Sartre's Double Economy

a review of Feminist Interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre

edited by Julien Murphy

by Steve Martinot

In any domain as contentious as the relation between Sartrean discourse and feminism, an attempt at confluence would necessarily be complex and conflictual. Julien Murphy's book, Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre, does not disappoint on this score. Its navigation of the contentions is not only fascinating, but makes a valuable contribution to both realms.

The issues the book implicitly raises range from the historical suppression of Sartre's thinking in the US, and de Beauvoir's controversial relationship to him, to Sartre's radical political stances and the question of what link or "application" a Sartrean perspective might have to feminism. And the historical background is important for such a volume. Sartre's thinking is relatively unknown in the US because it has been subjected to a long sequence of disparagements (as opposed to Latin America or Africa where he is more widely read, and Europe, of course): after World War II, existentialism was generally denigrated as nihilist; during the Cold War, Sartre was disparaged as Marxist; finally, Sartrean thinking has been generally refused by second wave feminism as sexist. With respect to de Beauvoir's relation to Sartre, this latter has produced a certain partisanship that has clouded understanding. Consideration of that relationship has too often led to either a valorization of Sartre through de Beauvoir, or a disparagement of de Beauvoir for her relation to Sartre -- leaving simple acceptance of its character as historically unique the available third choice, but blind to what those two took some first steps toward inventing about relationship as such.

These are rocky channels to navigate, and Murphy's book does an interesting job, though the hull of her ship does not emerge wholly unscathed. Sartre's dismissal by many feminists is a spectre whose participation is often disruptive. Attempts to "apply" a Sartrean perspective to various problems of feminist thinking sometimes crash against it. Symptomatic of this, there are disclaimers by some of Murphy's authors. Disclaimers are rhetorical accessions to other positions elsewhere without critique, which are thereby granted a certain social power. The disclaimers tend to be small, but they appear in a number of the articles, sometimes with mere footnotes (Hoagland, 171), sometimes as a problem of "congeniality" (Karen Green, 176), sometimes as overt disclaimers that Sartre is "hopelessly sexist" though perhaps "of use" (Iris Young, 212). Yet despite the disclaimers, the authors manage fresh critiques of Sartre's thinking, and open new insight into the problems that feminism confronts.

The notion of "using" Sartre faces a double task, first, to introduce whole dimensions of his thinking to a contemporary audience, and second, to organize complex material in a instructive manner. On both scores, the volume is very successful. In content, it is a clear and concise refresher course on much of Sartre's ontology; each contributor makes a faithful condensation of a different signal moment of it. And in organization, the book plays across a grid, weaving together the issues and the texts. In one dimension, it addresses the power of Sartre's thinking as a language to articulate questions of objectification of women, racism, feminist praxis, problems of identity politics, and resistance to oppression. In the other dimension, the volume moves through Sartre's many texts in a rough chronological order, so that we get exegeses of "Being and Nothingness" and "Anti-Semite and Jew" early on, then discussions of the Critique, and end with the Levy interviews in Hope Now. Throughout, the Notebooks for an Ethics break the surface, making appearances like dolphins running escort for a ship in warm waters. The Notebooks is, after all, a chronologically indeterminate work, written in 1948, yet unpublished by the author's choice, and released post-humously by Arlette El-Kaim.

Though Murphy's book does not conceive of itself as a compilations of "applications" of Sartre's thinking to problems of feminism (it is, after all, "feminist interpretations of Sartre"), the historical chasm between the two would give any bridge that character. To regard Sartre through feminist eyes, in the context of his being "hopelessly sexist," means to focus on what is implicit in the disclaimers, viz. "what is useful in Sartre for feminism." For instance, for Iris Young, it is the concept of social seriality as a mode of gender categorization or generalization; for Constance Mui, it is Sartre's concept of the look and the other-as-object that provides a way of reanalysing pornography as a feminist issue; for Linda Bell, Sartrean existentialism offers modes of resistance to the gratuitousness and pervasiveness of institutional masculinism and anti-woman prejudice.

But this raises the question, what does it mean to "apply" a thought system like Sartrean phenomenology to feminist theory? And what might the pitfalls of such "application" be? Each writer in this book affirms that the women's movements have confronted certain philosophical problems -- objectification, the psychology of disparagement, the nature of resistance, and problems of human relationship outside the dehumanizing boundaries of masculinism and heterosexism. For each author in this volume, Sartre's thinking provides some insight into these problems. Hazel Barnes has been suggesting that this would be the case for a long time. And the book properly begins with an article by Barnes who is not only the "professor emeritus" of Sartre studies in the US, but whose linguistic choices as translator of Being and Nothingness contributed indirectly in some interesting ways to later feminist controversy over Sartre, an irony that Barnes has herself addressed. But the notion of "application" presents an additional philosophical problem in itself, and invokes the ancillary question of dialogue, which points back to the nature of the Sartre-de Beauvoir relationship.

In general, to interpretively apply an idea system to a social situation or discourse transforms the dynamic between the interpreter and what is interpreted. In a sense, it introduces a third eye into the investigation in which one invests a prior truth value or validity; the discursive center of gravity gets shifted from experience to judgment, and from one's own critical thinking to that of the third. The interpreter abandons a certain autonomy, and his/her critical intervention toward the subject matter is no longer self-defining. The "applied" discourse, as an alternate view or "look," becomes a lens that inserts itself between the two, imposing the relevance of its own sense of "truth value" or abstract validity. It obviates the question of the extent to which "truth value" is even relevant to the situation under critique. The focus of interpretive validity gets shifted to the lens itself (hence, the relevance of disclaimers). At the same time, such deployment ideologizes the "lens" as well.

Marxists for instance do this all the time. In applying the Marxian dialectic to unusual situations they often transform their dialectic from a mode of critique to a formula or external template. The ability of Marxian analysis to be a living analysis of real situations gets lost in that formularity. Marxists have sought to construct dialectical articulations of the women's movements and women's situation of oppression in patriarchal society, but with limited success. To immerse the socio-cultural facticities of women's specific oppressions in the categories of class relations of exploitation often comes close to drowning them. Marx himself fell into such a trap. He supported British colonization of India, for instance, pursuant to his dialectical requirement that India be provided with a bourgeoisie and proletariat (which the English purveyed) in order that the proletariat have the context in which to liberate itself (as if the exploited of precolonial Indian society could not do this without some European industrialism under their belt). Significantly, Linda Bell and Karen Green find richer ideas in Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew" for understanding women's oppression and the machinations of masculinism, not as an "application" of Sartre's thinking, but precisely through its differences.

De Beauvoir had addressed the question of the "usefulness" of ideas in "The Ethics of Ambiguity." She discusses Sartre in order to open the notion of "ambiguity," and argues that the "useful" has no meaning "at the level of description of his ontology. She does not apply Sartre in this work; instead, she critiques him. For Sartre, the ontological notion of "in order that" or "in order to" transcends the ontic binary of useful/useless, and renders it an empty distinction. For de Beauvoir, the angst of Sartrean freedom remains a welcome opening into the world precisely for positing neither a god nor an engineer of social landscapes (EA,12) -- in contradistinction to patriarchal tendencies.

In a dialogue, the "use" of an idea system by one participant creates the necessity for the addressee to respond to two perspectives rather than one. There is an abrogation of reciprocity implicit in this. This refusal of reciprocity is one of the problems of ideological discourse. Its introduction has a tendency to ideologize even that which is non-ideological. And ironically, that is one of the sources from which some feminist perspectives have condemned de Beauvoir for her relation to Sartre. When de Beauvoir's real experience (speaking for itself, as well as for herself as a woman threading her way through the forest of 1950s patriarchal society in the company of a man with whom she has a special relationship) is examined by application of 1980s feminist analytics (as in Deidre Baar's biography, for instance), the refusal of reciprocity becomes an inability to hear her. The Fullbrooks, who contribute to Murphy's volume, extend this by theorizing a certain absence of de Beauvoir to Sartre's views, unreciprocated in his presence to hers. In having suggested that Sartre opportuned de Beauvoir's ideas, they deploy a language of property (a sense of public "credit") that is wholly alien to intimate and extended dialogue -- which in this case spanned 50 years. The language of property, required by the "copyright" paradigm, leaves ideas devoid of the incarnated dialogues that generated them.

In terms of the "application" of ideas, an interesting aporia emerges from Iris Young's deployment of Sartrean seriality, by which she theorizes a collectivity for women across their detotalizing differences. While Young wishes "theory" to be pragmatic and not "comprehensive," (205) a synthetic notion that would encompass all women seems important to her. She wishes to posit a kind of primordial foundation for feminism ("a structural conception of women as a social collective" (207)) underlying the variety of women's groups and "thinkings" that have emerged. Yet this would seem to marginalize the contestation of "hegemonic feminism" by "US third world women" that Chela Sandoval theorizes, for instance, and give ideological priority to gender hierarchy over the colonial relation to which the notion of "US third world women" refers. Young's purpose seems to be to preserve the ability to generalize about women while recognizing that it doesn't work.

Unfortunately, Young thereby leaves out of account the recognition that dialogue is already an escape from seriality (even while waiting for the bus, to invoke Sartre's example). To the extent people talk to each other out of mutual recognition (they don't always), they continually reconstitute the foundation for the affinity that Young was really looking at. In Sartrean terms, one can understand speech and listening as a form of the look. In the look, the one seen apprehends the other as a subject in the other's objectivizing look by becoming an object for them. Similarly, the one who speaks is seen by the other who listens, and is apprehended as a subject by the speaker as one who hears. Indeed, the purpose of speaking is to be seen, to be beheld and heard, and thus to encounter another as subject. To respond in dialogue is to return the look, but in a way that preserves the other's subjectivity through responding as one previously spoken to. It is to grant subjectivity to the other, and to take responsibility for it. (BN,377-8) In this form of being-for-others, a facticity of interaction that Sartre calls "I-and-the-other," (BN,397) there is already the generation of a micro-socius that transcends seriality.

A feminist conceptualization of Sartrean dialogue appears in one of the book's concluding chapters, an article by Guillermine de Lacoste which addresses Sartre's controverial conversations with Benny Levy in "Hope Now." In those dialogues, Sartre finds himself the recipient of a thinking from beyond himself and Levy both. He characterizes this as "a plural thought," one with a meaning that "each person approaches in his/her own manner," and produces on "different bases, premises, and preoccupations." In that sense, each participant determines only a share of the dialogue's substance, implying that the dialogue takes on a character all its own, independent of the desires of its participants. A participant must thus coordinate three disparate simultaneous moments, his/her own thought, the thought represented by the speech of the other, and the substance of the dialogue itself. One enters the dialogue as serial (participant), resides in it as a being-for-others (listener), and in responding generates a (mini)group-in-fusion transcending seriality in apprehending its dialogic content. The plurality of the thought is not the entityhood of the dialogue itself but the process emerging from relinquishing control over one's meanings.

"Hope Now" surprised a number of people because it represented a transformation in Sartre's anti-colonialism. He backs away from the sense of cathartic violence that Fanon had theorized for anti-colonialist insurgency. Sartre perhaps recognized that anti-colonialism had to change in the face of neo-liberal strategies that supplemented counter-insurgency, and determined local politics from afar through economic regulation, paramilitary terror, and starvation at the hands of international usury (e.g. the IMF). Violence against the cyphers of an invisible transnational structure betrayed a singlemindedness, a seriality, that was no longer insufficient for liberation.

For Lacoste, Sartre's acceptance of the dialogic represents a movement on his part toward what Helene Cixous calls a feminine economy, a "reciprocal abandon" to "thought created by two people," and away from his earlier masculine economy of mastery. Cixous allegorizes the difference of economies with Eve's apple. It contains two facets, the first a presence to the enjoyment of biting and bodily encountering the apple's immediate substance, and the second an absence marked by prohibition as the signifier for a law that is elsewhere. The two economies, pleasure and the law, abandonment and mastery, a gift as free and a gift as imposition or obligation, overlap in the apple's being. Eve opts for the first, and phallicized man becomes the creation of the second. Having hired Levy as a secretary in the wake of his stroke-induced blindness, Sartre found himself tasting a concrete thought that was not his, yet not not-his, in Levy's full participation as co-thinker -- a gift to which Sartre had only to abandon himself, and which in abandonment became him. He thus shifted economies from the "fraternity-terror" of the Critique to the conjoining of the matriciel, the affinity of all in being born of women. (HN,80,87)

Lacoste traces the appearance of this feminine economy in Sartre's earlier work, in embryo as it were, through the Notebooks, the Critique, and Saint Genet. For her, these mark various attempts to transcend what she calls the imperialism of the for-itself, its monolithic independence of consciousness. (293) But one could argue that a feminine economy swam all along under the surface, visible, yet hidden by that very visibility, in Sartre's ontology of being-for-others.

Like Eve's apple, being-for-others has two facets. In the face of having been rendered an object for the other in the other's look (whether one experiences the look in shame, or recognition, or intimacy), one can retrieve one's subjectivity by returning the look in a way that makes the other an object for oneself, engendering an arena of unending conflict in the ensuing exchange of re-objectivizations (which is how most commentators have interpreted being-for-others in general). (BN,473-4) Or, one can return the look so that one remains the object one had been for the other, (BN,377-8) thus granting the other their subjectivity while recovering oneself as a subject in order to do so.

To accomplish the latter, one adopts the project of maintaining the other as the subject one had apprehended in the other's look, but now as one to whom one turns as such. It is to apprehend oneself as the situation in which there is another as subject; each thus becomes the other's context and responsibility. (BN,380) For the other to return that look again in this context would not be to re-objectivize but to reenact the project of being-for-the-other through that look. (BN,360) It is thus a feminine economy, an abandonment of oneself to the situation given by the other, and to the other for whom one's for-itself is, in reciprocity. In it, the notion of "I-and-the-other" has two parts; the existence of one's own facticity as a "oneself" who is responsible for there being an other as subject, and a responsibility to the other that one lives as a "oneself." (BN,380)

In effect, both masculine and feminine economies inhabit being-for-others. If the feminine remains relatively hidden in Sartre's ontology, it is because it belongs to the category of facticity, within a text that focuses on ontological structures. Intersubjectivity cannot be an ontological structure of consciousness without eliminating difference. While ontology presents a foundation for understanding facticity and difference, it is to understand them ontologically, and not render them ontological. If Eve's apple consists of an inside (intimacy) and an outside (the law), so Sartre's notion of being-for-others provides a dwelling for both intimacy and conflict. And in its inner relation of subject to subject, more than a mere outline of a feminine economy resides. As Sartre says, to adapt oneself to the human order (the order of meanings), one "set[s] up a dialogue with the Other." (bn,452)