It is often assumed that existentialism and “poststructuralism” think differently toward the subject and its place in thought and philosophy.
“Poststructuralism” in philosophy, or “postmodernism” in art and literature, puts the subject into question by problematizing its traditional place through refusing and disrupting all determined origins, formed unities, guaranteed totalities, decided meanings, self-same selves and same-identical identities, hierarchies, oppositions, and ordered relations.
The subject in “poststructuralism” is constantly subject to ruptures, discontinuities, scatteredness, lacerations, fissures, and breakages. It is never one, but multiple, plural, and often less than one as a lack. The subject’s place is also constantly rendered place-less. Yet this does not mean that the subject disappears in “poststructuralism”. It remains; only rendered hollowed out, elsewhere, multiple, and less; constantly and without finality.
Not all versions of existentialism are in agreement concerning the subject. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, for instance, problematize the subject and never take it for granted. They render its truth multiple and evading. Truth, for them, is evading because it is constantly underway and already somewhere else, already escaping any attempt at thinking and reaching its elsewhere-ness, for it always returns, but always returns differently, as something else and different from itself.
They also problematize power and willing in such a way that inserts processes, crossings, junctions, and stages into the subject. They disrupt identity through a multiplicity of names and voices. Their writings and philosophizing are thus anti-modernist.
The Sartrean Subject
Sartre’s version of existentialism is, however, modernist in that it is rooted in the Cartesian Cogito in the sense that it takes it as the beginning of thought, philosophizing, and reasoning. Thus the Sartrean subject brings about determined meanings, makes available meaningful projections, and is capable of ordering a future. In the Sartrean subject, the clarity of origins and the security of centers find expressions and are effective.
Yet the Sartrean subject remains in a certain nearness to the “poststructural” subject because it is a site where self-coinciding never occurs. It is true that the Sartrean subject is the opening from which meaning emerges into the world and is first made possible, but this does not mean that it is a site where wholeness can be found, since Sartre says that one is not what one is, and is what one is not. Non-self-identity thus lies at the heart of the Sartrean subject. Sartre places non-coinciding with oneself at the heart of oneself.
Meaning does not thus emerge from fullness or completion, from self-presence or self-coinciding, but from the nothingness lying at the heart of the “for-itself”, which makes impossible full presence and therefore makes available multiple meanings instead of a pre-determined meaning.
Thus the non-self-identical subject, or the non-self-coinciding self, is already in a certain closeness to the “postmodern” or the “poststructuralist” notions of the death of the subject and author and the hollowing out of the self.
The “poststructural” problematization of identity is also hinted at in this non-self-identical subject, for now identity finds itself placed together with its difference into each other in such a way that it is constantly sustained by its other, which pervades it and, at the same time, lies beyond it. An other, within oneself, forever irreducible, forever uncontainable, made inevitable because of the nothingness in the being of the “for-itself”. Sartre’s notion of bad faith is simply a response to all attempts at containing oneself within, and reducing oneself to, a certain “identity” as a single way of being.
Finally, in his later writings, Sartre acknowledges that rationality is not one. An acknowledgment that brings his version of existentialism closer to “postmodernism” and “poststructuralism”. In the Critique, he says that at any moment there are constantly two rationalities at work: analytical reason and dialectical reason. The difference that still remains between the Critique and many “poststructural” works is that rationality in “poststructuralism” is often made multiple.
Besides, that Sartre links together different ways of reasoning and the political and social class of the individual is an indication that he realizes that the relations of power and knowledge, which are at work in society, form the individual; a linking together wholly shaping Foucault’s work and already expressed in Nietzsche’s philosophy.