Sovereignty and Deviation: Notes on Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2

This article explores the analysis of Stalinism advanced in the second, unfinished volume of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. It focuses especially on the concepts that Sartre adduces to explain the Revolution’s demand for a sovereign individual at its helm, and the deviations associated to the idiosyncrasies of the figure into which a beleaguered praxis came to alienate itself. It argues that Sartre’s conception of the historical dialectic is profoundly attuned to the phenomenon and the phenomenology of Stalinism because of the centrality that individual facticity – the necessity of human contingency – has in the French philosopher’s thought, ever since Being and Nothingness. This leads to a multi-dimensional effort at producing a fundamentally ‘biographical’ dialectic, which in turn requires the forging of a ‘dialectical biography’.