"What is subjectivity?" "" Is compiled from the records of French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's lectures at the invitation of the Gramsci Institute in Rome in December 1961. The class records of that year, especially the part where Sartre discussed with the audience, were rediscovered more than fifty years later and published in France in 2013. The main body of the report was a report titled "Marxism and Subjectivity". It also included texts from discussions between several Italian Marxist intellectuals (such as Enzo Paci, Cesare Luporini, Galvano Della Volpe) and Sartre.
It has a preface by Michel Kail and Raoul Kirchmayer, "Consciousness and Subjectivity," and the postscript is "The Realistic Significance of Sartre" by James Mingxin. "Subjectivity" is one of the important concepts emphasized by Sartre. The question "what is subjectivity" has regained importance because it is related to the discussion of "subject" in contemporary critical theory.
The question of subjectivity has troubled Sartre since the 1930s. Sartre believed that it is human subjectivity that gives us the ability to choose our own path in life. Because there are no objective standards, objective values, and there is no essence that determines who or what we are. All we can grasp are subjective standards, subjective values, and the essence derived from them, and these can only be expanded and understood from a subjective perspective.
As the "Preface" says: The publication of this book gives people a glimpse of the integrity of Sartre's works and provides an ideal introduction to his difficult "Critique of Dialectical Reason". The "Critique of Dialectical Reason" was published exactly one year before the lecture, constituting a confrontation with Marxism. The premise of this confrontation is Sartre's paradoxical evaluation of Marxism: Marxism has stalled and at the same time constitutes the insurmountable horizon of our era.
Sartre's ambition in this report is to place subjectivity at the core of Marxist analysis in order to re-give it its lost vitality. Attacking both subjectivism and objectivism, he wanted to show why subjectivity is essential to understanding society. Sartre's characteristic method was to grasp his object tightly by analyzing examples. To grasp subjectivity is to understand how objective conditions are internalized and experienced, so that one can be able to explain how the form of collective practice is established. Subjectivity is a "particular universal", a product of history, the basic structure of history, and a possible creation!
