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Finnish political scientists Kari Palonen and Leena Subra each contribute two articles on aspects of their research on the concept of politics in the thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre. In addition, the volume contains a French translation of an interview of Jean-Paul Sartre conducted by Jörn Donner during the World Peace Congress in Helsinki 1955 previously published only in Finnish. In the Introduction, Kari Palonen and Leena Subra remark on the reception given to Sartre's thinking which, only since the seventies, has received greater attention in Finland. The authors emphasize the thoroughgoing political character of Sartre's whole philosophy of man, and criticize the dominant trends in "Sartrology" which tend to neglect the political aspect of Sartre's thinking. In The Sartrean Relation to Politics Palonen criticizes the customary ways of understanding the theme "Sartre and politics" and relates Sartre's conception of politics to the history of the concept. His thesis consists of reinterpreting L'être et le néant in contribution to the understanding of politics as well as of putting forward, in this perspective, the aspects of continuity and change in Sartre's conception of politics as sketched in Critique de la raison dialectique. In her first contribution, Alterity and Facticity, Subra criticizes the conventional tendency to read these Sartrean notions in a pejorative manner. Her re-interpretation of them emphasizes their relation to marginal situations and their subversive use as instances which contribute to breaking the opacity of the practical field of action. With examples of the situation of women, she gives hints of strategic possibilities that this kind of use of alterity and facticity contains. In Politics as a Struggle-Situation by Weber and Sartre, Palonen sees Max Weber and Sartre as authors for whom politics consists in struggle. Even Weber sees that in political struggles, the results do not consistently correspond to anyone's intentions i.e. they are characterized by what Sartre calls (reciprocal) counter-finality. Their conceptions of politics, as different as they may be in tone and emphasis, are largely attempts to make this situation intelligible. In Organization and Disorganization as Structures of Political Action Subra sees in the practical field, as presented in Critique de la raison dialectique, bath an organizing and disorganizing facet. When failure and counter-finality are seen as limits to positive organization and action, disorganization gains strategic value by offering a perspective to the re-interpretation of the situation in view of opening new horizons for struggling against existing structures. |
