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Inventing the New: History and Politics in Jean-Paul Sartre

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Published Oct 2023

Luca Basso

Author: Luca Basso
Translator: Dave Mesing
Gilles Deleuze’s assertion that ‘Sartre knew how to invent the New’ suggests a vital aspect of the French philosopher, one that departs from the image that has often been presented of him. Sartre’s post-1956 critique of the Stalinist USSR, together with the increasing prominence of anti-colonial struggles and a series of experiences that would find their condensation in 1968, pushed him to a continuous rearticulation of his political ideas, on the basis of an intense confrontation with Marx. In Basso’s lucid study, here newly translated into English, the expression ‘singular universal’ seeks to capture the revolutionary potential of individual and collective subjects, illuminating the close but also unstable relationship between history and politics.

Biographical Note

Luca Basso, Ph.D (2004), University of Pisa, is Full Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Padua. His previous works include Marx and Singularity; From the Early Writings to the Grundrisse (Brill, 2012), and Marx and the Common: From Capital to the Late Writings (Brill, 2015).

Readership

Inventing the New: History and Politica in Jean-Paul Sartre will be of interest to academics, post-graduate students and PhD students engaged with political philosophy, French contemporary philosophy, Marxism, and critical social sciences.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1 Sartre: From Descartes to Marx

1 The Invention of Human Freedom: Descartes Beyond Descartes
1 Anthropology
2 A Philosophy of Freedom
3 Humanism and Intersubjectivity: towards the Critique of Dialectical Reason

2 ‘Fused Group’ and Fraternité: Between Rousseau and the French Revolution
1 The Practico-Inert: Objectivity and Alienation
2 Acting in Common: the Storming of the Bastille
3 The Dynamic of Fraternity

3 The Novum of Communism between Freedom and Equality: Marx
1 The Confrontation with Marx and Marxism
2 Class and Action
3 ‘The Realm of Freedom’

Part 2 Sartre and the Twentieth Century

4 Common Praxis and History: From the Russian Revolution to the Soviet Union
1 The Dimension of History
2 Between Stalin and Trotsky: ‘Socialism in One Country’ and ‘Permanent Revolution’
3 The Incarnation of the Russian Revolution and Totalisation

5 Seriality and Bureaucratisation: a Reified Equality
1 The Construction of the Soviet Man
2 The ‘Sovereignty of a Single Individual’ and Stalin’s Ghost

6 The ‘Spectre’ of 1968: Critique of Colonialism and New Spaces of Emancipation
1 Another Socialism Is Possible?
2 Between Race and Class: the Struggle of the ‘Wretched of the Earth’
3 ‘Autour De 68’

7 The Invention of the ‘Universal Singular’
1 Open Problems
2 Between the ‘Individual’-‘Collective’ Dualism: Rethinking Subjectivation

Bibliography
Index