Althusser and Sartre

[" George Snedeker" <snedeker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I doubt very much if the target of Althusser's antihumanism was Sart. by
1960, few in  the PCF cared very much about Sartre's thought. there was an
interest in the Young Marx that went back to the publication of the Paris
Manuscripts in the early 1930s.

Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason was not widely read or discussed in
France. it was a very poorly written book. its virtues were Sartre's
concerns with the problems of agency and history:  how is it that we make a
history that becomes our enemy. the problem is that the other also makes
history. but there is more to the story. we are the product of our products.
in what sense might it be said that history is intelligible? Sartre tried to
work out philosophically the answer to these questions.

these  questions were  also of    concern to Althusser. of course he was
still working within the framework of the PCF. by the 1960s, Sartre had
turned his attention to the anticolonial struggles. then there was 1968.then
there was a new revolution in thought: from structuralism to its post.
Sartre was a forgotten man.