Gilles Deleuze's assertion that 'Sartre knew how to invent the New' suggests a vital aspect of the French philosopher, one that departs from the image that has often been presented of him. Criticism of the Soviet Union post 1956, together with the increasing prominence of anti-colonial struggles and a series of experiences that would find their condensation in 1968, pushed Sartre to a continuous rearticulation of his political ideas, on the basis of an intense confrontation with Marx. In Basso's lucid (...) study, here newly translated into English, the expression 'singular universal' seeks to capture the revolutionary potential of individual and collective subjects, illuminating the close but also unstable relationship between history and politics. (shrink)

My article focuses on the status of the materialist dialectic in Sartre, with particular reference to the second part of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, with the points of continuity and together with the lines of demarcation with respect to Marxism. The attempt is to keep together, albeit in an unstable manner, the investigation into the intelligibility of History with an approach that takes on the demands of Marxian materialism, with a strong enhancement of the political dimension of the struggles, (...) but within the specific space of the situation. (shrink)

This article is a reflection on Balibar's account of the concept of Gewalt in Marx, Engels and Marxism. The German term contains both the meanings of power and violence. At the centre of the analysis is the structural link between the notion of Gewalt and the capitalist mode of production and state-form. The problem is whether Gewalt can be understood in relation to the actions of the working class. Balibar rightly refuses any sort of counter-politics of power set against the (...) power of the state which would retain the same overall logic as the latter. However, the question is how such a critique of the ahistorical ontology of violence can interact with Marx's idea of capital as a constitutively violent entity which threatens to subordinate to itself any stance of non-violence. (shrink)