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PARTISAN REVIEW
sense of battling against himself. There could be no complete
dichotomy, of course, between mortifying the flesh and fighting the
brain. In the same way that he resisted fatigue, he resisted his own
ideas, challenged them, questioned whether it wouldn't be better to
turn them upside down. Philosophically the habit of dialectical re–
versal was picked up from Hegel. Karl Marx, who had also picked it
up, found, like Sartre, that it encouraged him to leave books unfin–
ished. Both Marx and Sartre tended to define their position by mak–
ing someone else's untenable and later to make their own untenable.
They were both liable to start a book on the basis of convictions that
were repudiated before it was finished.
Without setting out to provide a rationale for his habit of leav–
ing projects uncompleted, Sartre does this in the
Critique,
arguing
that human action always tends to become something different from
what was intended. When a man looks back at his work, simulta–
neously recognizing and failing to recognize himself in it, acknowl–
edging that it isn't what he wanted to do but that he couldn't have
done it any better, he is being forced "by an immediate dialectical
movement to acknowledge necessity as freedom's destiny in ex–
teriority." This is a form of alienation, which invariably begins as
soon as the individual objectifies himself in action. Other people can
immediately rob him of his intention. Sartre was basing his ideas
about human activity on his own activity as a writer, and there may
be a connection between his misgivings about stolen or deflected in–
tentions and his pleasure in abandoning positions he had formerly
maintained. Inevitably this involved him in betraying friends, ad–
mirers and supporters who had rallied around the idea as soon as
they saw it flying from his flagstaff, but since their support had
helped to rob him of his intention, they deserved to be punished.
Even when he was young, his attitude to fans and supporters
was highly ambivalent. Following the loss of his infantile om–
nipotence, the loss of his mother when she remarried left him with
an uncomfortable awareness of a dichotomy between the impression
he had of himself and the impression other people had of him. His
strongest need was to be in command of their reactions to him. Lust–
ing for fame, which could bring this power, he was aware of his
brain as an aggressive weapon. Part of his need to keep shifting posi–
tions was the need to bring the weapon constantly into play. The
boxer can never afford to think about what he did in the last round:
what matters is what he is doing now.
If
other people got stuck with
