Sartre, Foucault, and the Subject of Philosophy's Situation

Author(s): Brian Seitz

Source: Sartre Studies International , 2004, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2004), pp. 92-105
Published by: Berghahn Books

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23512878

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 Sartre, Foucault, and the Subject
of Philosophy's Situation
Brian Seitz

Inez: But what a situation! It's a scream! We're—inseparable!

Sartre, No Exit1

1. The facts of the situation

Archival or archaeological exigencies of twentieth century philoso

phy prompt us to return to the relation between Jean-Paul Sartre
and Michel Foucault. Foucault's relatively numerous references to
Sartre enhance the invitation to the task at hand. While the content
of these references might seem to tend toward the negative—toward
critical repudiation—the existence of the references is, in Fou
cauldian terms, purely positive. Even before turning to the linkages
between their divergent philosophies, it is thus clear that Sartre is
quite literally in the corpus of Foucault.
What follows is derived from a suspicion that a consideration of
Sartre's and Foucault's respective understandings of the subject's sit
uation may not only help throw light on the relation between them
but may, further, also help situate Sartre and Foucault in the history
of twentieth century philosophy, as well as in the history of existen
tialism. That is the big picture project, a contemplation of the con
tours of a possible discursive formation, a question of taking care of
the business of archiving, which is a matter of articulation and there
fore of constitution.
There are several questions in play here: What is the relation
between Sartre and Foucault? Is this a question of Sartre's influence
on Foucault (and what is "influence," anyway)? Beyond the conspic
uous disjunctions between them, are they both functions of and
contributors to, more or less, the same discursive formation or to
the same general formation of philosophy? The differences between

Sartre Studies International, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2004 - 92 -

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 Sartre, Foucault, and the Subject of Philosophy's Situation

them are not difficult to discern. But can we understand either of

them better by contemplating the possible linkages between them?
Finally, do such considerations help open up resources for the phi
losophy of human possibilities today, including the philosophy of
existential possibilities?
At the same time, the effort to clarify the relation between these
two French giants may be blocked by Sartre and Foucault them
selves, both of whom were so adept at dodging attempts to situate
them that they may continue to intervene as if they had never exited
our situation. Nevertheless, history may represent them as insepara
bles, perhaps similar to the way that history has provided us with the
inseparability of Hegel and Kierkegaard. Not that I am trying to
establish any linkages in that direction, although it is somewhat
strange how effortlessly they seem to come, beginning with the com
plex linkage between Hegel and Sartre, or, really, between Kojève
and Hyppolite and Sartre, a network of linkages that includes Fou
cault's homage to Hyppolite in the final section of his 1970 "Dis
course on Language."2 It is also conceivable that, like Kierkegaard,
both Sartre and Foucault concealed themselves through their writ
ing, together contributing to or modeling in action a critique or
problematization of the concept of writing as expression. But let us
leave all of those general dimensions of the situation aside, at least
for now. We will return to them briefly later.
It may- seem ironic, but I would like to consider the possibility
that the linkages between Sartre's and Foucault's respective under
standings of the subject's situation may be clearest when we first
approach the issue through Sartre's earlier work rather than his later
writings. This tack is most promising when Sartre's earlier reflections
are related to those of Foucault in the mid-to-late 70s, as well as to
his later work on Greco-Roman practices of the care of the self, since
the latter might be characterized as belonging to a classical existen
tialist tradition (an anti-essentialist tradition that includes ancient fig
ures as diverse as Heraclitus and Marcus Aurelius, and moderns like
Machiavelli and Nietzsche). While the often hyperbolic individualism
of Sartre's modernist existentialism—the version expressed in Being
and Nothingness—may clash with Foucault's philosophical instincts
and values, neither Sartre nor Foucault embody fixed or intrinsically
limited perspectives, and there are plenty of conceptual connections
between them that cut through literal-minded juxtapositions.
Regarding such juxtapositions, it seems prudent to avoid characteriz
ing Foucault's camouflaged existentialism as "postmodern," partially
in order to avoid setting up obvious and suspiciously convenient or
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 Brian Seitz

lazy oppositions such as "Sartre's modernism" versus "Foucault's

postmodernism," but equally because Foucault had as little use for
the term "postmodern" as would have Sartre, who died in 1980,
before the term had saturated theory and then moved on to infect
the rest of Western culture. As Foucault remarked—doubtless with a
smile—in response to an interviewer's question, "What are we call
ing postmodernity? I'm not up to date."3
Given its engagements in social ontology and philosophy of his
tory, Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason might seem to bear
within it more fruitful linkages to Foucault's own work in those
areas. However, this later work of Sartre's is largely defined by what
the untimely Foucault must have seen as nineteenth century philo
sophical or discursive coordinates and thus, for starters, by a hope
lessly dated conception of the relationship between power, society,
and history; it is philosophy in the grand style, a real theory. Most
conspicuously, Sartre's Critique is determined by an unrestrained
enthusiasm for "dialectics," an enthusiasm that Sartre had long dis
played, going back to the relentlessly dysfunctional dialectic of en-soi
and pour-soi—back and forth, back and forth—the dialectic minus
mediation, skewed negative, absent advance, lacking an exit, a full
catastrophe, a dialectic that is original, idiosyncratic, provocative,
perhaps eventually predictable (it continues to be, after all, a system),
and overall very strange. Foucault doubtless viewed Sartre's devotion
to dialectics as philosophically fatal. As he noted in "The Eye of
Power," "If one was to take seriously the assertion that struggle is
the core of relations of power, one must take into account the fact
that the good old 'logic' of contradiction is no longer sufficient, far
from it, for the unraveling of actual processes."4 For Foucault,
dialectics is a way of domesticating conflict and making it meaning
ful. So the fact that the dialectic of Sartre's Critique may seem more
conventional than his earlier willful perversion of Hegel (or of Marx
or Kojève) is one stumbling block in considering the later Sartre's
linkage with Foucault. But this later tome is also plagued by Sartre's
bizarre persistence in underestimating the significance of language
and of representation—the significance, that is, of discourse.
What Sartre says about language in The Critique is extremely inter
esting. For example, he writes, "Words are matter,"5 a succinct
thought that Foucault might have admired, if he ever read those
words (which he may have felt obliged to). Further, Sartre writes,
"Language might well be studied on the same lines as money: as a
circulating, inert materiality, which unifies dispersal; in fact, this is
partly what philology does."6 This rather unoriginal proposal suggests

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 Sartre, Foucault, and the Subject of Philosophy's Situation

that Sartre had not been neglecting structuralist and perhaps psycho
analytic journals altogether. He writes, too, that '"human relations'
are in fact inter-individual structures whose common bond is lan
guage and which actually exist at every moment of History. Isolation
is merely a particular aspect of these relations."7 While this brief
passage on language contains other sentences that Foucault might
dismiss as uncritical and thus naive suggestions of a primordial subjec
tivity, this passage also contains material with potential for developing
positive philosophical connections between Sartre and Foucault, and
for expanding our appreciation of Sartre's understanding of the sub
ject's situation and thus of identity. The insistence in the phrase
"actually exist at every moment of History" resonates with a positiv
ity which characterizes Foucault. The phrase also echoes Marx and
Engels with their insistence on actual existence,8 an echo in which
Foucault, too, is implicated. Still, Sartre continues to underplay the
power of discourse, since his philosophical tendency is to see language
as the expression of an a priori consciousness (masquerading as
"nothingness") rather than to understand discourse as the possibility
condition of subjectivity.9 The Sartrean subject is one who on occa
sion chooses to speak, with the subject of Sartre himself having cho
sen to speak and to write a great deal. Overall, then, Sartre's Critique
tends toward the theoretic, and may be less fruitful than his earlier
work for providing the means to explore the concept of "situation" as
it might apply to Foucault, a hypothesis that I shall not pursue.

2. The Situation of Freedom

I would thus like to begin by suggesting a positive linkage between

the two philosophers by citing the late section in Being and, Noth
ingness entitled, "Freedom and Facticity: The Situation." There,
Sartre begins:

The decisive argument which is employed by common sense against free

dom consists in reminding us of our impotence. Far from being able to
modify our situation at our whim, we seem to be unable to change our
selves. I am not 'free' either to escape the lot of my class, of my nation, of
my family, or even to build up my own power or my fortune or to con
quer my most insignificant appetites or habits. I am born a worker, a
Frenchman, an hereditary syphilitic, or a tubercular. The history of a life,
whatever it may be, is the history of a failure.10

Of course this is all just a setup, and while Sartre is quite content,
perhaps too content, with the image of failure, he aims here to argue
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 Brian Seitz

against the claims of "common sense," a move that seems to echo

Machiavelli's in The Prince, where the Florentine suggests that
despite the determinants that subtend the human situation—despite
the forces of fortune—we are nevertheless free to develop our
selves—to develop our virtù—and thus to play with the resources
which fortuna provides.11 And just as Machiavelli proceeds to argue
on behalf of human intervention and of taking responsibility, Sartre
then goes on to insist that as much as "man seems 'to be made,'" we
are nevertheless not only free but in a certain quasi-Kantian sense
also thus responsible for what we do and what we make of ourselves.
In terms of the arc of his argument, Sartre is not suggesting that
somehow, despite all of these determinations that surround me, I
nevertheless remain free. No; regardless of the chasm between in
itself and for-itself, and regardless of his Cartesian inclinations
toward duality, Sartre is clearly not so dyadic in his thinking here. All
of these facts or givens that permeate my situation are not opposed
to my freedom. Rather, it is precisely the fundamentally situated
nature of freedom that marks the concrete dimension of Sartre's
conception of it. Perhaps Sartre's greatest contribution is his contes
tation of the abstract renderings of freedom that dominate modern
philosophy up until his time, a contestation achieved through his ele
gantly and obsessively articulated alternative. Dialectics aside, free
dom is a concrete relation. Freedom is a situation.
Returning to the quotation, while the style is not Foucault's, the
sentiment might be related to Foucault: as expressed by the dark
drama of Discipline and Punish, we might be forced to conclude, as
the caricature goes, that Foucault is something like a situational
determinist, and that he believes that social forces deprive the subject
of agency and thus of responsibility for the situation. He has cer
tainly been misinterpreted this way by people who have read him by
means of conventional philosophical categories. But it turns out that
Foucault is as complicated as Sartre is on this point, and that the
topic of freedom is, of course, a very complex one for Foucault. On
the one hand, and as already noted, it might appear that Foucault is
utterly skeptical regarding the prospects for freedom, given the rami
fications of, for instance, the image of docile bodies, of bodies pene
trated by "power," and of the ramifications of the concept of
"biopower." Characteristic of this tendency is his remark that "in
thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking rather of its cap
illary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very
grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their
actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and every
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 Sartre, Foucault, and the Subject of Philosophy's Situation

day lives."12 Part of Foucault's brilliance is his capacity to examine

the way that "power" quite literally insinuates itself into us, as if our
very bodies were grids of meridians available for occupation, bodies
waiting to be seized by souls. But on the other hand, if there is a
theme that quietly connects all phases of Foucault's work, it is a con
sistent if also usually implicit philosophical attention to freedom,
although Foucault seldom thematizes freedom as such, or at least
not directly. Here, I want to suggest that Sartre may help us enrich
the concept of freedom in Foucault.
In a well-known passage in "Power and Strategies," Foucault
observes that "to say that one can never be 'outside' power does not
mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter what."13
Since power is not a thing but a set of relations—a material reality
imagined 500 years ago by Machiavelli—it is natural that it should not
be conceptualized as a uniform structure, or1 as an inevitable success,
and that it be understood in terms of the possibility of its failure or
perhaps even possibly precisely on the condition of its failure. Let us
ignore the connection of failure that links Sartre and Foucault, because
it is more interesting that Foucault's understanding of the situation of
power—of human possibility—leads directly into an image that is cen
tral to Sartre's own representation of situation in the very section of
Being and Nothingness that I have already cited. I am thinking of Fou
cault's observation that "there are no relations of power without resis
tances."14 These quotations resonate in some remarkable ways with
Sartre's discussion of resistance and a resisting world in Being and
Nothingness, which come just after the passage I have already quoted,
the passage from "Freedom and Facticity." There, again, Sartre is at
his strongest, short-circuiting the dualistic thought that there is the
subject on the one side and the world on the other, and establishing
the ontological inseparability and even coextensivity of freedom and
facticity. For good reasons, Foucault rejects the consciousness-driven
discourse that frames Sartre's take on the situation. However, the situ
ation of Foucault is cast in terms of the play of power, which is
inescapable, but which also can be experienced in terms of resistance,
which is to say that a massive dimension of Foucault's discourse
regarding power is fundamentally about freedom in all of its difficul
ties. Resistance is not just a structural feature of power. Resistance is
one of Foucault's key vehicles for conceptualizing freedom. Resistance
is a code word, a code word, let us recall, that had acquired a wealth of
significance during the German occupation of France, when Sartre was
writing about freedom, while the schoolboy Foucault was taking in
critical lessons about the possibilities of human existence.
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 Brian Seitz

Sartre's formalistic phrase, "the coefficent of adversity,"15 provides

a way of talking about resistance that establishes "something like an
ontological conditioning of freedom."16 The fact that this last phrase
could have been written by Derrida—e.g. "something like a phe
nomenology"—is outside the scope of my suggestions here, so I will
simply tag that possible linkage and make two more pertinent notes.
First, Sartre's discussion of freedom's "ontological conditioning"
sets up his argument that the fundamental feature of human experi
ence is that being-for-itself is not its own foundation: "In fact," he
writes, "we are a freedom which chooses, but we do not choose to
be free ... a freedom which would produce its own existence would
lose its very meaning as freedom. Actually freedom is not a simple
undetermined power ... Thus we begin to catch a glimpse of the
paradox of freedom: there is freedom only in a situation, and there is
a situation only through freedom."17 Freedom is not the freedom of
disembodied intentions but of conditioned possibilities; that is, the
freedom of relations which express themselves in the form of resis
tance. That «the subject's situation.
My second point concerns Foucault, who consistently and with
good reason is wary of ontological claims about human experience in
general, but who is nevertheless inclined to deploy the concept of
resistance as a vehicle for discussing concrete freedom. Just as trans
gression is conditioned by the limits it exceeds, resistance to power is
defined by power and is itself a power, and it is here that freedom
shows its also specific and never universalizable face; freedom is
power as resistance.
In short, the theme of resistance is clearly central to both Sartre's
and Foucault's meditations on the concept of situation and freedom,
and provides a fruitful focal point for further contemplation of the
basic discursive linkage between them. What is noteworthy about the
linkage from the standpoint of philosophical history (of the philo
sophical archive) is that it involves a casting of freedom that emerges
from the material, concrete conditions that comprise the subject's
situation, thus constituting a decisive departure from and extension
of the modern effort to comprehend freedom. If freedom is inti
mately associated with resistance, resistance is itself a network of rela
tions, i.e. freedom is nothing other than sets of relations that
constitute the subject's situation, and this is as true for Foucault as it
is for Sartre.
One last note while visiting these passages: although highly specu
lative given the paucity of material with which to work, it might be
worth considering the significance of Sartre's reference to Stoicism
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 Sartre, Foucault, and the Subject of Philosophy's Situation

in this passage on the situation in Being and Nothingness18 in the

light of Foucault's fascination with the Stoic care of the self, particu
larly given the Stoic preoccupation with freedom in the face of the
divinely conditioned situation of the philosopher. Stoicism, which
might and sometimes has been weakly read as a passive philosophy—
as a philosophy of resignation to facticity—can be more productively
cast as a philosophy of freedom articulated around images of rela
tions, relations with family, friends, city, and world, with the plants
and creatures that pass through one's body, and with death, as well
as with sex and the stars. Foucault knew this, and I suspect that
Sartre did as well (curiously enough, Nietzsche lacked the patience
to appreciate the Stoic understanding of the subject's situation). As
we try to get clearer about the relation between Sartre and Foucault,
and thus about twentieth century philosophical discourse, we cannot
help but establish connections between them and other orders of
Western philosophy.

3. The history of the situation

In his 1961 eulogy of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre writes, "Perhaps, before

anything else, we are historical,"19 and the theme of history recurs
repeatedly in this monument to his philosophical comrade. "Work
and anxiety, tools, government, customs, culture," writes Sartre,
"how can we 'insert' the person into all of this? And inversely, how
can he be extracted from that which he never tires of spinning, and
which incessantly produces him?" Then Sartre quotes a sentence that
Merleau-Ponty wrote in the wake of the war: "In sum, we have
learned history, and maintain that we must not forget it."20
The hyperbolic individualism (the ahistorical Cartesianism?) of
Sartre's earlier existential phenomenology seems to have been shat
tered by the entry of a historical sensibility into Sartre's philosophical
orientation. The theme of history would thus be another purchase
point for a consideration of Sartre's and Foucault's conceptions of
"situation," since history is, finally, the backbone of the situation for
each, or at least one way of articulating the backbone (the armature
secured for the archive by Marx). While "history" is conceptualized
very differently for each, a historically-conceptualized "situation" is
in some sense a possibility condition of the philosophies of both.
Most to the point of all in this connection of the two philoso
phers' respective understandings of the historical plane of the subjec
t's situation is the suggestion that regardless of their conscious
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 Brian Seitz

distances from each other, both men were bound historically, not
part of the same situation, but certainly situated as adjacent to each
other and to many others (with Merleau-Ponty constituting a partic
ularly dynamic conceptual bridge between a range of historically
linked philosophical situations).
In "Structuralism and Post-structuralism," an interview that first
appeared in 1983, Foucault asked, "Is the phenomenological, tran
shistorical subject able to provide an account of the historicity of rea
son? Here, reading Nietzsche was the point of rupture for me. There
is a history of the subject just as there is a history of reason ,.."21
Shordy later in the same interview, he asks the interviewer, "Did you
know that Sartre's first text—written when he was a young student—
was Nietzschean? 'The History of Truth,' a little paper first published
in a Lycée review around 1925."22 This is not the only reference to
Sartre in this interview. In fact, as Thomas Flynn's, Sartre, Foucault,
and Historical Reason: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History23
illustrates and takes advantage of, the frequency of Foucault's refer
ences to Sartre is really quite remarkable, and it is clear that he at least
in part situated himself historically, philosophically, existentially in
relation to Sartre.
Sartre's philosophy of "nothingness," which resurfaces later under
the auspices of "scarcity," is counterbalanced by Foucault's happy
positivism, which depicts a world in which, as Deleuze noted
posthumously about Foucault, everything gets said.24 Foucault
reminds us that nature abhors a vacuum, as he continues his task of
transforming documents into monuments, which are sometimes
devoted to situating Cartesian and Sartrean reason historically, all the
while careful to avoid situating himself, a project left for us.
There is no getting around the powerful relations—the power rela
tions—between Sartre and Foucault, despite the latter's self-conscious
denial of kinship. Foucault's anxiety regarding the influence of Sartre is
interesting from a variety of standpoints. Foucault's subjectivity aside,
though, what is more important is the way these two twentieth century
conceptual artists resonate with each other, a resonance capped by
Foucault's history of sexuality, which might fruitfully be viewed as a
great contribution to the "existentialist" archive. As a vehicle for a fur
ther, brief probing of that archive, and with an eye to certain facticities,
I would like to take up other aspects of the situation in and of Sartre
and Foucault, to look back in order to gaze ahead, since, as Flynn
observes, "... the existentialist project is essentially forward-looking."25
What, in brief, would it take to consider Foucault an existentialist?
An initial reference—and this is simply a matter of "situation," i.e. of

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 Sartre, Foucault, and the Subject of Philosophy's Situation

the conditions of discursive formations—might be 1 ) to the atmos

phere of existential phenomenology in which he was nourished as a
philosopher; and 2) to his generation's oedipal rebellion against that
atmosphere, which for him entail relatively numerous references to
Sartre in particular (which, overall, might not be worth referring to
here if we are taking up the possibility that Sartre, with his Hegelian
commitments, is not an existentialist but that Foucault is one). This
is part of the historical backdrop to Foucault's innovative existential
ism, which is an inheritance from Nietzsche.
Withholding my observations about Nietzsche for a moment, let
me suggest some positive signs of Foucault's existentialism:
First, while Sartre universalizes nothingness, Foucault knows that
there is no such thing as "nothing," that the subject is always some
thing, always located—most interesting when fluid and open—but
always something or, rather, somewhere, some place; not a nihilation
but a position. One might argue that Foucault's insistence on posi
tivity, which may be viewed as an intensification of the Sartrean con
ception of "situation," repeats the gesture of universalization.
However, such a criticism would first have to evacuate the singularity
of Foucauldian somethingness or the positivity of subjectivities, and
it would thus no longer be talking about Foucault but about Sartre.
If we are talking about Foucault, his understanding of the positivity
of the subject has an existentialist casting, since—pitted against
essence, as all existentialism seems to be—it defines itself in terms of
the necessity of contingencies, of, specifically, the contingent condi
tions which shape the subject. Sartre stresses situation, but the
Sartrean situation may always be the same, a situation of futility,
nothingness always in the same dilemma, coiled in the heart of being
like a worm, while Foucault stresses the materialized orders of repre
sentation, orders in which dilemmas multiply rather than simply
repeat in perpetual ontological frustration.
But there are two other linked aspects of Foucault's understanding
of human situations which look strikingly existential and do so in part
because of the way they resonate with Sartre; these are his emphases
on freedom and resistance, which have already been mentioned. First
of all, there is Foucault's persistent concern with freedom, which in
good existential fashion is seldom direct, usually advanced by means
of the questions posed by his texts. Second, there is the theme of
resistance which plays a prominent role in Foucault's thought and in
the very questions generated by his texts, a resistance the roots of
which may stretch back to WWII, but which in any event is intimately
linked to the prospects and strategies of freedom he wants to suggest.
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 Brian Seitz

Together, they are not reminders of ontological conditions, but of the

possibilities for the transformation of the self. Foucault does not
believe that "I am condemned to be free," a sentiment which doubt
less sounded to him extremely axiomatic and abstract. He does not
have a philosophy of freedom, finding freedom instead in the practice
of philosophy. Traveling light with Nietzsche, freedom for Foucault is
not "the stuff of my being,"26 but is, rather, the effect of labor, philo
sophical labor, which is neither given nor an ontological possibility,
but a prospect enmeshed in and associated with the specific condi
tions of the soul in question.
Maybe the only obvious thing that Foucault gets from phenomenol
ogy is the power of nuanced description, something like eidetic varia
tion, whatever the object, the subject, the discourse, the power.
However, he also appropriates the advantage of the epoché, which
repeatedly leads him to pose radical alternatives to sedimented or con
ventional assumptions. What he gets from Nietzsche is not really an
appreciation for power—as if there were such a thing as power as
such—but an appreciation for the history of truth and its connection
with the conditions of existence, an appreciation for life—for saying
"yes" rather than "no"—and thus an appreciation for bodies and their
relation to art or artfulness and the capacity to create, which translates
into an appreciation for the countless ways we live as doubled, dis
course and practice sometimes coextensive, sometimes parallel uni
verses, doubling that does not translate into a futile dialectic, but into
the possibility of struggling to stay one step ahead of consolidating into
something definite, which is different from being nothing, doubling,
quadrupling, etc. (skipping the threes). This might be existential.
Nietzsche's importance for Foucault is so obvious that it would
be hardly worth mentioning, were it not an unavoidable aspect of
any consideration that Foucault is part of the existentialist tradition.
It is more fruitful to go back to Nietzsche via Sartre here, focusing
on two considerations. First, convincing arguments could be made
that Sartre's prolonged alliance with an existentialized Hegel over
whelmed the impact that Nietzsche might otherwise have had on his
thought. And yet, as indicated by the interview quoted earlier, there
is Foucault's awareness of the Nietzsche in Sartre. So maybe Niet
zsche was a condition for the formation of Sartrean existentialism
before the twinned dialectics of the phenomenological method, and
then Kojève took over.
Further pursuit of these thoughts would necessitate questioning
whether or not Nietzsche is an "existentialist," since if Sartre is, then
maybe Nietzsche is not, and perhaps neither is Foucault.
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 Sartre, Foucault, and the Subject of Philosophy's Situation

But then, of course, any extended consideration of Foucault's

existentialism—or of Sartre's—will eventually have to require refer
ence not only to Marx and to phenomenology, but perhaps above
all to Heidegger, who may or may not have been a phenomenolo
gist or an existentialist, but who in any event was a key inspiration
not only for Sartre, but for Foucault, who once said, "My whole
philosophical development was determined by my reading of Hei
degger. But I recognize that Nietzsche prevailed over him."27 Per
haps the question of the constitution of the canon of existentialism
will always return to Nietzsche, who again may or may not have
been an existentialist. The future will tell, or, we must hope, keep
on telling. On the other hand, maybe we are always led back to
Sartre. So I will let an observation about Sartre finish this little exer
cise, also from a late interview of Foucault, long after Sartre's death,
but not long before Foucault's:
Q: ... How does your view differ from Sartrean existentialism?
M.F.: I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sartre avoids the
idea of the self as something that is given to us, but through the moral
notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be our
selves^—to be truly our true self. I think that the only acceptable practical
consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to
the practice of creativity—and not that of authenticity. From the idea that
the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical conse
quence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.28

Maybe this is just a positive echo of Dostoevsky's taunting thought

that "only fools become something."29 Does this suggest that exis
tentialists are fools? Or does it suggest that existentialism is a perfor
mance piece that is still becoming and will never be something
definite or self-identical, that it never came and thus never went, and
that it has been around perhaps for centuries and will continue to be
around to help keep open philosophy's future?
The impetus for exploring the relationship between Sartre and
Foucault may be informed more by Foucault than by Sartre, as it
would seem to be geared toward a Foucauldian determination of
the discursive parameters of a particular dimension of modern phi
losophy; that is, of the history of philosophy, including, by exten
sion, the history of existentialism. But insofar as this determination
opens up a significant dimension of the situation of philosophy
today—of our situation and of the situation of existentialism—it is
also Sartrean in nature, as are the effects of this determination, a
determination situated somewhere between Sartre's philosophy of
freedom and the freedom afforded to Foucault and to us all by the
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 Brian Seitz

practice of philosophy, and by its future possibilities, which include

the possibility "... that I do not believe a word, not one little word,
of all I've just scribbled."30

Notes

1. Sartre, Jean-Paul, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage Interna
tional, 1989), 42.
2. Foucault, Michel, "Discourse on Language," in The Archaeology of Knowledge,
trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 215ff.
3. Foucault, Michel, "Structuralism and Post-structuralism," in Aesthetics, Method,
and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 2, ed. James D.
Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998),
447.

4. Foucault, Michel, "Eye of Power," in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon, trans.

Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pan
theon Books, 1980), 164.
5. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. I, trans. Alan Sheridan
Smith (London: Verso, 1991), 98.
6. Sartre (1991).
7. Sartre (1991), 99.
8. Cf. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: Interna
tional Publishers, 1981).
9. While it would be a mistake to push this characterization too far, it might make
sense to view Sartre as Hegelian and Foucault as Kantian, insofar as Sartre was a
dialectician, while Foucault was obsessed with possibility conditions.
10. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1992) 619.
11. Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1982), 130.
12. Foucault (1980), 39.
13. Foucault (1980), 141-42.
14. Foucault (1980), 142.
15. Cf. Sartre (1992) 619ff. He attributes this expression to Gaston Bachelard (see
BN 324).
16. Sartre (1992), 622.
17. Sartre (1992), 623.
18. Sartre (1992), 622.
19. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Situation, trans. Benita Eisler, (New York: George Braziller,
Inc., 1965), 160.
20. Sartre (1965), 161.
21. Foucault (1998), 438.
22. Foucault (1998), 446.

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 Sartre, Foucault, and the Subject of Philosophy's Situation

23. Flynn, Thomas, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason: Toward an Existentialist
Theory of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1997.
24. Deleuze, Gilles, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Min
nesota Press, 1988).
25. Flynn (1997), 54.
26. Sartre (1992), 139.
27. Foucault, Michel, "The Return of Morality," in Foucault Live, trans. John John
ston, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 326.
28. Foucault, Michel, "On the Genealogy of Ethics," in Ethics: Subjectivity and
Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 262.
29. Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994), 5.
30. Dostoevsky (1994), 37.

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