Jean-Paul Sartre: The Intelligibility Of Everyday Life

For existentialism , the study of problems of everyday life, the pattern of behavior and living, the quest for emancipation and acceptance to the complexities of human life serve as the dominating themes in a text. Jean-Paul Sartre in his attempt to formulate the grounds for the intelligibility of everyday life in relation to historical totalization he elaborates a theory of subjectivity in relation to practice and conditions of production.
Sartre denouncing the-the fetishizing the immediacy of direct experience, instead, emphasises on his theory of mediation, in which he attempts to establish the singular unity of individual praxis and history, his insistence for “the dialectical totalization to include acts, passions, work, and need as

What he relates is the individual’s position as a subject with the ideological practices , these ideological practices exist within ideological apparatuses: ... an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material (22). And I shall point out that these practices are governed by the rituals in which these practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological apparatus, be it only a small part of that apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a minor match at a sports ' club, a school day, a political party meeting, etc. (23). According to this thesis, the concept of the "ideological apparatus" refers to social practices, which are material practices. Althusser does not conceive ideology as merely distorted or mistaken ideas. This does not mean that individual subjects do not have distorted or mistaken ideas. Althusser 's argument is rather that ideology takes place as an ensemble of material practices by individual subjects within ideological apparatuses: I shall, therefore, say that, where only a single subject (such and such an individual) is concerned, the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his mate? rial actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological

According to Ryan, they ‘are united by their compulsion to relate literature to history, to treat texts as indivisible from contexts, and to do so from a politically charged perspective forged in the present’ (Ryan xi). New historicism could, in a sense, be considered as cultural materialism in a postmodern register preoccupied with historicizing texts and with the workings of power through culture, but focused on issues of individual subjectivity construction, gender and the workings of patriarchy, rather than on class and nation. Where Williams’ cultural materialism had been concerned with the connections between social class and collective emancipatory politics, new historicism tends to exhibit the characteristic preoccupations of the officially sanctioned forms of political radicalism within the North American academy: subjectivity formation, desire, race, gender, queer theory, and so on. This later is also analyzable in more strictly cultural materialist terms, however, as Dollimore and Sinfield’s work clearly suggests (Dollimore, 1991; Sinfield, 1994; Sinfield, 1994a). The more fundamental differences between cultural materialism and the new historicism are threefold: first, “the theoretical question, concerning the subversive potential of apparently subversive texts; second, the political question, concerning the competing claims of academic professionalism and