Abstract: Jean-Paul Sartre’s lecture, “Marxisme et subjectivité” delivered in Rome, took place during a phase of transformation in the Italian Communist Party, as much on the political as on the cultural level. The watershed year of 1956 drove the party to call into question the line it had followed to that point; from the cultural standpoint, this meant reopening dialogue with the national and international intelligentsia. Sartre then distanced himself from the French Communist Party and sought a socialism capable of accounting for the total human being as the incarnation of praxis and theory.
