Gender and the Abject in Sartre
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations 256)
1 In this essay I will take Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection as a starting-point to explore the relationship of the French nation to German fascism in the twentieth century — a relationship long marked by an othering of fascism as foreign or non-French. To investigate this relationship, I will specifically analyze the discussion of fascism and the phobic abjection of the feminized (female or homosexual) other in the early work of France's leading philosopher of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre. In that Sartre's work gives expression to the extreme fear of the feminine that, as Klaus Theweleit has argued, is at the basis not only of patriarchal society in general, but also of its extreme manifestation, fascism, it can serve as an example of the dialectical implication even of antifascist critiques in fascist thinking.
2 As Kristeva has pointed out in Powers of Horror, the continually endangered boundary between the inside and the (ultimately illusory) outside of a given symbolic system — such as, for instance, the nation — can only be maintained through a process of othering. Kristeva posits that abjection occurs when the rules of classification peculiar to a certain symbolic system cannot be maintained — that is, when "leakage" occurs. The binary structure of patriarchal society, the basic separation of (masculinized) inside/center and (feminized) outside/margin, cannot be kept intact. Abjection is a blurring of boundaries, a contamination of the "proper" center by the outside. The abject is both the zone where contamination occurs and the contaminating matter itself:
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. (Kristeva 4)
The transgression of established separations and the impossibility of keeping these strict separations intact produce what Kristeva calls the "abject." Abjection is thus the mechanism by means of which patriarchal society, in the interest of establishing a clear inside/outside division, constructs the "feminine" as its other — as everything that threatens that distinction.
3 Well-known scholars of fascism such as Klaus Theweleit have argued that the attempt to establish strict classificatory boundaries and the abjection of alterity are at the heart not only of patriarchal societies, but to a heightened degree also of fascist patriarchal societies. Both Theweleit's exploration of the proto-fascist male psychic constitution in his classic work, Männerfantasien (Male Fantasies), and Kristeva's analysis of fascism in Powers of Horror center on the fear of the invasion by the feminized other. My Kristevan analysis of the rhetoric of alterity in Sartre's drama Les mouches, his philosophical treatise L'être et le néant, and other early texts, reveals a patriarchal language marked by the fear of contamination and points to the continuities between Sartre's patriarchal thinking and what Theweleit has theorized as the extreme manifestation of patriarchal society, namely fascism.
4 I would like to emphasize clearly here that I am not claiming that Sartre was a fascist. Rather I aim to point to the problematic nature of an "othering" of fascism. Such an "othering" has marked both Sartre's early work and — until quite recently — France's official stance towards its role in WWII. While France's reassessment of its war-time responsibility started in the 1960s, I argue (in response to the American historian Robert Paxton's different assessment quoted below) that there was a long way to go from the early questions often asked by a younger generation and the public acknowledgments by the French government and other institutions that the second half of the 1990s saw.
5 It was Theodor Adorno who, in his Negative Dialectics, insisted on the inescapability of dialectical contradiction, on the 'remainder' inevitably excluded in all conceptual identity. Adorno is interested in the part of the object that is not included in the identifiable thought, in the specificity, the concrete and individual, that is covered up by generalizing concepts. Conceptual thinking, in other words, does not readily acknowledge the multi-valence of social experience. I would argue that this insight also applies to the concept "fascism." Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg cite Adorno's famous and equally misunderstood statement that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (12). They explain that "[w]hat initially concerned Adorno [. . .] was less the impropriety of any artistic response to the Holocaust than how culture in general and poetry in particular failed to recognize their own implication in the 'sinister' forces of total social integration that made the barbarism of Auschwitz possible in the first place" (12). I argue that Sartre's work as well, while claiming fascism as its absolute other, is also implicated in its structures.