Rev Left Radio - Jean-Paul Sartre and the Critique of Dialectical Reason

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

Austin Hayden Smidt returns to Rev Left, this time to discuss his new book "Sartre, Imagination, and Dialectical Reason: Creating Society as a Work of Art".  Follow Austin on Twitter Check out Austin's podcast "Owls at Dawn" Check out Austin's other Rev Left appearance here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/post-structuralism-postmodernism-and-metamodernism Outro Music: 'Days of the Years' by Felice Brothers LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have a long episode, but a fascinating episode. It is on Sartre and his critique of dialectical reason. Austin has been on the show before, and he's written a new book about Sartra and his critique of dialectical reason. So we go through what the critique is, what it consists of, some core. philosophical ideas that Sartre puts out in this work and then we take Austin's book and Cora to run with it, how he takes those ideas and crafts them and extrapolates them. And we have some just fascinating, deep conversation.

And while the material itself can be sort of challenging, Austin is an expert at taking the complex and putting it into words that people can understand who are not specialized in philosophy. So if you're at all interested in Sartre, in existentialism, in French Marxism, in Sartre's critique of the USSR, I mean, there's so much here that you'll like. We talk about France Fanon, we talk about Mao and Stalin, we talk deeply about innumerable philosophers. So wherever you're coming from, I think you're going to find a lot in this conversation that is valuable and fascinating. I know I learned a lot just by talking to Austin about this wonderful book. So again, Austin Hayden Smith's book is called Sartra Imagination and Dialectical Reason, Creating Society as a Work of Art. Let's get into it.

Enjoy. Yeah, cool. So I'm Austin Hayden Smith. I kind of jokingly but seriously refer to myself as a professional scatterbrain. I do some production work sometimes for the YouTube channel Wisecrack. I co-host a philosophy podcast. called Owls at Dawn. I am also an academic and do work on, like, critical finance and political economy, critical

economy. But I think I'm most comfortable kind of being described as a philosopher, a political philosopher, something like that, professional dilettante. I don't know, something along those lines. And I'm a producer as well in other spaces. I produced the cinematic adaptation of the film, Inventing the Future, which is the book that was inventing the future post-capitalism in a world without work by Nick Sernick and Alex Williams that caused a bit of a storm in like 2015, 2016, you know, talking about

full automation and UBI and stuff like that. But a super talented avant-garde director named Isaiah Medina, who's well known for his first avant-garde film called 8888, he and I decided to take that book and turn it into a film. So it's kind of a documentary, but it's also. challenging the form of what documentary even means but yeah so people can check that out if they're interested in issues about cinema for one because it's a film about cinema as much as it is a film about the content of the book as well but if they're interested in ubi marxist accelerationist arguments things like that they can find it on youtube it's just inventing the future so that's kind

of me in a nutshell wonderful yeah we'll link to that i'm excited to go check that out you are absolutely a man of many talents. I love your podcast, Al's It Don. I've had you on before to talk about postmodernism and metamodernism. And that was a show that a lot of our listeners really loved. So it's awesome to have you back. This time we're talking about your new book, Sartra Imagination and Dialectical Reason, Creating Society as a Work of Art. So this is sort of a deep dive on Sartrean philosophy specifically around his critique of dialectical reason. We have done another episode with existential comics on Sartra, Camus, and existentialism, which I'll link to in the show notes for people who want to do some more background investigation on like sort of

just the historical context in which Sartra existed. But yeah, so this is going to be an exciting, if not challenging sort of episode, but I think it'll get a lot of people interested. And if it is challenging, there's still the underbelly of a challenge is that you come out the other end learning something new. And so I think that will be what this episode does. So, first, First and foremost, can you kind of give us just a quick summary of what Sartra aimed to accomplish in his critique of dialectical reason to sort of set the stage for this broader conversation? Yeah, I mean, immediately from a practical perspective, he says what he's doing in the early pages. He says basically, if what I've produced in this text serves no other purpose, then to place it

at the feet of future working groups. And I think it's important how he phrases that, because he doesn't say, like, this is for future philosophy nerds, although it is, right? But he makes it clear that this is for future working groups. He says, if I can place this at the feet of further working groups and they can develop it and expand on it more, he says, then my task will have been successful. So I think that's the first thing that's important to understand. At this point in Sartre's life, this is the late 50s when he's writing this. Critique of Dialectical Reason, the first volume comes out in 1960. The second volume, which was unfinished, comes out posthumously. He dies in 1980. So the second volume comes out.

in the, God, mid to late 80s. And so he's writing this in the late 50s, and it's really in the wake of his frustration with Stalinism. Particularly, it's the event that triggered a lot of people in France, but a lot of other communist or communist-adjacent type of people around the world that raised their ire against the USSR, which was the invasion of Hungary in 56, right? And Sartre was extremely critical of the French communes. Communist Party, the PCF, for their unwavering alliance with the USSR at this time.

And Sartre thought that this was an act of unwarranted aggression, unchecked, and I think that's important, unchecked aggression. And so what he wants to do is he investigates in this text from his philosophical perspective what I think are justifications for explaining why the USSR operates the way that it does, why certain trends in Marxism operate the way that they do, and to see if he can identify a sort of rationale for it, a reason. That's why it's a critique of dialectical reason, right? He's investigating rationality.

He's investigating knowledge. He's investigating thought and how it is that we think about things. The worldviews, you might say, that we hold, that disposition us, that dispose us in particular directions. And so he has, I think, an idea that. there's something that he can identify about the way that the USSR and other sort of Marxist formulations operate. He's critical of Lukash. He's critical of angles and other people who kind of assert a sort of metaphysical notion of the dialectic. And so he wants to investigate them because he thinks that they orient in particular ways in ways that you might

call totalitarian, that you might say lead to what he calls seriality, which we can talk about this later, but that lead to a type of restrictive form of action. So there's a necessary relation here between thought or one's worldview or one's ideology and the action that that leads to. And that's really, I think, what he's investigating in simple terms here. And he kind of variously refers to this in a few different spots as a pro-legomena to any future anthropology, which is just a really complicated way. He's doing two things with that. It's a complicated way of saying that this is a sort of preamble to any sort of future anthropological study, which is an interesting assessment assertion in itself. But also what he's doing there,

by calling it a pro-legomena, and then also by calling his book a critique of dialectical reason, he's firmly situating his text within a particular historical legacy as well. A post-Contian legacy. Kant famously writes critique of pure reason, critique of practical reason, then critique of judgment. Those are his three critiques, right? But he also writes a pro-legomena as well. a prologamidating future metaphysics, right? Or a prologamidating metaphysics. And so there's something that he's doing where he's trying to situate himself

within the Kantian project, which is then for people who are familiar with philosophy, they would know Marx's relation to Kant comes from a critical relation via Hegel, right? So if Marx is critical of Hegel, Hegel's critical of Kant, con is the one who is critical of, like,

hum and dogmatic thought and things like that. So there's kind of this tradition that Sartre is, I think, trying to align himself with in accomplishing that task that I said earlier about investigating what thought is, how we think, why we think certain ways, and how does that impact how we act in the world. Fascinating. So is it fair to say that while he's critiquing the USSR and other Marxists, he's also responding to other French intellectuals who are against Marxism and in some sense trying to defend or advance Marxism in the same time. time that he's critiquing it is that fair to say yeah there's a really vibrant community at this time of people some who are obviously supportive particularly like i mentioned the french communist party at this time who are supportive of the un uh i was going to say uh unwaveringly supportive i'm not sure how true that is entirely but some would be unwaveringly supportive and some would kind of be like hey it's the best we got i guess you could say and so sartra is still trying to

navigate through some of these issues that he really really ultimately thinks can be distilled down to an issue of party politics, right? There's something about party politics. There's something about collective thought that stifles what we might say a more authentic orientation of thinking. And if people are familiar with the language of existentialism, you can already start to see some of the concerns, right? The concerns about freedom. So this is one of those tensions that has never, that never leaves him, even when he does make his explicit Marxist turn here in the 50s, 60s, and later. there's something about

there's something about freedom not just freedom and thought in the way that we think of it especially not now with like fucking the debates going on about free speech and shit like that in this Harper's letter like put that shit out of our minds for a second right like it's not that banal

it's it's something I think that we can really kind of work through in this conversation but it's really something that concerns him about what is liberation more generally right and is there something that stifles the liberatory impulse because of party politics or because of a certain form of rationality.

So there are certain people that he's critical there of, particularly like in the French context, there are people like Maurice Merleau-Ponty that actually becomes a really influential person for him in writing this text because of Merleau-Ponty's critiques of Sartre's early philosophy. So there's people like that, and then there's like structuralism at the time that is starting to become a really sort of vibrant, vibrant intellectual milieu at this time as well. And so Sartra, not only does he refer to his work as a prologomena to any future anthropology, but he also says it's an historical and structural investigation. So he usually structuralism is oftentimes viewed as being what's concerned with something called synchronic, right, rather than diachronic.

Diacronic is through time. Synchronic is generally understood as being kind of, we might say, a snapshot understanding of time, right? Kind of a freeze frame. That's how you understand the objective structures. that kind of form thought or language for Ferdinanda Sassur or how you can understand, like, anthropology and communities, human people for someone like God Claude Lévi-Strauss, right? And Strauss and Sartre at this time are engaged in a pretty stringent critique.

After Sartre writes, critique of dialectical reason, the last chapter of Strauss's, of Levi-Strauss's, the savage mind is actually directly targeted against Sartre's critique of dialectical reason. So there's an interesting debate here, right? But the concern for Sartre is, well, what if we don't look at things just purely historically and fall into a type of historicism that might lead to a sort of historical determinism or technological determinism? What if we don't just fall into that camp? But at the same time, what if we don't fall into just a pure structural camp where we think that we can identify the objective conditions that explain society? But what if we kind of look at both of them and we kind of problematize each?

at the same time work through each and bring them together. And so that's another concern that kind of is guiding his efforts. And there are other kind of like historical philosophers, Raymond Aaron, in French, it's probably something sexy like Raymond Evelin or something like that. My French is fucking horrible. So, but Raymond Aaron is one of those guys that he's also kind of engaging with at this time, who's a friend of his. But, you know, Sartre was very good at making friends and then making enemies throughout his life.

So, yeah, that's kind of what he's navigating through. Fascinating. Yeah, very well said, complicated, but you did a great explanation, and there's lots of different variables going on, and I appreciate you, situating him in that historical and philosophical context as well. So why did you then decide to write your own book on the subject, and what did you hope to accomplish with it? You know, it's so funny.

The irony in all of this is that there's probably a bit of bad faith in my writing of this book. And I don't mean that in the sense that, like, I didn't do it honestly or authentically. But in Sartre's sense of bad faith, which is that there was like a denial of my freedom. And I had a friend one time when I was doing a master's degree a long time ago who said, we were out having some drinks. And I don't even remember the context, but this has never left my mind. He said, sometimes our decisions make decisions for us. And, you know, and I was thinking about this.

Actually, I was making a cup of coffee. And I was because I wanted to bring this up. it totally is the reason why I wrote this book in a lot of ways. You know, when you, like, you wake up and you find yourself in a fucking a jail cell and you just got nipped for petty crime when you're a teenager and you're sitting there and you're like, fuck, how did I get here? And you're like, the voice of your dad in your head is like, if you hang out with those kids, you're going to get in trouble and you're like, fuck, dad was kind of right, right?

Like, I hung out with this kid who was kind of a jerk. He did something stupid. He, like, I don't know, nipped some jewelry from the, old neighbor or something like that, which is fucked up anyway because she's an old widow or something. And so we ended up getting caught and you're like, how did I get here? What decisions did I make that were kind of predicated on previous decisions and previous decisions and previous decisions? And there's something where you kind of just find yourself in a place, right? And you have to pause and kind of parse out, dude, how did I get here? And did I freely kind of make this decision?

Or was there a sense in which I was kind of constrained by other previous decisions that limited what decision choices I could make at any given juncture, right? So at any given juncture, that decision doesn't just emerge out of a vacuum, but it's contextualized. There are previous decisions that set whether you can choose this path or that path or choose from many paths, let's say, in a particular decision point. And that's really what happened with me is I came out of a religious background, studying theology, and it was in my first proper university philosophy class that I first read Sartra.

And I read him as like, he was held up as like this symbol of all that is bad with atheism, right? And I don't even remember what the text was. It was probably a segment from being in nothingness, which is his big philosophical tone that most people are familiar with from the 40s. And where he says something like, I can't remember the exact quote. It's something about like how life is like nothingness, like a bubble of nothingness floating on a sea of nothingness. something along those lines. And I remember sitting there and I was like, oh my God, that just sounds bleak, right? And then when I ended up doing master's degree research, I started to see that there was something substantial about Sartra. Particularly in that book, being in nothingness,

he develops an ontology, right, a view of what is, what is the world, what is reality, how can we speak about the world? What is, I guess we could say, is what the word ontology really refers to, um, more or less. And, uh, and what I noticed is, is that this ontology that he develops is one that a lot of people view as as being very pessimistic. And there is a, a personal pessimism in terms of like a human pessimism about, about what people can do in groups or what they can't do in groups. And he's famously kind of maybe solipsistic in, in that text. But there was something about the world. There was something about reality for him that was very robust, right, that sort of was excessive of the human.

And a lot of times in the school of phenomenology, which he comes out of, is this referred to as the given, that the world is given. And so when I look at an object, what is given to me in that object is so multivalent, right? Like, I'm looking at my coffee mug right now. It's got a little bit of coffee in there. and I'm looking at it from one angle, right? And even in three dimensions, I can get a lot of it and I can see reflections of light that are on it and it's giving itself to me.

It's showing itself to me in these various ways. And I can turn it and I can rotate it and I can feel it. I can move my hand and I can smell the coffee and I can put my mouth to the mug and I can experience in different various perceptual engagements this mug in all of these different ways. And this is because what is in front of me can give itself infinitely. And this is something that Sartre writes about in being in nothingness subtly,

but something that like Merleau-Ponty writes about in his phenomenology of perception quite explicitly. And it was this idea of encountering a world that can give itself to me infinitely. And now, even to use kind of a temporal version of this, I'm looking at my same coffee mug again. I haven't moved my hand. I'm holding it in the same position, but it's still different. It's giving itself to me differently now.

And so my question was, why is that the case? And so I was really interested in the potential for revolutionary thought to kind of emerge out of this precisely because there is this infinite potential of the given, right? And that seems to me to confound the limitations that we have in thought. That seems to me to provide this source, if you will, of endless potential, endless possibility. Sartre refers to it as the field of possibles. And to me, that was the first thing

that got me interested in Sart. And then it comes to this next text, critique of dialectical reason, that not many people write about, not many people talk about. There are obviously Sartreans. There's like a group of people. I'm part of the North American Sartre Society

and the UK Sartre Society. So there are like Sartre nerds that talk. about it. But even within Sartre studies, it's not like the sexy text. Everyone likes to talk about existentialism and being in nothingness because that's like freedom and like our place in the world and like all of this stuff. Whereas the critique is kind of expanding on some of these ideas that I just talked about, but then it takes a little bit of a turn. And for me, I found that turn that it takes to be really valuable because not only was I still inspired by that idea of infinite possibility that could come from the material world, right? Rather than just like

ideas that we just create out of nowhere. But no, there's like a real material ground for this infinite possibility. And then he brings that together with Marxism. And that for me was so important because coming out of my theological background, I still had this concern for liberation. It used to be salvation. And then it kind of morphed into liberation as I started to be exposed to Latin American liberation theology. And so that was really what attracted to me to the text in the first place. as being maybe a valuable way of kind of thinking through these concerns that have always persisted, but without just kind of like floating around into some sort of idealistic speculation, but that there was something that would ground me in a real material analysis of quote

unquote reality, whatever that means, right? That would help me to even think what the fuck reality is and how do I engage with reality and how do we as humanity find ourselves in these situations that we think are real and what is unreal about them and how are we sort of like governed by our mystifications and ideas and things like that and so that was really what attracted me to this text and and then so i'll wrap this up real quickly to to shortly longly answer your question why did i decide to write a book well ultimately what happened was is um as i continued to research further and further and further i started to realize that a lot of the interpretations of the text were what i thought were quite

limited and missed some really important and crucial components of what I think is going on in the text. So my book, which, by the way, for people listening, it's a super, super, super technical, nerdy academic text. And it's only out right now in Hardback. The paperback will be out later this year. There is an e-book, but nobody likes to read e-books. Unless you like to read e-books, you could get it.

It's affordable. But let me tell you, don't buy it, okay? And I know that if my publisher's listening, they're going to fucking hate that. But don't buy it because it's... It's like a hundred bucks for the hardbacks. Don't even entertain it. You can find it, I'm sure, online through alternative means. If you remember my last podcast, I said, hit me up if you want to know what those alternative means are.

You can find it online. I have no problem with people getting it open access, just if you're interested. But it is super technical, super philosophical. It's really like dealing with some inside baseball stuff, which is why I'm glad I can talk about it here, that this can be the sort of dissemination, if you will, of the, information because the text itself is you know maybe for not always for the best but it's like jargony and academic e and shit like that but that was it i was in the academic context and i just felt that there were questions that didn't adequately address some of the things that i saw in this

text that i thought really ought to be brought out and so that was my endeavor was was to really kind of bring those elements out um and then the second half of the book is where i then take those elements that I bring out that I think are sort of underrepresented. And I attach them to my concerns about, as the subtitle says, creating society as a work of art. I kind of grew up in the theater. I grew up in front of the camera, but then I also grew up in bands and stuff like that. And I still do work in kind of creative spheres. And I view my philosophical output as kind of being an art project in so many ways. And so I wanted to kind of attach this new set of tools to Sartra's work on the imagination

and then my own interests with regard to directly challenging the forms of society and the forms of thought that presently exist. And how can we use this text as a set of tools to transform how we think and how society exists? So that's where the way. book kind of came from wonderful there i cannot imagine more capable hands of of that project being in than your own so i'm glad you took that on and that's just a fascinating sort of explanation of how you got there and why you did it and i love it um you know just really quick this is sort of beside the point but just going back to your whole talking about you know infinite possibilities and in your coffee cup

is that that is that basic idea what sartra sort of fictionalizes in nausea when he talks about the chestnut tree or am i off there well so the problem is In nausea with the chestnut tree, it's horrifying and it's terrible, right? So you have the protagonist who's sitting there and all of a sudden he becomes aware of the world that slips away from him. We could think of this like our normal everyday experience, we're able to differentiate things, right? I've got my laptop and I've got my desk and I've got my notepad and I've got my coffee mug and my phone and I've got a book and I've got some old tea bags that are sitting in a cup that I need to throw away. right and but all of these things have meaning that are already sort of ascribed to them they're in their place they're relating and so there's one way of analyzing it which is kind of looking at those pre-constituted relations what's going on with the tree when all the sudden that starts to slip away is that um the world which sartre refers to in being in nothingness we might say as the in itself being in itself which is the world of material reality and then the being for itself is human consciousness for sartra right well at this point this is when being in itself starts to really slip away from being for itself

all of those like constituted identities that i just noted all of a sudden start to meld together and pull away and what's happening there is horrifying because it kind of places you as the for itself in a position where you realize that the things that are constructed the way they are are only constructed that way contingently they could have been been otherwise. They could be otherwise. The relations between these things aren't fixed and absolute and permanent. Like, God did not place them in some sort of eternal relation, right? The coffee mug is not just a coffee mug because the form of the coffee mug exists in some sort of ideal realm or in the mind of God or in some sort of absolute reality, right? But that rather

that coffee mug has a slippery existence to it, right? And when you attune yourself, to that slippery existence, Sartre refers to this as like the slimy towards the end of being in nothingness, then what happens is this terrifying nausea, and that's what is going on in that text, is feeling that slippage away. Now, it's terrifying, but at the same time, it's also supposed to motivate, if you will, to the human project, is what he calls it. This idea of creating, if you will, new orientations within that slimy, right? And so there's this freedom that he thinks that comes from this that allows us to realize that we're not beholden to these pre-constituted identities,

to these truths that someone can wield, that the state can wield, that God can wield, that the church can wield, that your parents can wield, that your local bowling club can wield over you. But rather, there is a freedom, if you will, outside of these institutionalized arrangements of reality. Absolutely fascinating. That could be its own show. There's a million things I want to say about how that dovetails with certain deep philosophical ideas within Buddhism and my own experiences with like depression and anxiety and

sort of having that sensation of nausea when I looked out at like the summer at nighttime with just illuminated by like a street lamp. The leaves and the trees blowing gently and the wind became incredibly oppressive to me. I don't know. I don't want to go down that route. because that's a whole episode, but maybe in a future conversation, we can dive deep into that. But let's go ahead and move on so we can stay on something like a course here. I know you touched on this a little bit in the first question, but maybe we can dive a little deeper here.

Can you talk about the broader context of and who are the background figure Sartra takes aim at in critique of dialectical reason? Yeah, so Sartre's a novelist, right? He's a novelist and he's a playwright. So I think without being overly rhetorical, we can think of him as writing this text with some baddies in mind. Right. There's the protagonists and then there are the antagonists. So let's say that the bad guys for Sartre are one, the USSR, two, Lukash, and three angles. And those are just like three representative figures.

but they sort of speak to some larger set of concerns. Oh, and then we'll do one more. The fourth one is what he calls the positivist Marxists. Okay. So we already talked about the USSR, but why? Why was he, not just why was he critical from an empirical level, right? Like, an empirical level would be we look at what the USSR did and we would say, fuck, was that cool or was that not cool, right?

That's not enough for start, right? he wants to understand like how can we justify how can we give a rationality that explains what the USSR did and why that form of rationality and other iterations might be bad and for him it really comes down to the idea that the USSR and the communist party in particular what they've done is they have sort of inscribed the limits around reality they have determined what is what is right and what is wrong. And in so doing, they've preconstituted, right? Remember this thinking back to what we were talking about with nausea, that they've sort of fixed reality in a particular way. They have placed their finger on the pulse and they've said, this is the way that history works, this is our place in history, and this is our role as historical agents to change history in a particular way. And once you do that, you sort of erect what he calls a totality, right? And he contrasts this with a totalization, which is kind of a technical term.

But the idea is we can really just think of this as being a fixed reality. And this is really important because this fits back into some of his early existential concerns, particularly when he defines what existentialism is in his famous lecture, which is turned into a script called existentialism as a humanism, in which he says existentialism is that existence precedes essence. And this is so important because what this means is, is that there is no, again, fixed reality that precedes our thrownness into the world, are being placed in any given context, right?

So wherever you find yourself isn't predictated by rules and norms, by the desires of a divine dictator, by the demands of some sort of state, like your obligations, you must be in a particular way, right? You must act in a particular way. You must think in a particular way. That would be placing essence before existence. And he's completely trying to confound that, to destroy that frame of thinking.

And so for him, one of the problems with the USSR is that they have kind of erected in essence before existence. And what they've done is they've absolved themselves. They kind of stand outside of that essence, which means that they're kind of looking at things from a supposed objective perspective, that they have like the finger on the pulse, right? We know the world. This is one of the critiques that he would probably level against scientific. socialism, that if you think that you are absolved from your own critiques of the world, then you've kind of asserted yourself as this godlike figure. In philosophy, it's sometimes referred

to as the view subspecy a eternity, a view from the eternal, right? That you've kind of pulled yourself out of the context and you're looking from on high. And that's his concern here, is that's what led to and has led to activities by the USSR, such as the invasion of Hungary, among others, but it's not just an accidental historical thing that was like, ah, if only they had made a different decision, but no, there's something integral about the role of the Communist Party for Sartra that sort of justifies their action in this way precisely because they're absolved from the responsibilities of the actions that they take in the world because they kind of are standing outside of it. By taking that sort of God's eye view, Sartre's critique would be anything

sort of becomes justifiable and permissible because you're standing outside and sort of seeing or you think that you see it all. And so what you're doing is ultimately for the greater good, no matter how depraved any individual act can be. Is that a fair way to understand his critique here? Yeah, I think so. And the irony here is that when you do that, you're claiming that you have some sort of freedom over things. But actually, and here's the twist, you're actually beholden though to the image that you're projecting or to the sort of totality to the kind of state of reality that you think governs the world. And so the irony here is you think that you are being free, but really you're just being a sort of sovereign dictator that is actually kind of controlled

and determined by the object of your own creation, which for people who are familiar with Marx is kind of Marxist critique of religion, right? That religion sort of, which he gets from Feuerbach that religion inflates if you will these ideas and then subsumes themselves under those ideas not realizing that they created the ideas in the first place right right and that's all because if you think of essence preceding existence whether it's the essence of god or whether it's the essence of the party or whether it's the essence of historical materialism or the mandate to kind of like change the world then you can fall into that trap and so he's really kind of concerned that we don't fall into that trap, right?

So that's kind of, and I think we can say the same. So his critique of Lukash comes from a similar set of concerns. It's just a different interpretation of it or a different iteration of it. And same with his critique of angles. He's really critical of the dialectic as being like this metaphysical reality, this like force that moves history forward, which a lot of times comes from angles and post-Engelsian reception, especially of the dialectics of nature.

Sartre has a section on the dialectics of nature, which he says, hey, it might be the case that one day we find it, but it can't be something that's posited beforehand. It can only be something that's discovered, right? So that's his concern, which, to be fair, I think, is actually what Angles was kind of driving at, but there's a sort of tendency and some reception of interest in the dialectics of nature that Sartre sees as being overly metaphysical, right? Not concerned with the physical world, again, but having an essence or an idea of the dialectic that precedes the material. real world. And so all of his critiques kind of issue from that set of concerns. And is there a critique somewhere in here with Althusair's structuralism? I know you mentioned structuralism a little bit. Earlier, is there anything you can connect up with that specific? Because I know Althusair, you know, was living at the same time Sartre was living and came to

prominence sort of in this time period. I was just wondering where that fits in. And this is a little prior to Sartre's big heyday. but later Al Thusay makes a really interesting critique that sounds like a compliment, but it's actually from Althrasa's perspective, quite critical. He says that Sartre is the philosopher of mediation par excellence, and it's a side swipe because basically the concern is that Sartra insufficiency understands structure. And for Althusser is that he basically says that Sartre is too historical, that he's too interested in like a philosophy of becoming. where things are in flux and there's motion and stuff like that. And so he can't adequately kind of apply a scientific analysis to the state of reality. I see.

So this is like before that issue, before that kind of remark is made when the critique is written, because it's written probably let's say like 57, 58, 59, it comes out in 60. So it's a little bit before the kind of like heyday of Althusarian structuralism, which really kind of comes to the four around this time, but really in the 60s, right? So it's just a little bit prior to that. So it doesn't engage as much directly with Althusarian structuralism, but I think we could see this as a proto-critique of that. You know, the resources are there.

Totally. So I was right to detect some tension between those two philosophies, but just got the chronology a little mixed up. A hundred percent, man. That tension is there. Okay. Cool. So you just mentioned existentialism as a humanism. I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about the connections here with Sartre's previous work, you know, that essay and his well-known argument that, as you said, existence precedes essence.

And just tell us why this matters in relation to the critique of dialectical reason and Sartre's broader critique. Yeah, so I think it's extremely important to understand, at least in broad strokes, some of the criticisms of Sartre from his early existentialist writings. One is that he's just a radical individualist, right? and the reason that matters is because for someone who is apparently writing a text about Marxism, how can you be a radical individualist? Right? There's a universal message in Marx. It's very fucking clear, you know?

So it's kind of like, well, how does that work? So his early writing we need to understand is being situated within kind of an individualistic philosophy. Also, he is definitely a pessimist in his early writings with regards to not just the nausea of how it individualistic philosophy. effectively affects you, how we talked about that earlier, how you feel that kind of being overwhelmed, if you will, by the infinity of the slipperiness of reality. But then what does that mean in terms of social relations? Like, how do we interact with each other? And in his early writings, he doesn't really seem to have much of a much positive to say about that. As a matter of fact, he has this mode of being that he refers to in being and nothingness as being for others.

But it's this idea of, he uses the example of kind of like a guy looking. through a keyhole at a woman where it's also really interesting it's really important to pay attention to the anecdotes that he uses right they're very bourgeois one um they also might be quote unquote problematic in a lot of ways but it is very important i think to look at those because and i'll talk about this in a second when he talks about like what he calls uh the we subject and the us object in being in nothingness but his like his examples are all very much like you're at a cafe in paris and a waiter does this thing or like you're in this hotel and you're looking through a keyhole and like another you know it's like they're all these very

he's definitely bourgeois in that sense petty bourgeois right um but um so the idea though is that the mode of otherness is always this conflictual thing right there's always these people that have competing projects and one person has their individual project in their response to that kind of nausea that we talked about and you have your individual project and the projects don't really a line, right? There's always this, there's kind of a binary relationship between self and other, we might say. And it's only when a third appears. So the guy looking through the keyhole at the girl in the room doesn't really, he's not really aware of himself in the situation of them being together until he hears the steps of the third person coming. But the problem with

this for Sartre is it's not like some sort of harmonious, ah, we are together in this three way, but rather it's much more like oh shit i feel shame because i shouldn't be doing this and at that point right you sort of are aware if you will of larger norms and structures and things like that but what that means is is that that there's a really sort of like pessimistic take on on what community might be or what togetherness might be because of this essentially conflictual relationship what he does say though is he does say in being in nothingness that there are two modes of being where we are together he calls it the us object and the we subject and the us object is precisely what I talked about before right where there's like that third party that sees us the sees the two of

the primary relation as a sort of like objective us right but the problem with the us for Sartra is precisely in the title of what he calls this the us object we're objectified right there's no freedom there's no subjectivity here we're just an object within this this set of relations which for start sure that's not good right but he says sometimes we do sort of come together in these community projects you might say he calls that the we subject and this is where it's super bourgeois again he says the best example of this he says is the audience at the theater i mean come on that's that's the best example bro but like what he means is is like i know how fucking like that's the best example of human community together is it bro um and i'm a

theater nerd so like I'm I'm partial to it but come on dude let's not oversell the point here but the point is for him is that when you're sitting there the audience are all suspended by a common gaze and this is important because it's the gaze that unites them they're held if you will suspended in a sort of unity in this weeness uh of the show he says however you can get snapped out of that and he talks about like you know a car accident happens outside and all of a everybody's attention gets distracted and at that point you're not paying attention anymore because you've been snapped out of that momentary gaze that's been held together right so then people are like well dude okay so one if that's the best example like how does politics operate what about direct

action what about like actually coming together and doing something for a greater good what about coming together and contesting asymmetrical power relations if that if none of that is possible because you have no theory of togetherness except for these, one, this temporary gaze-oriented, super bourgeois formulation, and then the other one is just this pessimistic or just objects, how can we actually understand what you might think of as the group action?

And so what Sartre then, at, I think, being nudged by some of his friends, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was a thinker of mediation, what Sartre introduces is one of the most revolutionary introductions for his work, and a lot of Sartreans love to talk about this, but it's his introduction of what he calls the mediating third. It's the third, the role of the third. And when he develops this third in critique of dialectical reason, what he's doing is he's changing the

relations from just a binary to a ternary, a three-way relationship. And the reason that that's important is that's what allows us to understand how relations between individuals are always ever already mediated. And what that basically means is there are two ways that Sartre analyzes this, but one we could think of it in terms of like a bad mediation, right? Which you refers to as negative reciprocity, which is where we're mediated by an oppressive system. Let's say to use some theology background that like will like an oppressive theological

orientation about how you orient in the world. So you go into a church community and those relationships, are mediated by the demands that are issued from that mediating third, which is you have to behave in a certain way. You've got to hate gays. You got to blow up abortion clinics, whatever. Obviously, I'm being unfair. I don't think that all theology thinks that way,

especially for people who know me, but you get the point. It can lead to that type of thinking, right? And his point is, in that situation, ah, you're still trapped within that bad faith because you're not aware that there's an essence there that is dictating the demands to you, right? He says, but what if there's another way that we can understand, for example, for him, the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution?

He says, because that seems, you know, French theorists love to fetishize the French Revolution. He looks at that and he says, that seems to be a moment of freedom. That seems to be a genuine community. That seems to be real group action. How do we understand that? And so what he says is, you know what it is? What happens is, is there's a transformation from that other third, the bad third, the one that is like dictating how to behave, the one that comes from essence that precedes existence, to this other form of mediation, where everybody shares in a common vision. But it comes from the bottom up.

It's not imposed from outside. It's almost this intuitive connection, almost telepathic. It's this empathic and telepathic connection that just bursts. It's an eruption, right? It's an event. And he uses the word apocalypse to talk about this. And for people who are familiar with the history of kind of evental theorizing, this is where Alain Badu, who's a really kind of prominent French philosopher of the latter half of the 20th century and currently,

this is where Alon Badu first derives his interest in the event. He says this explicitly. It's from Sartre's elaboration of what Sartre refers to as the apocalypse in critique of dialectical reason, which is that moment of revelation, which is people think of apocalypse as being like the end. It kind of pertains to that, but really what it means is like a revelation. It's this revealing of this unity in group together as we all have a common goal and as we all have a common mission. And we're not thinking anymore about our selfish projects. And we're not oppressed by the sort of dictates and demands that come from religion or the state or society or the norms or the ideas.

or the identities that we hold on to, but rather there's this moment where it all kind of dissolves and we all sort of become united. And it's the mediating third that shifts then from not being mediated by an essence, but what mediates is praxis. And it's the common praxis of each and every person who is one, an individual, let's say, component within that group,

but also each individual serves as a third for every other person. So we could just think of this as like, put like 100 dots on a paper in front of you and that each dot represents like an individual person. Each person is in some sort of triangular relation, right? We can draw little triangles around everything. But at the same time, it doesn't have to be just based on proximity, like the dots that are closest together. But we could connect dots that are disparate, you know, that are really far across. The point is that everybody kind of is sharing this mediatory role with one another.

And that's where the optimism for what he calls the group infusion comes from. And so that's the big shift from his earlier pessimistic concerns about sociology towards what I think is a very sort of hopeful and optimistic understanding about how we can understand the logic of freedom within a group. Wonderful. Yeah, that is absolutely fascinating. Before we get into this next question where we dive deeper on mediation, And I do want to say that although neither myself nor most people listening have been in probably a revolutionary moment like storming the Bastille, there is some, like maybe even a microcosmic or smaller version of that. when you are in a protest with lots and lots of people,

there's moments where that protest maybe reaches its zenith, like a confrontation with the forces of the state and the forms of police. I know that when I go and I'm in those moments, which I've been in many times in my life, I'll often start tearing up, like tears will start falling down my face in this extreme moment of, I don't know exactly how to describe it, sort of like utter selflessness,

like you are sort of more powerful. I don't think it's too woo-wooey to say, connection. We live in a world that is not connected. As a matter of fact, I would say one of its impetus is to disconnect. And that doesn't mean that there aren't platforms like on social media and stuff like that for connection. But my argument would be that I think that's a degraded form of connection, which is extremely integral to the proliferation and furtherance of the system, right? Not that like there's somebody standing behind there pulling the levers like ah ha ha maybe there are maybe there's like some sort of cabal that is doing that

but i don't necessarily think we'd have to think that way but there's something about the systemic reproduction of the system to disconnect and when you're in that situation i think i'm like you dude i'm sensitive and i'm a crier and i feel that too and i think it's because at that moment we are feeling i just got chills right now even thinking about it i think it's because we feel connection real true selfless like you just said connection with the other. And that is something that is transcendent and it's transformative. Absolutely. Yeah. And standing across a riot line with the whole forces of the state arrayed against you is like as an individual, you'd be utterly helpless. But side by side with hundreds, if not thousands of people who are on the same side as you, you have that sort of force.

And so the mediation of the law and your adherence to it out of fear most of the time is no longer present and you're ready to take on the cops. You know, it's fascinating. Yeah. And I think this is what's so different about how a lot of people, so I mentioned how I thought that there was something unique in the text that kind of flies under the radar. The kind of first generation of interpreters of the text really saw the text as a failure because the people who love his existentialism were like, we're like, dude, where's the radical freedom? And then the people who are like straight up Marxists are like, bro, you can't be talking about like concrete individuals. Like Marxism is a universal thing. So that's the first interpretation. the first generation. And then what I would say is like the second generation of interpreters, the ones who are around like now, you know, the end of the 20th century who are around now. And they basically say that, oh, they think that this is a text more about like social ontology or normativism. And basically what that means is they think that this is a text that you can like look to to kind of figure out like what are the best types of practical ensembles, like groupings of humans that, that Sartre thinks that we could reproduce, that we could like, If only we just made groups that were like in this shape, so to speak, right?

Then we would have the right group. And then therefore, Sartre was giving us a normative blueprint for how to kind of like get out of the pitfalls of restrictions that he sees in party politics, right? I think that there's something important in those analyses. But I think they're fundamentally missing out on why this is a critique of dialectical reason, which is particularly what you just said. how can we understand that sense of being overwhelmed and that sense of connection in a moment when people are grouped together and that's what Sartre's doing here

is he's giving us tools to understand the logic to that right so the reason that we can understand it is precisely because of that that idea that I talked about of mediation earlier of the mediating third how we're all coming together and suspending our individual projects and so what Sartre does is he doesn't give us a blueprint for necessarily how to organize groups, but rather he gives us a heuristic, a learning device,

for analyzing how do we understand rationally the organization of those groups? And then how do we understand the experience of living in those groups? And then, of course, how do we understand groups that don't operate in that way? Something he calls the collective, right? How do we understand the logic of those things?

And then why are they, quote, unquote, bad or insufficient or inadequate right and that's what he's really doing here is he's providing us resources so we can try to explain the apparent expressions of group organization and to see under what rubric can we rationalize them and that that is what i think is kind of going on there so i think it's really great that you brought up like the personal experience of just being emotionally overwhelmed because I think that that really speaks to what Sartre is then trying to give justification for, you know? I see. Yeah, so interesting.

All right. Well, let's keep it moving and go into mediation then. One of the largest shifts, as you said, in Sartre's thinking that manifests in the critique of dialectical reason is the role of mediation. You talked about it a little bit. Can you tell us what Sartre means by mediation even more concretely and the sort of broader role that it plays here? Yeah. So I think this is a big concern in the history of philosophy, especially from a Hegel onwards, right? And what Sartre's trying to do is he's trying to ground an understanding of society or trying to ground a rationality of how it is that we can investigate people coming together in a world that they're

they didn't choose, right? So he's very indebted to the quote from the 18th Brumere of Marx, where Marx says that man doesn't make history out of the whole cloth, but out of that which is close at hand, right? And Sartre basically takes this and says that man makes history to precisely the extent that history makes man. And what he means by that is that humanity is not totally free to just create the world as he previously may have articulated with his earlier existentialism,

but rather we're thrown into contexts that we didn't choose. You're born into a situation that you didn't choose. Sometimes your decisions make decisions, make decisions, and you find yourself in a jail cell at 17, and you're like, how the fuck did I get here? By the way, does it sound like this maybe happened to me? I mean, absolutely, yes, me as well. Yeah, I mean, you find yourself in these situations, right?

Because you're thrown into contexts that you didn't choose. And so then the question is, how do we understand what freedom might mean within those contexts? And so what he's really trying to do by shifting the focus to mediation is trying to help us, what are the influencing factors that mediate our relations, not just with each other, but also with the world, right? And how do we understand the role of material reality? How do we understand labor? How do we understand we could even say like romantic relationships? How do we understand party politics?

How do we understand the role of the state? How do we understand these things without just saying that there are just these units of individuals who are kind of like thrown into a world and that all we can do is aggregate them and then try to like infer about what society is and nor do we just posit some sort of like universal notion of the proletariat as some sort of meta subject which is a direct critique of Lukash by the way this meta subject that is the supposed uh full realization of like a totality or some sort of universal uh expression of of history rather than doing that how can we understand the sort of like sticky and messy stuff of life where we are engaged with each other and with

the material world in such a way that we don't always choose those contexts we don't choose the language that we speak we don't choose the actual physical environment where we find ourselves but at the same time there's also a sense in which we transform those things right i can use words in a different way i can use them for a particular end right i can change the material environment for particular ends. I can either do it in destructive ways by extracting, you know, carbon-based minerals, or I can do it in positive ways by sort of creating community gardens or something along those lines. So that's really what he's interested. He's trying to navigate that set of concerns. And mediation for him becomes so important because mediation is kind of what dictates the

terms by which we understand all of those various formulations. So again, kind of, going back to the idea of like essence preceding existence or like the theological example, if the mediating terms dictate that you must act like an asshole to somebody because they're going to hell and you're one of the saved, well, then Sartre would find that a little bit problematic and be like, well, how the fuck do you get there? Like, why do you think that way? And so he wants to analyze, like, where do those dictates come from? not only acknowledging that that person's being an asshole and that that is an assholeish way of living your life,

but then kind of trying to understand, okay, where did those dictates come from? And how can we understand the mediations that inform and that influence, that kind of impose limits and demands on how people can think under the influence, under the sway of that mediatory force? And then similarly, as I just said earlier, how can we then understand a sort of liberatory understanding of mediation? So that's the stakes for what he's concerned with. And then we already talked about like kind of a little bit about the group,

but I think we'll probably talk about that a little bit further. But that's the real issue for Sartre here. For sure. Okay. So given all of this, everything we've talked about so far, what then is the dialectic for Sartra and what makes his conception of it unique or different from other conceptions of dialectics? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of really simple but also kind of complex at the same time.

I think we should probably not think of it as the dialectic because once we think of it as the dialectic, you're turning it into an essence. I see. Right? And so for him, what he wants to think of is identifying, he still uses the word, the dialectic, but of finding dialecticity, we might say. Kind of like turning it into a verb almost rather than a noun. And for him, the dialectic is really just the relation. between humanity and the environment in which the human finds itself, right? So when you find yourself in one of those situations that are not of your own choosing,

which is at every moment, by the way, right? Dialectic for him is the transforming or overcoming of that situation. So I'm sitting here at my desk right now, and my foot is falling asleep because I'm sitting on my foot, which I tend to do, right? and I've got my coffee mug here and I'm presented with a set of limits right like I've got a desk and I've got a wall I can't like fly through my wall

to get into the kitchen right so there's a sense in which the material world is restraining me from getting up and getting my coffee but what I can do is I can get up and I can walk around and I created doors so that we can make this convenient so that I can walk in and out of rooms and I can go through there so that I can go in the room

room and I can make myself a cup of coffee. That's a really sort of like banal example, but the point is that that's me sort of engaging with the transformation, if you will, of the situation that is presented to me. The situation is presenting certain limits and restrictions about what I can do and how I can behave and freedom for Sartra is this expression of this dialectical overcoming of those limits and those demands that are imposed upon me. so outside of that banal example maybe a political example would be something like we could look at at some of like the black lives matter protests that are going on right now around not just the united states but around the world right that there are here's a perfect example so in australia here we had um we've had a couple of actions but we had one a couple weeks ago and it was actually it came down a couple days before that it was going to be deemed an illegal protests and they were using the cover of the coronavirus and the lockdown measures that have been imposed to try to justify this

declaration of illegality. But the protest was going ahead anyway, right? So we can see that as a sort of expression of free dialecticity because there were limits and restrictions that were imposed upon us, which aren't just ideas. Those are material, right? Those are real. Not only because it's going to ramp up the police presence, but also in the sense of the law as being some sort of material imposition of what you can and cannot do, what you can and cannot say. But the fact that the protest was going ahead anyway, now thankfully, actually, like, I think it was like a half hour before the protest proceeded. The judge kind of changed their mind, and they ruled it legal, which meant that the police

presence wasn't as ramped up as it could have been, even though some people did get fucked in a subway station later in the evening. For people who are interested in learning more about that, you can Google about that. but the point was is that this collective or let's say this group decision to go ahead anyway and to march and to exercise this this free expression what they were doing is they were overcoming those limits they were overcoming the material restraints that were imposed that were coming from without by that other mediating force that was trying to impose limits and demands and so the dialectic for sartra is precisely just that perpetual action of the human

confronting a material set of realities, and then transforming that set of material realities. That is essentially what he means by dialectic. Fascinating. So would that also work in the opposite way? So like in Portland, for example, there's a recent development where unmarked federal agents that are not showing what agency they come from, not identifying themselves, are basically kidnapping protesters off the streets. And so would that sort of dialecticity work in the opposite way, if you're looking at it from the perspective of the police trying to overcome this historical challenge to their sort of, you know, rule and their dominance over everybody else.

And that's how they manifest. So it is very much back and forth, right? It can never be one-sided. It gets me so excited. That's such a perfect question. Yes, Sartre refers to this as anti-dialectical. So this is what happens when you just simply succumb to the limits and the demands that are imposed, right? This is what happens when the world is operating according to those pre-existent essences of power, those pre-constituted mediating forces.

When the world operates according to that, that's anti-dialectical. So absolutely. Fascinating. And the thing is, and it's so important to understand that for Sartra here, he's not saying that there are situations that can purely be delineated as an anti-dialectical situation and that this one is a dialectical situation. But they'd rather, they both sort of inhere in a given moment at the exact same time. So the police who are exhibiting thought and action according to the sort of, let's say, structural demands to break up the protests. And when they use excessive force, which is the sort of like MO, right, then what they're doing is they're acting anti-dialectically. But at the same time, there's a convergence that you can only understand that which is anti-dialectical in relation to that which is dialectical.

So it needs, if you will, the overcoming of those restraints, one, in order to distance itself from it. And that also is kind of required in order to have a momentum to actually identify itself as what it is. So this is a very Hegelian idea of the relationship that he talks about in the science of logic between the something and the something. the other and that something is only something because yes it's individually something right it's a this right it's this microphone that i'm talking into not this coffee mug over here but the thisness of the microphone is tied up in it's called reciprocal determination in haggle it's it's tied up in the fact that it's not that coffee mug so this something that is my microphone is precisely something but it's also other that is it's not

the coffee mug. Now, similarly, if I put my attention on the coffee mug, the coffee mug is an other in relation to the original something, but it's also a something in relation to the other that is the microphone, right? The priority of something and othering, if you will, kind of shifts. There's something similar here with the relationship between anti-dialectical and dialectical, which is the idea that they require each other, one, as being a sort of negation of unfreedom, which is dialectic, right?

And then the anti-dialectic is a sort of assertion and sort of imposition of no freedom, of anti-freedom in relation to the dialectic. But they always require each other at the same time. And that's absolutely right. Okay. So a quick side question before we move on then. In what ways does this conception of dialectics or dialecticity differ fundamentally from other, let's say, Marxist, well-known conceptions? of dialectics, perhaps, in angles or elsewhere? I mean, the biggest thing

is that he doesn't want to posit the existence of some sort of pre-existent force. I see. Right? As something that is guiding history. Above and beyond. So any... Yeah, exactly. Because then that would be a metaphysical speculation for him. Right.

And then also, then at that point, then you're erecting an essence, you're erecting a substance that you then are sort of like dictated by, which again would just lead to that negative form of mediation, which would actually ironically lead to a type of anti-dialecticity, which I think is part of his critique, if you will, of the USSR at this point, is that there are tendencies towards anti-dialectical rationality

in certain iterations of Marxism. And so what he really wants us to do is he's not, I don't think it's fair to say that he's just shitting on every Marxist or Marxism, but rather it's insofar as you engage thought or engage in thinking in this way, right? Then you kind of fall into this trap of anti-dialectical thinking and practice. And he says, let's make sure that we can just continually think really dialectically without falling into the trap of subsuming ourselves under a force that is guiding history, that we have to kind of look over our shoulder and check like. Dad, am I doing it right? Dad, am I doing it right?

That shit would drive Sartre crazy. If you're doing that, like, is this dialectical? Are we doing this the right way? Is this according to the initiatives of the Communist Party? When you're looking over your shoulder at Daddy, that's when I think it becomes an issue for Sartre. Yeah, so that really clarified things, and a big light bulb went off in my head at the very end of you talking right there.

Now I think I do have a good grasp on it, and I certainly am guilty myself of talking about and perhaps even conceiving of dialectics in the sort of metaphysical way that Sartra is critiquing here. Even how you phrase that, you know, and you critique this a little bit of the dialectic, you know, some pithy phrase like the dialectic marches on. I can see how that sort of implicitly asserts dialectics as a sort of metaphysical thing, you know, a noun instead of a verb sort of idea. And I really, it really makes sense to me now. Yeah, but here's the irony. there's almost a sense in which we can't avoid thinking in that way, right?

There's almost a sense in which in order to think dialectically, we kind of have to think anti-dialectically. Like, they converge upon one another at the same time, in various different expressions. Like, it's different when we're talking about the cops in Portland as being an expression of anti-dialectical rationality versus you sitting there and sometimes being caught up and maybe what Sartre would refer to as a sort of like

determining or predestining of thinking in relation to the dialectic. Like, I don't think he's sitting there like, ah, let's flagellate ourselves because we aren't thinking perfectly dialectically all the time. Because if you do that, then you're kind of just imposing another sort of like norm that you're submitting yourselves to, right? But I think the point is that let's perpetually engage with this tension of realizing those tendencies that we have to think and to act anti-dialectically. While at the same time, let's work towards stimulating the

priority of dialectical rationality. And so it becomes a very sort of integrated set of concerns for Sartre. I love that. Yeah, absolutely. That really makes things clear for me, and I appreciate that. So one more question before we get into what is your part of the book in the sense that, you know, you're sort of making innovations and carrying things out. So just the last sort of question about CDR itself. And you mentioned this earlier, which is that CDR is considered a work of philosophical anthropology. Can you flesh what this means out for us and try to help us understand what he means by that? Yeah. So when he says that this text is a pro-legomena to any future anthropology, what he's really getting at is how do we understand humanity, right? So he writes

existentialism as a humanism, and he has a very sort of clear understanding at that point of what he thinks humanity is. And this goes back all the way to his early work on the imagination. He wrote a couple books on that. He wrote a book called Transcendence of the Ego. Then he writes, you know, being in nothingness. And then all of his literature, there's a very sort of simple idea of what the human is. Human is an individual, right? An individual unit.

A sort of singular consciousness is how he would describe it. We are a consciousness. And he really derives this from the phenomenological philosophical tradition that comes out of Husserl, who's influenced by a psychologist named Franz Brantano and then of course, you know, Heidegger takes this up and in France at the time, you know, the kind of post-Hydegarian influence is quite rich, right? Although there's a great anecdote and I've heard it multiple times and I've never really seen any evidence of it, but it's that someone went into Sartre's office and they saw being in time Heidegger's, you know, big, his first tone that he writes in the trash can and that

Sartre is like, ah, the book is trash, but apparently the binding was not cracked on the book. so you don't know if he actually fucking read it or not and he was just kind of like just kind of picked it up through transmission and then started doing his own thing but I love that I love it whether it's not whether it's real or not I don't care

I love the story and I'm sticking with it and so but there's this concern right about the individual having kind of primacy in Sartre's early philosophy now Heidegger writes a stinging critique of existentialism as a humanism in which he basically says that existentialism does not set the humanitas

of humanity high enough. And what Heidegger means by that is that there's something more about the human, about what in Heidegger's terms is d'azine, but that's the German word for existence or their being, like being there. But there's something more that existentialism fails to adequately grasp, right? That we're not just a rational animal. We're not just a political animal. We're not just a linguistic animal. Like, there's something, there's something about the human that exceeds all of empirical and phenomenological explorations of the human. And I think that Sartre kind of takes this on in some ways, because by the time you get to the critique of dialectical

reason, you don't get a theory of the human anymore. As a matter of fact, a lot of Sartrians don't like this. I actually, I taught this class in a seminar. recently and I had a student who was very versed in Sartre who was like where's the human in this where's the radical individual in this where's radical freedom and he actually got like angry with me and I'm like bro I mean I get it but but let's try to understand what Sartre's trying to navigate through here because in the critique of dialectical reason he actually says there is no such thing as the human that actually what you end up having are acts without actors and products without producers.

So there's something that he's working through here to kind of think about the human in a way that doesn't just assume some sort of prior construction of an essence of what the human might be, and therefore that would lead to what he would call a sort of serial understanding of how the human acts, which is, again, that issue of you have an essence that precedes existence, right? If the human is this, then that means you've kind of created this like permanent and eternal and fixed essence that kind of dictates how the study of the human must proceed and how we understand the actions that proceed from this essence of the human.

And then you can kind of do all kinds of nefarious things because then once you say that the human is this, then that means any deviations from that, you can punish, right? So in disability studies, for example, if you have a notion that is singularly and erected as that which is able-bodied, then the disable is somehow a deviation. It's wrong. It's lessened, it's diminished, right? Because it's a sort of like veering from the quote-unquote norm. That's despicable.

Once you wield that power, you can wield that power in political terms. So Sartra in this text is really kind of trying to develop a sort of new understanding of what the human itself might even be, which is why it's a pro-legomena to any future anthropology, because he wants to investigate what are the conditions by which we can understand, how these things that we call humans have been constructed and then once we understand those conditions doesn't that allow us this possibility to perpetually undertake new projects of developing new understandings of what humanity might be and I think that's that's really what he's trying to get at really deep really interesting I see okay yeah that makes that makes total sense uh that first

that whole phrase um threw me off but I think I'm getting it now for sure yeah um So now let's shift into the, you know, your part of the book where you take these ideas and sort of run with them and make your own arguments. And again, the book is called Sartra imagination and dialectical reason. So now that we have some idea of what Sartra is doing and critique of dialectical reason, let's turn to your book. How does Sartra sort of conceive of matter according to you? And what are the implications, you know, why does it matter, et cetera? Yeah. Yeah, so this matters matter and matter and matter.

It matters because for Sartra, he doesn't think that there is such a thing as like pre-existent matter, right? Like think of the physical sciences, scientific naturalism, that there is a pre-constituted reality of matter that exists, whether we think of it being distilled down to like strings or, you know, some sort of like universal conception of a multiverse or something like that. He doesn't think that that is really important for philosophical thought. Now, he's not trying to engage. He does say that there is room for metaphysical speculation and for science. That's not his concern. But what he does want to do is he wants to kind of contest the idea that, again, that there is just a simple, pre-constituted understanding of matter, right? So kind of expanding on Marx's understanding of, like, congealed labor or stored labor, he kind of takes this and expands it.

a little bit larger into a larger social theory in the idea that all matter is what he calls is worked matter that means that all matter is always already somehow a product of human hands in some way it's a product of human hands we can think of this and not just in terms of like the desk that is before me that is clearly an artifact of human hands right but let's even think about it in terms of the rain that falls on my head that we think of as being a natural phenomenon but that rain has been affected by various industrial actions, that rain has been infected by acidity levels in the air because of pollution, right? And also that rain is falling in mapped areas, areas that have been mapped as this region versus that region. And fuck, you have

corporations in the northern hemisphere that are trying to lay claim to nations in the southern hemisphere's actual rainfall so that they can use that as a water supply. So there's a sense in which even the natural environment is always already worked for Sartra, whether it's mapped, whether it's linguistically worked on, or whether it's actually physically infused, if you will, by sort of like the externalities of industrial production, matter needs to be understood as always being a part of a process of having been worked. And so that's important. Yeah. So one second, just to drill down on that a bit, you talk about rain.

Obviously desks, artifacts of human creation, but even something very, very alien to us like, you know, quarks or like black holes and galaxies far, far away, is the mapping process, the conceptualization of it, the thing that makes it human in that sense? Yeah, so this is an issue that goes back to Kant, right? Which is how do we kind of understand the world, let's think? Like, what are the conditions of possible knowledge is what Kant is really curious about? And the issue is there's a philosopher by the name of Wilfred Sellers, who's an American philosopher who really brings Kant back into the world of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. And he basically says that, yeah, like one of the things that we get with Kant is that everything is always already conceptual, right? That even sensory experience, like my immediate, I'm touching the wall right now, like even that is a conceptual activity. So there's like a representation, a representation.

There's no just pure immediate experience of the world. Now, Sellers wants to kind of like argue that there is if people are interested in exploring sellers further. He wants to argue that there is a way that we can speak of like sheer receptivity. But for Kant, at least there's not, right? And I think Sartre kind of takes up that Kantian idea that there is no immediate, right? This is why mediation again becomes so important for Sartra. There's no immediate. relation to the world everything is always already mediated which means whether it's conceptual

mediation or whether it's like physical mediation in the sense of you know industrial runoff or something like that there's always a sense in which our encounters are mediated or conceptualized we might say so yeah absolutely okay i see did you want to keep going with the implications or well okay so the difference is so that's just kind of an abstract theory for sartra um That's worked matter. But then there's something, and this is so kind of crucial to understanding his argument that will ultimately lead to where freedom actually comes back in the critique of dialectical reason and why freedom doesn't have the same place that it did previously as being like this primary thing

that is constitutive about the human experience. And it's when you think of worked matter, that's kind of more an abstract theoretical idea. But what he then talks about is something called the practico-inner. And this is a kind of technical term that he uses that brings together two ideas. One praxis and one inertia. Praxis obviously kind of pertaining to what we talked about previously with regards to dialectical overcoming, this perpetual transformation of the material environment. That's praxis, right?

And then inertia is stasis. It's not moving. That's not happening, right? There is no happening happening, right? So he brings them together in this term so that we can understand. the logic of worked matter as previously before, which is that, so yeah, we kind of get the idea, Sartre, what you're saying about worked matter. Everything is always kind of like mediated and there's some sort of infusion, if you will, of like a conceptual apparatus or something

or other. But what does that actually mean? It means that we're always investing ourselves, right? Think of Marx and the idea of the expenditure of labor power that is congealed into fixed capital, right, and ultimately into value, that there's an expenditure, if you will, of praxis, of the human, into, that is then stored and that is congealed, that is made inert, that's where the inertia comes from, that is then congealed in the physical object, right? And the physical object doesn't just mean the desk in front of me. It can also mean the words that I'm using right now. The words that I'm speaking are practical inert objects, right? There's meaning that's been infused into the word meaning, for example. There's meaning that's been infused to the word good, right?

And so there's a sense in which even when I use the word good or I think about the word good and now you're thinking about good and now the listeners are thinking about good, we're kind of changing, we're infusing some sort of impetus, some sort of potency into this word, right? And so there's a sense in which we're transforming it, but at the same thing, same time, I can only use the word because there's a pattern of how humans have used the word good that sort of impose kind of restrictions on me again, right? Thinking about that idea that there's an essence here. There's sort of an imposition that I can use the word good in this context when I'm speaking in this way, but, you know, I don't use the word good when I'm saying

what's in your coffee cup and I just say, good. Well, what does that mean? What's in the coffee up, you know, there's a context that sort of imposes how we speak, right? So that's what the idea of the practico inert is, is that there's like a perpetual infusion of human vitality, of meaning, of labor into the material world, and then at the same time, it's kind of stored, and it becomes a sort of static entity that then becomes a mediating force, and this is where unfreedom comes from. This is how to understand why that dogmatic person in the church that speaks those horrible things issuing from a very sort of vindictive conception of what they think of God is. This is why that happens.

This is Sartre's way of explaining how do we get there in the first place. How do we understand the conditions that create that type of thinking that come from that? Or to go back to the USSR, this is how we understand the totality that the USS. our wields that then justify its own sort of actions without needing that responsibility to kind of be self-critical, it's precisely because there's a practico inertia that is the kind of signal mediation that dictates that world. But the thing what this is is that we need to understand. It's not just simply inert. There's also praxis. There's always a sense in which we can create it differently. We can keep recreating differently. And even if there are

limits and things that are imposed upon us that say how we can use the word good, we can transform how we use the word good. Even if there are limits and impositions that say, God demands this from you, liberation theology can come along and say, no, fuck that. That's just pure ideology. And salvation is actually liberation of the oppressed, right? When the party says, ah, we can do what we want because we're the ones in control of things, you say, wait a second, that's not necessarily the case. We don't have to be beholden to the party platform. So that's the idea. He wants to bring them together to allow us to understand the material environment that is impinging upon us. It's having this dual side to it at all times.

I see. Okay. I see. So then what is serality in Sartre and what role does that play in his overall philosophy? Yeah. So this is the effect that comes from life that is mediated by the practico inert. So life that is unfolds or that proceeds from limits and. demands that come from a practical inert object, whether it be an object like God, an object like

a word, an object like an ocean, how you can navigate on this ocean? What are the rules? Can you not go in this particular part of the sea? Can you not go in that particular part of the sea? Can you not surf here? Can you not swim there? Whatever. Those things are kind of imposed upon us, and serality is the effect that that has on human society. And one way of thinking about this for people who are familiar with Sartra, is that seriality is basically collective bad faith. It is the, one, there's a sense of not recognizing your freedom, but again, that's still too existential and phenomenological. More it's that there's an imposition of unfreedom on people under serial conditions as dictated

by the demands and the limits that come from practical inert material reality. So he gives a couple examples. One is a bus queue. And he's talking about a bus queue in France, right, at the time where you actually had to take like a little number. So think of it like you've got to pull a number and you stand up and you're waiting for the bus to come. And he says, this is a series. And the reason it's a series is because each person has a place. And that place has been dictated by their place in line.

Right? So each person then already has a sort of like static identity of what they are. right not what they could be but in relation to the bus queue they have been determined this is who i am i am number five brett is number seven and you might actually resent me because what if there are only five seats right then not only do you not get a seat and you're running late for work but i'm the last person that got the seat and you're like fuck that guy and i got he's got he's got bleach tearing a beard and what a fucking doucheback you know like like like All that shit can happen, right?

So that's the idea is that the series then produces conflictual relations because, one, we're in a relationship of alterity, which means otherness, right? So you're other to me. Two, we're in competition because there are scarce amounts of seats. There are only a few seats maybe. So we're in competition. And then three, and perhaps one of the ones that gets underrepresented, but I think that is one of the most important ways of understanding this, every.

component part within that cue is replaceable because we're just simply a number right so you're replaceable so i think that's really what's important to understand about the series here for sartra there's relations of alterity and otherness which leads to competition and conflict and then there's a real sort of inessentiality of the human and what becomes essential is the system that places you in that position so that's the bus queue then he experienced bands that and he says that doesn't always this just happen though in like a kind of like a present state where we're actually like in a in a similar space but he uses the notion of the radio broadcast now of course this is like the late 50s so you know got to update the example

jonathan crary is someone who wrote a book called 24-7 in which he kind of takes this notion and talks about digital media and things like that for people who are interested but in the radio broadcast for search or something similar is going on but people are in now mediated by the common consensus that is being bestowed through the broadcast on the radio. So we could think about network news maybe, right, as being the thing that unites us. It tells you how to think. It tells you how to feel. It tells you what to think and what to feel. And then because of that, it doesn't really matter who you are, just as long as you are an input for them to generate money for their advertisers, right? So we're, we're really.

replaceable and then it also absolutely we can think about network news as stimulating conflict and otherness just look at the fucking battles between liberals and conservatives and shit like that that that gets flamed through those fucking those media platforms right yeah so there's otherness there's conflict and then of course there's um replaceability which means that you are an inessential component person so seriality then is the effect of living in a world that is mediated by those practical inert limits and demands. And what that does is that leads to the development of what he calls the collective. And a collective is basically his technical term for distinguishing this serial form of existence

from a free form of existence, which he calls the group, right? But typical de facto, anti-dialectical, unfree existence is this collective serialization of human bodies. but the problem is this isn't just again a physical or empirical reality it also infects how we think so we think serially we think according to um certain limits and demands regimes of knowledge like world views that tell us how to think what to say um those things are also part of this so seriality is one you've got the issue of the bus queue but two you've got the issue of common opinion that comes from like the radio broadcaster we talked about it with regards to network news

and that for Sartre is extremely powerful because what it does is it produces a situation of what he calls infinite seriality which is that there is this infinite degree of impinging forces that impose limits and demands on how we ought to think and how we can behave

what activities we can engage in what we can do and what we can't do and that for Sartra is this really oppressive force that needs to be contested. Okay, I see. And obviously, you can zoom out and talk about capitalist class society in these same ways, the worker being replaceable, conflict, other, right? You can zoom in and out to micro-cosmic things in society.

I, my, a future book that I want to write is actually going to be called like Sartra with marks. And I want to do a sort of like concept by concept, um, comparison between Marks, Marxist ideas from capital in particular and critique of dialectical reasons. So how does stored labor or congealed labor become for Sartra the practical inert and worked matter? How does commodity fetishism relate to seriality, right? Like these are things that I think Sartra is working through, but still within a little

bit more of an explicitly philosophical set of concerns rather than political economic. But yes, absolutely. And that's why I think this book is so useful. And that's where I think a lot of people get the book wrong is because they don't see that potential. But we can totally do that. Like you just said, if you're looking at a factory, Sartre refers to these different forms of serial collectives. There's the collective, but then ultimately what this leads up to is what he calls the institution. And this is where it gets really bad for Sartre.

And this is where the Stalinist regime is implicated, right? The institution for him is where the sovereign is given ultimate essential authority, but the parts that are within the kind of reach of the sovereign are inessential. They're only valuable insofar as they are component parts for the totality. And he says if you start kind of institutionalizing thought and action, then what you end up getting is this tendency towards sovereignty, right? And for him, the second volume of the critique of dialectical reason is he begins an investigation into Stalin in particular to try to kind of elaborate this further. And he never finishes the project, and we can talk about that in a second because there's actually, I think, a really profound reason why he doesn't finish the project.

But the point is that there's something interesting about the oppression and exploitation that comes from institutionalization. So you could even look at a factory and you could say, well, we don't fucking matter in the factory. we're just replaceable component parts for the extraction of profit, right? What really matters is the sovereign. And the sovereign doesn't have to be a singular person. It could be the board or it could be the corporation, right? Or it could be the capital state nexus, right?

There are scales here that we can use by – there are scales here that we can analyze by using the tools that Sartre gives in this text. All right. So we've been bumping up against the – the concept of freedom throughout this entire discussion. So let's go ahead and just dive deep and wrap that part of it up. How does Sartre conceive ultimately of freedom and critique of dialectical reason? And how is it different from his earlier, perhaps more existentialist conceptions of freedom?

Yeah. So first, you're free, but not within conditions that you have chosen, right? So then how does that operate? What the fuck does that even mean? What it basically means is that serial condition that we just mentioned, that serial condition is always present. It's always impinging itself upon us, right? Because words demand that they be spoken in a particular way. Ideas demand that they be appropriated and understood and then wielded in particular ways. Institutions demand that you wear certain types of clothing, that you

show up at a certain time. Even something like the family unit, there are expectations for how you behave as a father, as a mother, as a sister, as a brother, right? There are expectations that are imposed upon us, right? So there's always a sense in which there's an un-freedom, but again, on the other side of the inertia is that practicality. There's also always a sense in which there's this perpetual dialectical transformation, a sort of dissolving, if you will, of those serial restraints, of those limits and those demands that are being imposed upon us. So for Sartre, he explicitly talks about this with reference to the group. And the group for Sartre is what we talked about when we were mentioning the storming of the Bastille, right?

It's that experience of that free kind of telepathic and empathic, mediatory sort of shared nowness, if you will, right? It's not even a nowness. If there is a moment of time that we can think about before nowness, because even nowness implies a sort of like static unit. Right? It's like before that. It's like a suspended state of infinity, if you will, which is maybe being a bit wanky and poetic. But I think that's the idea that he's really trying to get at, that in the moment of what he calls the eruption of the apocalypse, what happens is that those serial restraints, those impositions are completely dissolved. So let's go back to the example of the bus queue. So you and I are at a bus queue. I'm in position five. You're in position seven. Under serial conditions, you fucking hate me because I'm going to get that seat and you're late for work. And if you're late for work, your boss is going to yell at you.

And if your boss yells at you, then you're going to have a shitty day. And then you're going to go ahead and you're going to take that out on a friend who's like, hey, dude, I'm fucking pissed. And then your friend's like, whoa, dude, chill out. So there's this like chain set of serial reactions that come from this situation, right? Sartre says, but what happens when everybody comes together in a strike? Right? They strike with the city workers, the bus union, for example, for better wages.

At that moment, you and I look at each other in that shared action, and you're not angry at me anymore. You're not competitive with me anymore because we have a common praxis that is uniting us. And then everyone who fucking leaves that bus queue and says, you know what, fuck this bus, unless you pay the bus workers more, we're not going to ride your bus. In that moment, there's an eruption of freedom. And that's what Sartre refers to as the group infusion. That's a practical example of how, like, the storming of the Bastie kind of really. reiterates itself in a sort of very simple notion of like local action, right? Group action.

And that's really what freedom is for Sartra, is it's that. But, and now here's where some of the criticism comes against Sartra. So then, yeah, that sounds great, dude. I love that idea. But how do you sustain that? What happens afterwards? What happens when we go home at night and we're not protesting anymore? So we're not in that shared space of mediated common connection.

But now you get home and a bill is sitting on your desk. Boom. You've been snapped back into a serial condition, right? Limits and demands have been opposed upon you. What happens when you get home and you find out that a loved one has died? What happens when you get home and your partners had a really rough day? Boom. You've been confronted with a set of serial reactions.

Now, how you respond in that situation, you can respond anti-dialectically or dialectically, right? But the point is that there's always this threat of the return of serial conditions because of the infinity of the practico in our world, the infinity of the material reality that is imposing limits and demands. Again, we're thrown into conditions that are not of our own choosing. I didn't choose to have this bill sent to me at 7 p.m. on a Friday night when I just wanted to chill coming home, right? But it's there anyway. So at that point, then, that what ends up happening is this return of seriality. So a lot of people criticize Sartre because they think, oh, great, you have this really romantic idea of the storming of the Bastille, such a fucking bourgeois French understanding of collective action. What about scaling up and actually creating an organization?

And so he then works through a series of different kind of, let's say, processions from the logic of the group infusion through what he calls the pledged group, The pledged group is basically where you kind of come together after that moment of eruption and you say, you know what, we're not going to go back to that serial condition that we were before. Fuck that. I'm not going to allow Brett and me to get mad at each other about being in a fucking bus queue. Maybe they're not enough spaces, but guess what? We're not going to do that anymore, right? So you make a pledge.

And Sartre actually refers to what's called the tennis court oath after the storming of the Bastie during the French Revolution, which is a kind of a social contract in a way. But it's not the social contract in the way that we typically understand it, but it's a way that we all kind of come together and we create the social contract. But there's another reason that you create the social contract. You also create the social contract because you want to get a guarantee from the other person that they're not going to be treasonous, that they're not going to go back to that kind of other way, right? So, like, we make a contract that we say is binding because I want to make sure that Brett

isn't going to, like, punch me in the back of the head the next time I get space five and he gets space seven, right? Like, we want to ensure, and so we all come to an agreement. Now, this sounds like the reimposition of stasis and inertia and in essence, right? And for Sartra, it kind of is. It kind of is. And this is why a lot of people read the text as being very pessimistic, because they think that, fuck, you see Sartra? You just can't get away from your pessimistic understanding about human beings. You inevitably think that we're going to be in these conflictual relationships.

I don't think that's the case. And the reason I don't think that's the case is because even when you look at the pledged group, the pledge has been constituted under different conditions. It's been constituted not under the same purely serialized conditions that led to the eruption of the kind of understanding the logic of the group in the first place. But now this pledge is formulated on a common concern. It's formulated by and out of that previous state of connection. Now, there might be elements of seriality and of stasis that come in, but there's also still always the presence of that connection that insists, like not exists, because that means to stand from, but it insists, it's internal to, it's integral to the kind of creation of the pledge. So there's still a sense in which there's a dialectical freedom, we might say, that is present within this moment of the pledge. Then the next group that he analyzes is what he calls the organization.

And the organization, he talks about, again, super bourgeois example here, but he talks about a football team, a soccer team. And he's like, everybody basically has a role, and they kind of all agree to come together to play their role, and their role is based on their capacity, right? So everyone has a capacity to do something. You're doing this, and you're good at that, and you're good at that. So you guys play your role, and we can all create this, like, harmonious organized group, right? Again, it does seem that there are fixed positions, and is that a sort of imposition of

seriality? It could be, yeah, absolutely. But the point is that Sartra isn't saying we need to create groups, we need to be wary of how we make pledges, and organizations are really the best way of creating a group, so we all should kind of, you know, create our organizations like a football team or a soccer team or something like it. That's not what he's saying. He's saying, here's how we can understand the logic. of the organization. Here's how we can understand how the organization functions.

And here's how we can understand both the free elements within that organization, but also there are going to be elements of unfreedom, even within an organized group. So we could think of that in terms of the party, for example.

You look at a political party, there are going to be certain impositions, if you will, practical inert impositions. But at the same time, people have roles, right? People are connected in a common unity. That's what caused the fusion

of the party in the first place. The point for Sartre is let's just not rest in those serial conditions. Let's not rest in the impositions that come from the platform of the party, but let's recognize that we can perpetually and continuously change those conditions, right? And this is where Sartre might be a bit sort of Trotsky-esque, right? This idea of permanent revolution. And Sartre does talk about the idea that he finds it interesting. to think about the permanence of the apocalypse, right?

Which is also why he loves the cultural revolution at one point in Maoist China. He's really interested in this idea of like a perpetual overcoming and transformation, but at the same time not being ignorant and unaware of the fact that serial impositions kind of orient us and set how we are in those conditions in the first place. But let's just not rest in them. And that's really what freedom becomes for Sartre is. how can we then analyze situations so that we can best stimulate the conditions to resist the tendency towards seriality? Does that make sense? Totally. And in fact, right when you mentioned Trotsky,

I actually wrote down Maoism, Cultural Revolution, when Mao tried to unleash the people on the party as an example of something that Sartra might like. So that's incredibly funny that you mentioned that right as I was just finishing that sentence in my notes. But I can totally see how that is in line with his overall, not only philosophy, but then also critique of the USSR, which Mao had, which is this critique of the bureaucratization of it, and the unleashing of the masses on the party itself was this sort of experiment that Mao and the Chinese communists underwent to see how we can move beyond those limitations. And so, yeah, that's really interesting to think about Sartre's response to that.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, it's no wonder that somebody like Alon Badu, who's a noted Maoist, would would kind of find influence from Sartra. I mean, is he a Maoist, or like, Bejou, was he? I don't know if he still kind of considers him this way. Was he so interested in Maoism because of this kind of idea of that he saw in Sartra of the kind of like perpetual revolution? As you say, the people against the party.

I mean, there's probably some cross resonance here. But yeah, absolutely. Super interesting. So before I go to the last question about what we can, learn. My listeners will crucify me if I don't follow up on something you said earlier, which is Sartreus Stalin project and why he didn't finish it. Do you want to touch on that? Yeah. So this actually gets me really excited. So here's the thing. Nobody really knows for sure. He doesn't say I just abandoned my project because of this, although he does say at one point in these Rome lectures,

he says that he felt like he was still a bit too idealist in the critique of dialectical reason, which is interesting. This is kind of a future problem. for me is I kind of want to parse that out a little bit, you know, like in what ways is this idealist, and then what can we learn from that? And is that bad necessarily, right? Like, I'm curious about this. But Robert Bernascone is a Sartre scholar, and he wrote this article that I, again, whether or not this is absolutely true or not, I like it, and I'm going to use it, and I think that there's something accurate to it. Phenon was extremely influenced by the critique of dialectical reason. There's a letter that Fenon writes to, I believe it's Sartre's

publisher, basically saying that when I'm engaged in these activities with the Algerian Liberation Army, we're reading the critique of dialectical reason. Like, we're actually reading this text. So they kind of saw it as something useful. So there's something interesting about the post-colonial voice using this text as some kind of inspiration. To what extent it's kind of hard to quantify. But I do find that interesting. And Phenon basically says every time I sit down at my desk, I think about this text. And then, of course, notably, Sartre writes the preface to Wretched of the Earth.

So there's something really interesting about this relation that Sartre has with the emergent concerns of post-colonial revolution. and Bernascone says that what he thinks this leads to is the conclusion that Sartre realized ultimately that he wasn't the right person to finish this kind of project. That if Sartre was trying to understand history and this would lead us to understanding our space within history and then maybe to even identify something like a revolutionary agent that Sartra started to realize that it was the post-colonial voice

that was the one that was really going to speak on this behalf. This is Bernascone's kind of speculative assertion, but I think it's right. And the reason I think it's right is because Sartre is definitely, I mean, not just in terms of his political concerns, that he absolutely was always on the side of the victim. You might say the side of Palestinians, the Algerian side, right? He was always the side of Hungary against the like aggressive institution of the USSR. He was always on the side of like the little guys. we might say um and i think that there's something that he starts to realize as he's investigating this that makes him ill-equipped to speak of how we can programmatically offer an analysis of history

without integrating the voice of the other because marxism western marxism has a really poor history of speaking from the other. They might try to include the other into the universal narrative, the universal proletariat, for example. But to just simply say that everybody is exploited via the mechanism of surplus value in the same way is to really misidentify certain points of serial, in searcher's terms, of serial control and serial domination. And so, So Sartra, I think, wants to include, and this is why I think this text is so useful for us today, people who are navigating between these concerns over identity politics and, like, class first Marxists, whatever the fuck these terms are, right?

The anti-woke left and the woke left or whatever, right? Like, Sartra is trying to say that, guess what? If you think from identity, then you might find yourself falling into a form of serial thinking. There is a feminist scholar who actually uses this. She wrote an article called Gender as Seriality. It's Iris Marion Young for people who are interested. And she takes up this challenge. Is there something about gender that can be a serial logic?

Is there something about an ethnicity or a race identity that might fall into that trapping? Is there something about what we might call bourgeois identity politics that can be explainable precisely by the mechanisms that Sartre elaborates with regards to. to mediation, the practical inert, and seriality. Absolutely, I do think so. Similarly, though, is there not also a possible tendency that if you universalize the proletariat, that you're basically just taking a particular,

which is the white, industrial, male, and inflating that to the status of a universal category, that then every other voice is meant to be subsumed under? So is there a seriality in the universalization of the proletariat it from a Western Marxist perspective. And I think you see this, for example, in the work of like Cedric Robinson in black Marxism, right? Who clearly says that.

I mean, Robinson is very critical of all universalizing narratives. So there's something about paying attention to the otherness that is outside of the already serializing conditions that is integral for us to understand capital H history, if we're going to try to understand capital H history. And so I think the reason that Sartre abandons his project is that he ultimately starts to realize that his analysis, which is unfortunate, because I want to know what the fuck he wanted to finish to say about Stalin. Yeah, for sure. But I think he ultimately realizes that his hands were ill-equipped and that really it's almost an opening.

I don't think he is like, it's not like some sort of like, he's not passing the baton or anything like that. But I think he's kind of saying, I can't do this because if I do this, I will only potentially. reproduce another layer of seriality. And people like Phenon, and then later, CLR. James and Cedric Robinson, those are the voices that we can look to for understanding

kind of a more robust understanding of this historical set of concerns that really drives Sartre. Yeah. Wow. I love that. I think you're definitely getting at something very important and true there for sure.

For those interested on our other podcast, Red Menace, we did a three-episode series going through the entirety of France Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. And in our Red Menace Patreon episodes, we did something different every episode. But for one of them, we fully read and then commented on Sartre's preface to Rretched, where a lot of these ideas and these tensions within Sartre and his ability to do it as Sartre sort of come to the forefront. So if you're interested in that, check out Red Menace. And in fact, in one of those episodes, we were confronted with Phenon's appreciation of critique of dialectical reason,

but Allison nor I had ever read it. And so we promised, I think it was almost a year ago, promised that either on Rev. Left or Red Menace, we would address it. And this actually is that episode. So everything comes full circle there. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah, final question for you. And you touched on it a little bit, but maybe you could really drill down on this. What can we learn today from the critique of dialectical reason and how importantly can it meaningfully inform our theory and our revolutionary practices? Yeah. So for me, critique of dialectical reason is a heuristic. It's a teaching device. It is, I refer to it in my book as a formal and logical investigation into the conditions by which history can be made intelligible. And this is really just a reformulation of stuff that Sartra Stez. He's concerned with intelligibility. That is, why isn't the working class able to achieve self-consciousness? right like where this this self-awareness seems to be stifled why and so he wants to say well the reason

why is because of these tendencies of seriality right the reason why the working class not that the working class doesn't have iterations and expressions of freedom that's not his point but the question is is if there are tendencies where the working class is not exhibiting self-consciousness is there a set of tools that we can use to analyze why that's the case and that's really what he's trying to get at. And then simultaneously, if there are instances where genuine group freedom bursts in the world, how do we understand that? Like, what is the logic behind that? What is the justification for it, the rationality for it? What grounds that? And then ultimately, Sartre doesn't say this too much in the critique, but the point is, is because then we have the tools

of creation in our hand. And that is why the subtitle of my book is creating society as a work of art. At that point, you realize that society is artificial. Society is an artifice. Not that there's no material substrate or reality. This is where Sartre might be a little bit too idealistic, right? There might be a failure to pay sufficient attention to capital R reality, right? Maybe that's the case. But beyond that, he's really interested in trying to figure out how can we equip humanity to change the world and the way that happens is one by transforming society and transforming itself and it's not that you do one without the other but as a matter of fact when you transform society you do change what humanity is when you change what humanity is

you do change what society is neither has priority either temporally or logically but both must exist in that dialectical relation to transform society to create a as a work of art is to transform ourselves. It's to create new forms of what the human is and what the human might be. It's not to rest in the assumptions that women are X, that black people in America are Y, that they fit in this particular place. One of the things that I've tried to articulate with people who do follow me is that when somebody retorts, even like people in my family, when someone reports all lives matter, what that is ultimately

saying is shut up and know your place. Exactly. Get back in line. know who you are that is the fundamental that that's why it's not some sort of like no man but all lives matter you know because actually no they don't matter but the point is by saying black lives matter is that black lives fucking should matter but politically they don't matter at the moment and that's what it's contesting so when you say all lives matter you're saying get back into your serialized place get back into your institutionalized position

where you are in essential and the institution deems who you are and how you can speak be civilized, right? All of that shit is serialized discourse. And so I think what we get from Sartre and the critique of dialectical reason it isn't a prescription for how to do politics.

It isn't some sort of normative idea of these are the best groups and therefore we ought to just engage in these crazy radical, disruptive, horizontal political actions of destroying private profits, although I will not talk shit about that but rather it's how do we have tools of analysis to understand who we are and why we exhibit certain tendencies and then how we can kind of perfect those or better those towards these liberatory ends and at the very end of his life in a kind of controversial text that he writes under the influence perhaps of a of a sort of mentee of his when he was a little bit older and people are kind of critical of it but nevertheless I still think there's some value in something he says is He basically says that I'm an old man now, but I'm unwaveringly optimistic and hopeful.

Like, there's a pessimism that oftentimes surrounds sartry and reception. But the tension is that there's also an optimism and a hope about what the human might be, what society might be, and then what the world might become. And I think that's what we can learn from the critique of dialectical reason, is how can we use the tools that he provides us, with as analytical tools right it's a toolbox more than anything yeah beautiful austin thank you so much for coming on um this is a wonderful book this is a complex subject that you help not only my listeners but myself understand and engage with meaningly it's always an honor to talk with you before i let you go though can you please let listeners know where they can find you and your myriad work online uh yeah i mean i'm on twitter i'm relatively active uh austin underscore hayden

You can find me on Insta. I'm not as active on Insta, but, you know, sometimes I do shit. It's A-U-S-U-S-H-A-Y. I do a philosophy podcast called Owls at Dawn with one of my best friends, Troy, Paula Dory. We have similar concerns, and we talk about stuff like this, and we talk about more practical stuff, too, like issues going on with, like, the protests and things like that. Our last episode actually was about, like, the logic of tearing down statues and things. but we also do more kind of like high theory stuff as well we'll go through philosophical texts so it's owls at dawn you can check that out

and then like I said I produced the cinematic adaptation of inventing the future so if you're interested in a sort of speculative cinematic experience it's very it's very inventive let's say to kind of be redundant fits perfectly with the title but you can find it on YouTube just inventing the future the director is Avunderkind. His name's Isaiah Medina. So if you're familiar with his work, you'll kind of get the idea.

If you're not familiar, brace yourselves. It's fucking weird. But I love it. Perfect. I will link to all of that in the show notes so people can find it

as easy as possible. Thank you again, my brother, for coming on. Let's do it again sometime. Absolutely, man. Leaving my coat at the Greyhound Station, raising my arms

in supplication, making some money, spending some money, drinking Pepsi, Just walking around Making people hate me Making people laugh Fear drowning in a shallow bath

Feeling underdressed in the cold Midwest Kissing my grandmother goodbye Watching the crocuses Bloom and fade Easter bonnet from an old parade Exchanging pleasant trees Under pleasant trees Over griefs and apper teeths

These are the days Of the years Of my life American summer And it's all the breeze Buck-tooth girls in skin-tight jeans The mastiff heals The accounts are solving

I'm crooning in the open west Meeting my baby At a greasyy spoon Sitting alone in the Rembrandt room Walking in the shade where lilies weep Under clouds of marzipan Walking in the dark of monument valley Stray cats in a narrow alley

The song was weird But still they cheered It scrambled eggs in solitaire These are the days Of the years of my life mopping up gore from the butcher's floor feeling clean as a new drug store

singing loud idiotic songs in the blue blue mountains walking along night long drive is on the wild edges apparitions in the neighbor's hedges Sinus drips in a battleship Putting ashes in a rushing stream Watching a city turn into sea Standing in water up to the knee

Missing my stop on a city bus In the land of propaganda These are the days Of the year Of my life Watching birds on a drowsy sea Sitting in the dark of a family tree Funeral flowers and paperwork

Drowning my dreams in mountain streams Standing tall in a cap and gown In a house that's since torn down It's summer in the cat skills now Leisure classes in the mountain passes the jaws of life and the jaws of death hearing secrets

in a dying breath in a black four-door sedan down the road to the end of the world these are the days of the years of my life these are the days

of the year of my life