by Steve Martinot

It is said that Sartre maintained a certain opposition to post-structuralism, for which his focus on a dialectical understanding of historical praxis is considered evidence. Yet he rarely discussed post-structuralism, nor engaged it in debate; which is odd, since it formed part of his philosophical milieu. After all, he took on Marxism and Christianity. But to debate post-structuralism would mean addressing its view of the world, thereby assuming it actually had one. Perhaps he saw that to address it as an ideology, a view of the world, rather than a critique of discursivity itself, would be to transform it into what it was not, against itself.

Yet still, it belonged to his times, a part of his historical moment, to be engaged. I will argue that, rather than engage with post-structuralism, or respond to it, it engaged him. But if it engaged him, it could only have done so in a dialogical process that formed part of the continual conversation Sartre engaged in with history, with that history of his own thinking and writing, and with the history that surrounded him with responses to his responses to itself. On the particular question of engagement, a particular personage engaged Sartre, not in what one would call dialogue, but rather an unspoken exchange of forms. That person was Roland Barthes, who stands among his contemporaries as a singular interlocutor to Sartre's historical thinking.

Sartre theorized engagement in What is Literature?, as an imperative faced by the writer, a demand that, in order to be a writer, in order to situate oneself as such, one write in and for one's time. <<1>> For Sartre, a writer's involvement in his/her historical moment meant revealing the possibilities of being, the modes of freedom of that moment. The writer must write in such a way as to guarantee the reader's freedom; rather than trap the reader in the constraints of ideological vision, one must write so that readers encounter a world of greater or richer possibility for themselves. To this end, language becomes an instrumentality, and not an end in itself. In short, engagement names the problem of how a writer grasps the historical moment as his/her own.

And Roland Barthes responded from within Sartre's historical moment, and asked (in Writing Degree Zero) how history grasped writers, and writing, as its own. <<2>> Barthes posed the problem of writing as manifesting itself within a determined and determining structure of language. For Barthes, writing (l'ecriture) is not merely the act of a writer; it occurs in a space of language that has its own historicity. <<3>> Language itself defines a realm of possibility, but one characterized by limitation, by boundedness, as an "horizon of intelligibility" rather than an instrumentality. Bequeathed by tradition, it is an inherited realm of familiarity. Within the space of that historical horizon, a writer chooses a mode of writing. Modes of writing are not themselves genres or semiotic codes by which literary meaning is generated, but Form itself, that is, systems of formal signs, connotations, second order significations, that carry socio-historical and ideological meaning. Form is not itself an object to be regarded or played with; it is precisely where intentions and objects reside. As a sign system constituted by traditional uses of language, it brings with it concomitant socio-historical meaning (for example, a literary mode of writing signifies Literature, while in the process of producing it). It configures the space in which personal style can find expression. That is, for Barthes, form, or mode of writing, is not style, but the place where style arrives as the upsurge of the writer's psycho-biological being, the immediacy of the biographical, of past experience. Style comes not from elsewhere, but from "here", the meaning of the personal, of immediacy itself (a signifier without a signified).

Because an aura of the objective accompanies modes of writing, as form, a history of writing and of literature becomes possible. For Barthes, such a history defines and constrains the possibility of being a writer. A writer's choice of a mode of writing becomes his/her choice of how to become a writer. That is, form is where the writer is engaged. Barthes expresses this as "l'ecrivain s'engage," (Le degr zéro,23) leaving ambiguous, between the reflexive and passive voice, whether the writer engages him/herself, or is engaged.

When Sartre "responded" to Barthes, in the Critique, he reposed the question of how practical structures determined praxis (including the praxis of writing). <<4>> He returns to forms of historical exigency, or imperative, as addressed through dialectic of praxis, the relation between freedom and one's determination by social praxis. The problem, for Sartre, is how one makes history and is made by it, not one's determination through the historicity of language. Language remained the instrumentalized rather than the instrumentalizer, in opposition to Barthes, for whom language constituted a "horizon of intelligibility" rather than an instrumentality.

Nevertheless, though their two notions of l'engagement are not the same, they are closer than they look. For Sartre, the writer is inherently engaged at the moment of lifting the pen, but can succeed in his/her project only if the reader is free, which the writer must write to guarantee. Sartrean engagement is freedom posed against the moment. For Barthes, writing instead raises the question of how the reader (as well as the writer) is determined by historical language and literary history (l'ecriture). And it is from the determining meanings given by form that the reader must be liberated. For instance, 19th Century naturalism, though affecting a mimesis of popular speech, was still a form of bourgeois writing; the passions it described remained imprisoned within its bourgeois (individualist and objectivist) character. When left-wing writers deploy naturalism to articulate their rejection of bourgeois individualism, they sustain, through their use of bourgeois modes of writing, the very ethos they seek to oppose. Thus, they become complicit in it. And it is with such complicity that he charges Sartre.

Against such complicity, Barthes proposes a "zero degree writing," a mode of writing in which social connotation and second order significations (the meanings of form) have been reduced to the negligible. For this, Barthes looks to avant-garde experimentation with language (the New Novel movement, for instance) to flatten language toward pure denotation, to push writing to the point of violating its own internal logic and produce a significationless form. This, for Barthes, constitutes the hypothetical liberatory, or revolutionary role of the avant-garde.

In sum, both address the freedom of the reader, though Sartre locates this freedom in the content rather than the form, in language's referentiality rather than its self-referentiality.

Nevertheless, when Sartre turned to the issue of the historical determination of praxis through the dialectic of praxis, certain problems arise with respect to the praxis of writing. To address the question of the praxis of writing and the praxis of reading, and how praxis becomes constrained or unfree through the givenness of the social past, the language of praxis becomes inadequate. It comes up against the limits of that same self-referentiality.

For Sartre, praxis constitutes itself as a dialectic between activity in pursuit of a project and the given world of worked matter that is transformed by that pursuit. One gains a grasp of the given (the practico-inert) through one's activity (an interiorization of exteriority), and one realizes one's project through that action on the given (an exteriorization of interiority). Where the given is known through activity, activity is known through its effect on the given. Instrumentality (as raw material, tools, etc.), which interposes itself in this process of knowing as the mediation between activity and the given, thereby presents itself as a material moment of the epistemological. It is a way the world is apprehended that is irreducible either to itself or to that apprehension. In that sense, instrumentality functions (in Sartre's metaphor) as an "organ of perception." <<5>> It discloses the object and the subject, the world and the person acting in the world, to each other. It interposes itself between praxis and matter as an avatar for their very relation, an intelligibility that transcends the project it realizes. (CDR,44)

But the mediation of instrumentality marks the encounter between praxis and matter with a certain necessity. It is never arbitrary; it incorporates certain imperatives which in turn govern the knowledge produced. As matter demands to be worked in certain ways and not in others, so instrumentality requires that it be used in a certain way, and not others. (IF,45) That is, the instrument represents certain socio-technical relations which constitute the imperatives of its deployment. It requires know-how that itself embodies a form of practical knowledge. But this is knowledge that is "implicit and non-verbal," an "intuitive knowledge" because it constitutes a direct and totalizing comprehension of praxis in its immediacy. (IF,45)

In other words, "implicit knowledge" is prior to articulated knowledge in its immediacy, and different from institutionalized ideas and discourses ("ideologies, cosmogonies, ethico-esthetic and confessional systems" (IF,48)) in its implicitness. It constitutes an immediate intuition of the social relationships conditioning each instrumentality through the imperatives of its use. Like the project that seeks to overcome, as part of one's Being-for-others, the endlessly oscillating subject-object relation of the look, this implicit knowledge reflects one's lived relations with others. <<6>> That is, it is intelligible in terms of Sartre's account of the for-itself. And like non-reflective consciousness, or one's apprehension of one's fundamental project, it is an illumination that withholds itself from analysis and conceptualization -- content without form, a signified without a signifier.

In effect, instrumentality is more than mere know-how or technique; it constitutes, in the social world, a mode of dialogue between worker and matter, a "subjectivity of work." (IF,46) In mediating the dialectical relation between agent and world, it positions itself as ontologically prior to that relation, and thus prior to the dialectic as well; that is, it pertains to the existential, to the for-itself, to that for which the dialectic would then exist. <<7>>

If Sartre gives this account of instrumentality to extend the discussion of praxis developed in the Critique, it is because, for writing and reading as praxis, the language of the Critique is insufficient. First of all, writing resists translation into the terms of the practico-inert; it does not, strictly speaking, work on matter nor produce worked matter. Though Sartre speaks of the written as a "thingified idea" (l'idée chosifiée) (IF,49), and of literature as "a work of material production," (IF,49) both still require contextualization within the cultural rather than the material to exist as such.

But second, a real problem arise when one seeks to reflect upon intuitive knowledge (as content without form), and thereby to give it form. Whether in writing or in thought, such reflection must necessarily have recourse to language. (IF,45) In transforming intuitive knowledge from the lived to the known, one subjects it to social discourse (i.e. to culturally extant terminologies and ideational forms). Like the worker subjected to an assembly line, where s/he becomes an adjunct to the machine and living the machine's rhythms, articulation renders intuitive knowledge "thingified" (IF,47), though on the cultural rather than the material plane. And because one's articulation occurs through culturally extant discursive forms, one ends by making (non-material) instrumentalities of those cultural forms themselves. (IF,45)

Furthermore, the process of articulation is never innocent. As Sartre points out in Being and Nothingness, the language chosen for deliberation (or articulation) is always deceptive because its use is pursuant to a different project than what it articulates. (BN,581) As instrumentality, the discourses of social, political, or technological relations subject intuitive knowledge to other, already constituted social knowledges. They divide intuitive knowledge in ways that are alien to it, or into theoretic moments that don't necessarily accord with the praxis it governs. In being transformed from the lived into the known, implicit knowledge gets falsified; it becomes a form of what Sartre calls non-knowledge.

In order to speak of this cultural instrumentality, to reflect on and articulate the intuitive knowledge that accompanies writing, as well as the instrumentality of writing that materially reflects the human relationships of its specific social milieu, Sartre defines the notion of l'esprit objectif, in L'Idiot de la Famille. If, as Hazel Barnes suggests, L'esprit objectif combines ideas from both What is Literature? and the Critique of Dialectical Reason, it does so by amalgamating the free praxis of writing with the social givenness of the practico-inert. <<8>> For Sartre, L'esprit objectif can be understood as culture to the extent that culture is practico-inert. (IF,47) That is, l'esprit objectif comprises the institutional discourses, ideologies, truths, mystifications, cosmogonies, etc. that present or articulate "the totality of imperatives imposed upon a person in a particular society." (IF,48) Its central aspect is that it is outside, not the product of thought in the present, but ... the writings of others. (IF,51) The texts it subsumes must be broadly construed, however, to include not only written texts, but oral texts whose mode of existence is a particular inscription in memory, and the already experienced meanings given to worked matter that constitute its material imperatives. (IF,48) For Sartre, the actual written texts are only "the last avatar." (IF,49)

Freedom is more narrowly constrained within l'esprit objectif than by materiality. While material exigency can be ignored, the discursive imperatives of l'esprit objectif purvey an unavoidable imposition of terms. Articulated knowledge does not determine what one thinks, but it necessitates that one respond within its given terms -- that, like an instrumental imperative, it be used, or "read and understood in this way, and not that." (IF,46) Even the spoken acceeds to those discourses chosen as speech. One's thought becomes thus ruled by them. To refuse the terms given only becomes another concretization of (and accession to) the imperative of those same terms. If there is freedom, it is relative freedom.

If l'Esprit objectif is a synthetic domain in which prior discourses instrumentalize themselves, it provides access to a historicity of writing and discourse which parallels what Barthes sought to articulate as a "horizon of intelligibility" and modes of writing -- the space of ecriture. Indeed, Barthes' sense of the historical determination of language may be included in it. There is a difference, of course, between spatial boundedness and discursive imperative. The value that Sartre finds in the latter is that, in considering language as instrumental, a freedom is preserved for the individual -- albeit a relative freedom because it is practical rather than ontological. But it accords recognition to Barthes' notion of complicity. In general, writing must choose with respect to ideological discursivities for its instrumentalities; and it becomes complicit in their self-reification to the extent it ignores the ambiguity in their elsewhereness. When Sartre says that the development of a working class consciousness must involve freeing class subjectivity from the given (ideological) discourses available for its articulation, he is recognizing a renovative process analogous to Barthes's vision of the zero degree. Thus, Sartre accedes, in a sense, to the thrust of Barthes's historicization of writing.

At the same time, he is in accord with Derrida's argument that context is not immanent in a text, but is coded onto it from extant ideological discourses. <<9>> For both, there is an openness, an ambiguity to any text that requires a choice of perspective and interpretive structure to render the act of (re)producing its meaning possible. Though Derrida focuses on the text's interior semiotic indeterminacy, he does not neglect the socially given moment that requires or points to a particular interpretative contextualization. <<10>> Indeed, that is the point of inception of his semiotic critique -- what lies prior the social necessity of interpretive ideologization. Sartre, on the other hand, focuses on the imperative, and on how the articulation of practical knowledge becomes a process of acculturation. (IF,46) His point of inception is how the "acculturating process" that pretends to simply articulate intuitive knowledge is always both totalizing and ideologizing.

Parenthetically, one might note that this is essentially what one has to do to post-structuralism in order to debate it; without acculturating it, ideologizing it, or inventing a position for it to uphold, to which one can then address oneself, there would be nothing to debate. And Sartre doesn't do that; he does, however, absorb it in his own terms.

But now, lodged between the dialectics of instrumentality and the existentiality of intuitive knowledge, we encounter a semiotic. It begins where Derrida's begins, in the recognition that, if signification persists in the objectivity of texts, then writer and reader must be independent of each other, and signifiers independent of both. Sartre cleaves to the phenomenological idea that in the absence of both a writer or reader, there are no signs; that signs serve only to guide a transcendence. (IF,50) But this doesn't obviate the recognition that reading and its guided transcendence are re-determined by a certain linguistic priority. <<11>>

Sartre's semiotic has to be understood, however, in terms of social praxis. Like Derrida's, Sartre focuses on reading. The praxis of reading, because it relies on the totality of social textuality, enacts itself at the heart of l'esprit objectif. Reading is an undertaking that transforms a thing into an idea. It is the "synthetic surpassing of signifying materiality toward signification," in which "the eye must reconstitute the ideational act of the other through that act's vestiges," (IF,51) the traces of an other's ideation left in worked matter. This is not the Derridean trace, which is the semiotic investment of each sign by its differences with other signs, the presence of absence. Sartre's trace is the presence of a beckoning, enticing idea that is no longer there; it is thus also a presence of absence, but an absence that is ontological rather than semiotic.

Reading, as a surpassing of materiality, also depends upon a multiplicity of social textualities: (1) institutionalized ideas entextualized as ideologies, cosmogonies, cultural and class practices, etc.; (2) the use of these texts as articulatory instrumentalities; and (3) an articulated intuitive knowledge within its praxis. As materiality, these textualities are what is read (or listened to, if such is the case); and as the instrumentality of reading praxis, they are the mode of reading. In other words, the totality of social textuality is what one reads with, as well as what one reads.

But if this is the case, then the articulation of intuitive knowledge for the social praxis of reading presents a critical problem. Intuitive knowledge, we have seen, is coherent at the level of the for-itself, as a form of non-reflective consciousness; and it is intelligible dialectically at the level of praxis as instrumental mediation, as know-how accrued in and through practical activity. Work, for instance, is surrounded by meaning and imperatives because it is material within a human world, and is lived as such -- it is the human world that is thus revealed. But with respect to the praxis of reading, intuitive knowledge is already perfused by cultural and ideological discourses. Social usage, explanation, linguistic training, social, political and business relations are all constituted by language. For Sartre, they are already inscribed within instrumentality. If one's praxis and its social relations have those discourses embedded in them, then they are already acculturated. For the praxis of reading, (implicit) meaning is already a deployment of articulated meaning. What does it mean to have an implicit, unarticulated knowledge of it? <<12>> The means of articulation of implicit practical knowledge are already what constitute what was to be articulated.

Thus, for reading, implicit knowledge is not bound by the same form of imperative as for materiality. The implication is that reading praxis obeys a second logic. Sartre approaches this second logic by recognizing that each reader reads a text knowing (implicitly) that there are others, unknown, who are reading the same text, each of whom is reading it differently -- and each of whom is aware in some sense of this variance. "I know that other readers appropriate the idea at the same moment [as I do] ... who surpass the same material toward nearly the same, but sensibly different, meanings." (IF,50,52) In other words, reading praxis is inherently multiple; it is never a totalized act. Part of the independence of the sign is that each reader reads with a different intuitive knowledge, a different intellection, employing different re-articulatory instrumentalities.

If the sign, or the text, were a materiality (whether historical, machinic, or objective), then readers would have the same totalized imperative to obey. They would constitute what Sartre calls a statutory group -- that is, a fused group that had itself become part of the practico-inert, that had established its own existence as such. The statutory group seeks to preserve itself and its coherence through the imperatives of its own past, the operation of nostalgia for its own origins, rendered a commitment to their permanence. (CDR,418) Though composed of free praxes, its materiality restricts its members' freedoms, because it brooks no alternative points of view. Reading would be subject to one interpretation only. But this, Sartre recognizes, is not the case.

Instead, what one reads is "enriched in my eyes by a thousand interpretations that escape me." (IF,52) If reader's praxes differ, surpassing the same signs toward different meanings, the possibility of these different praxes must be part of the sign; the detotalized praxis of reading must reflect a semiotic polysemia. And each discourse or text must necessarily contain the possibility of being polysemic, in order to be subject to different readings, instrumentalities, and practical contextualizations. In particular, context is not inherent; the transcendence that is guided by the sign assists that guidance through its choice of contextualizing (instrumental) discourses.

Thus, though Sartre begins with a dialectical formulation of praxis, an historically totalized praxis of reading is not where he ends up. And the question then arises, how is the individual reader to totalize this "detotalized totalization of readers"? For Sartre, what totalizes for each reader cannot be discursive or articulatory, since such sources are already semiotically diffuse. Instead, it is the future, a "presentament" or implicit apprehension of the way the future will see the present as its past -- that is, how others "will make of today's lived present a totalized past." (IF,50) While the present multiplicity of readings remains subjectively irreducible, this previsioned future abolishes the present's experience of itself by expressing it through what future readers will experience of this present as their past. (IF,51)

But this presentiment of the future is without content. Otherwise, the multiplicity of other readings would not be irreducible. It is totalized in form only. Understood as what a future will understand, the present is a deferred totalization, in a mode of non-being. That is, the present is apprehended as not yet given, while at the same time already given as past, that is, as no longer the present. And the praxis of reading understood through the future is other than its own present (re)construction of the text or sign. Thus, the praxis of reading is both a deferral (to a future) and an alterity to itself (through that future). But if reading praxis (i.e. l'Esprit objectif) manifests itself as alterity and deferral, it is not dialectical. Rather we recognize the operation of (Derridean) differance. <<13>> This is not unusual; it recurs often in Sartre -- for instance, in his notion that "the thought [read], in the instant I make it mine, remains definitively other, an other's thought that commands me to resuscitate it." (IF,51) It is always elsewhere, always later. The praxis of reading constitutes itself as two inseparable, incommensurable positivities; there is neither opposition nor synthesis.

Instead, there is dissemination. "The reader must restrain (as a praxis) the dispersion of signs," in order to "discursively recompose" the author's thought. (IF,51) Not only is the sign's prior dispersion, its polysemia, recognized as structural, but the "restraining" done by each reader apprehends its multiplicity not in others but as otherness in his/her own reading in order to read in the first place. The dissemination of the sign is the prior condition for reading. And Sartre's account takes on a Derridean flavor in embracing a dissemination that it relinquishes only in the absolute otherness of deferred totalization through an envisioned future. (FI,51) Furthermore, the act of reading is a search, an implicit knowledge, within an otherness that is already, at the moment of reading, a trace ("a vestige") left in worked matter by another, of an other's ideation. Though not the Derridean trace, it too, as the presence of what is no longer there, is closer than it looks. Both pertain to the generation of meaning. However, the Sartrean trace, as the praxis of making meaning, unlike the Derridean trace, contains Sartre's refusal to erase the person who acts, or who reads.

Thus, the dissemination of reading does not obstruct its historicity; in fact, it is the condition for it. Alterity and deferral historicize writing, though in an inverted sense from Barthes's. For Barthes, the past determines the present. Sartre, on the contrary, asks how that past is determined or constructed, and responds that the past does not determine the present, but is constructed by it through a future which constructs the present as one that contains such a past for itself. The present writes its own past by envisioning itself through its future.

In effect, the reader is historicized at three levels. First, there is the reader's epoch itself (l'esprit objectif); second, the history that the reader lives (the multiplicity of real readings); and third, the envisioned historicity of each reader (the deferral and alterity of the present as a totalization of detotalized givenness). In other words, l'Esprit objectif constitutes a triadic lamination whose layers are: 1) materiality (the present), 2) discursive instrumentality (the present as the given future of a past), and 3) intersubjectivity (the present as the past of a future).

Ultimately, Sartre has transformed his earlier notion of engagement in one's own time into a sense of being in one's own time as a past produced through an envisioned future; that is, as form. Both Barthes' project in Writing Degree Zero and Sartre's in L'Idiot de la Famille now project the liberatory through form rather than content. If the writer has become a synthesis of an ontology of praxis with a Barthesian structure of historicity, albeit inverted, then a structure enfolds the relation between language and intentionality in which it becomes undecidable which grounds which. And this is reflected in the bi-valent temporality of past and future. The terms of this undecidable ground reveal a chiasmus that has already expressed itself as alterity and deferral. In l'esprit objectif, we encounter alterity (difference) as historicity and historicity as deferral; difference (alterity) as materiality and materiality as deferral.

Here, Sartre recognizes that, if the transformation of thing into idea is never complete, there is no synthesis. There is always a residue, an elsewhere that detotalizes. Meaning never exhausts the sign. There is no transcendental meaning from which to apprehend the whole. If, to be "penetrated" by the idea-thing testifies to the artifactuality of knowledge, it also implies that there is always more knowledge contained in signs than we can mean with them. Signs themselves can never be totalized.

In short, there is an analogue relation with Derrida. For Derridean semiotics, the sign means as difference, through the trace, at the moment of reading, but as a sustained deferral at the instance of difference. In Sartrean semiotics, meaning emerges from an alterity (my thought of another's thought) and a deferral to future pastness (my assignment of another's assignment of my meaning), in which content and form are totalized separately. Sartrean alterity and deferral are not negations of each other, nor are they mutually generating. They map out a positive space in which meaning is generated.

In other words, Sartre acceeds to the post-structural, but in form rather than content -- which is as it should be if post-structuralism is not a view of the world. It constitutes a level of discursive form, within Sartre's text, beyond dialectical totalization. The site of the post-structural lies between the existential and the dialectical, and structures Sartre's discourse as tri-laminar. In this tri-laminar structure, one encounters the existential, the semiotic, and the dialectical, in which are manifest intuitive knowledge, intersubjectivity, and the materiality of group praxis. These reflect Sartre's own historicity, his movement from his own time of theorizing engagement to his later incorporation of post-structuralism deep within his own thinking, as part of post-structuralism's engagement with Sartre, its confrontation with Sartre as part of its world.

In these terms, Sartre's writing itself can be historicized on three levels, 1) its own internal development (a historicity in Sartre), 2) Sartre's interaction with his times, his response to political and philosophical events, and to the "force of circumstance" (a historicality to Sartre), and 3) Sartre's times themselves, the real circumstances surrounding him, which he in turn lived as one of history's events (a history for Sartre). It is a homologous tri-laminar structure.

But this trilaminar structure is a complexity within Sartre's thinking which not only recapitulates his own historicity as an interaction with the philosophical movements of his time, but has embedded itself within his thinking. Indeed, the fact that there has been a debate on whether Sartre's early and late writings reflect a continuous development or a division in his thinking at least signifies that some difference is noticeable between existentialist and dialectical components. <<14>> Our present discussion would suggest that not only is there a continuity that envelops a real shift in focus from the ontological (for which the ontic is a necessary substrate) to the social, the ontic (for which the ontological is a necessary substrate); but furthermore, the mortar which binds the terms of this continuity comes from beyond it, from Sartre's history and times, from the post-structuralist other to Sartre's philosophy. And this would suggest that Sartre's critique of the dialectic would have to be understood as preserving at all points both existential and Hegelian components. It is, after all, with the question of whether the dialectic exists or not that Sartre begins his critique.

But this poses the question, does this tri-laminar construction appear even within the structure that Sartre critiques as the dialectic?

For Sartre, "the dialectic is the living logic of action." As such, it is "invisible to a contemplative reason." (CDR,38) It is, in part, for this reason that the existence of the dialectic is a question. But it appears, and "becomes a theoretical and practical method when action in the course of development begins to give an explanation of itself." Already, we see three planes structured together: the agent who acts; a course of practical development of action constituting a relation between agent and world; and an attempt by that action to "give an explanation of itself." But it has greater exigency than that.

There is a space, then, between the agent's relation to his/her action, and the method that stands as the self-explanation produced by others, with a seemingly objective aura, "over there."

Let us leave aside the idea that Sartre's Critique is itself a self-explanation of his own action, which we re-enact by reading it, and perhaps even enact as "rational transparency." If reading Sartre's Critique is the condition for reading "it" (the dialectic in Sartre's Critique), reading "the dialectic" is likewise the condition for "seeing" it as method, that is, for "reading" as a dialectical activity of reading Sartre's Critique. We would be caught in a second chiasmus between the dialectic of reading and reading the dialectic -- a chiasmus which would appear sandwiched between the for-itself in its project to be guided as a transcendence, and the other (Sartre's text) as the self-explanation of the dialectic of reading. And let us leave aside the idea that between reading Sartre's dialectic, and reading with the awareness of reading dialectically, there is no longer a difference, since this would only collapse transparency and necessity into each other (and we know what the necessary transparency of thought is; it is the apriori.)

Let us then look at Sartre's structure a little more closely, in what can be considered a fairly representative passage.

This passage can be divided into three parts, or clauses, each of which relates to a different aspect of Sartre's thought: need, freedom, and the Hegelian "idea" (consciousness knows itself in the other, and knows the other in itself). And, indeed, the first two clauses seem to generate and condition each other, which the third then synthesizes in a nice dialectical manner.

In the first clause ["the praxis of everyone reveals itself to the individual as the necessity of his own praxis"], the expression of necessity is not "need" in the sense of scarcity; it is not yet external necessity. Neither is it external investigation, but rather the interior situatedness of the "investigator who lives his investigation." (CDR,38) In effect, it is the existential relation of the for-itself to others. This necessity is the necessity of freedom to exist, in the sense that freedom is "not free not to be free, not free not to exist." (BN,625) It is necessity in the sense that freedom exists only insofar as there are others. It expresses the internal necessity of having to not be the others in order to act toward them as praxis, as a project.

Again, this parallels the structure of one's Being-for-Others, in which one adopts the project of not engaging in endless oscillations of subject-object relation; in such a project, one both recaptures one's subjectivity and preserves the other as the subject one has discovered in the other's look. Such a project is a "pure, irreducible contingency," a duality of negations ("the fact that my denial that I am the Other is not sufficient to make the Other exist, but that the Other must simultaneously with my own negation deny that he is me") that is not derivable from the for-itself. It constitutes, without mediation, the facticity of being-for-others. (BN,399) Because it is a resistence to being an object for others, and a resistence to making the others objects for oneself, this project constitutes a mode or "coefficient" of adversity interior to the for-itself, a contingent necessity. (BN,398) The for-itself's choice to abjure the mutual objectifications of the exchanged look is the condition for apprehending the other's praxis as such, and to not allow oneself to be oneself the very instrumentality of that other's praxis. As contingent necessity, the apodicticity of freedom, this is the ontological structure that grounds engagement.

In the second clause ["the freedom of each person's praxis must re-encounter itself in everyone"], the relation is no longer contingent. It is not freedom that re-encounters itself in the freedom of others, but the fact of one's praxis, which is freely chosen, that encounters or apprehends itself in and through others, in their praxis. This goes beyond the relation between worker and worked matter mentioned above, in which instrumentality becomes an "organ of perception." Here, others become the feedback mechanism by which one apprehends one's praxis as such, and not merely its project. That is, it is the form of agency that is made apprehensible, or intelligible, in the form of others. Sartre expresses this in another of his conditional statements on the existence of the dialectic.

The dialectic is not just founded in the object; it is the condition for thinking the object, (CDR,43) the condition for its intelligibility, which it acquires through others. The totalization and the comprehension of the totalization are totalized and in progress insofar as each is the totalization of the other. In other words, a totalization (conception) of an object emanates from one's thought in relation to others, which is totalized in turn as an "emanation" of its object. That is, it is a chiasmus.

In this passage, what is at stake is a process of comprehension. Totalization is the ground for intelligibility; its problematic is the form intelligibility takes, rather than the dialectical process whereby one arrives at it in content. And with respect to intelligibility, the form is not dialectical. As Sartre says, the dialectic includes its intelligibility within itself; and its appearing is the ground for its intelligibility. (CDR,44) The dialectic and its intelligibility are each the condition for the other, in terms of individual praxis; freedom and the everyone are the ground for each other's intelligibility. It is again a chiasmus. If the existentiality of being-for-others constitutes the inner kernal of Sartre's dialectic, the chiasmus constitutes the form of its existence.

But the chiasmus is incommensurable with the contingency of freedom (in the first clause); the contingency of freedom and the intelligibility of totalization exist on different planes. They are in no dialectical relation; neither can take the other as its object. The chiasmus will not lend itself to dialectical motion, since it stops all conceptual movement in its circularity. Thus, it is not itself a moment of the dialectical process. Instead, it reveals how incommensurability, in transcending intelligibility, transcends the existence of the dialectic.

In the third clause ["this reveals to the individual a process which produces itself and produces him insofar as it is produced"], a material and historical reality, which is not produced by one's project or intentions, or those of others, but which is other to both, and in which one acts, is still at the same time produced; and this is the real mediation between the individual and "everyone", that sets them in dialectical relation. In this last phrase, there is both an objectivization of subjectivity, and a subjectivization of objectivity -- which is the essence of what Sartre understands as dialectical reason.

At the core of this structure which Sartre calls "the dialectic," there remains the existential relation to others, the interior project of relating to others as subjectivities in order not to objectivize or be objectivized by them. Around this core, there unfolds a dialectical reason that renders the objectivity of practical multiplicities intelligible.

If allusion is made here to both the interplay of the for-itself and its objectivizations, and to enactment within practical multiplicities of human consciousnesses, what is also included, and continually explicated by Sartre without being named, is the cement that conjoins them across the incommensurability encompassed by one's "subjectivity getting its objective reality" through others. This cement, like semiotic mesons linking the quantum possibilities of individual consciousness with its fields of social and historical action non-deterministically, is an engagement, in unmediated chiasmatic form, in lived meanings that are themselves, interiorly and exteriorly, what one understands as the historical. It is different from being-for-others, which is ontological, and from the dialectic in its rationality; it is neither an historical process nor consciousness in its ontologidal unfolding. It is neither the "inert totality" of language (CDR,98), nor language as praxis. It is a structure of discursivity itself.

In sum, at the core of Sartre's dialectic is the existential project of granting others their freedom in order not to make them objects, upon which is overlaid the chiasm of intelligibility, and finally the dialectic of the production of producer and produced. In effect, Sartre's dialectic has three levels, only one of which is dialectical, and whose interrelations are not dialectical because they reflect deeper historical processes -- processes that he himself lived as his own and as its own. The site of this historicality, of post-structuralism's engagement of him, rather than with him, is internal to his text, and internal to his dialectic. Sartre did not respond to post-structuralism, whether dialectically or otherwise, because he interacted with it as an element of his own historicity.

NOTES

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernand Frechtman (Washington Sq. Press, 1966).

2. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Levers and Colin Smith (Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 9-18. Originally published as Le degr zéro d'écriture (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1953).

3. Annette Lavers translates l'écriture as "mode of writing." This objectifies the notion more than Barthes may have intended, but in some contexts it makes it easier to talk about. I will use both.

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 1982). Cf. in particular, Book I, section 3, pp. 220-252. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as CDR.

5. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Idiot de la Famille, Vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 45. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as IF. The translations are my own. In discussing l'Esprit objectif below, I will use the French term throughout, to preserve its Sartrean specificity, and not dilute it with, or disseminate it among, the Hegelian or positivist connotations of the English phrase "objective mind."

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (Washington Sq. Press, 1966). Hereafter abbreviated in the text as BN. Cf. the section on the look: Part III, Chapter 1, Section IV.

7. It is interesting to note, politically, that in his appeal to the non-reflective here, Sartre is also suggesting that primordial forms of class rebellion first emerge at the level of such social intuitions. In other words, for Sartre, implicit knowledge already contains a social critique in its intuition of the inhumanity of an exploitative structure, of the subhumanity of the exploited, and thus constitutes the "first germ of a political attitude of refusal." (IF,45) In that sense, social superstructures are not the locus of disclosure of this implicit knowledge, but only the higher levels of its elaboration. That is, the relation of implicit practical knowledge to social structure, literature, law, or ruling political ideology, already constitutes a transformation (from the "practico-theoretic" to the "theoretico-practical") through a complex process of explicitation. (IF,45)

8. Hazel Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert (Chicago University Press, 1981), p. 248.

9. See, for instance, Derrida's many treatments of this idea in Writing and Difference.

10. Derrida makes this point at length in Limited, Inc., edited by Gerald Graff (Northwestern University Press, 1988).

11. This affinity is quite pronounced in Sartre's discussion definition of ideology. "By ideology, one does not mean here a philosophical system, a rigorous construct (even on false premises), or even a vague, loose set of ideas held in common by the members of a class. In truth, it is a question of a group of relations between terms that are only defined by their reciprocal oppositions, or by a "differential" that determines each by others such that the essence of each resides in its difference with such and such others terms, and ultimately, with the whole." (IF,222) We recognize this as the structuralist view of language itself, which is precisely how Sartre sees ideology, or institutional discourses, operating in the articulation of intuitive knowledge.

12. Sartre's own critique of an unconscious is apropos here. In his discussion of the Freudian unconscious, Sartre asks how the censor can repress certain material without being conscious of discerning it, and of the need to repress what is discerned (i.e. of what it would have to be conscious). One would have to "conceive of a knowledge that is ignorant of itself." (BN,93) And for the praxis of reading as implicit knowledge, we would have to conceive of articulated knowledge that could no longer articulate itself, and have to be articulated anew, in different terms, though its initial form as articulated had only been that of certain terms.

13. Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Northwestern University Press, 1973).

14. Some commentators argue that a philosophical break occurs between the early and later texts, while others see a continuity, or at least an ontological coherence. In particular, Mark Poster and Thomas Flynn argue that there is an ontological consistency from beginning to end, with only a change in emphasis from individual consciousness to social praxis. Ronald Aronson (in Philosophy in the World) argues, on the other hand, that because radical freedom obviates a practical account of human solidarity, Sartre had to later theorize collectives and social constraints on a different basis. Cf. Mark Poster, Marxist Existentialism in Post-war France, and Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism. Thomas Busch maintains that Sartre's transformations were accomplished within a historical dialogue with his world, and thus were both responsive and coherent, or temporally consistent. Cf. Thomas Busch; The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances.

15. The French reads as follows: