Abstract

Much recent continental philosophy, especially that influenced by structuralism, takes the issue of language as its point of departure. Sartre is normally thought to have ignored this trend and consequently be irrelevant to its concerns. I argue, on the contrary, that a coherent theory of language can be drawn from Sartre's philosophy. ;In Part One, I draw the implications for a theory of language from Sartre's early philosophy and apply its conclusions to literary communication and the development of freedom. Language arises in the realm of being-for-others as a form of objectifying struggle. Linguistic meaning results from the manipulation of mutually objectifying acts. Because it originates in struggle, the communication made possible in literature occurs by means of a literary object to which only the reader can have access since in Sartrean ontology the writer and reader cannot project a common object. Further, since language is being-for-others, Sartre recognizes that the coming into being of a freedom, emerging from childhood, is crystallized in the original crisis which erupts in the first concrete relation with the Other and is reflected in the manner in which the individual acquires the signifying structures of language. ;In Part Two, I show how Sartre's later move to a Marxist dialectic alters his view of language and its implications. He now contends that language originates from a struggle between the organism and inorganic materiality, resulting in a signifying projection that employs the linguistic system as a practico-inert materiality. This re-grounding of language expands the possibility for communication both as the projection of a common social meaning and as the creation of a literary object available to both writer and reader. Further, since language arises from the struggle with materiality, the acquisition of linguistic structures precedes and shapes recognition of the Other, and the coming into being of freedom instantiates a semantic structure in the form of an original belief. ;A Sartrean theory of language maintains the centrality of human freedom as the source of the very possibility of language and meaning, thus denying the structuralist principle of the disappearance of the subject