Sartre's second century

168 Chapter Eleven
Now destabilises his distinction. Notwithstanding, Sartre's work on the
imaginary, particularly his thoughts on the types of consciousness
involved in reading different kinds of texts, remains quite helpful. Sartre's
philosophy provides a way of accounting for our immediate experiences of
pre-deconstructed texts. Our experience watching a play or reading a
novel is certainly not the same as our experience reading a philosophical
treatise or, for that matter, skimming over the back of a cereal box. I
contend that there is no inconsistency in appreciating these differences or
in constructing basic categories such as "philosophy" and "literature" that
correspond to our immediate experiences while, nonetheless, also holding
that these very categories ultimately fail, in the final analysis, on account
of their internal auto-deconstructive logic
For people who are familiar with Sartre's general philosophical
positions, many of his statements in Hope Now will come as a surprise.
But surprise is only a bad thing if our goal is to ascertain the "true Sartre".
If we start off knowing full well that such a project is doomed to fail and
that only a metastable They can be found in the text, then the element of
surprise becomes extremely useful. These moments of surprise break up
the flow of reading and, as in the case of a novel, allow the latent images
of the text to rise to the surface. Furthermore, one of the lessons of Hope
Now may be that ethical collaboration is necessarily disconcerting, and so
it is exactly the disconcerting parts of the text that we should examine. We
should ask questions such as: what surprising vocabulary do they use and
how does it stretch our normal understanding of Sartre's philosophy?
What do Sartrean ideas look like in Jewish clothing and vice-versa? How
far will the two interlocutors go in order to think with one another?
These are literary considerations. We must recognise that there is a
stylistic ambition to Hope Now. In this work of philosophy, a word does
not mean one thing only. How, then, do we reconcile Hope Now's overt
stylistic ambition with Sartre's emphatic assertion, only a few years prior,
that he had never had a stylistic conception of philosophy? 34 We could
submit that Sartre simply failed to meet his own requirements, but we
could also, more interestingly, hypothesise that something in his final
years (perhaps his blindness, his inability to do philosophy alone, etc.) led
him to conceive of philosophical inquiry in a fundamentally different way.
Sartre suggests as much at one point in the dialogue by telling Levy that he
could only have considered their collaboration in his old age. 35
See notes 6 and 7, above.
Hope Now, 73.