Sartre's second century

CHAPTER ELEVEN
DESTABILISING IDENTITIES
AND DISTINCTIONS:
THE LITERARY-PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIENCE
OF HOPE NOW
IAN RHOAD
The title of this chapter might seem strange at first glance. 1 Why bring
up the notion of a "literary experience" with regard to Hope Now! After
all, the text in question is not one of Sartre's novels or plays. Hope Now is
a set of interviews between Sartre and his secretary, Benny Levy, that
purports an undeniably philosophical aim: to sketch out an ethics for the
political left. Published a month before he died, Hope Now was Sartre's
last attempt to make good, at least partially, on the promise he had made at
the end of Being and Nothingness: to put forth an ethics. As such, it
engages with a project—a specifically philosophical project—that Sartre
had kept with him for almost four decades. Thus, it might be thought that I
am doing Sartre a disservice by subordinating his philosophy to his
literature. That is not my intention.
The aim of this essay is simply to appreciate the unique project of
Hope Now and to argue that the way it has been studied has not taken into
account a certain literary element therein. This literary element is not
something imposed on the text from the outside, but rather inherent in the
text itself, and can be identified by using Sartre's own criteria (not my
own) for separating his philosophy and his literature. Far from privileging
Sartre's literature over his philosophy, then, my aim is to show that the
1 1 am indebted to Craig Vasey, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mary
Washington, Virginia, for challenging me to develop many of the ideas I present in
this essay; all conclusions are of course my own. A previous draft was given as a
paper at the 15 th Biennial Conference of the North American Sartre Society at
Fordham University, Manhattan, New York City, 27-29 October 2006.