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What Is Engagement: Mediating Engagement, or Engaging Mediation?—A Reading of Sartre's What Is Literature?

Ivan Yi-fan Hu · 2025.4.30–5.2
"But how can one understand what is worth saying without recourse to a transcendent system of values?"

—Sartre, What Is Literature?1

Introduction: "We Must Begin Again"

"Writing is a certain way of wanting freedom; once you have begun, you are committed, willy-nilly"2 (Literature, 62). When I read Sartre's essay and begin writing my assignment, am I, too, "already" engaged, whether I wish to be or not? One easy objection to this playful provocation is that the "writing" Sartre means differs from mine, so the question is invalid. But what precisely distinguishes them? Perhaps Sartre's writing addresses a "public" and is therefore understood to intervene, whereas mine amounts at most to an internal academic exercise and consequently intervenes in nothing. The distinction seems well founded. Yet would this not mean that "what to write" and "how to write" matter less than "for whom to write"? Would that not reproduce the vulgar sociological schematism of the "young fools" Sartre mentions at the outset? Engagement is either reduced to a writer's explicit—and in fact gestural—position on public affairs or condemned as a betrayal of artistic autonomy. How can this either/or cycle be broken? As Sartre puts it: "People read too quickly, swallow things whole, and judge before understanding. We must therefore begin again" (Literature, 4). Beginning again means a metacritique of the "transcendent system of values" in my epigraph: recovering the obscured third term, the mediating middle. While both sides endlessly dispute where literature "ought" to point—towards an apparently opposed "inside" or "outside"—literature itself is displaced by its object. It becomes a self-evident foundation requiring neither reflection nor a critique that clarifies its premises and delimits its scope. We might even venture that this naturalization and objectification of "literature" as a specialized domain—or even an "infrastructure"—under aesthetic modernity enables the two positions to sustain each other in inverted form. The decisive question is therefore not whether a writer takes an inward or outward stance, but what "literature" makes the writer possible in the first place. "Since critics condemn me in the name of literature without ever saying what they mean by it, the best answer is to examine the art of writing without prejudice" (Literature, 4).

Mediating Engagement: "Why Not Join the Communist Party?"

How, then, should "literature" be defined? Such a definition presupposes that literature is a specialized field that can be grasped as an object. Yet Eagleton observes: "It may be difficult to isolate permanent inherent characteristics in everything called literature for one reason or another. In fact, this is as impossible as finding the single distinctive feature common to all games. Literature has no 'essence'."3 Rather than confining literature to an imagined "literature itself," Eagleton thus invites us to view it as "ways in which people relate themselves to writing"4. Literature appears within moving relations; it is not a closed, self-sufficient systematic object. It is inseparable from concrete situations—indeed, it may itself be this connection—and is always relational, discursive, and ideological. A literary work is mediated by a particular historical situation and in turn mediates between people and social history. European writers and scholars, watching the Second World War give way almost immediately to the Cold War, confronted such extreme "reification of the mind" that "even the most radical consciousness of impending doom could degenerate into idle conversation". Hence Adorno's famous remark: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. This even corrodes the knowledge of why writing poetry has become impossible today."5 To continue speaking of literature, still more of committed literature, could consequently appear an increasingly aggressive act of barbarism, prompting questions such as: "Since you want to engage, why do you not join the Communist Party?" (Literature, 3). But just as Adorno's sentence is often quoted only in part, Sartre is not reviving the formulaic literature of vulgar sociology associated with "socialist realism." He seeks precisely to interrupt the corrosion of the metacognition of why poetry has become impossible.

"Literature believes itself independent of every ideology in principle, and so retains the abstract appearance of pure negation. It still does not understand that it is itself ideology; it loudly proclaims an autonomy that no one has denied it" (Literature, 112). To say that literature is itself ideology does not mean that literature must first "choose" a position before expressing anything. An older Chinese rendering of ideology, yidilaojie—ideas bound into a knot—helps illuminate Sartre's definition of the writer as one who "deals with meanings" (Literature, 9), returning us to the introductory question: literature, which Sartre chiefly restricts to prose, is "always already" engaged. His critics often connect engagement to polemics that oppose aesthetics and politics. They thereby fail to enter the premises of his argument—or, more precisely, his clarification of the premises themselves. A more critical perspective reveals that Sartre fundamentally questions this false opposition. Such critique is not the condescending criticism of one established position by a professional intellectual within the capitalist market, but Kantian self-reflection on the transcendental framework of cognition. Political or aesthetic? Sartre "provides a model of their exemplary alliance. Contrary to a common assumption, the alliance does not depend on literature's subordination to political directives: for Sartre it arises from literature's essence."6 This "essence" is not the static essence criticized at the beginning of this section; it is the ongoing process of symbolic mediation. The absurdity of "Why not join the Communist Party?" now becomes clear. The question does not mean that only Party members can engage; it implies that Party membership is a better form of engagement than literature. Yet "the Communist Party" and "the Communist" are themselves mediated mediations. Engagement through them is doubly or multiply mediated, although it is naturalized and accepted as immediate. This misunderstanding, even distortion, of engagement may be called "mediating engagement." It reverses Sartre's argument at its root: "A writer becomes committed when, seeking the clearest and fullest awareness of being implicated, the writer brings engagement from spontaneous immediacy to reflection, for oneself and others. The writer is the mediator par excellence; the writer's engagement consists in mediation" (Literature, 71).

Engaging Mediation: How Literature Does—or Does Not—"Become Alienated"

"It is praise, palm branches, an offering, pure reflection. Literature thus becomes alienated. Since it always embodies the reflexivity of a social organization, it remains an unreflected reflexivity: it mediates the Catholic world, yet remains immediate for the clergy; it recovers the world but loses itself in doing so" (Literature, 139–140). Flynn defines committed literature as "performing a concrete 'moral' function: making people aware of alienation while proposing possibilities for change"7. The bourgeoisie, Sartre says, is not incapable of recognizing its alienation. But "it expects ideas rather than creates them" (Literature, 93). This group is structurally homologous with the apparatus that alienates it; it may itself constitute the conditions preventing self-awareness. The "ideas" it expects are reduced to commodities or medicines, possessing quantitative extent while never reaching the qualitative, overturning reflection on how all this becomes possible. The professional writer and literature within this system are therefore "parasites of a parasitic class" (Literature, 95), offering entertainment without fundamental effect. "Bourgeois art is either a means or it does not exist. Fearing that principles will collapse, it forbids itself to touch them; fearing that it will find disorder, it refuses to explore too deeply within human beings. ... What is favoured is accomplished craftsmanship: talent constrained and turned against itself, the art of reassuring through harmonious, anticipated words, of declaring in a cultivated voice that the world and human beings are mediocre and transparent, without surprise, threat, or interest" (Literature, 105). Yet this art cannot be answered simply by substituting "socialist realism" or "literature for workers, peasants, and soldiers." The issue is not an either/or determinism of content—which itself produces misunderstandings of Sartre's engagement—but a transcendental critique of a form of knowing. Without that serious and fundamental step, a hasty declaration that "I will engage" risks accompanying enforced literary programmes such as Soviet RAPP literature with another violence, structurally resembling the supposedly opposed bourgeois art and perhaps amounting merely to its counterposition. Even good intentions may fall into the hypocrisy described in these words: "Their determination to defend the proletariat is abstract: however sincere they may be, at best they merely 'care' about certain misfortunes; they understand them intellectually without feeling them in their hearts" (Literature, 111). As already noted, they may be unable to recognize this themselves. Engagement, for Sartre, is therefore "first a critical theory, a negation and destruction of earlier literature; only then is it a constructive theory, declaring the stakes, turning writers towards their present situation, and asking them to fight within it".8

Adorno's "Engagement," translated into English as "Commitment," is usually read as a critical response to Sartre's What Is Literature? Read side by side, however, the former may chiefly address misunderstandings of the latter: clarifying what Sartre left indistinct and pushing his insights to their limit. Adorno principally attacks the division between committed and autonomous art, arguing that "each pole negates itself together with the other". "Art has always inhabited the tension between these extremes, but this tension has now disappeared."9 As shown above, Sartre already distinguishes himself from that oppositional dichotomy at the outset. Adorno agrees that "the object of any philosophy of art or aesthetics ... will not be art's journalistic or propagandistic aspect", and places the "message" a work conveys between "the artist's subjective intention on the one hand and, on the other, the demand for a metaphysical meaning required to be objectively explicit"10. This accords with Sartre's question: "But how can one understand what is worth saying without recourse to a transcendent system of values?" (Literature, 18). Adorno's distinction between commitment and tendency likewise targets those whom Sartre criticizes as people who "read too quickly, swallow things whole, and judge before understanding" (Literature, 4). Their hurried "engagement" may contradict their creative intentions, becoming a sham circuit of marketing and ideological gratification. "Properly understood, committed art does not aim at producing reforms, legislation, or practical institutions; 'commitment' concerns fundamental attitudes."11 "Committed art too readily endows itself with noble values that it can then manipulate at will."12 Sartre is acutely alert to this condition. Hence his firmer confidence in committed literature as metacritique: "... Within a collective continually reclaiming, judging, and transforming itself, writing can be a principal condition of action: the moment when consciousness reflects upon itself. ... In a society without classes, dictatorship, or fixed stability, literature will complete the process of attaining self-consciousness. It will understand that form and content, reader and subject matter, are one; that the formal freedom of saying and the material freedom of doing complement one another, and that each should be invoked in demanding the other. It will understand that it embodies subjectivity most fully when it most deeply expresses collective demands, and conversely. It will understand that its function is to address the concrete universal to the concrete universal, and its aim is to call upon human freedom so that people may establish and sustain the reign of human freedom" (Literature, 146).

Notes

  1. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Shi Kangqiang (Beijing: People's Literature Publishing House, 2018), 18. This essay chiefly uses that Chinese translation. Also consulted: Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1985); and Jean-Paul Sartre, 'What Is Literature?', trans. Bernard Frechtman, in "What Is Literature?" and Other Essays, introduction by Steven Ungar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). References in the text abbreviate these editions as Literature, QCL, and WIL respectively, followed by page numbers, instead of giving full notes each time.
  2. 'Already' here points towards the question of genesis or origin. The French reads 'si vous avez commencé, de gré ou de force vous êtes engagé' (QCL, 72); the English, 'once you have begun, you are committed, willy-nilly' (WIL, 69). It may be understood as beginning to write and then becoming committed, or writing as engagement. What deserves attention, however, is the tense of 'already': if I am engaged when writing, am I not engaged when not writing? This is not a temporal before and after, but an Althusserian state of surdétermination, or overdetermination. Engagement requires neither awareness of whether or when writing began nor writing something out or completing it: it is always already underway. These readings correspond structurally to the essay's distinction between mediating engagement and engaging mediation. Spivak offers an anticipatory formulation: "For this discipline, the way out seems to lie in recognizing a definite future anteriority, a state of 'to come'-ness, and the quality of 'will have happened'. ... Such a projective philosophy welcomes non-exhaustive taxonomies and provisional system-generation, rejecting the mapping of literary criticism's routes as an end, since diagnostic mapping does not open itself to what is 'to come'." Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, trans. Zhang Xu (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2014), 6–7.
  3. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, trans. Wu Xiaoming (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2018), 9.
  4. Ibid., 9.
  5. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Cultural Criticism and Society', trans. Liu Jian, in Chronicle of Social Critical Theory, vol. 12, ed. Zhang Yibing (Nanjing: Jiangsu People's Publishing House, 2021), 16.
  6. Suzanne Guerlac, "Sartre and the Powers of Literature: The Myth of Prose and the Practice of Reading," MLN 108, no. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec. 1993), 823.
  7. Thomas Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 9.
  8. Zhao Yong, 'Literary Engagement and the Intellectual's Role-Playing: A Reading of Sartre's What Is Literature?', Foreign Literature, no. 4 (2007), 52.
  9. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Commitment', trans. Xie Jun, in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Xie Jun and Li Yinan (Xi'an: Northwest University Press, 2024), 277.
  10. Ibid., 279.
  11. Ibid., 281.
  12. Ibid., 302.

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