Consider the following:Existentialism refuses to abandon the real life to the unthinkable choices of birth for
the sake of contemplating a universality limited to reflecting indefinitely up itself. It
intends without being unfaithful to Marxist principles, to find mediations which
allow the individual concrete – the particular life, the real dated conflict, the person –
to emerge from the background of thegeneralcontradictions of productive forces and
relations of production.
(SM 57 )
One senses that Sartre is gesturing toward the “structuralist” Marxists
like Althusser and Le ́vi-Strauss, whose horizontal application of
basic categories (Sartre’s “analytic reason”) he hopes can be integrated
(“subsumed”) into a totalizing historical process with the help of appro-
priate mediating praxes. In particular, he had in mind those of the family,
and his study of Flaubert argued this in detail. He was writing Flaubert’s
existential biography while working on theCritique, with the result
that extended references appear in both L’Idiot and the Critique.
It is not surprising that Sartre should remark: “the explosive mixture
of naive scientism and religion without God which constituted Flaubert,
and which he tried to overcome by his love of formal art, can be
explained if we understand that everything took placein childhood: that
is, in a condition radically distinct from the adult condition.”^16
This leads Sartre into “the one privileged mediation which permits
[dialectical materialism] to pass from general and abstract determinations
to particular traits of the single individual,” namely,psychoanalysis.He
does not mean that of Jaspers, which he dismisses as “mythological,” nor
even the theories of Freud, insofar as they employ their own myths and,
of course, rely on the unconscious. It is (existential) psychoanalysis that
(^16) He continues: “It is childhood which sets up unsurpassable prejudices, it is childhood which,
in the violence of training and the frenzy of the tamed beast, makes us experience the fact of
our belonging to our environmentas a unique event”(Mallarme ́or the Poet of Nothingness,
trans. Ernest Sturm [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988 ], 60 ;
hereafterM). And even that can neither be deduced from the abstract antecedents nor left
to chance. We must not forget that Sartre is preparing his autobiographyWordsat this time
as well (see Beauvoir,Force of Circumstance, 346 , and Contat and Rybalkai: 480 ). And, for
that matter, his description of the dinner-table sparring over religion and science that Poulou
recalls from the exchanges between “Karle ́mami” at 1 , rue le Goff echoes those ascribed to
the Flaubert household by Sartre inFamily Idiot. In both cases, the tension was relieved, the
contradiction resolved, by the subject’s turn to writing.
Marxism and existentialism 327