Sartre's second century

120 Chapter Eight
and hopeless. Such is the calm despair of an old man who will die in that
despair. But the point is, I'm resisting, and I know I shall die in hope. But
this hope must be grounded. We must try to explain why the world of
today, which is horrible, is only one moment in a long historical
development, that hope has always been one of the dominant forces of
revolutions and insurrections, and how I still feel that hope is my
conception of the future. 44
Whether the future conforms to Sartre's hope-full conception remains
to be seen, marked as it is, of course, by the feature of contingency that
Sartre theorised so effectively throughout his work. In any case, his critical
spirit, philosophical guile and gift of dialectical understanding provide us
with the inspiration and the means to recover a sense of the authentically
human in an increasingly inhuman and cybernetic postmodern world. In
the context of Deleuze's remark, in Negotiations, that "[a] thought's logic
is like a wind blowing on us, a series of gusts and jolts", Sartre's
thinking can be likened to a gust of freedom which blows away
constricting webs that bind and entrap. This shines through in the focus of
his work, which grapples constantly with the problematic of freedom, as
well as in his personal life, where his activism and struggle against
oppression thrust him into the forefront of ideological and political
controversy in post-war France. Somewhat diminutive and corpulent,
physically enfeebled and almost blind in his later years, Sartre stood
defiantly as a resolute defender of the marginalised and downtrodden
against the strong arm of the Goliath capitalist state. This made him an
object of vitriolic hatred for the French state, which threatened on
numerous occasions to imprison him; for pro-colonial groupings on the
Right, who threatened and ultimately attempted to kill him; and even for
those on the Left, such as the orthodox guardians of the Communist faith,
who demonised and excommunicated him as a heretic. Through all this,
Sartre continued, in his own inimitable way, to articulate and to refine his
telling discourse of freedom. It remains to be seen how this will be taken
up and articulated by others in the postmodern configuration of the
twenty-first century.
Works Cited
Aronson, Ronald. Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World. London:
New Left Books, 1980.
44 Sartre, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, 109-10.
45 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, 94.