9 - A contemporary perspective: Qui perd gagne

Summary

Current disaffection with Sartre in French philosophical circles is almost total. Certain rare voices in the Structuralist and Post-Structuralist movements have taken up his defence, but these have generally been drowned in the cacophony of polemical criticism to which Sartre's views have been subjected. The aggression may well be considered a form of self-defence; the global rejection of Sartre is a necessary but transitional stage in the assessment of a major thinker. Indeed, the insistent repudiation of his influence by his successors can only be interpreted as a form of intellectual dénégation.

The preceding analyses of Sartre's ideas should have made clear the sense in which he is a precursor and indeed a founder of certain contemporary philosophical tenets, tenets which are perhaps in danger of becoming the current idées reçues rather than contestatory scandals subverting doxa and ideology. The decentred subject, the ‘death of man’, the paradoxes of qui perd gagne and of ‘différance’, the rejection of Hegelian dialectics and the recognition of the impossibility of ultimate synthesis – such notions are more commonly associated with Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard than with Sartre, but a close reading of La Transcendance de l'Ego, L'Etre et le Néant, Saint Genet, Critique de la raison dialectique and L'Idiot de la famille in particular, shows them to have been, at least in part, of Sartre's making. Sartre may be cursorily dismissed at present for his ‘humanism’, and derided for translating the Heideggerian Dasein as la réalité humaine.