Monday, October 30, 2006
(8:05 AM) | Anonymous:
Tour of Duty
On Friday, I managed to meet my (first) L.A. Times deadline and reach the station to print out my pre-purchased, nonrefundable ticket for the 1:05 train to New York. With, even, a whole ten minutes to spare. I'd spent six hours writing about a biography of William James. That left until late afternoon to go over my comments on a paper by Ron Aronson, since the two of us were the speakers at a session of the North American Sartre Society conference early that evening.Fortunately there was no Amtrak drama, and I even had time to drop luggage off at the apartment we sometimes borrow while in NYC. It was about ten blocks from where the conference was held, at the Fordham branch campus (if that's how to put it) close to Lincoln Center.
I'd drafted most of my talk a week earlier, so all things considered the stress level was about as low as could be expected. But there was certainly some pressure at seeing the turnout of fifty people, give or take. t didn't look as if there were more than a few empty seats. Not surprising, given that Aronson is one of the top Sartre scholars in the country.
His talk was called "Sartre After Marxism." Besides covering the highlights of JPS's protracted engagement with the left, it included a consideration of how the final "Hope Now" interviews (published just before his death in 1980) might provide an ethical vision suitable for left-wing politics today. I've learned an enormous amount from Aronson's work over the years, and said as much. But my response was pretty skeptical -- not so much of Aronson's presentation itself, as to a kind of Sartrean orthodoxy that surrounds the question of his relationship to Marxism. (Hence some caution in thinking about his post-Marxism seems warranted.)
Some of it was just a matter of challenging the standard narrative of his thought as undergoing a deep engagement with Marxist theory in the 1950s and '60. He ignored -- or denounced -- critical currents within Marxism theory that challenged the Stalinist system and its orthodoxies. That is not a small thing. By 1975, Sartre no longer thought Marxism had a future. Well, okay. But now that there is an actually existing graveyard for "actually existing socialism" (so-called), does that make the final interviews with Benny Levy (a Maoist militant turned rabbi, no relation to BHL) some kind of dialectical supercession of the limits of Sartre's existentialist Marxism?
Some of the Sartreans are very keen on the Hope Nowphase, in which Sartre speaks of a messianic dimension of a humanist ethics that can't be realized in history (unlike Marxist messianism, which had the blueprints right in hand, at least in principle). Whatever its other problems, this perspective ignores that there were ways of analyzing, criticizing, and acting against Stalinism that actually came from within Leninism itself. So, not so fast, there, Jean-Paul.
The more one looks at this final phase of Sartre's work, the less clear it seems just what would distinguish his "messianic" humanism from garden-variety liberal humanism. So I asked. And not entirely as a rhetorical question, by any means. Is his humanism really different from, say, Martha Nussbaum's "capabilities approach"? If so, how? If not, why not?
I am also no end of puzzled by how Sartre went from being the go-to guy for mediation in Search for a Method to endorsing this particular kind of history-escaping messianic notion of ethics. It can't (or at least shouldn't) be reduced entirely to Levy's influence. Sartre uses theological language elsewhere, a point that hasn't really been pursued in anything I've seen. (The stuff in Being and Nothingness about how the goal of the for-itself-in-itself is to be God, for example.) I suggested that, in this case, it might be an effect of an implicit dialogue with the New Philosophy -- in particular, Lardreau and Jambet's concept (or metaphor, or whatever the hell it was) of "the Angel." Not too farfetched. After all, L&J had been members of Gauche Prolétarienne, the Maoist group that Benny Levy had led. And there is a sort of family resemblence between their "angelic" radicalism and Sartre's "messianic" ethics.
Anyway, that's what I threw out for discussion. But it was late in the day. While the response was mostly good, the Q&A part wrapped up in about ten minutes so that people could go out for dinner. I was too beat and had to crash. The next morning, I spent some time at the awesome Labyrinth Books near Columbia before heading back downtown for more of the conference. (Everything I brought to read was geared to fine-tuning my rant on Friday night. It was pretty obvious I'd be all Sartred out by the trip home on Sunday morning, as was the case.)
Got to meet Farhang Erfani, who runs the ContinentalPhilosophy.org. A very personable guy, and the site makes a real contribution. He assumed I live in New York and suggested coming down to Washington, DC for a visit, one of these days. Well, actually, it won't be necessary to wait that long. It turns out we live within about three Metro stops from one another. Farhang needs tips about conferences, digital texts, videos, etc. he can link to at the site. So, let him know.
Thus ends my first piece of Live Journal-ism, so to speak. Time now to settle down to reading the new novel by Thomas Pynchon. It's about 1100 pages long. Although the page proofs arrived in early October, I have so far read exactly three paragraphs.
There was an item up at the National Book Critics Circle website a few weeks ago about how the publisher was sending out proofs to reviewers with the name and publication written in large letters on the title page. (That way we wouldn't go out and sell them to rare book dealers, or something.) And in fact that was no rumor.
