Postmodernist thinkers rejected existentialism as outdated and overly human-centered

Evidence

The student demonstrations, strikes, occupations, love-ins and be-ins of the 1960s constitute an extended historical moment to which one might point and say that existentialism had done its job. Liberation had arrived; existentialism could retire. Indeed, new philosophers were already on the scene, reacting against existentialism’s personalised style of thought. New novelists turned against its literary aesthetic too: Alain Robbe-Grillet, in his 1964 manifesto Pour un nouveau roman (For a New Novel), dismissed Sartre and Camus as having too much of the ‘human’ in them. In 1966 Michel Foucault predicted that ‘man’, being a relatively recent invention, might soon be ‘erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ — an image that recalls Lévi-Strauss’ call for studies that would ‘dissolve man’. Later, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the postmodernist Jean Baudrillard dismissed Sartrean philosophy as a historical curiosity, like the classic 1950s films whose old-fashioned psychological dramas and clear characterisation ‘express marvellously well the — already banal — post-Romantic death throes of subjectivity’. No one needs this kind of ‘existential garb’ any more, Baudrillard wrote. ‘Who cares about freedom, bad faith, and authenticity today?’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 916

Categorization

• XREF: This charts the succession from existentialism to structuralism/postmodernism — useful for orienting how Sartre relates to Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, and Baudrillard in later Continental thought. — connects to: The Frankfurt School rejected philosophical anthropology and eternal human essence — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 226; Post-structuralist philosophy rejected lived experience and active human subjects — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 88; The Davos debate was perceived as a generational rupture between Enlightenment and existentialism — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 243 (+3 more)
• SEED: A possible essay: ‘Who cares about freedom, bad faith, and authenticity today?’ — answering Baudrillard’s taunt with the Eastern-bloc history where existentialism remained vital.

Broader Connections

• Modernism doubted Being’s stability while postmodernism abandoned Being altogether #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 473
• Postmodernism abolishes the inside-outside distinction that modernism still presupposed #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 259