Gender Disgussed

Conclusion

51     Contrary to Sartre's claims to an unequivocally antifascist ideological stance, his early work demonstrates the historical continuity between the modern European patriarchal tradition and fascism, and the dialectical implication even of antifascist philosophy and art in fascist thinking. As this article has aimed to demonstrate, Sartre's early work shows a gender ideology reminiscent of the proto-fascist texts analyzed in Theweleit's classic text on fascism, Männerfantasien. Both the texts analyzed in Theweleit and Sartre's texts examined here are characterized by an extreme fear of the feminized, abject Other — a fear of (inner and outer) nature, sexuality, maternal engulfment and ego dissolution. Sartre establishes a rigid, dualistic philosophical system as a protective armor against the imagined threat of invasion or contamination posed by feminized abjection. Due to this phobic rigidity, Sartre's fictive characters as well as his philosophy betray an inability to form object relations already familiar from Theweleit's study. According to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, this modern inability to establish non-instrumentalized interpersonal relations and the consequent perception of any libidinal desire as ultimate threat found its most radicalized expression in twentieth century European fascism. If, as Theweleit has argued, fascism is an extreme manifestation of what is latently always already present in the basic exclusionary and phobic structure of patriarchy, France — like any patriarchal society — bears the roots of fascism within it. The exploration of the work of one of France's most influential antifascist writers and leading intellectuals of the twentieth century confirms this assessment.