In this chapter, I argue that Sartre's philosophical system instigates the ontology of ‘pure’ immanence that underpins micropolitics and that is carried forward by Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze. But is there indeed such a thing as a Sartrean system, a total Weltanschauung? This question touches on one of the foremost debates afflicting Sartre scholarship. A number of interpreters have portrayed Sartre as a sporadic philosopher, void of any underlying and continuous ontology or philosophical and political engagement. His oeuvre, it is said, is punctuated by a series of divergent and conflicting views. In particular, with its emphasis on consciousness, Sartre's early work between The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness is typically taken to represent a deeply subjectivist or even rationalist position, which would later face the axe in Sartre's turn towards a neo-Marxist or even ‘postmodernist’ dialectic of praxis. Against these interpretations, others have attempted to locate a stable vantage point from which to grasp and fix all of Sartre's thinking under one heading. This is typically identified in the ‘dialectic of the self’, of which an early formation is evident in Being and Nothingness. In this reading, the Critique and its ‘totalisation-detotalisation’ of praxis is said to represent its historico-material fruition. Badiou (2012: 20) goes so far as to claim that Sartre's later encounter with Marxism in the Critique was ‘unavoidable’, precisely due to the presence of the dialectic in Being and Nothingness. Thus, as opposed to signifying a radical split, it is supposed that each major work of Sartre's focuses on a particular aspect of the dialectic. Whereas the earlier work can be said to focus more on the nature of existential ‘choice’, the later work focuses more on its situational or contextual limits.

The true irony here is that despite the divergence of these interpretations, each unwittingly establishes an overarching image of Sartre as a thinker of formal transcendence. In the first instance, as Deleuze (2004b: 114 n6) puts it, while repudiating transcendence in the version of a field of consciousness immanent to a transcendental subject, Sartre retains transcendence's form, insofar as the transcendental field is still determined as a field of consciousness, ‘and as such it must be unified by itself through a play of intentionalities or pure intentions’.