Sartre's second century

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 167
they show that, at the end of his life, Sartre was beginning to think again
like a young man. 31 While his emphasis on the act of thinking is a
constructive move away from traditional critiques of Hope Now, I cannot
follow Bernard-Henri Levy to his conclusion that "this last Sartre was a
Levinassian". 32 1 cannot make this move because the very structure of such
a statement is incompatible with my opinion of what is taking place. If,
when studying an academic work, we agree to use a person's ideas as
representative of his or her identity (for example, we might say: "Sartre is
a Marxist in The Critique of Dialectical Reason"), then the very form of
Hope Now prohibits us of from describing Sartre as anything; we must say
that They are something, "They", here, being understood as the textual
voice of the collaboration between Sartre and L£vy. Thus, if Sartre had
conducted another investigation of this type with somebody else, even
during the same period of his life, then the identity of the They might have
been something quite different. What is important is not the identity of
Sartre himself, but his effort to shape thoughts with another person and
draw ethical conclusions from the process. Much like a jazz ensemble
where a lead saxophonist plays notes that only sound pleasant in relation
to the backing music played by musicians with different ideas, Sartre's
statements take on religious overtones because he is trying to think with
Levy and not against him. 33 To extend this music analogy a bit further, we
might say that Sartre and L£vy have decided to play in a common key.
They improvise off one another, but like a jazz group they do so with the
hope that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts and that a They
will become manifest before the audience. Thought of in this way, Hope
Now is simultaneously a testament to, and an attack upon, the notion of
authorship. In Derridean terms, we might say that the text deconstructs
itself The question then becomes: should we therefore throw out Sartre's
distinction between literature and philosophy altogether? For my part, I
find Sartre's adamant separation of philosophy and literature highly
problematic, and indeed one aim of this essay has been to show that Hope
31 Sartre, 498-502.
32 Ibid., 495.
33 1 am using jazz as an example very deliberately. Thomas Larson has suggested
five guidelines for defining jazz: 1) Improvisation, 2) Rhythm, 3) Dissonance, 4)
Jazz Interpretation, and 5) Interaction. With the exception of point 4, which is
necessarily specific to jazz, I think we find all of these elements in one form of
another in Hope Now. For those who think analogically, a close attention to the
presence of these almost musical elements in Hope Now can yield some very
interesting observations and comparisons, (see Larson, History and Tradition of
Jazz, 3).