Sartre wrote volume one of Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR) between 1957 & 1960, & it was published in France in 1960. The first English edition appeared in 1976. A second, unfinished volume appeared posthumously in 1982.

CDR was a massive attempt to describe the minutiae of human interaction & Sartre's last major philosophical work. Its thesis statement can be drawn from its thematic antecedent, Search for Method: cultural order is irreducible to natural order.

Rhetoric professor Michael McGee (1989) said that CDR was lost in the avant garde reconstruction of Foucault, Lacan, & Gilles DeLeuze. In CDR, life was an endless occasion of totalizations, detotalizations, & retotalizatons on a field of scarcity. We called the temporalization of events "history."

On the other hand, structuralists & their scholarly progeny forever looked for an objective entity called "context" with which to examine their subjects. Sartre insisted that even "context" was reducible to further concerted human effort, which he called "praxis."

Because of the scant attention that CDR has got from professional scholars (except for McGee), it holds a truly grand secret, which is that it was more or less the weapon with which orthodox psychiatric medicine was challenged in the 1960s by R.D. Laing et al. Laing synopsized CDR in 1964's Reason & Violence; terms & elements in CDR fairly drip from Sanity, Madness & Family & The Politics of Experience.

Rebel French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1961) used Sartre's quite original ideas of the pledged group & the terror of the brotherhood to show how violent revolution by oppressed peoples would produce a cultural catharsis & a healthy nationalism.

I know of no other original study, treatise, or even novel that uses the themes & concepts of CDR. A CDR-oriented examination of, say, American domestic relations proceedings might be a worthy endeavor.

I picked this one up because I thought it would be a nice relaxing series of short essays for a cross country plane trip. I was a bit disappointed. Its essays are of uneven quality, the first and last two being the best, and in order to get the little nuggets of pithy critical theory goodness out of muddled mass that is the rest of this book one has to do a bit of searching. In fact Cultural Turn was almost completely unmemorable, except for the interesting bit on architecture and spectrality in "Brick and the Balloon" (The last essay) and a few of the remarks on the myth of scarcity in the "Second World City" that are to be found in one of the first two pieces. Jameson's writing in Cultural Turn seemed crippled by a greater than usual density of language and jargon, unlike in Political Unconsious, which make several of these pieces tough on either the casual reader (like myself), or the reader who is not versed in Jameson's ideas or specific field of Marxist aesthetic critique. A good addition to other writings by Jameson and on various subjects, but not a pleasant escape or introduction.