Sartre would introduce the term “a socialism of abundance” (FIv: 171 ),
noting that there is an “original contingency” at the core of its internal
necessity, which reserves a place for existential creative freedom in
whatever “dialectical necessity” one may ascribe to History (shades
of his “dialectic with holes”). In effect, the philosopher of the imaginary
is asking us to act “as if ” in the hope that the future is worth the
sacrifice.
In 1948 the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Luka ́cs published
a book-length polemic against Sartre,Existentialism or Marxism. In this
book he argued that Sartre’s politics were little more than petit bourgeois
revolt and that “he is absolutely incapable of understanding [Marxism]”
( 150 ). Illustrating the kind of assertion and counter-assertion that such
political polemics can sink to, Sartre retorts that it is Luka ́cs who
does not understand Marx (SM 21 ). But this confrontation did goad
Sartre into summarizing what he takes to be the provocative relation
between Marxism and existentialism for the concrete thinker:
Here let us simply observe that Luka ́cs fails absolutely to account for the principal
fact: we were convincedat one and the same timethat historical materialism furnished
the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only
concrete approach to reality. I do not pretend to deny the contradiction in this
attitude. I simply assert that Luka ́cs does not even suspect it.
(SM 21 )
“The Problem of Mediations and Auxiliary Disciplines”It was structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser who labeled Sartre “the
philosopher of mediationpar excellence.”^15 This was no compliment
from a structuralist author; on the contrary, it was an implicit attack
on “dialectical” reasoning and its theory of history that Sartre was now
embracing. We saw Sartre’s analogous contrast of his and Foucault’s
respective approaches to history, namely the cinema versus the slide-
show. Taking the latter’sThe Order of Thingsas a model structuralist
achievement, Sartre is claiming that structure is to history as the static is
to the dynamic.
(^15) Louis Althusser, Etienne Ballibar and Roger Establet,Lire le capitale, 2 vols. (Paris: Franc ̧ois
Maspero, 1965 ),ii: 98.
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