Abstract

In part an attempt to provide a fourth volume to J.-P. Sartre's incomplete study of Flaubert, l'Idiot de la famille, this work has had to confront the eclipse of existentialist Marxism by poststructuralism in recent French thought. ;In the central sections of the dissertation, a Marxist analysis locates this shift as one dimension of that global transformation of the world which is the third industrial revolution. The questions as to whether Marxist accounts of poststructuralism, and vice versa, are theoretically admissible are examined in the course of close comparisons of the work of Derrida and the late work of Sartre. It is concluded that these two bodies of writing are not, contrary to received opinion, incompatible. ;In the final section, a close stylistic analysis of Madame Bovary attempts to accomplish some of the most important theoretical goals of Sartre's l'Idiot de la famille. This work, it is argued, far from being a relic of an obsolete philosophy, is of crucial importance to our present debates on the status of the subject