12 April 2005
saint sartre
limited, inc writes very interestingly on the continuing relevance of 'saint sartre' and the US persepctive on (the current lack of) left philosophical icons.
'no slave revolt has ever succeeded by pennypushing': quite right. What strikes me as I reread the Critique of Dialectical Reason is the audacity of Sartre's project: a unified notion of capital-H History, the thesis regarding the contingent necessity of the foundational role of scarcity (and could we say that contemporary consumer capitalism operates with a logic of the 'scarcity of enjoyment'?), the exhaustive attempt to analyse the ontological status of individual and collective formations, to explain why and how History must be understood dialectically. Not to mention the effort to comprehend, without recourse to notions such as the 'cult of personality', the rise of Stalin and the corresponding theoretical arrest of Marxism. There is much more to be said - will return to this.
