'Unhappy consciousness': Reflexivity and contradiction in Jean-Paul Sartre's changing conception of the role of the intellectual

Jean-Paul Sartre articulated two distinctly different conceptions of the role of the intellectual. He cited the events of May–June 1968 as central to the precipitation of circumstances that necessitated a move from the classic to the revolutionary intellectual (sometimes also referred to by Sartre as the ‘leftist’ or ‘new’ intellectual). This chapter will argue that it would be a mistake to regard a specific set of political events as solely responsible for bringing about this alteration in Sartre’s position. The chapter will attempt to place Sartre’s changing conception of the role of the intellectual within the wider context of his own pre-reflective ‘fundamental project’ as an intellectual. The chapter will explore the dialectical relationship between Sartre’s abandonment of literature as a bourgeois art form in favour of existential biography, his political writing and action and his changing conception of the role of the intellectual. This will be done in a manner that is broadly consistent with the dialectical nominalism he developed in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The themes of contradiction and reflexivity will be highlighted to illustrate the dialectical understanding Sartre’s own work can give of his conception of the role of the intellectual.