Sartre

but becomes more marked as the key to his emerging social ontology in
“Materialism and Revolution.” In the Flaubert study, let us call it “the
principle of totalization,” namely that “a man – whoever he is – totalizes
his epoch to the precise degree that he is totalized by it.”^27 This is the
perfect vehicle for gaining an understanding of the author and his time.
In Sartre’s hands, it demands a “dialectical” relationship that is more
than just the endless back-and-forth of Hegel’s “bad infinite” or the
circle of Genet’s “tourniquet.” Sartre’s claim is that “personalization”
advances in spirals that interiorize and exteriorize the situation in which
the agent finds himself (SM 106 ). But Sartre remains committed to
the primacy of free organic praxis, lest he get stuck in the mire of
historicism. So he insists in theCritiquethat “The men history makes
are never entirely those needed to make history” (CDRii: 221 ). This is
an expanded version of his existentialist mantra: “We can always make
something out of what we’ve been made into.” But both sayings call
for serious refinement when encountering “objective impossibility”
such as Heinrich faced inThe Devil and the Good Lord. This brings us
to the next theme.

Pessimistic metaphysics

This is the antihumanist ghost that stalks Sartre’s personal optimism.
It reappeared in his Dialogical Ethics,Hope Now. We find it at work in
all three writers (and also in Genet, which we discussed earlier
because of the widespread belief that this book was to be Sartre’s long-
awaited Ethics). It comes down to the claim that a fully human “man”
is impossible in our present socioeconomic condition. The best the
“system” can produce is a class of “submen” who are structurally
exploited and personally oppressed. We have observed this line of
argument inThe Communists and PeaceandintheCritique.
While this “Marxist” interpretation is Sartre’s, the materialist
metaphysics that Mallarme ́embraced is analytical, not dialectical, and
“vaguely Spinozist” in its determinism. On Sartre’s reading, the poet’s
impotence symbolizes man’s impossibility. “What is man? A volatile
illusion flittering over matter in movement” (M 135 ). In sum,

(^27) FIv: 394 ;IFiii: 426.
392 Existential biography: Flaubert and others