Gender and the Abject in Sartre

Abstract

This essay takes Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection as a starting-point to explore the relationship of the French nation to German fascism in the twentieth century — a relationship marked by an othering of fascism as foreign. To investigate this relationship, the essay specifically analyzes the discussion of fascism and the phobic abjection of the feminized (female or homosexual) Other in the early work of France's leading philosopher of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre. In contrast to Sartre's claims to an unequivocally antifascist ideological stance, his early work demonstrates the historical continuity between the modern European patriarchal tradition and fascism, and the dialectical implication even of antifascist philosophy and art in fascist thinking