the in-itself. In this respect, totalization can be
interpreted aesthetically

The aesthetic nature of politics and history: the “poetics of history” (Thomas Flynn)

The status of history for political thought and political action is always particular. History is
indissociable from politics, and it is even more true in the case of Sartre. It is thus necessary to
give particular attention to the Sartrean approach of history. Following the lead of Thomas
Flynn, I wish to show that Sartre’s conception of history is fundamentally aesthetic, to the point
that there is such a thing as a “poetics of history” according to the American scholar.198
Sartre’s understanding of history is correlated to his understanding of human action in the
political and social world. The Critique primarily produces a theory of the knowledge of

198
Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and historical reason.

141
history; yet it is also political to the very extent that the true understanding of history provides
the key to the understanding of ourselves as political beings and as the heirs of history. From
reading the Critique, it seems like the one key element of Sartre’s philosophy of history is the
centrality of individual action in the grand scheme of things, which I hold for yet another sign
of Sartre’s philosophy being a plea for the resistance of subjectivity.
Before undertaking to theorize the knowledge of history in the Critique, Sartre first
expressed the premises of his philosophy of history in the shape of a reply to Raymond Aron
in the War Diaries. In this text, he agreed with his then friend on the complexity of human
history due to the existence of freedom. Nonetheless, he refused Aron’s scepticism. Indeed,
Aron claimed that there cannot be a unity to history because human freedom is disruptive; this
is the point Sartre disagreed with. To this sceptic approach, Sartre opposed the concept of
totalization: he defined it as a unifying force, directly resulting from a human freedom
understood as praxis, i.e. as a creative force – which can be deemed aesthetic. Thomas Flynn
notices that Sartre is “seeking historical unity by appeal to that very freedom which Aron
believes renders such unity impossible.”199
Going further into the aesthetic characterization of Sartre’s conception of history, Flynn
writes: “Sartre likens the intelligibility of history to that of an artwork because he considers the
former as much the product of creative freedom as he does the latter”200. Doing so, he
establishes an analogy between history and art, showing that history is as much of an aesthetic
concept as art is. Flynn backs his argument with the specification that Sartre’s philosophy of
history is also a philosophy of consciousness and “the paradigm of consciousness for him was
imaginative consciousness.”201 There are two layers of aesthetic understanding to take into
account here. First, the making of history is aesthetic because it is the coherent harmonization
of freedoms in action: the encounter of various praxis. Second, the understanding of history is
aesthetic because it must be an understanding close to the very nature of the thing it aims at
explaining: this is why a dialectic totalization is the path Sartre chooses.

Ethics vs. Aesthetics

As discussed in my first chapter, one of the hypotheses of this thesis is that ethics and
aesthetics have been pulled apart since the French Revolution. This original separation created

199
Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and historical reason, p. 5.
200
Flynn, T. (1992), “The poetics of history”, in. The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, p. 213.
201
Flynn, “The poetics of history”.

142
the conditions for positivism and the decline of a discourse on values. In the previous section,
I have given a panorama of the persisting presence of aesthetics in Sartre’s philosophy. I must
now show that ethics and aesthetics share a similar status in Sartre’s philosophy, to the point
that it can help bridge the gap that was created after the French Revolution. In spite of the
commentaries and demonstrations suggested in the previous section, the idea of an aesthetic
understanding of politics remains difficult to grasp because it is a rather uncommon perspective.
In order to give more strength to this idea, I argue that it is involved in a network of texts written
over the past decades, which all deal with the mystery of the presence of aesthetics in politics.
Such theoretical intuitions can be found in the works of Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit or
Arthur Danto. It is primarily in a discussion with Ankersmit that this chapter’s argument will
take shape, but before pinning it down to it, I must stress that the question of the relationship
between politics and aesthetics has been the object of an important number of publications ever
since the beginnings of the Frankfurt School.202 Always anchored in a Marxist perspective, this
question gave way to Terry Eagleton’s thinking, that was first encapsulated in a 1978 article,
before occupying an important part of his work.203 This question made its way out of Marxism
in the 1990s and started to interest various authors, including White, Ankersmit or Danto. At
the dawn of the twenty-first century, Jacques Rancière published The Politics of Aesthetics: The
Distribution of the Sensible,204 where he connects a thinking of a history of art with the political
rationale behind the choices that make some things visible and some others invisible. Strongly
influential, Rancière’s book is now an authority’s reference for the field.205 In a slightly
different perspective, Crispin Sartwell makes a claim that this work shares, namely the idea that
not all art is political but that politics is aesthetic.206 This claim is one that contributes to define
the main direction of my argument in this section. Now that I have given a clearer idea of the
field of aesthetics and politics, I must go further into my argument, that I choose to build from
Frank Ankersmit. Although Sartwell’s claim is close to mine, he still gives too much
importance to the actual reality of art, while I am mostly interested in politics insofar as it is
aesthetic. For this reason, Ankersmit is a particularly interesting author to enter in a dialogue
with, as I will try to explain and show now.

202
Marcuse, H. (1978), The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, Boston: Beacon Press.
203
Eagleton, T. (1978), “Aesthetics and Politics”, in. New Left Review, No. 107.; Eagleton, T. (1990), The
Ideology of Aesthetic, Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
204
Rancière, J. (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London: Continuum.
205
See, for example: Tolia-Kelly, D.P. (2017), “Rancière and the re-distribution of the sensible: The artist
Rosanna Raymond, dissensus and postcolonial sensibilities within the spaces of the museum”, in. Progress in
Human Geography, Vol. 43(1), pp. 123 – 140; Durham, S. and Gaonkar, D. (2019), Distributions of the Sensible:
Rancière, between Aesthetics and Politics, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
206
Sartwell, C. (2010), Political Aesthetics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

143
 My argument must now give more solid grounds to the idea of an aesthetic understanding
of politics. Indeed, an inquiry into one of the authors just mentioned can be helpful to my
thematization. I choose to focus on the works of Frank Ankersmit, more specifically on the
notion of “aesthetic politics”. There are several reasons for this choice. First, Ankersmit
contextualizes his intellectual undertaking and proposes an original reading of the history of
political philosophy that gives importance to the role of the French Revolution. In this respect,
his perspective has affinities with mine. Second, in his historical inquiry, Ankersmit underlines
the existence of a conflictual relation between “Ethics” and “Truth” in the post-revolutionary
era. Although different from the thematization I suggested in my first chapter (between ethics
and aesthetics), Ankersmit’s point is close to my claims. Second, the concept he suggests
(aesthetic politics) helps to establish a political understanding of aesthetics that aims at
preserving political philosophy. Finally, the conclusion of Ankersmit is very different from the
Sartre-inspired perspective that this thesis is following. Because Sartre only left us with clues
from which an aesthetic understanding of politics can emerge, it is helpful to rely on
Ankersmit’s already existing aesthetic understanding of politics, for drawing my own
conclusions by difference and comparison.
In this section, I address some of the questions that I left unanswered in the first chapter.
These answers can be seen as a first step towards a characterization of the current state of
political philosophy. These answers are all inspired by a Sartrean understanding of a special
affinity between aesthetics and ethics, which leads to questioning the status of metaphysics in
contemporary political philosophy. The Sartre-inspired solution that I want to suggest promotes
a unity that Ankersmit wants us to renounce to. Nonetheless, because the primary observations
he makes are so close to mine, presenting the premise of his views might reveal extremely
useful for then presenting how Sartre’s thought helps foster a fruitful political philosophy that
puts an end to the theoretical conflicts born with the French Revolution.

On Frank Ankersmit’s “Aesthetic Politics”

Frank Ankersmit is a Dutch philosopher of the late twentieth century who has little in
common with Sartre. Yet, some elements of his thought are very likely to shed light on some
of the hypotheses and assertions I wish to make in this work. This thesis is involved in a
rethinking of the recent history of political philosophy, and its aim is to show how Sartre’s
specific situation helps to solve theoretical issues born with the post-revolutionary political
modernity. In this undertaking, Ankersmit does not help our understanding of Sartre, but he

144
backs our understanding of the general recent history of political philosophy. Ankersmit
therefore brings an unvaluable element of clarification to the reconstruction of the intellectual
history this thesis is involved in. A thinker of history and politics, Ankersmit wrote several
books on the aesthetic nature of politics, but the one I will focus on is Aesthetic Politics.
Political philosophy Beyond Fact and Value.207

Aesthetic political philosophy as a solution to the “disappearance” of politics

Ankersmit is one of the only late twentieth century thinkers who produced an in-depth
theorization of the aesthetic nature of politics208. In this respect, Ankersmit’s conception of
“aesthetic politics” can help conceptualize even more clearly the status of aesthetics in Sartre’s
political philosophy. The main claim that Ankersmit makes in the afore-mentioned book is that
the political object has purely and simply disappeared. By political object, he means the object
of inquiry of political philosophy. In this book, Ankersmit suggests an original reading of the
history of political philosophy, in which he puts stoicism to the forefront. Entering the details
of this intellectual history is not my purpose. Yet, the central place that the concept of stoicism
holds in Ankersmit’s argument makes it necessary to highlight it. As a matter of fact, it is
against what he calls a Stoic political philosophy that Ankersmit’s concept of an aesthetic
political philosophy will emerge. I do not claim to give an account of ancient stoicism here, but
rather to give a quick presentation of the way Ankersmit understands stoicism because this
understanding is central to the construction of his thought. He is not interested in stoicism per
se, but in the way stoicism infused political philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
Ankersmit insists on two fundamental Stoic concepts: oikeiosis and logoi spermatikoi. The
first one is a certain kind of explanation that “aims at the domestication of the world” while the
second one designates the rationale behind this domestication – it is reason to the extent that it
“rules both the world and the thought of rational man.”209 Ankersmit summarizes his
understanding of stoicism as follows: “The laws of reality are also the laws of thought, and this

207
Ankersmit, F. (1997), Aesthetic Politics. Political philosophy Beyond Fact and Value, Stanford University
Press.
208
Establishing links between aesthetics and politics is rather common in contemporary philosophy, and it is
enough to evoke the work of Jacques Rancière in Le partage du sensible, published in 2000, and the debates it
triggered. Yet, in all works close to the perspective of Rancière, aesthetics is always understood through the prism
of art in some way or another. What singles out Ankersmit’s perspective is that his understanding of aesthetics is
rather independent from art, and, as such, is apt for establishing a network of specifically political meanings of
aesthetics. See Rancière, J. (2000), Le partage du sensible, Paris: La Fabrique.
209
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 70.

145
guarantees the possibility of knowledge of reality.”210 In other words, reason is “the common
background of both reality and knowledge” – or the tertia comparationis, as Ankersmit
articulates. He analyses the modern and pre-revolutionary history of philosophy as a quest for
this common ground, and as a series of attempts at defining it. He claims that “most of Western
philosophy since Descartes has been a continuous effort to offer a satisfactory definition of the
tertia.” 211
Against this Stoic philosophy , Ankersmit claims that aesthetics can be a model for a renewal
of political philosophy that would be born against the norms of stoicism. From Ankersmit’s
perspective, the construction of a Stoic political theory took time; it was born with the natural
law theories, a set of theories that marked the beginning of a naturalization of politics.
Ankersmit claims that this process of naturalization is complete today; fully achieved, it
manifests itself in the contemporary disappearance of the political object. It is natural because
it aims at justifying the existence of the State by resorting to nature (the nature of man, the
natural social order, etc.).
Ankersmit mentions Hobbes and Rousseau and interprets their philosophies at the starting
point of a modern process that led political philosophy to decline. His main thesis is that politics
has evaporated into nature. For him, the most striking sign of this evolution is the contemporary
confusion between the State and society, as well as the disinterest of contemporary political
philosophy for the State. Justifying the State by grounding it in nature ultimately led to its
disappearance. Ankersmit maps that road for us and insists on the various moments of this
disappearance. From his argument, I choose to single out two moments, which are of particular
interest for my argument. Indeed, they can contribute to a better understanding of Sartre, and
therefore back the argument of this chapter.
The first moment is the era of Marx and Hegel, or, more broadly, the ideologies of the
nineteenth century. About them, Ankersmit writes that they “did not abandon the Stoic tertia,
which here took the form of ‘history’ or ‘sociology’, in whatever way these words were
understood.”212 From the definition Ankersmit gives of the Stoic tertia, it appears that the
nineteenth century is a time where “history” or “sociology” became the tertia, i.e. the common
background between reality and knowledge. Ankersmit therefore pinpoints the starting point of
an intellectual movement that gave birth to social sciences. From his perspective, sociology or
the social sciences, are a side-effect of a Stoic political philosophy, defined as a philosophy of

210
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 71.
211
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 71.
212
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 79.

146
foundation; “how to give a legitimate foundation to the State?” would be its driving question.
In this respect, this Stoic political philosophy presents similarities with the spirit of the French
Revolution. As discussed in the first chapter of this thesis, the French Revolution is what paved
the way, symbolically, for the rise of positivism, and social sciences. It is worth stressing that
the French Revolution was partly inspired by natural law theories, which supports an affinity
of views between the argument of this thesis and the argument made by Ankersmit.
Stoic political philosophy, as Ankersmit calls it, does not suffer the contingency of political
practice and historical change. Therefore, when history emerges in the theories of Hegel and
Marx, it is a rationalized history. Ankersmit writes: “[…] when history is accepted within Stoic
political philosophy, history will immediately take here the form […] of speculative systems
like those of Hegel and Marx, where, as we saw above, the historically contingent has been
neatly boxed and accounted for by the overall Stoic rationality of the historical process.”213
According to him, such systems misunderstand the field of political practice to the point that
they make it disappear. They almost have a performative power and tend to create the very
political reality they are analysing. In doing so, Ankersmit claims that they are backed by the
development of social sciences, which confirms the proximity of Marxism with positivism,
established in the first chapter of this work. By rationalizing history, both Hegel and Marx were
faithful to the program of what Ankersmit calls the Stoic political philosophy; they ended up
achieving the aim of suppressing contingency. This is a convincing claim; I would even go
further and assert that the suppression of contingent history is in fact the suppression of human
freedom as a key of explanation for history. By reclaiming subjectivity and human existence,
Sartre put human freedom back to the centre of explanations almost a century after Hegel and
Marx diluted it in their respective systems.
Ankersmit contends that aesthetics can be a solution to the disappearance of the political
object induced by the slow and steady naturalization of politics over the past three centuries.
How does he make such a connection? When Ankersmit uses the word “aesthetics”, he refers
to a specific characteristic of art that lies in the gap between the representation and the
represented. In the very same way that there is an ontological gap of aesthetic nature between
the work of art (representation) and the object it is based on (represented), there is a gap between
the State (representation) and the people, or society (represented). In Ankermit’s argument, this
aesthetic connection firmly stands against the efforts of Stoicism for dissolving the State into
society. For Ankersmit the State was diluted into society, which led to the disappearance of the

213
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 83.

147
political object. Aesthetics, for Ankersmit, is not internal to politics; it is an external tool for
politics, theoretically, and practically. Ankersmit states that he wants “aesthetics to do for
politics the job that was traditionally assigned to epistemology.”214

The opposition of aesthetics to ethics

In his effort for revitalizing an aesthetic approach of the political world, Ankersmit is led to
challenge what he considers to be the domination of the ethical paradigm in contemporary
political theory, that he associates with Stoic political philosophy. Calling for the rise of an
aesthetic political philosophy, he clearly identifies its opponents, namely “political science”
and a “metaphysically oriented philosophy”. Both have two characteristics in common: they
follow what Ankersmit calls the Stoic paradigm and they have ethical preoccupations at heart.
Ankersmit writes: “[…] from the perspective of aesthetic political philosophy, metaphysical or
epistemological political theory and political science have more similarities than differences.
Hence it is its anti-Stoicism that effectively separates aesthetic political philosophy from its
rival.”215
He clearly identifies two opponents of an aesthetic political philosophy that share a Stoicism
backed by ethics. This point is interesting for my argument because Ankersmit’s call for an
aesthetic political philosophy emerges from a specific interpretation of the modern history of
political philosophy, as well as its current state.
In a similar analysis to the one I suggested in my first chapter, Ankersmit interprets the
French Revolution as a moment of theoretical conflict. For him, this conflict is between
“beauty” and “truth”. After analysing at length the theoretical consequences of the French
Revolution, Ankersmit claims that “we should therefore replace the ‘truth’ of ideological
politics by the ‘beauty’ of a postmodern aesthetic political theory.”216
At the beginning of this thesis, I interpreted the aftermath of the French Revolution as a
moment of tension and conflict between aesthetics and ethics. Aesthetics and ethics have in
common to be areas of human knowledge, or philosophy; the questions “what is beautiful?”
and “what is good” can summarize their respective purposes. They also have in common to
designate two levels of human reality – indeed, the questions mentioned above involve direct
and practical applications in human life. Choosing to formulate aesthetics and ethics differently

214
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 115.
215
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics , p. 119.
216
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 161.

148
can lead to identify the driving concept or value on which both areas rely; “beauty” imposes
itself for aesthetics. In post-revolutionary France, “equality” imposes itself for ethics.
Ankersmit also believes that the French Revolution led to a theoretical conflict involving
beauty, but he opposes it to the idea of truth, rather than that of equality. This difference between
Ankersmit’s analysis and mine is due to a different historical interpretation. About the moment
of the French Revolution and its aftermath, Ankersmit writes the following analysis:

[T]he impossible task was to find a new political matrix, which inevitably had to be, once
again, a new experiment, while at the same time avoiding all that might make it look like
another experiment – it had to be something new and yet should not seem like something
new.217

Later, he adds that “this resulted, especially in France, in a flourishing political theory.”218
Ankersmit clearly identifies the French Revolution as the moment of the emergence of
democracy, and he draws the reader’s attention to the fact that democracy, like all political
systems, is an answer to a conflict. While there is a tendency to look at the founding principles
of democracy as inherently peaceful, democracy is the self-contradictory answer to an age of
conflict. In the path that leads Ankersmit to the formulation of an aesthetic political philosophy,
he was actually interested in the genesis of democracy, and this is how the founding nature of
the event of the French Revolution emerged in his writings. As a thinker interested firstly in the
origins of democracy, Ankersmit proposes a philosophy of foundation. Eager to reconnect with
traditional political philosophy, he does wish to transform political philosophy. In this respect,
even if he recognizes the important role of the French Revolution in the intellectual history that
followed it, he does not believe this event to be transformative to the point that political
philosophy cannot be what it used to be. On the contrary, I contend that political philosophy in
post-revolutionary times – including our times – cannot be what it used to be: it cannot be a
philosophy of foundation.
Aware of the fact that returning to a philosophy of foundation in the late twentieth is a
dangerous undertaking, Ankersmit seems to try to make it more acceptable for modern times in
operating a fusion between this philosophy of foundation and postmodernism. This might
actually explain his use of aesthetics. In the book afore-mentioned, he relates twentieth century
postmodernism to nineteenth century romanticism. He considers this connection to be the

217
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 134.
218
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 136.

149
“essence” of his argument,219 which confirms that the role of postmodernism is central to
Ankersmit’s choice of an aesthetic political philosophy; indeed, with this connection, his
aesthetic political philosophy builds up. Ankersmit characterizes romanticism as an aesthetic
understanding of post-revolutionary democracy, and he claims that it is the ancestor of
postmodernism. He contends that “we can only understand democracy properly if we realize
that it came into being during the Romantic movement in the period of the so-called
Restoration” and that “postmodernism can be seen as a specification of the relevant aspects of
Romanticism.”220
Ankersmit focuses on three characteristics shared by both intellectual movements: Romantic
irony, the notion of the fragment, and variation. My purpose here is not to enter into
Ankersmit’s demonstration at length, but it is enough to underline that the network of concepts
he builds between both movements aims to shed light on the existence of an “intertextuality”
of politics; in other words, our political and social lives can only be understood through “micro-
narratives”. With the use of this linguistic – and almost artistic – understanding of our lives as
social beings, Ankersmit is building up his aesthetic political philosophy. Looking at the history
of political philosophy, postmodernism and the linguistic paradigm are particularly suited for
an aesthetic interpretation of politics; this explains why his aesthetic political philosophy must
be “postmodern”.
Ankersmit’s choice of a postmodern paradigm helps to explain the reasons for the emergence
of an aesthetic political philosophy. The first one is the necessity to fight the Stoic idea of a
confusion between the State and society (the State, or “political object”, must be given a
renewed legitimacy in political philosophy for Ankersmit). The second reason stems from the
observation that our social and political reality is inherently fragmented and must be interpreted
following the paradigm of linguistic postmodernism. The aesthetic political philosophy
Ankersmit calls for is actually in harmony with the current state of political philosophy, given
the overarching strength of postmodernism and the paradigm of the “fragment” in the
humanities today, as he shows.221 While Ankersmit’s proposition of an aesthetic political
philosophy could have been welcomed as the sign of a true renewal of political philosophy, it
actually falls into the postmodern paradigm that already dominates the scene of “continental”
political philosophy. Another way of explaining Ankersmit’s point is the following: interested
in both Foucault-like deconstruction and Rawls-like foundationalism, Ankersmit wonders what

219
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 141.
220
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 115.
221
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 115.

150
a unification of both trends could mean for political philosophy. I do not find this attempt a
relevant or convincing one, in regards with Sartre’s proposition, made several decades earlier.
Ankersmit’s enemies are political science and metaphysics. Yet, and in spite of the obvious
strength of political science, Ankersmit’s attacks against metaphysics are the strongest; this is
because he hopes to reject the idea of totalizing truths. About theorists from Hobbes to Kant,
he writes that “they all have an opinion on the foundations of the political order, an opinion on
how this order can or ought to be legitimized metaphysically and on how the unity and
coherence of the political order comes into being or ought to have come into being, taking into
account its metaphysical foundations.”222 Ankersmit rejects metaphysically inspired political
philosophy because it is focusing on the foundations of the political order, and one cannot but
underline this is a contradiction of his argument. By calling for a return to a reflection upon the
State, he is suggesting a philosophy of foundation. Yet, Ankersmit claims that aesthetic political
theory must be postmodern because postmodernism is sceptical about systems, and about the
claim to universality and unity that metaphysics stands for. He holds the contradiction in
embracing the postmodern program. From the observation that the world is essentially broken,
Ankersmit claims that a true political philosophy can only recognize this fundamental
brokenness. This recognition must lead, according to him, to a minimization of the role of
ethics, the centrality of which both political science and metaphysically inspired political
philosophy both have in common. Ankersmit opposes the centrality of ethical preoccupations
in contemporary political thought by resorting to an original understanding of aesthetics.
In other words, Ankersmit re-enacts the old conflict born with the French Revolution.
Aiming at helping political philosophy’s revival, he does not believe that the conflict between
ethics and aesthetics should be solved. Rather, he seems to fully embrace it, in a philosophical
perspective that would take sides with aesthetics. This conclusion raises many issues. Why
would Ankersmit be harder on an already dying metaphysics than on a thriving positivism?
Isn’t the so-called incompatibility of aesthetics and ethics another way to accept the gap created
with the French Revolution? Could one think of a theoretical way out of this deadly alternative?

Breaking the post-revolutionary narrative with Sartre

What I call the “post-revolutionary narrative” is the series of theoretical oppositions I

presented in the first chapter of this work, and which Ankersmit, along with most twentieth

222
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 117.

151
century thinkers, seems to be giving in. When he attacks metaphysics and calls for a purely
aesthetic political philosophy, he accepts that metaphysics is something of the past. In other
words, he situates himself in the post-revolutionary tradition of Hegel and Marx, in spite of his
criticism of both authors. He also accepts the idea that ethics and aesthetics are incompatible.
By focusing on the centrality of the State in the political philosophy he wishes to see born, he
also implies that subjectivities and the subjective lives of citizens should be of little importance
to the figures of this future political philosophy.
The introduction of this chapter made clear that subjectivity was the real issue behind the
reconciliation of Marxism and existentialism. Because subjectivity has been opposed to
objectivity and rejected in the wake of the French Revolution, it has been dismissed in most
works of post-revolutionary political thought. It is what Sartre aims to make up for, without
giving up on the understanding of the objective structures of society. To quote Foucault again,
Sartre really is a “nineteenth century man” in the sense that he makes a thorough and faithful
synthesis of the nineteenth century: he aims at reconciling what has been deemed impossible to
reconcile by the Revolution. Until now, I have drawn a thread, from subjectivity and history to
intersubjectivity understood through the prism of recognition, before showing the irreducibly
aesthetic aspect of Sartre’s ontology and ethics. The presence of an aesthetic paradigm in
Sartre’s thought sheds a new light on the concept of recognition that I have built up from his
reflections in the previous chapter.
As a connecting point between subjectivities, a concept such as that of recognition would be
of little interest to the aesthetic political philosophy that Ankersmit is calling for. And maybe it
is because aesthetics, in his views, characterizes political philosophy, while in my Sartre
inspired perspective, aesthetics characterizes the political reality itself. By calling philosophers
to focus on the State again, Ankersmit calls for a return to a pre-revolutionary philosophy,
which would fall into the tradition of Machiavelli, and the natural law theoreticians (like Rawls
did two decades before Ankersmit, and with more success). From this assessment, the radical
modernity of Sartre’s philosophy is made clear by contrast with other less fortunate twentieth
century attempts to save political philosophy; although working on a return to pre-revolutionary
transcendence, Sartre could not focus on the State and the institutions because he fully
acknowledged the contributions of post-revolutionary history. Sartre chose to give importance
to subjectivity and to situate transcendence within subjectivity itself.
Earlier in this thesis, I made clear that a Sartrean concept of recognition was a positive one,
going against the interpretation of Axel Honneth. I showed that Sartre’s understanding of a
philosophical concept of recognition is particularly fruitful for thinking postcolonial situations

152
given its historical anchorage in Sartre’s real life fight against colonialism. More importantly
maybe, I also showed that a concept of recognition born from his philosophy was a fruitful
starting point for a criticism of positivism. Indeed, in the necessity to recognize the Other, there
is the necessity to not turn him/her into an object of pure and cold knowledge. On this occasion,
I mentioned that recognizing the Other amounts to recognizing his/her worth, or, in Sartrean
terms, the value inherent to his/her being. Earlier in this section, I showed how value also is
another word for beauty in Sartre’s ontology. Now the possibility for an aesthetic interpretation
of recognition is emerging.
There are two ways in which the Sartrean concept of recognition can be aesthetic. The first
one has to do with what happens if recognition becomes a structuring element of social
dynamics: as a normative concept, recognition can be a criteria for action and help appease
social interactions, to the point that it changes society. It is the creative aspect of recognition,
which can be drawn from Sartre’s observations on the group in the Critique – this aesthetic
aspect is interesting but does not serve the general purpose of this thesis. The second aspect is
more interesting; when I recognize the Other, I recognize his/her value, hence his/her beauty.
Put together with the theoretical propositions made all along this thesis, it means that I
recognize the beauty of the history inscribed in the Other. Poetically, this philosophically
aesthetic aspect of recognition is embodied in the words of late Algerian writer Assia Djebbar:
“A country without memory is like a woman without a mirror: beautiful, but she doesn’t know
it.”223 Mentioning the Algerian situation here is not anecdotal: after a long theoretical argument
aiming at reconstituting the intellectual history Sartre’s thought falls into, the social and
political reasons founding this work are emerging because the theoretical network apt for
thinking them is taking shape.
Already, by exposing the aesthetic aspect of Sartre’s unvoiced concept of recognition, I
made clear that aesthetics and ethics are two complementary elements of the social and political
world, hence of philosophy. Therefore, in the concept of recognition, aesthetics and ethics
unite, in a movement that refuses the alternative born with the French Revolution. Clarifying
this point involves to recall some elements exposed in the first chapter of this work, where I
showed that, by imposing the idea of a rationality of equality and creating the conditions for
positivism, the French Revolution created several theoretical conflicts, that can be interpreted
aesthetically. With a Sartre inspired concept of recognition that can be interpreted aesthetically,
equality and beauty not only unite but are complementary. Sartre’s philosophy is at the same

223
“Un pays sans mémoire, c’est comme une femme sans miroir, belle mais qui ne le saurait pas”, in. Kaouah, A.
(2012), Quand la nuit se brise. Anthologie de la poésie algérienne.

153
time ethical and aesthetic, and his concept of recognition is proof for this. Sartre helps to break
the post-revolutionary narrative that tended to reduce the role of political philosophy: in making
this historical and intellectual synthesis, Sartre helps to preserve political philosophy by truly
transforming it.

Existentialism: transcendence for a post-revolutionary world

By shedding light on the aesthetic dimension of Sartre’s philosophical understanding of the

political and social world, I showed the possibility for an aesthetic interpretation of a Sartre-
inspired concept of recognition. Itself a normative ethical concept, recognition is the place
where aesthetics and ethics unite. In other words, with recognition, one does not have to choose
between a beautiful or an ethical world: the social world can be both. In fact, it is both. This
conclusion is not that of an aesthete unaware of the important issues of the world, and this is a
key specification: using aesthetics or beauty as a criteria for an ethical action or behaviour can
actually very well encapsulate the true meaning of ethics. Sartre did not say more than this
when he claimed that existentialism was the true meaning of Marxism.
The conclusive lines of this chapter will address this overarching reconciliation.
Nonetheless, before addressing this final result, understanding why the concept of
transcendence matters in this process is necessary. When Sartre mentions beauty, in the afore-
quoted extract of Being and Nothingness, he conflates it with value and transcendence.224
Sartre’s philosophy can be understood as a quest for a post-revolutionary and post-God
transcendence. In the conference he gave in 1946, Existentialism is a humanism, Sartre
mentioned the famous sentence formulated by Dostoevsky: “If God does not exist, then all is
permitted”; in the conference, he built a reply to this statement, anchored in a new ethics, that
I characterize as aesthetic.

Existentialist humanism: an answer to the French Revolution

Answering Dostoevsky implies for Sartre to look for a new source of value. Sartre claims
that whether God exists or not is not an interesting issue. Rather, the stake is for man to
rediscover himself and realize that he is the source of all value: as I explained at length all along
this work, subjectivity is the source of all value in Sartre’s philosophy. In a book devoted to a

224
“It is value as transcendence; it is what we call beauty”, Being and Nothingness, p. 217.

154
study of Sartre’s theoretical connection to theological thinking, Kate Kirkpatrick225 shows that
Sartre’s philosophy is infused with religious and theological references: he did not give up on
finding a new value, or set of values. In this respect, his philosophy can be seen as an anti-
nihilism that draws the consequences from the “death of God”. Sartre’s whole intellectual
undertaking can be seen as an attempt to create of a non-theological ethics, a God-less morals.
In the previous section of this chapter, I used aesthetics to interpret his philosophy, given the
insistence with which he conflates beauty, transcendence and subjectivity. This conceptual
porosity can sound surprising and, mostly, non-rigorous. Yet, the easiness with which I tried to
show one can navigate between these concepts stems from Sartre’s intellectual project itself,
which can be seen as the project of a reconstitution of a network of pre-revolutionary values,
compatible with post-revolutionary principles.
This assertion can seem surprising for characterizing one of the most radical figures of the
twentieth century. Yet, it is within radicality that he claimed the importance of pre-
revolutionary values, without naming them. The ghostly presence of concepts like
transcendence, beauty or value in Sartre’s philosophy have not been assessed to their full
potential. By ending his philosophical career with a proclaimed reconciliation of Marxism and
existentialism, I contend that he gave us the key for understanding the depth of his philosophy:
the reconciliation of pre-revolutionary and postrevolutionary values, the appeasement of
modernity. This moment of French philosophy has been missed, and the reasons for this
dismissal should be investigated.
The obscuring effect of the domination of Marxism

Sartre famously wrote that “Marxism is the unsurpassable horizon of our time”. Abundantly
criticized for being short-sighted, this statement should not be seen for more than it is. In writing
this, Sartre simply made an observation on the cultural zeitgeist French philosophy was
embedded in, in the middle of the 1960s. Marxism was indeed the central point around which
political philosophy revolved back then, and in this respect Sartre’s assessment is correct.
In my first chapter, I showed that Marxism was a late theoretical consequence of the French
Revolution. As such, it is also the bearer of the theoretical conflicts of the Revolution – more
specifically, the interpretations of Marxism, given by self-proclaimed Marxists, manifested
these conflicts even more. Within the boundaries of his attachment to a radical program of
emancipation anchored in Marxism, Sartre intends to give meaning to Marxism; in this

225
Kirkpatrick, Sartre and Theology.

155
perspective, he calls for a way out of what he calls “vulgar Marxism”. As discussed in my first
chapter, in the wake of the French Revolution, and precisely as French political modernity was
being shaped, an affinity between Marxism on the one hand, and the French political culture on
the other, was built, piece by piece. When Marxism was discredited in the late twentieth
century, French political culture was hit to its core, which opened an identity crisis that still
needs to be solved.
With Marxism gone, a huge void was left in political thought, which has yet to be filled.
Marxism has occupied the function of a support for the other philosophical propositions of the
mid-twentieth century. It has been like the colour of the times (or the “unsurpassable horizon”
as Sartre put it). With the demise of Marxism in French academia and within intellectual spheres
over the second half of the twentieth century (provoked by the discovery of the gulags, and
made definitive by the fall of the USSR), it is often said that French political philosophy has
lost its capacity to create concepts apt for giving account of the social and political reality. This
standstill is echoed by the stagnation that characterizes political parties and their ability to offer
a “vision”: this is a common and unoriginal assessment of the French reality of the past thirty
years. It is often explained by how strongly Marxist France and French intellectuals have been
before that.226
There might just be a deeper explanation for this: how can one explain the strength of
Marxism among French intellectual and political elites? The following hypothesis can be made:
after the French Revolution, Marxism might have occupied a specific function in the French
intellectual landscape, that of looking like a set of philosophical propositions encapsulating into
one coherent theoretical system the essence of the French Revolution. Obviously, Marx’s
thought was more than this, but there has been a tendency to narrow its outreach. Sartre himself
expressed the severity of his judgement about Marxists in Search for a Method (1960); about
Marxism, he wrote: “For the last twenty years […] its shadow has obscured history; this is
because it has ceased to live with history and because it attempts, through a bureaucratic
conservatism, to reduce change to identity.”227
When Marxism came to slowly disappear from mainstream academia and political
reflections of all kinds (in philosophy, history, or sociology), it left a void that has not been
filled since. One of the reasons why it is so difficult to fill this void is the fact that it has been a
dominant paradigm for more than a century. Bur more importantly, I claim that another reason
for this difficulty is that filling that void would involve to take a critical look at the French

226
Gauchet, M. (2002/1), “Les tâches de la philosophie politique”, in. Revue du MAUSS, Paris: La Découverte.
227
Search for a Method, p. 29.

156
Revolution and at the founding values of the Republic. It is like Marxism interpreted by an
endless series of French commentators provided a coherent explanation for the conflicts born
with the French Revolution. The political crisis France has been going through for around forty
years has provoked a constant debate between political and intellectual spheres. My claim is
that Marxism, because of its intellectual domination, has obscured the theoretical conflicts of
the French Revolution: because of the biased interpretations of Marx’s thought, it looked as if
Marxism took side in this historical series of oppositions.

The reconciliation of Marxism and existentialism: where ethics meets

aesthetics

By claiming that existentialism is the truth of Marxism, Sartre therefore does two important
things: first, and for the sake of Marxism, he de-solidarizes it from the both strictly rational and
radical side of the Revolution, and draws our attention to the fact that its truth might lie
elsewhere; second, and for the sake of French political and theoretical culture, he uses Marxism
as a mirror of French political modernity; indeed, if it is in Marxism that the truth of the French
Revolution lies, then stressing existentialism at the heart of Marxism is a way of pinpointing
transcendence inside of materialism, or subjectivity inside of objectivity. In Search for a
Method, Sartre presents the program for a reconciliation of Marxism and existentialism. I
choose to end this thesis with the presentation of this program because it is the answer to several
interrogations raised throughout this work.
Before showing how this theoretical connection is interesting for the purpose of my
demonstration, I must give a fair presentation of Sartre’s argument. The first section of Search
for a Method is entitled “Marxisme et existentialisme”. Although I claim that this connection
is made throughout Sartre’s works, particularly in the Critique, the above-mentioned section
must be taken as the first and most direct source for understanding Sartre’s reconciliation
between Marxism and existentialism. The introductory developments of Search for a Method
are significantly devoted to Philosophy – which Sartre capitalizes – and its status in
contemporary society. The reader gets a strong sense of the intense intellectual debates that
were taking place in Paris at the time of Sartre’s writing. In order to seize the essential argument
of Sartre, it is necessary to patiently try and abstract some key argumentative points. Indeed,
there is a certain thickness and density to this text, due to the historical context in which Sartre
writes (for instance, Sartre’s discussions and intellectual conflicts with Lukács and Guérin are
particularly central to his text). Putting this historical density on the side can help to see the key

157
moments of Sartre’s argumentation. From the reading of the first section of Search for a
Method, three main themes emerge in support of Sartre’s argument: the fate of Philosophy; the
debate between Kierkegaard and Hegel as the historical incarnation of a debate between
subjectivity and knowledge; and the irrelevance of Marxism interpreted as a pure objectivism.
It is worth underlining that Sartre begins Search for a Method with what looks like a brief
panorama of post-revolutionary intellectual history and an interrogation on the roles and
functions of Philosophy within this history. Even if Sartre never thematized his works under
this light, it shows that he was very well aware of both the context in which his own thinking
was being produced and the role that this thinking could have in this long-term post-
revolutionary intellectual history. He writes: “The philosopher effects the unification of
everything that is known.”228 This sentence could stand as a summary for Sartre’s intellectual
works themselves, and one thinks of Foucault’s assessment of Sartre’s philosophy here.229 But
more importantly, Sartre describes a philosophy for post-revolutionary times in this text. It is
striking that his inquiry into what philosophy is starts with the French Revolution: “The abstract
revolt precedes the French Revolution and armed insurrection by some years. But the directed
violence of weapons will overthrow privileges which have already been dissolved in
Reason.”230 Sartre recalls that the French Revolution is in itself the embodiment of ideas and
principles, encapsulated in the fight against privileges. More importantly, he traces back the
origins of his very own philosophical moment. In his 1946 conference Sartre claimed:
“Marxism is the unsurpassable horizon of our time”. In Search for a Method, he intends to
understand the origins of this centrality of Marxism, and he singles out the French Revolution
as the beginning of this era, therefore corroborating the argument I made in the first chapter of
this thesis.
In Search for a Method, Sartre is involved in defending what he claims is the truth of
Marxism. Doing so involves for him to recall this post-revolutionary intellectual history, with
a specific stress on the debate that opposed Kierkegaard to Hegel. Sartre sees these two
nineteenth century figures as the embodiments of subjectivity and objectivity. His aim is to
show that, contrary to both Kierkegaard and Hegel, Marx did not fall into the trap of this
opposition and offered a more balanced understanding of the social world. Sartre assesses
Hegel’s philosophy as follows:

228
Search for a Method, p. 4.
229
For Foucault, the Critique was a “wonderful and pathetic effort of a nineteenth century man for thinking the
twentieth century”, Dits et écrits, vol. 1, p. 542.
230
Search for a Method, p. 6.

158
 We are not only knowers; in the triumph of intellectual self-consciousness, we appear as
the known. Knowledge pierces us through and through; it situates us before dissolving us.
We are integrated alive in the supreme totalization. Thus the pure, lived aspect of a tragic
experience, a suffering unto death, is absorbed by the system as a relatively abstract
determination which must be mediated, as a passage toward the Absolute, the only genuine
concrete.231

In spite of the admiration he has for Hegelianism, which he deems “the most ample
philosophical totalization”, Sartre stresses the impossibility to seize the subjective experience
of existence in Hegel’s philosophy. With Kierkegaard, Sartre agrees that subjective
experiences, specifically experiences of pain and suffering, cannot be grasped by objective
knowledge: “Whatever one may say or think about suffering, it escapes knowledge to the extent
that it is suffered in itself, for itself, and to the degree that knowledge remains powerless to
transform it.”232 Later, Sartre writes: “It would be too easy to reject this work as simply
subjectivism; what we ought rather to point out, in placing it back within the framework of its
period, is that Kierkegaard has as much right on his side as Hegel has on his.”233
From the presentation of this nineteenth century opposition between Hegel and
Kierkegaard, Sartre intends to produce a powerful opposition to the interpretations Marxists
were giving of Marx’s thought during the 1960s. Entering the complex debates Sartre is having
with Lukàcs or Guérin would lead me far from the central argument of this chapter. It is enough
for my point to note that Sartre’s understanding of Marx turns Marx into a much more balanced
thinker than the image history has tended to make out of him. Indeed, Sartre writes; “Thus,
Marx, rather than Kierkegaard or Hegel, is right, since he asserts with Kierkegaard the
specificity of human existence and, along with Hegel, takes the concrete man in his objective
reality.”234 For Sartre, Marx preserved human existence from the strength of structures. Sartre
draws the attention of his reader to the fact that Marx made a clear distinction between
alienation (which is a suppression of freedom) and objectification (which is a process through
which man expresses his freedom and his existence through work). Sartre develops this point

231
Search for a Method, p. 9.
232
Search for a Method, p. 10.
233
Search for a Method, pp. 11 – 12.
234
Search for a Method, p. 14.

159
further, to the point that he claims Marx was seeing the possibility for human existential
emancipation where Hegel denied it because of systemic totalized knowledge.
A question then raised by Sartre is worth stressing: “Why then has ‘existentialism’
preserved its autonomy? Why has it not simply dissolved in Marxism?”235 Indeed, if Marxism
is the balanced theory of the social world that Sartre claims it is, why did existentialist authors
continue to produce intellectual work?236 If Marxism is what Sartre claims it is, then it should
have absorbed existentialism. Sartre’s answer is rather unclear at first, before it unfolds in a
long and detailed analysis of the state of Marxist literature at the time of his writing. Step by
step, he shows that existentialism has persisted because of the historical victory of a biased and
wrong interpretation of Marx’s thought. The details of this history do not serve my theoretical
purpose but can be found in many commentaries of Sartre’s works.237
When Sartre demonstrated the possibility to reconcile existentialism and Marxism, he
answered the criticism he was receiving from Marxists of his time, considering Sartre was a
bourgeois philosopher who was wrong in affirming the strength of radical freedom. Within the
Marxist doxa of the 1960s, there could not be such a thing as freedom, and each individual was
defined by his/her class position. Sartre breaks this narrative by showing that Marx himself
made room for the preservation of subjectivity and the possibility of human freedom. This
ethical standpoint resulted in an epistemic consequence: analysing the world from a Marxist
point of view implies to look at economic structures while paying attention to the role of human
freedom.
Because of the extreme complexity of Sartre’s text, this reconciliation program is not taught
outside of Sartrean spheres. I claim that, paradoxically, this specialized approach to Sartre tends
to minimize the outreach of his works. I started this chapter with a presentation of the ghostly
presence of aesthetics in Sartre’s philosophy, before engaging in showing that existentialism
was Sartre’s suggestion for a post-God transcendence. The brief inquiry into the reconciliation
of Marxism and existentialism penned by Sartre can help bring some nuance to this statement.

235
Search for a Method, p. 21.
236
Starting with Kierkegaard, the philosophy of existentialism has been perpetuated by other figures than Sartre,
including Karl Jaspers or Gabriel Marcel. In 1946, Hannah Arendt wrote an essay, “What is Existence Philosophy”,
published in the American quarterly Partisan Review. Often considered a classical introduction to twentieth
century existentialism, Arendt’s original text has revealed difficult to find, and I invite the reader to look at the
French translation, published in 2002, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie de l’existence?
237
Catalano, J.S. (1986), A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason; De Coorebyter, V.
(2005), “Présentation des esquisses inédites pour la Critique de la Raison dialectique”, in. Études Sartriennes,
n°10 ; De Coorebyter, V. (2010), Sartre, l’histoire et les historiens. Études Sartriennes, n°14; Wahnich, S. (2017),
La Révolution française n’est pas un mythe.

160
 As clearly shown by the presentation of the opposition between Kierkegaard and Hegel,
subjectivity is at stake under Sartre’s pen, in Search for a Method, but also in most of his texts.
In this reconciliation, Sartre actually asks the following question: how can one fight for
universal freedom (embodied by Marxism) while also preserving the life of subjectivity
(embodied by existentialism) from the potential threat posed by superstructures? In fact, and in
very simple terms, he asked the question that some French revolutionaries probably asked
themselves in the 1790s. In contemporary liberal terms, the question could be phrased as
follows: how can we create a fair and equal society while preserving the rights of the individual?
This question is the central question of our post-revolutionary political modernity. It has
received numerous attempted answers, and Sartre’s proposition has been left aside. Yet, given
how it helps to revive philosophy, its originality can only draw our modern eye back to Sartre’s
texts. Indeed, Sartre chose to operate a synthesis that would not only preserve subjectivity, but
also keep our relation to transcendence safe. Because he paid attention to the concept of value,
he brought back the connecting dot between a just society and a preserved subjectivity, namely
aesthetics. Sartre has not made this link visible, but I claim that his philosophy makes it
possible. From the developments of this thesis, I claim that Sartre’s thinking can lead to the
following argument.
From an ethical perspective inspired by Kierkegaard inspired, subjectivity must be
preserved. The ontology presented in Being and Nothingness teaches us that subjectivity is the
place of a lack, the lack of being. The for-itself wants to be, which means that us humans are
constantly looking for an ontological solidity that we lack. Yet, value is the “unifying force”
between both. More importantly, Sartre insists on the fact that subjectivity is the source of all
value. Elsewhere, and as discussed in this chapter, Sartre claims that value is beauty, bringing
a rather dramatic turn to the definition of value. This quick panorama could lead to claim that
it is through the creation of value, hence beauty, that man can attempt to reach the ontological
solidity of being. In this rather consensual and politically uninteresting claim, artistic creation
would be the key. Yet, I insisted on the necessity to conceive of beauty without any reference
to art. If value/beauty emerges primarily from subjectivity, then subjectivity can be appreciated
in aesthetic terms. In the dynamic of recognition, it means that recognising the other amounts
to recognize his/her beauty. In the theoretical framework I have tried to build in this thesis, it
amounts to recognizing the beauty of his/her collective past. With Sartre, I found that
subjectivity is influenced and haunted by a collective past while it is at the same time the place
where value/beauty emerges.

161
 When Sartre proposed to reconcile Marxism and existentialism, he suggested a tool for
understanding society that would be apt for understanding the complexity of subjectivity as he
defined it. In the theoretical framework of this thesis, he gave a final point to conflicts born
with the French Revolution. This radical and revolutionary theoretical synthesis is accompanied
by an element of even greater importance. Indeed, Sartre prepared the foundation of a political
philosophy suited for post-revolutionary and post-colonial times.

162
 Conclusion

I started this work with the exposition of the external questions from which this thesis
directly stems. As the end of this work is now approaching, I must recall them for the purpose
of clarity: What does it mean to be French when you are Algerian? Why is there a feeling of
being haunted by a past that you have not lived? How can one characterize the pain felt by
French-Algerians by virtue of this very identity? Why does the word “discrimination” feel like
it does not cover the entire truth of the reality it designates, which feels more like a denial of
respect?
I have not addressed these questions directly because doing so would involve to break the
neutrality of academic discourse and to enter the field of politics. Yet, I hope that their ghostly
presence, throughout this work, helped to give ground and body to the abstract and theoretical
arguments that this thesis was primarily occupied with. Answering these political, social and
intimate questions properly made this doctoral work necessary, as a theoretical preliminary
aimed at establishing a network of concepts suited to a political and theoretical reflection
anchored in history. Nonetheless, I hope to have shown that, while this work is an intellectual
preliminary for this future undertaking, it also stands as an independent piece of research about
Sartre and the intellectual history of post-revolutionary France.

Reclaiming transcendence, reclaiming philosophy

French society is still enduring the long-lasting effects of the inaugural event of the French
Revolution. In the first chapter of this work, I have made the following point: the intellectual
effects of French Revolution can be understood as an attack on transcendence, which led to a
series of oppositions that structured political thought for post-revolutionary times (between the
transcendent and the immanent, the subjective and the objective). In common English,
transcendence can be defined as an experience that goes beyond the physical level, and the
Cambridge dictionary defines it as an “experience that goes past normal limits, or the ability to
achieve this”. In philosophy, transcendence has a slightly different meaning. It is not opposed
to the physical world, but to the immanent world, which designates all things of which one can
have a direct experience (physical or not). Understood through the prism of post-revolutionary
political themes (equality, converging toward Marxist materialism), transcendence was
dismissed from political thought for it did not give account of the concrete lives of people.

163
Associated with religion, transcendence was likened to pre-revolutionary values of the nobility,
which led to a defiance towards any discourse on transcendence, or values.
Sartre’s philosophical work can be summarized as an attempt at reclaiming a right to discuss
values, which the centrality of the concept of value in Being and Nothingness shows. In the
conclusion of this book, as he put an end to his ontological reflections and opened up a space
for a future work in ethics (which was published after his death, as I recalled), Sartre
encapsulated the meaning of his work as follows: “Ontology has revealed to us, in fact, the
origin and the nature of value.”238 That Sartre chose to introduce his conclusive lines about a
future ethics through the notion of value is particularly evocative. The rest of his philosophical
career will show that the wish to reinstate values and transcendence within political thought is
what drove his intellectual trajectory.
In Search for a Method, Sartre’s claim according to which there is an affinity between
existentialism and Marxism is another way of putting values and transcendence at the heart of
political thought. In an issue of the Saturday Review that followed the publication of Search for
a Method in English, Alfred Bloch characterized Sartre’s undertaking as follows: “The attempt
to enrich and purify Marxism assumes intellect-defying proportions when Sartre adds to his
unshakable conviction that existentialism is the pulsating heart of Marxism”. 239 It is true to
notice that the proportions of Sartre’s attempt are “intellect-defying”, insofar as they involve a
radical breaking point on the level of long-term human and intellectual history. In the last
chapter of this thesis, I have shown that existentialism is a twentieth century defence of
transcendence, a transcendence which is compatible with Marxism, hence with the post-
revolutionary world. The reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism is a direct answer to the
theoretical conflicts born with the French Revolution.
The defence of transcendence can be understood as a defence of philosophy. In the first
chapter of this work, I have shown that the French Revolution created the conditions for the
creation and the rise of positivism. As my argument unfolded, I have argued that the issue of
the “death of political philosophy” can be understood in regards with this history. What Peter
Laslett called a death in 1957, I chose to call it a problem. I pinpointed the existence of a
problem of political philosophy theorised by Anglophone intellectuals in the 1950s and in the
1960s. This problem is broader than these cultural and time limits, and I have tried to trace back
its origin to the rise of positivism, directly resulting from the French Revolution. What I have

238
Being and Nothingness, p. 645.
239
Search for a Method, Fourth Cover.

164
left unanswered until these conclusive lines is that Sartre, in putting transcendence back to the
centre of political philosophy, was actually trying to defend and save political philosophy.
Recalling the essence of Sartre’s argument in Search for a Method can go as follows: when
explaining the social and political world, twentieth century Marxism and positivism both paid
too much attention to structures, and lost their ability to look at the individual in the course of
their explanations. Because existentialism is a philosophy of subjectivity, it is a philosophy of
the individual. When one replaces “individual” by “subjectivity”, then one can use Sartre’s
argument in Being and Nothingness, only to find that subjectivity is the place of transcendence
and value. In placing existentialism at the heart of Marxism, Sartre places transcendence at the
heart of post-revolutionary political thought. While the history of nineteenth century post-
revolutionary political thought had been the history of a slow and long replacement of political
philosophy by sciences – political, human and social sciences – Sartre suggests to change the
focus for understanding the social world. In establishing a new method for this understanding,
he introduces into philosophy all the disciplines of knowledge which were born in the wake of
the French Revolution. In other words, he transforms political philosophy in order to save it
from being irrelevant.
Nowadays, a university student in Politics and Political Thought learns that, before the
French Revolution, political philosophy was mostly devoted to the establishment of the
common good (Ancient Greece), the assessment of the frontier between the temporal power
and the divine power (Middle Ages), and the legal thinking around the birth of the modern State
(with the social contract thinkers in the modern era). The same student also learns that, a few
decades after the French Revolution, new disciplines of knowledge came to life in order to
understand the social world with more accuracy: after Marx proposed an original synthesis
between political economy, history and philosophy, Auguste Comte’s positivism rose to
success, until it inspired the rise of sociology and the social sciences. While this intellectual
history unfolded, another one happened, which should belong to political thought, and which
this same student rarely has access to. Sartre’s philosophy is the result of this other history.
As I have recalled in the first chapter of this thesis, Hegel’s philosophy is inspired by the
event of the French Revolution, which he sees as the emanation of the “Spirit of the World”.
With Hegel, transcendence is immanentized: in other words, metaphysics is made obsolete. The
voice of resistance to this powerful Hegelian system came from a Danish thinker who refused
to be called a philosopher: Kierkegaard. A deeply religious man, Kierkegaard believed that the
destruction of transcendence resulting from the French Revolution and conceptualised by Hegel
was a negation of the individual subjectivity. Sartre claims the legacy of Kierkegaard and pays

165
homage to the Danish thinker in a communication given in 1966.240 This homage has been
published as an article in which Sartre theorised a crucial concept of his philosophy: l’universel
singulier, which can be articulated as the singular universal. Following the steps of
Kierkegaard, Sartre claims the impossibility to dissolve the individual in a system, or in
structures, as he argues elsewhere against positivists and some Marxists.241 Sartre remains a
Hegelian philosopher insofar as he is a direct heir of dialectical thinking; nonetheless, he refuses
the destruction of the individual subjectivity resulting from Hegel’s systematic method. Once
again, Sartre reveals himself a thinker of reconciliation. He turns Kierkegaard’s religious
defence of subjectivity as the place of transcendence into a de-theologised defence of
transcendence and subjectivity. This Kierkegaard’s legacy can be interpreted as the ethical
influence in Sartre’s political philosophy, which leads him to challenge positivism from an
ethical point of view. The epistemic aspect of Sartre’s resistance to positivism can be traced
back to Husserl’s phenomenology. As I have shown in the course if this thesis, the roots of
Sartre’s defiance towards positivism can be found in Husserl’s phenomenology. In this respect,
Kierkegaard and Husserl are the figures of an ethical and an epistemic influence on Sartre’s
philosophy, leading him to challenge positivism.
This history of philosophy is parallel to the growth of social sciences. A direct influence on
Sartre’s thought, it is sadly seen as independent from political thought today. It is
understandable; Kierkegaard was a religious thinker while Husserl was a philosopher mostly
interested in fundamental ontology. Nonetheless, while this history belongs to philosophy, it
has been somehow de-solidarized from political philosophy. As a result, part of the originality
of Sartre’s thought is missed. Yet, it is only by understanding how anchored into fundamental
philosophy Sartre’s political thought is that one can start to understand that his aim was to create
a new political philosophy.
While Peter Laslett and Leo Strauss were worried about the alleged “death” of political
philosophy, Sartre was creating a new political philosophy. As I have briefly mentioned, the
themes of political philosophy have changed while society has. Nonetheless, with post-
revolutionary modernity, political philosophy seems to have failed to adapt, to the point that
some thinkers feared it might be lost. Sartre proposed an adjustment of philosophy of the same
proportions of those that human history has known before (from Machiavelli to Hobbes). For
various reasons, this adjustment has not been seen as such. Although it has been sleeping for
over half a century now, Sartre’s political philosophy is worth being reactivated today.

240
Sartre, J-P., “L’universel singulier”, in. Situations IX.
241
Sartre, Search for a Method.

166
Sartre, a radical Modern: a political philosophy for a postrevolutionary,
postcolonial world

One can oppose the point that I have just made by claiming that political philosophy is well
and alive, and has been perpetuated without the help of Sartre. In the English-speaking world –
and elsewhere, but to a lesser extent – the publication of a Theory of Justice by John Rawls in
1971 was seen as the opening of a new era for political philosophy. The concepts of “original
position” and “veil of ignorance” came to occupy philosophical debates for decades, as they
were seen as a radical novelty. Academic Katrina Forrester even wrote: “Rawls invented an
entire language, transforming the conceptual vocabulary of political philosophy to an
unprecedented degree.”242 I would call for a more cautious assessment of Rawls’s contribution.
The American philosopher certainly provided an interesting theoretical framework apt for
justifying and re-thinking liberalism, but, on a historical scale, from Plato to Hegel, going
through Hobbes, his conceptual propositions can hardly be seen as “unprecedented”; Forrester’s
generous assessment might be seen as an overstatement. In the same article, she recalls the time
when the very existence of political philosophy was threatened, and claims that Rawls answered
these doubts: “Many political philosophers said the field died during World War Two, when it
became impossible to think about justice or utopia; thanks to the prevailing outlook of anti-
totalitarianism, a slippery slope to authoritarianism was seen behind every progressive reform.
It was in this context that A Theory of Justice was heralded as having revived political
philosophy, giving philosophical form to the dream of a just society that liberals found
embodied in postwar social democracy.” Without mentioning them directly, Forrester is
alluding to Peter Laslett and Leo Strauss, but attributes their views to the following idea: after
the horrors of World War Two, establishing normative principles about justice became
impossible, or, to quote Adorno’s famous word, “barbarian”. Nonetheless, the worries
surrounding political philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s were mostly due to the fear that
positivism and political science were threatening the very existence of political philosophy. I
have shown this in the first chapter of this work, and have pinpointed the connection of this
evolution with a long-term intellectual history, which started after the French Revolution. In
this respect, it is not true to attribute the fears about the end of political philosophy to World
War Two, and it is unclear whether Rawls was able to produce a true answer to those fears.

242
Forrester, K. (2019), “The Future of Political Philosophy”, in. Boston Review (online).

167
Indeed, with his Theory of Justice, Rawls placed the problematic of foundation at the heart of
political philosophy: by interrogating the foundation of justice, he reconnected philosophy with
the problematic of foundation, as Marcel Gauchet argued.243
In a 2002 academic article, Gauchet gave an overview of the situation of political
philosophy, reflecting on what its tasks are. In the introduction of his article, Gauchet claimed
that, at the time of his writing, there was a revival of political philosophy, due to three main
evolutions: the disappearance of the Marxist revolutionary ideal, the ideological rise of law,
and the crisis of social sciences. Going further into his argument would lead me too far from
my preoccupations, but it is worth quoting these words Gauchet wrote, and which I translate:
“We attend the rebirth of the moral point of view as the point of view of prescriptive legitimacy.
We are going back to the interrogation of what things must be, en raison and en droit.”244
Gauchet thus underlined the revival of normative claims after what he believes to be a collapse
of the descriptive claims of social sciences. He included Rawls in this revival, thus supporting
the argument Forrester made almost two decades later. Nonetheless, and even if he recognized
Rawls’s belonging to philosophy, he tended to include his works in what he calls “political
law.”245 Later in the article, he wrote: “We attend the rebirth, after two centuries of
disappearance, of the problematic of foundation as a living problematic in political matters.”246
Certainly, Rawls’s influence cannot be overlooked. Nevertheless, I contend that Rawls’s
theoretical contribution, for important as it is, does not help to produce a philosophy adapted to
our contemporary world. This political philosophy of foundation is not apt for understanding
today’s world.
Indeed, our world can be characterized as post-revolutionary. Summarized, this
postrevolutionary modernity can be seen as the irruption of history and the refusal of
transcendence. In going back to the theme of foundation, which was that of social contract
thinkers, Rawls denies this evolution, along with the nature of our post-revolutionary situation.
In his article, Gauchet contended that the main difference between Rawls and social contract
thinkers is the relation to history: contrary to pre-revolutionary thinkers, Rawls would include
history insofar as his reflections would not be grounded in natural law. In this respect, he would
help to avoid the alternative theorized by Leo Strauss between history and natural law. I argue

243
Gauchet, M. (2002/1), “Les tâches de la philosophie politique”, in. Revue du MAUSS, Paris: La Découverte
244
Gauchet, “Les tâches de la philosophie politique”, p. 276: “Nous voyons renaître le point de vue moral comme
le point de vue de la légitimité prescriptive. On en revient à l’interrogation sur ce que les choses doivent être en
raison et en droit”.
245
Gauchet, “Les tâches de la philosophie politique”, p. 286: Gauchet phrased it as follows: “droit politique”.
246
Gauchet, “Les tâches de la philosophie politique”, p. 286: “Nous voyons renaître, après deux siècles d’éclipse,
la problématique de la fondation comme problématique vivante en matière politique”.

168
that this cannot be understood as a genuine inclusion of history into philosophy because it does
not change the philosophical method, which is as disembodied and coldly rational as it was two
centuries ago. In this respect, Rawls is proposing a return to pre-revolutionary times, useful to
the exact extent that his purpose is not broader than justifying liberalism. As Forrester put it in
the afore-mentioned article, Rawls’s philosophy is a “philosophical architecture of a highly
flexible and adaptable ideology – the ideology of modern liberalism.” Narrowed to the space
of liberalism, Rawls’s intellectual undertaking cannot be seriously seen as a revival of political
philosophy for the twentieth century.
Through this thesis, I hope to have shown that Sartre has included the post-revolutionary
breaking point of the emergence of history into philosophy. Under this influence, he proposed
a fundamentally modified face for philosophy in general, and political philosophy in particular.
I believe it is not an understatement to assert that Sartre revolutionised political philosophy to
proportions similar to the works of Machiavelli, Hobbes or Hegel. These three philosophers are
seen as three “revolutions of the political” by Marcel Gauchet, and the latter would be well-
advised to include Sartre into this group, as a fourth moment of no less importance than the
previous ones. As I have pinpointed in my fourth chapter, Marxism contributed to obscure the
true reach of Sartre’s contribution. Because Sartre was politically engagé, there has been a
general tendency to dismiss his views without looking closely at what he brought. One could
then oppose to my point that Sartre was a Marxist in the same way that Rawls was a liberal,
and, as such the argument of ideology cannot be enough for diminishing the contribution of
Rawls. Yet, there is one major difference between the two: Marxism is epistemic as much as it
is ideological, while liberalism does not provide us with an self-sufficient epistemological
viewpoint on society (that Rawls engaged into writing Theory of justice for providing such a
viewpoint to liberalism is enough proof of this). As a result, when Sartre claimed to be a
Marxist, he obviously claimed Marx’s ideological legacy but also, most and foremost, his
epistemological legacy. My claim is that Sartre’s Marx-inspired philosophy is interesting and
fruitful for philosophy at large – including ideologically non-Marxist or even anti-Marxist
readers. This necessary clarification made, I can now summarize my point as follows: Sartre’s
philosophy is fundamentally post-revolutionary in the sense that it draws all the intellectual
consequences of the French Revolution, and proposes us a synthesis apt for conceptualising our
post-revolutionary world. Indeed, Sartre included contingent history and the ethical centrality
of individual freedom into philosophy, while keeping the connection with pre-revolutionary
transcendence alive.

169
 Moreover, our world is also postcolonial. Sartre stood in solidarity with the anticolonial
movements, and he was aware of the necessity of a non-Eurocentric point of view for
philosophy. Yet, he was at the very same time promoting the idea of a universal understanding
of freedom, and the possibility of total truths. He recognized cultural and historical specificities,
and yet he aimed at totalization. He was at the same time the heir of traditional Western
philosophy and the forerunner of the criticism of Eurocentric views in philosophy.247 This is an
interesting contradiction, and it is all the more interesting as I think it is at the heart of Western
politics today: Sartre believed in the possibility for every singular freedom to be recognized as
such, but he also refused to renounce to universality. In this respect, Sartre’s philosophy
expresses one of the driving contradiction of the West in a postcolonial situation. In fact, I
believe that the Critique can be interpreted as the embodiment of the torn conscience of the
West, as a direct reply to Husserl’s idea of a crisis of the West, three decades earlier. Yet,
Sartre’s proposition of a universality is very different from the French Republican universalism
I mentioned earlier in this work. Sartre’s claim for the universality of freedom is philosophical.
The universality at stake under his pen is the universality of the philosophical concept. As such,
it cannot be conflated with an oppressive political system such as Republican universalism.
Sartre’s idea of a totalized truth is only valid for as long as it is also immediately de-totalized.
Indeed, Sartre’s approach to universal truths can be conflated with his approach to freedom,
discussed in this thesis: although radically free, a man is also radically alienated. A de-totalized
totalization expresses a similar idea: a universal truth is only universal if we understand that it
is also determined by its local specifications. In this respect, Sartre’s philosophy acknowledges
the instability of a universal adapted to a postcolonial world. This universal or universality is
not a universalism, insofar as it does not lock up expressions of individual and subjective
identities into an vertically imposed identity. It is a philosophy for our times. Sadly, this
complex proposition was dismissed in the 1960s because the social reality apt for supporting it
was not visible, or made visible. I contend that the political reflection characterizing the early
twenty-first century around postcolonial issues is apt for giving ground to a Sartre inspired
political philosophy, which could incidentally bring appeasement and direction to this
reflection. Sartre’s proposition was missed and, until today, philosophers in France lament the
loss of the universal. It is for instance the case of Francis Wolff. In Plaidoyer pour l’universel,248
he claims that contemporary feminism or anti-racism are a threat to a universal humanism

247
Sartre, J-P. (1965), Black Orpheus, in. The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, Issue 1. Also: Sartre, J-P. (1964)
Situations V, Paris: Gallimard.
248
Wolff, F. (2019), Plaidoyer pour l’universel, Paris: Fayard.

170
inherited from the Lumières. I would easily follow his lead but, rather than deploring it, would
welcome this evolution as a necessary criticism of the oppressive universalism that fathered the
French Revolution, and French colonialism. Against Wolff, I would argue that these scattered
contemporary attacks against the Lumières cannot be seen as attacks on philosophy as such, but
only against a certain understanding of philosophy, which was destined to disappear since the
nineteenth century. Against such a sterile nostalgia, I call for a return to Sartre’s proposition,
that of a philosophy still capable of producing symbolic meaning and positive concepts –
against the paradigm of deconstruction – while being relevant to a post-revolutionary and
postcolonial world such as ours.

Towards the understanding of the French-Algerian situation

As I have discussed at length in the introduction of this thesis, I take this work for a helpful
preliminary for establishing a network of concepts apt for making sense out of the contemporary
French-Algerian situation. As I write these final lines, France is once again the theatre of a
debate about the memories of the French-Algerian history, initiated by one of its presidents.
President Macron made public a discussion he had with young people he chose for representing
all sides of this history, including grandchildren of French settlers, independence fighters,
Jewish Algerians, harkis,249 and even generals of the OAS.250
This informal gathering, along with the Rapport Stora, are wrong for so many reasons, that
academic neutrality prevents me from entering into. Nonetheless, mentioning this current state
of things is important for underlining the urgency of the theoretical claims I make in this thesis.
Sartre helped me to pinpoint a network of concepts that are invaluable for truly understanding
the French-Algerian situation, as well as inspiring truly emancipating public policies. The
criticism of positivist social and historical sciences, of which a Sartrean concept of recognition
gives the premise, is central for fighting the idea that a simple collection of data on the shared
history of France and Algeria is enough for resolving problems which actually require
interpretation and symbolic meaning. When president Macron gathers people who supposedly
embody conflictual sides of a same history, he gives in to the positivist idea that collecting

249
This colloquial Arabic word is used to describe Algerians who chose to fight against the independence of
Algeria, siding with the French army.
250
Organisation de l’armée secrète: a French far-right terrorist organization created during the Algerian
Revolution – its leaders attempted a coup and almost overthrew the French Republican regime in 1961, when it
became clear that president Charles De Gaulle was going to grant independence to Algeria.

171
points of view and putting them next to one another is enough for understanding the wounds of
history.
This inquiry into Sartre’s philosophy taught us two important things. First, if the French
power is interested in providing a critical understanding of its history to its citizens, then
providing a critical assessment of the French Revolution might be a helpful first step. This
thesis helps to support the following argument: there cannot be a true end to the tense and
conflictual relations between France and its French-Algerian citizens without a critical
assessment of French Republicanism. Second, history without the understanding of what
history means to subjectivities is useless. Because the history of the French colonization of
Algeria is intrinsically linked to the history of French political modernity and intellectual
history, only a revolutionary philosophy such as Sartre’s can provide the tools for a critical
understanding of this French history, and give us along the way the key to a true understanding
of the French-Algerian situation.
Only by putting in motion concepts such as subjectivity, collective past, recognition,
aesthetics and value can we start to create a political vision for appeasement in the French-
Algerian context. For instance, the afore-mentioned concepts can be a source for a powerful
criticism of the ideologies of integration and assimilation. They can also provide the basis for
a critical assessment of the use of sociology in the context of postcolonial dynamics, especially
in stressing the colonial aspect of such sociological uses, often resembling the ethnological
studies led in Africa during the colonial period. These contributions are epistemic and
theoretical, but there is a more profound, political, contribution of these theoretical network. In
supporting the possibility for a self-understanding, a Sartre inspired perspective on
subjectivities shaped by colonization can help foster a political emancipation that French
republicanism renders, to this day, impossible.

Can this Sartre inspired understanding be included in the field of postcolonial studies?
Asking this rather peripherical question regarding the classification of this work at the very end
of my thesis can seem surprising. Yet, I raise this question now precisely because I believe the
answer it involves holds the substance of the argument this thesis has tried to follow. The
specialization of academic research over the twentieth century, accelerated in the first decades
of the twenty-first century, can be seen as an effect of the scientific spirit that inundated social
knowledge, or social sciences. It can also be interpreted as the effect of a political logic; the
marginalization of certain themes inside of academia over the past fifty years led to the
emergence of self-sufficient areas of research. In a political philosophy dominated by the

172
Rawlsian paradigm, how could one have made room for a reflection on postcolonial realities?
Naturally, the postcolonial studies took shape. Many other areas of research follow a similar
logic: put to the edge of reflection, they had to emerge as independent fields of research. I
contend that this is a pernicious effect that has to be corrected. For this reason, I do not believe
that this would be helpful to classify the Sartre-inspired perspective I describe into the field of
postcolonial studies. It helps to understand colonial and postcolonial dynamics, to the extent
that these logics have something to say about knowledge at large. As such, the understanding
of the French-Algerian situation that I wish to propose in a later work on the basis of the present
findings does not ambition to belong to postcolonial studies. Rather, I want it to be a political
reflection anchored in a renewed political philosophy that aims at building a legitimate point of
view on politics, and not only on colonialism. As the movement of this thesis has shown, it is
from a personal reflection on a French-Algerian history of colonization that the necessity to re-
think French political philosophy with Sartre arose. In this respect, Sartre’s powerful reshaping
of political philosophy allowed for a non-European critical perspective on European thought
that becomes European itself insofar as it transforms its foundations. Actually, and more
profoundly, it becomes global more than European and it is possible to say that Sartre realized
a philosophy-world (philosophie-monde).

173
Bibliography
Sartre’s works
In French

Sartre, J-P. (2003 [1936]), La transcendance de l’Ego, Paris: Vrin.

Sartre, J-P. (2008 [1943]), L’être et le néant, Paris: Gallimard, TEL.

Sartre, J-P. (1985 [1946]), Réflexions sur la question juive, Paris: Gallimard, Folio Essais.

Sartre, J-P. (1993, [1946]), L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris : Gallimard, Folio Essais.

Sartre, J-P. (1947), Situations I, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, J-P. (1949), Situations II, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, J-P. (1952), Saint-Genet, comédien et martyr, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, J-P. (1985, [1960]), Critique de la raison dialectique, t. I, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, J-P. (1964) Situations V, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, J-P. (1972), L’idiot de la famille, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, J-P. (1972), L’enfance d’un chef, in. Le mur, Paris: Gallimard, Folio Essais.

Sartre, J-P. (1972), Situations, IX, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, J-P. (1983), Cahiers pour une morale, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, J-P. (1989), Vérité et existence, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, J-P. (2013), Qu’est-ce que la subjectivité ? Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires.

In English

Sartre, J-P. (1965), Black Orpheus, in. The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, Issue 1.

Sartre, J-P. (1968), Search for a Method, New York: Vintage.

Sartre, J-P. (2001), What is Literature? London and New York: Routledge Classics

Sartre, J-P. (2003), Being and Nothingness, London and New York: Routledge Classics.

Sartre, J-P. (2004), Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1, London and New York: Verso.

Sartre, J-P. (2007), Existentialism is a humanism, New Haven: Yale University Press.

174
Sartre, J-P. (2016), What is subjectivity? London and New York: Verso.

Other works
Abbas, F. (1962), La Nuit Coloniale, Paris: Julliard.

Acheraïou, A. (2008), Rethinking Postcolonialism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Adam, I. and Tiffin, H., eds. (1991) Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-
Modernism,New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Adorno, T. (1933, 1989), Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, University of Minnesota

Press.

Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1947, 1972), Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Herder
and Herder

Adorno, T. (1956, 1984), Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the
Phenomenological Antinomies, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Adorno, T. (1963, 1994), Hegel: Three Studies, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Adorno, T. (1966, 1981), Negative Dialectics, London: Continuum.

Adorno, T. (1970, 2013), Aesthetic Theory, Bloomsbury Academic.

Ahluwalia, D.P.S. (2000), Politics and Post-Colonial Theory: African Inflections, London:
Routledge.

Ahmad, A. (1992), In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso.

Aissaoui, R. (2009), Immigration and National Identity: North African Political Movements in
Colonial and Postcolonial France, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Al-Dabbagh, A. (2009), Literary Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and Universalism, Bern: Peter

Lang.

Al-Dabbagh, A. (2010), Literature Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and Universalism, Bern:

Peter Lang, 2010.

Anderson, T. C. (1993), Sartre's Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity, Chicago:
Open Court.

Ankersmit, F. (1997), Aesthetic Politics. Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value,
Redwood City: Stanford University Press.

Amer Meziane, M. (2021), Des empires sous la terre, Paris: La Découverte.

175
Amrani, Y. Beaud, S. (2004), Pays de malheur ! Paris: La Découverte.

Appiah, K.A. (1991), “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial”, in. Critical
Inquiry, No.17.2, pp. 336-57.

Appiah, K. A. (1992), In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press.

Appiah, A. (2005), The Ethics of Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Aravamudan, S. (2012), Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, H. (2002), Qu’est-ce que la philosophie de l’existence, Paris: Rivages.

Arnold, M. (1960), Emotion and Personality, New York: Columbia University Press.

Aronson, R. (1987), Sartre's Second Critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Arthos, J. (2014), Gadamer’s poetics. A Critique of Modern Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury.

Asad, T. (1973), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, London: Ithaca.

Astier-Vezon, S. (2013), Sartre et la peinture. Pour une redéfinition de l’analogon pictural,

Paris: L’Harmattan.

Bal, M. and Boer, I. eds. (1994), The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, New
York: Continuum.

Balibar, E. and Wallerstein, E. (1991), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London:
Verso.

Barker, F. and Hulme, P. (1994), Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory. New York:
Manchester University Press.

Barker, F., Hulme, P. and Iversen, M., eds.(1985) Europe and Its Others, University of Essex
Press.

Barlow, T. (1993), Colonial Modernity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Barrett, L. (2005), “Feeling is Perceiving: Core Affect and Conceptualization in the Experience
of Emotion”, in Barrett, L., Niedenthal P., and Winkielman P., Emotion and Consciousness,
New York: Guilford Press, 255–284.

Barry, B. (2001) Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism,

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Barry, B. (2014), “The Strange Death of Political Philosophy”, in. Government and Opposition,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

176
Bayart, J-F. (2010), Les études postcoloniales. Un carnaval académique, Paris: Karthala.

Beaud, S. (2018), La France des Belhoumi, Paris: La Découverte.

Bedford, E. (1957), “Emotions”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 57: 281–304.

Behdad, A. (1994), Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.

Bell, D. (2016), Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press.

Bell, L.A. (1989), Sartre's Ethics of Authenticity, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Benjamin, W. (1935, 1991), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, London:
Penguin Books.

Benhabib, S. (2002), The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bensmaïa, R. (2017), Gilles Deleuze, Postcolonial Theory, and the Philosophy of Limit,
London: Bloomsbury.

Berlin, I. (2000), “The Counter-Enlightenment” in. The Proper Study of Mankind: An

Anthology of Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Berleant, A. (1992), The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Berger, J. (1972), Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin Books.

Berthet, D. (2013), Pour une critique d’art engagée, Paris: L’Harmattan.

Bewes, T. (2011), Event of Postcolonial Shame, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bhabha, H. (1994), The Location of Culture, Routledge.

Bhabha, H. (1995, 2004), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.

Bidet, J. (2017), “’Blédards’ et ‘immigrés’ sur les plages algériennes”, in. Actes de la Recherche
en sciences sociales, 2017/3, No. 218.

Blancel, N., Blanchard, P., Vergès, F. (2003), La République coloniale. Essai sur une utopie,
Paris: Albin Michel.

Blancel, N., Blanchard, P., Lemaire, S. (2005) La fracture coloniale, Paris: La Découverte.

Blancel, N., Blanchard, P. (2005), “La fondation du républicanisme colonial. Retour sur une
généalogie politique”, in. Mouvements, No 38, pp. 26 – 33, Paris: La Découverte.

177
Bleiker, R. (2001), “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory”, in. Millenium:
Journal of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 509 – 533.

Braconnier, C. and Mayer, N. (2015), Les inaudibles. Sociologie politique des précaires, Paris:
Presses Universitaires de Sciences Po.

Brady, M. (2013), Emotional Insight: The Epistemic Role of Emotional Experience, New York:
Oxford University Press.

Brennan, T. (1997), At Home in the World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Brentano, Franz, (1874 [1995]), Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, London: Routledge.

Bruhat, J (1966), “La Révolution française et la formation de la pensée de Marx », in. Annales
historiques de la Révolution française, Paris.

Bodunrin, P. (1981), “The Question of African Philosophy”, in Philosophy: The Journal of the
Royal Institute of Philosophy, No.56.

Boule, J.-P., and McCaffrey, E. (2011), Existentialism and Cinema: A Sartrean Perspective,
New York: Berghahn.

Bourdieu, P. (1979, [1987]), Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge
Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press.

Bowen, J.R. (2007), Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public
Space, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Buck-Morss, S. (2009), Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, University of Pittsburgh Press.

Bunge, Mario (1964), The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy, Glencoe: The Free
Press.

Busch, T. (1990), The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre's
Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Butler, Judith (1999) [1987]. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century

France, New York: Columbia University Press.

Butler, Judith (2006) [1990], Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New
York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Butler, Judith and Spivak Gayatri (2007). Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics,
Belonging. London: Seagull Books.

178
Butler, Judith; Asad, Talal; Brown, Wendy; Mahmood, Saba (2009). Is Critique Secular?:
Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Berkeley, CA: Townsend Center for the Humanities,
University of California Distributed by University of California Press.

Butler, Judith; Athanasiou, Athena (2013). Dispossession: The Performative in the Political.
Cambridge: Polity Press.

Butler, Judith (2015). Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press.

Butler, Judith (2020). The Force of Nonviolence. New York: Penguin Random House.

Butterfield, E. (2012), Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism, Bern: Peter Lang.

Carey, D. and Festa, L., eds. (2009), The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-century
Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Castle, G. (2001), Postcolonial Discourse: An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell.

Catalano, J.S. (1986), A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason,

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Catalano, J.S. (2010), Reading Sartre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chakrabarty, D. (1995), “Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some

Recent Critiques of ‘Subaltern Studies’”, in. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 30, No. 14,
pp. 751-759.

Chakrabarty, D. (2007), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Difference, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Chatriot, A. (2009), “Réformer le social sous la Troisième République”, in. Revue d’histoire
moderne & contemporaine, No 5, Paris: Belin.

Chatterjee, P. (1993), Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: a Derivative

Discourse? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chatterjee, P. (1993), Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chatton, J.-F. and Mazuryk Bapst, J. (1991), Le Défi francophone, Bruxelles: Bruylant.

Cheah, P. (2003), Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial

Literatures of Liberation, New York: Columbia University Press.

Chered, A. (2010), Gender and Identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and Feminism in
Maghrebi Women’s Literature, London: Tauris.

Chibber, V. (2013), Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso.

179
Chrisman, L. and Perry, B., eds. (2000) Postcolonial Theory and Criticism, Cambridge, UK:
D.S. Brewer.

Cohen, M. and Mazouz, S. (2021), “A White Republic? Whites and Whiteness in France”, in.
French Politics, Culture & Society, New York, The Institute for French Studies at New York
University.

Comte, A. (1830, [2010]), The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Contat, M. (2008), Pour Sartre, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (PUF).

Coulthard, G (2007), “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’
in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory, 6(4): 437–60.
Coulthard, G (2014), Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cox, G. (2009), Sartre and Fiction, London: Continuum.

Craps, S. (2013), Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.

Crowder, G. (2013), Theories of Multiculturalism: An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cusset, F. (2008), French Theory, How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the
Intellectual Life of the United States, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dabashi, H. (2012), The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism, London: Zed Books.

De Coorebyter, V. (2005), “Présentation des esquisses inédites pour la Critique de la Raison

dialectique”, in. Études Sartriennes, n°10.

De Coorebyter, V. (2010), Sartre, l’histoire et les historiens. Études Sartriennes, n°14.

Deonna, J. and Teroni, F. (2012), The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction, London:

Routledge.

Deonna, J., Rodogno, R. and Teroni, F. (2012), In Defense of Shame, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

De Sousa, R. (1987), The Rationality of Emotion, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

De Sousa, R. (2011), Emotional Truth, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Detmer, D. (1988), Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul

Sartre, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court.

180
Dewey, J. (1894), “The Theory of Emotion. (I) Emotional Attitudes”, Psychological Review,
1(6): 553–569

Dewey, J. (1895), “The Theory of Emotion. (2) The Significance of Emotions”, Psychological
Review, 2(1): 13–32.

Diagne, S.B. (2011), African Art as Philosophy. Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude,
trans. Chike Jeffers, London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books.

Dilthey, W. (1989), Introduction to the Human Sciences, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dirlik, A. (1997), The Postcolonial Aura. Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism, London: Routledge.

Dixon, T. (2003), From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological

Category, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dobson, A. (1993), Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Dokic, J. and Lemaire, S. (2013), “Are Emotions Perceptions of Value?”, Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, 43(2): 227–247.

Donald, J. (1991). Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, London: Macmillan.

Doty, R.L. (1996), “Immigration and National Identity: Constructing the Nation”, in. Review
of International Studies, No. 22, pp. 235–55.

Drabinski, J. (2011), Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Drayton, R. (2000), Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement"
of the World, New Haven: Yale.

Dreyfus, H. & Wrathall, M. (2006), A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism,

Oxford: Blackwell.

Durham, S. and Gaonkar, D. (2019), Distributions of the Sensible: Rancière, between Aesthetics and
Politics, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1895, [2013]), Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique, Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France (PUF).

Eagleton, T. (1978), “Aesthetics and Politics”, in. New Left Review, No. 107.

Eagleton, T. (1990), The Ideology of Aesthetic, Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

Eagleton, T., Jameson F. and Said, E. (1990), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

181
Fanon, F. (1952, [1986]), Black Skin, White Masks, London, Pluto Press.

Fanon, F. (1961, [2004]), The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press.

Fell, J.P. (1965), Emotion in the Thought of Sartre, New York: Columbia University Press.

Fell, J. P. (1979), Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place, New York: Columbia
University Press.

Fleming, J. (2013), Passions and Emotions, New York: New York University Press.

Flikschuh, K. and Ypi, L., eds, (2014), Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical
Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Flynn, T. (1984), Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Flynn, T. (1997) Sartre, Foucault and historical reason, Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.

Flynn, T. (2008), “The poetics of history”, in. The Cambridge Companion to Sartre,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foucault, M. (1954-1988), Dits et écrits, Paris: Gallimard.

Frankenberg, R. (1993), The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fraser, N. (1989), Unruly practices: power, discourse, and gender in contemporary social
theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus: critical reflections on the "postsocialist" condition. New
York: Routledge.

Fraser, N., Boltanski, L., Corcuff, P. (2014). Domination et émancipation, pour un renouveau
de la critique sociale, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon.

Foti, V. (1980), “Painting and the Re-orientation of Philosophical Thought in Merleau-

Ponty”, Philosophy Today, No. 24, pp. 114–120.

Gadamer, H-G. (1976), Philosophical Hermeneutics, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gadamer, H-G., (1986), The Relevance of the Beautiful, London: Cambridge University Press.

Gadamer, H-G. (1994), Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue, Albany: State University of
New York Press.

182
Gandhi, L. (1988), Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, New York: Columbia
University Press.

Garrard, G. (2003), Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the

Philosophes, New York: State University of New York Press.

Garrard, G. (2005), Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present,

Londres: Routledge.

Garrard, G. (2011), “The War Against the Enlightenment”, in. European Journal of Political
Theory, 10, 277–86, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishing.

Gaudry, M. (1929), La Femme Chaouia de l'Aures. Etude de sociologie berbère, Paris:

Geuthner.

Gellner, E. (1983), Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell.

Gill, M. (2009), “Moral Phenomenology in Hutcheson and Hume”, in. Journal of the History
of Philosophy, 47, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gilroy, P. (1993), Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London: Serpent's
Tail.

Gilroy, P. (1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Giudice, F. (2017), Arabicides. Une chronique française, 1970 – 1991, Paris: La Découverte.

Gjesdal, K. (2009), Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.

Goldberg, D. T. (1993), Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning, Oxford:
Blackwell.

Goldberg, D.T. (1994), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.

Goldie, P. (2000) The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration, Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Goldie, P. (2012), The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Goldthorpe, R. (1986), Sartre: Literature and Theory, Cambridge University Press

Gordon, L. R. (1995), Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities.

Granier, J. (1980), « Hegel et la Révolution française », in. Revue de Métaphysique et de

Morale, 85e Année, No. 1, Janvier-Mars 1980, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

183
Grene, M. (1998), “The Aesthetic Dialogue of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty”, in The Debate
between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 293–314.

Grove, R. (1994), Green Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guérard de Latour, S. (2015), “Cultural Insecurity and Political Solidarity: French

Republicanism Reconsidered,” in France since the 1970s: History, Politics and Memory in an
Age of Uncertainty, Emile Cabal (ed.), London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 245–262.

Guha, R. and Spivak, G. (1988), Selected Subaltern Studies, New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Gyasi, K. A. (2006), The Francophone African Text: Translation and the Postcolonial
Experience, Bern: Peter Lang.
Gyekye, K. (1987), An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Habermas, J. (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Habermas, J., (1998, 2001) The Postnational Constellation, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Habermas, J. (1996, 2002), The Inclusion of the Other, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Habermas, J. (1998, 2002) Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity,
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Harrison, N. (2003), Postcolonial Criticism, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Honneth, A. (1991,1985), The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Honneth, A. (1995), The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts,
Polity Press.

Honneth, A. and Fraser, N. (2003), Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical

Exchange, London: Verso.

Honneth, A. (2007), Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View, Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Honneth, A. (2000, 2007), Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Polity
Press.

Honneth, A. (2010), The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory, Princeton
University Press.

Honneth, A. (2020), Recognition. A Chapter in the History of European Ideas, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

hooks, b. (1989). Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, Boston: South End.

184
hooks, b. (1990), Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Boston: South End.

Horkheimer, M. (1939), “The social function of philosophy” in. Studies in Philosophy and
Social Science, vol. 8, n°3, New-York.

Horkheimer, M. (1967, 2013), Critique of Instrumental Reason, London and New York: Verso.

Horkheimer, M. (1975), Critical Theory. Selected Essays, London Continuum.

Horvath, C. (2018), “Riots or revolts? The legacy of the 2005 uprising in French banlieues
narratives”, in. Modern and Contemporary France, Vol. 26, Issue 2: The Anti-Police of Mai
’68 Fifty Years On.

Hufendiek, R. (2016), Embodied Emotions: A Naturalist Approach to a Normative

Phenomenon. London: Routledge.

Husserl, E. (1954, [1970]), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental

Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.

Ingarden, R. (1962, 1989), The Ontology of Art: The Musical Work, Painting, Architecture, the
Film, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

Innes, C.L. (2007), ed. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Israel, J. (2006), Enlightenment Contested, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jan Mohammed, A. and Lloyd, D. (1990), The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jansen, W. (1987). Women without Men: Gender and Marginality in an Algerian Town, Leiden:
E.J. Brill.

Jameson, F. (1961), Sartre : the Origins of a Style, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Jameson, F. (1981), The Political Unconscious, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Jameson, F. (1992), The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Jay, M. (1984), Marxism and Totality, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jeanson, F. (1965), Le problème morale et la pensée de Sartre, Paris: Seuil.

Jeffrey, R. (2018), “Emotions and International Political Theory”, in. The Oxford Handbook of
International Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

185
Johnson, P. (1984), “Art against Art: The Cinema and Sartre’s La Nausée”, The French Review,
58, pp. 68–76.

Jones, D. (2010), The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy, Négritude, Vitalism, and
Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press.

Jordan, E. and Weedon, C. (1995), Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, and Race and the
Postmodern World, Oxford: Blackwell.

Judaken, J. (2006), Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the
Politics of the French Intellectual, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Judaken, Jonathan, ed., (2008), RACE after Sartre: antiracism, African existentialism,
postcolonialism, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Kaelin, E. (1962), An Existential Aesthetic: the Theories of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty,

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Kaouah, A. (2012), Quand la nuit se brise. Anthologie de la poésie algérienne, Paris : Seuil.

Katz, E. (2015), The Burdens of Brotherhood. Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France,
Cambridge Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press.

Kaushik, R. (2011), Art and Institution: Aesthetics in the Late Works of Merleau-Ponty,
London: Continuum.

Kearney, R. (1991), Poetics of Imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard, New York: Routledge.

Kelly, P. (2002), Multiculturalism Reconsidered: Culture and Equality and Its Critics, Oxford:
Polity Press.

Khair, T. (2009), The Gothic, Postcolonialism, and Otherness: Ghosts From Elsewhere, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Khanna, R. (2008), Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present, Stanford:
Stanford University Press.

Kierkegaard, S. (1843, 2005), Fear and Trembling, London: Penguin.

Kierkegaard, S. (1844, 1980), The Concept of Anxiety, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kingston, R. and Ferry, L. (2010), Bringing the Passions Back In. The Emotions in Political
Philosophy, Vancouver: UBC Press.

Kirkpatrick, K. (2007), Sartre and Theology, London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Knauss, P. R. (1987), The Persistence of Patriarchy: Class, Gender, and Ideology in Twentieth-
century Algeria, New York: Praeger.

186
Kohn, M. (2010), “Post-colonial Theory,” in Duncan Bell (ed.), Ethics and World Politics,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–218.

Kojève, A. (1947, [1971]), Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard.

Kompridis, N. (2014), The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, London: Bloomsbury.

Koselleck, R. (1988), Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern
Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Koselleck, R. (2002), The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kymlicka, W. (1989), Liberalism, Community, and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kymlicka, W. (1995), Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Kymlicka, W. (2001), Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and

Citizenship, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kymlicka, W. (2007), Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of

Diversity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Laborde, C. (2008), Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Laden, A.S., and D. Owen (2007), Multiculturalism and Political Theory, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Lamouchi, N. (1996), Jean-Paul Sartre et le tiers monde : rhétorique d’un discours

anticolonialiste, Paris: L’Harmattan.

Laslett, P. (1956), Philosophy, Politics and Society, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Lazarus, N. (2004), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Lazarus, N. (2011), The Postcolonial Unconscious, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Le Goff, J. and Rémond, R. (1991), Histoire de la France religieuse, Paris: Seuil.

Lenard, P. (2010), “What Can Multicultural Theory Tell Us about Integrating Muslims in
Europe?,” Political Studies Review, 8: 308–321.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962, [2008]), La pensée sauvage, in. Œuvres, Paris : Bibliothèque de la

Pléiade.

187
Lionnet, F. (1995), Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.

Lionnet, F. and Scharfman, R. (1993), Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and

Nomadisms, Special Issue of Yale French Studies 82-83.

Longino, H. (1990), Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Loomba, A. (1998), Colonialism-Postcolonialism, New York: Routledge

Lowe, L. (1991), Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.

Lukács, G. (1923, 1971), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

MacMahon, D. (2001), Enemies of the Enlightenment, the French Counter-Enlightenment and

the Making of Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Majumdar, M. A. (2007) Postcoloniality: The French Dimension, New York: Berghahn.

Malik, K. (1996), The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society, New
York: New York University Press.

Mandouze, A. (2012), “La Nuit Coloniale de Ferhat Abbas”, in. Présence Africaine, Paris.

Mansouri, M. (2013), Révoltes postcoloniales au cœur de l’Hexagone, Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France (PUF).

Marcuse, H. (1941), Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Marcuse, H. (1958), Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis, New York: Columbia University
Press.

Marcuse, H. (1978), The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics,

Boston: Beacon Press.

Marrouchi, M. (2004), Edward Said: At the Limits, Albany: State University of New York
Press.

Masolo, D. A. (1994), African Philosophy in Search of Identity, Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.

Mauger, G. (2018), “Sociologie et Marxisme”, in. Ducange, J-N. et al., Marx une passion
française, Paris: La Découverte.

May, S. and Sleeter, C. (2010), Critical Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxis, New York:
Routledge.

188
Mazouz, S. (2017), La République et ses autres, Lyon: ENS Lyon.

McBride, W.L. (1991), Sartre's Political Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

McBride, W. (1996), Sartre’s Life, Times and Vision du Monde, London: Routledge.

McBride, W. (1996), Existentialist Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers,

Heidegger, London: Routledge.

McBride, W. (1997), Existentialist Literature and Aesthetics, New York: Garland.

McCormack, D. (2013), Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing, London:
Bloomsbury.

McGee, P. (1992), Telling the Other: The Question of Value in Modern and Postcolonial
Writing, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

McGonegal, J. (2009), Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and

Reconciliation, Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

McLeod, J. (2010), Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Memmi, A. (1957, [1965]), The Colonizer and the Colonized, Beacon Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945 [1962]), Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.),

London: Routledge & K. Paul.

Miles, R. (1982), Racism and Migrant Labour, London: Routledge.

Miles, R. (1993), Racism After Race Relations, London: Routledge.

Mill, J.S. (1843, [2011]), A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Mills, S. (1991), Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and

Colonialism, London: Routledge.

Mills, C. (1997), The Racial Contract, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Mills, S. (2005), Gender and Colonial Space. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Moore-Gilbert, B.J. (1997), Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, London: Verso.

Moore-Gilbert, B.J. (2009). Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-

Representation, London: Routledge.

Moore-Gilbert, B. (2009), Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation.

London: Routledge.

189
Moran, D. (2012), Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morton, S. (2013), States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature, and Law, Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press.

Mudimbe, V.Y. (1988), The Invention of Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mufti, A.R. (2007), Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of
Postcolonial Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mukherjee, A.P. (1994), Oppositional Aesthetics, Toronto: TSAR.

Murdoch, I. (1953), Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Murphy, J. S., ed., (1999), Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre, University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.

Nardal, J. (2002), “Black Internationalism”, in T. D. Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women,

Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 105–107.

Narayan, U. and Harding, S. (2000) Decentering the Center. Philosophy for a Multicultural,
Postcolonial, and Feminist World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ngugi, T. (1989), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language, London: James Currey.

Ngugi, T. (1993), Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom, London: James
Currey.

Nicholls, B. (2010), Ngugi wa Thiog'o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading,
Burlington: Ashgate.

Nietzsche, F. (1886, [1998]), Beyond Good and Evil, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.

Nkrumah, K. (1964), Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization, London:

Panaf Books.

Norris, C. (1992), Uncritical Theory, Postmodernism, Intellectuals & the Gulf War, Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Nussbaum, M. (2001), Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Nussbaum, M. (2004), “Shaming Citizens?” In Hiding from Humanity. Disgust, Shame and the
Law, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Nussbaum, M. (2016), Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

190
Nussbaum, M. (2013), Political Emotions. Why Love Matters for Justice, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.

Livingstone, D. N., and Withers, C.W.J, eds. (1999), Geography and Enlightenment,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oboe, A. and Bassi, S. (2011), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and

Cultures, London: Routledge.

O'Brien, K. (1997), Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to

Gibbon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Okolo, M.S.C. (2007), African Literature as Political Philosophy, London: Zed Books.

Olaniyan, T., and Quayson, A. (2007). African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and
Theory, Oxford: Blackwell.

Outlaw, L. (1996), On Race and Philosophy, New York and London: Routledge.

Parekh, B. (2000), Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory,

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Parry, B. (2004), Postcolonial Studies. A Materialist Critique, London: Routledge.

Paryz, M. (2012), The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendantalism,

New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pellerin, P. (2017), Rousseau, Les Lumières et le monde arabo-musulman, Paris: Classiques

Garnier.

Pénigaud de Mourgues, T. (2017), “Amour-propre et opinion dans Rousseau”, in. La

reconnaissance avant la reconnaissance, Lyon: ENS Éditions.

Pérignon, S. (1968). “Marxisme et positivisme”, in: L'Homme et la société, N. 7, pp. 161-169.

Pervillé, G. (1989). “Les principes de 1789 et le mouvement national algérien”, in. Revue
française d'histoire d'outre-mer, tome 76.

Pettit, P. (1997), Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Clarendon.

Pialoux, M. and Weber, F. (2002), “La gauche et les classes populaires. Réflexions sur un
divorce”, in. Mouvements 2002/4.

Pieprzak, K. (2010), Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pinto, L. (2014), Sociologie et Philosophie: libres échanges, Paris: Ithaque.

191
Pinto, L. (2021), Sociologie des intellectuels, Paris: La Découverte.

Planche, J-L. (2010), Sétif 1945, Chronique d’un massacre annoncé, Paris: Perrin.

Popper, K. (1960), The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge.

Popper, K. (1972), Objective Knowledge, Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Popper, K. (1962), The Open Society and Its Enemies, New York: Harper & Row.

Prakash, G. (1995), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Prinz, J. (2004), Gut Reactions: a Perceptual Theory of Emotion, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Rancière, J. (2000), Le partage du sensible, Paris: La Fabrique.

Rancière, J. (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London:
Continuum.

Rancière, J. (2009), The Aesthetic Unconscious, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Rancière, J. (2010), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetic, London: Continuum.

Rancière, J. (2011), Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, New York:
Columbia University Press.

Rancière, J. (2013), Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, London and New York:
Verso.

Ramone, J. (2011), Postcolonial Theories, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rattansi, A. and Westwood, S., eds. (1994), Racism, Modernity and Identity on the Western
Front, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Ratti, M. (2013), The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature,

London: Routledge.

Rice, L. (2007), Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of
Africa, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage
Publications.

Rorty, R. (1999), Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America,

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

192
Rorty, R. (2000), “Is ‘Cultural Recognition’ a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics?”, in. Critical
Horizons, No. 1, pp. 7–20.

Rosanvallon, P. (2021), Les épreuves de la vie. Comprendre autrement les Français, Paris:
Seuil.

Said, E. (1978), Orientalism, New York: Pantheon.

Said, E. (1981), Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the
Rest of the World, New York: Pantheon.

Said, E. (1984), The World, the Text, and the Critic, London: Faber.

Said, E. (1993), Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto.

Said, E. (2006), After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, London: Faber.

Sanjay, S. (2020), Beyond Reason: Postcolonial Theory and The Social Sciences, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Santoni, R.E., (1995), Bad Faith, Good Faith and Authenticity in Sartre's Early Philosophy,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Santoni, R. E., (2003), Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent, University Park, Penn.:
Pennsylvania State University Press.

Sartwell, C. (2004), Six Names of Beauty. New York: Routledge.

Sartwell, C. (2008), Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory. Albany:
SUNY.

Sartwell, C. (2010), Political Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Schelling, T., (1960), The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schroeder, W. (1984), Sartre and His Predecessors, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Senghor, L.S. (2015, [1948]), Anthologie de la nouvelle poésire nègre et malgache de langue
française), Paris : Presses Universitaires de France (PUF).

Shelby, T. (2005), We Who Are Dark. The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Shepard, T. (2008), The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of
France, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (1994), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media,
London: Routledge.

193
Shringarpure, B. (2015), “The Afterlives of Frantz Fanon and the Reconstruction of
Postcolonial Studies”, in. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy – Revue de la
philosophie française et de langue française, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, pp. 113-128.

Silverman, H. J. (1987), Inscriptions: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism, London:

Routledge.

Silverman, H. J., et al. (1988), The Horizons of Continental Philosophy: Essays on Husserl,
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Skinner, Q. (1998), Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sollors, W. (1989), The Invention of Ethnicity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sollors, W. (1986), Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Solnit, R. (2014), “Icebergs and Shadows”, in. Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, San
Antonio: Trinity University Press.

Spivak, G. C. (1987), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Methuen.

Spivak, G. (1988), "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Spivak, G. C. (1993), Outside in the Teaching Machine, London: Routledge.

Spivak, G. (1999), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward A History of a Vanishing

Present, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Spurr, D. (1993), The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing,
and Imperial Administration, Durham: Duke University Press.

Stasi, P. (2012), Modernism, Imperialism, and the Historical Sense, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Sternhell, Z. (2009), The Anti–Enlightenment Tradition, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Strauss, L. (1988, [1959]), What is Political Philosophy? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Syrotinski, M. (2007), Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of Theory, Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press.

Tackett, T. (1986), La Révolution, l’Église, la France, Paris: Cerf.

Tappolet, C. (2000), Emotions et Valeurs, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Tappolet, C. (2016), Emotions, Values, and Agency, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, C. (1975), Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

194
Taylor, C. (1979), Hegel and Modern Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, C. (1989), Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.

Taylor, C. (1991), The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Taylor, C. (1992), "The Politics of Recognition", in. Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics
of Recognition. Edited by Gutmann Amy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Taylor, C. (1992), Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition: An Essay, Princeton:

Princeton University Press.

Taylor, C. (2011), Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. With Maclure, Jocelyn. Translated
by Todd, Jane Marie. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Tétu, M. (1987), Francophonie. Histoire, problématique et perspectives, Montréal: Guérin.

Thomas, D. (2013), Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Tocqueville, A. (1837), “Second Letter on Algeria,” in Writings on Empire and Slavery,

Jennifer Pitts (ed. and trans.), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 14–26.

Tocqueville, A. (1841), “Essay on Algeria,” in Writings on Empire and Slavery, Jennifer Pitts
(ed. and trans.), Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 59–116

Tolia-Kelly, D.P. (2017), “Rancière and the re-distribution of the sensible: The artist Rosanna
Raymond, dissensus and postcolonial sensibilities within the spaces of the museum”, in.
Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 43(1), pp. 123 – 140.

Tomès, A. (2013), “La critique sartrienne de l’inconscient”, in. Les Temps Modernes, n°674.
Gallimard: Paris.

Tomkins, S. (2008), Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition, vols. I, II, III, IV,
New York: Springer Publishing Company.

Tricoire, D. (2017), Enlightened Colonialism: Civilization Narratives and Imperial Politics in

the Age of Reason, New York: Springer Publishing.

Vaillant, J. (1990), Black, French, and African. A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Van Parijs, P. (2004), Cultural Diversity versus Economic Solidarity, Louvain-la-Neuve: De

Boeck.

Vermeren, P. (2016), La France en terre d’islam. Empire colonial et religions, XIXe-XXe

siècles, Paris: Belin.

195
Verstraeten, P. (1991), “Sartre et Mallarmé”, in. Revue d’esthétique, Paris.

Vétillard, R. (2008), Sétif, mai 1945 : massacres en Algérie, Paris: Les Éditions de Paris.

Vovelle, M. (1988), La Révolution contre l’Église. De la Raison à l’Être Suprême, Bruxelles:

Complexe.

Vradharajan, A. (1995), Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wahnich, S. (2017), La Révolution française n’est pas un mythe, Paris: Klincksieck.

Walder, D. (2011), Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory, London:

Routledge.

Wald Lasowski, A (2011), Jean-Paul Sartre, une introduction, Paris: Agora.

Wallace, M. (1990), Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory, London: Verso.

Watts, R. (2005), Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the

Francophone World, Lanham: Lexington.

Webber, J. (2009), The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, London: Routledge.

Weisz, G. (1979). “L'idéologie républicaine et les sciences sociales. Les durkheimiens et la

chaire d'histoire d'économie sociale à la Sorbonne”, in: Revue française de sociologie, Paris:
Presses de Sciences Po.

Welch, C. (2011), “Social science from the French Revolution to positivism”, in. The
Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

West, C. (1993), Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, London: Routledge.

West, C. (1993), Race Matters, Boston: Beacon.

Wilder, G. (2005), The French Imperial Nation-State. Negritude and Colonial Humanism
between the Two World Wars, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Wilder, G. (2015), Freedom Time. Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World,
Durham: Duke University Press.

Williams, P., and Chrisman, L., eds. (1994), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory,
New York: Columbia University Press.

Wittmann, H. (2001), L'esthétique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels, Paris : L'Harmattan.

Wolin, R. (1992), The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism,
Poststructuralism, New York: Columbia University Press.

196
Wolin, R. (2004), The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from
Nietzsche to Postmodernism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wolin, R. (2010), The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and
the Legacy of the 1960s, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Woodhull, W. (1993), Transfigurations of the Maghreb. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.

Young, R. (1990), White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, London: Routledge.

Young, I.M. (1990), Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.

Young, R. (1995), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London:
Routledge.

Young, R. (2001), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.

Young, I. (2002), Democracy and Inclusion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

197