ABSTRACT
How to explain the stunning reversals announced so casually in Sartre’s 1975 interview in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre? I refer not only to his “No” when Michel Rybalka asked whether he still considered himself a Marxist. In the same place Sartre also said that he had come to regard existentialism and Marxism as two separate philosophies, and that “by the way,” Marxism was on its deathbed. When published in 1981 these declarations caused scarcely a ripple among the community of philosophers, radical intellectuals, and political activists who had once responded with enthusiasm to Sartre’s 1957 declaration that Marxism was “the philosophy of our time” (Sartre 1963: 31). Members of this generation had listened closely to Sartre as he legitimated both their personal and political sides, and were eager to meet his challenge of integrating freedom and determinism. Two decades later they had changed, both Sartre and those who had responded to his call to integrate Marxism and existentialism. His great projects of the period, Critique of Dialectical Reason and The Family Idiot, had been abandoned, Sartre had lost his sight, and he was no longer able to write. Moreover, vast changes in the world and on the Left would make these projects seem less relevant and would make totally unaccustomed demands on political intellectuals to put their bodies on the line. So the aging Sartre’s conclusions, however offhand and sweeping they may sound, were hardly shocking. As Marxism was fading intellectually and politically, the Sartre who had embraced it was himself in steep decline, fated to leave unfinished his most ambitious projects, and was steered toward reminiscing by Simone de Beauvoir and provoked into reasserting his radicalism against his young minder, the former Maoist rabbi-in-the-making, Benny Lévy (Beauvoir 1985: 129–445; Sartre and Lévy 1996: 38).
