Andrew Jampol-Petzinger, 'Sartre, Deleuze, and the Politics of Difference'

'Sartre, Deleuze, and the Politics of Difference' A paper from the Royal Holloway Centre for Continental Philosophy's Sartre Now! Workshop, April 4th 2022, by Prof. Andrew Jampol-Petzinger (Grand Valley State University) Abstract One thing we know about the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Gilles Deleuze is the influence of Sartre’s critique of phenomenology upon the latter’s metaphysics. In Sartre’s early Transcendence of the Ego, it is the critique of the personal “I” that allows Sartre to escape the confines of intrasubjective phenomenological reflection and place philosophy more firmly in contact with a concrete outside through which metaphysical reflection once more becomes possible. It is this turn away from the enclosure of the “I” towards questions of material situatedness that will enable philosophers like Deleuze to invoke a naïve, even intuitionistic contact between human beings and their “world,” beyond the bracketing of critical and phenomenological concerns with mere appearances, and thus pursue a robust metaphysics of difference. Beyond this theoretical reversal, Sartre is explicit that these reflections on the concrete situatedness of the subject make possible and even necessary a return to questions of ethical and political importance for philosophy. The metaphysical reversal that Sartre introduces implies an equally strong political reversal by which philosophy must take account of questions of social inequality and injustice. Yet if the association between Deleuze’s and Sartre’s metaphysical reversal is well-known, Deleuze’s inheritance of the latter’s political reversal in this context has been less well understood. This, perhaps not least on account of the hesitance with which Deleuze has overtly trespassed on questions of political engagement in his philosophy (excepting, of course, the more politically-minded Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus). Indeed, if for Sartre the connection between the rejection of phenomenological “bracketing” and his own activism is self-evident, the connections between Deleuze’s commitment to “pure” metaphysics and his own political avowals are less obvious. This paper aims to unpack the nature of the turn from phenomenology to ontology in Sartre in terms of its implicit impact on Deleuze’s political thought. Looking in particular at some of Sartre’s most provocative and prophetic works on political difference in Anti-Semite and Jew and “Black Orpheus,” I consider the influence of Sartre’s political thought on Deleuze’s own minoritarian politics, especially in the latter’s Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature and Cinema II (where the topic of concern is so-called “third world” cinema). In making this comparison, I am particularly interested to see what Deleuze has adopted and what he has rejected from Sartre’s handling of political difference, which has itself been criticized by readers like Michael Walzer and Souleymane Bachir Diagne. In this context we will have the opportunity to reflect on our own inheritance of some of Sartre’s most promising—and problematic—philosophical ideas.