thirty-year-long relationship with psychoanalysis “an ambiguous
mixture of equally deep attraction and repulsion.”^33
His thesis is that our class consciousness modifies/enriches our con-
sciousness in a manner that is more basic than our reflective knowledge.
In other words, it isnonknowledgetied to praxis. Sartre is taking issue
with Georg Luka ́cs, who defended a notion of proletarian consciousness
that was independent and determining of the individual worker’s
consciousness. This is the kind of “collective consciousness” that Sartre
had rejected sinceBN. True to the primacy of free organic praxis, he
now enlists class consciousness into the praxis (comprehension, he says
inCDR) of individual workers:
The concrete, social reality is not this machine [the inert exigencies of the physical
object] but the person working at the machine, payed, married, having children, etc.
In other words, one has to be this social being, worker or bourgeois, and one has to be
it in a manner that is first of all subjective. That means that class consciousness is not
the primitive given, far from it, and that at the same time, one has to be [a class
member] in the very conditions of the work.
(MS 36 – 37 )
A socialist humanism and its morality?
Returning to Foucault’s critique of dialectic because of its apparently
necessary link to bourgeois humanism and its ethics, it seems that the
battle lines were drawn as early asAnti-Semite and Jew, when Sartre
distinguished “synthetic” (later, dialectical) from “analytical” reason.
That abstract difference carries numerous concrete consequences for
Sartre. It emerges, at a still admittedly abstract level, in his remark in
theCritiquethat “at a certain level of abstraction class conflict expresses
itself as a conflict of rationalities” (CDRi: 802 ). But it appears concretely
in the inability to recognize the existence of social wholes such as “class”
with its concrete expression in practices and impersonal processes like
capitalism, colonialism and racism.
Again, Francis Jeanson captures the contrast between Sartre’s ethics
of authenticity and his dialectical ethics when he observes: “for a practice
of the self oriented toward a personal conversion to authenticity [inNE]
(^33) See Jean-Bertrand Potalis,BEM 220.
A socialist humanism and its morality? 367