Sartre and critical theory

Although the first generation of the Frankfurt School attacked Sartre's phenomenological ontology on a number of grounds, most of their charges miss the mark. One charge does hit home, however, and it implicates what Sartre calls "the initial project," which is the basis for the empirical ego and otherwise plays a pivotal role in many of his other commitments in Being and Nothingness. I argue that this structure can be fruitfully discarded, which is what Sartre essentially does as he moves toward a dialectical phenomenology in Search for a Method and Critique of Dialectical Reason, and that doing so brings his thought much closer than is generally appreciated to Adorno's negative dialectics.