THE LAST WORDS OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Lévy, Benny
Shortly before his death last April, Jean-Paul Sartre gave an extended interview– really, a full-scale review of his intellectual career to a young friend, Benny Levy. This interview appeared in...
...It is this end, which is social as well as religious and which only the Jewish people — B. L.: It's clear why you could be receptive to the idea of the end of human prehistory, which you found in Marx...
...S.: The Jewish end has none of that...
...It means something very precise...
...B. L.: Is it a lesser evil...
...S.: I think that the total, truly thinkable experience will exist when the goal that all men have within them—the creation of the human being—will have been achieved...
...Levy is apparently referring here to the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple, published in the '60s in Paris, which—like the paper of the same name issued by Marat during the French Revolution—tried to imitate or compete with Le Pere Duchesne, an ultraleft paper issued during the French Revolution by Herbert and notable for its extreme violence and cynicism of tone...
...As the Mexican writer Octavio Paz says in his article about Sartre (p...
...and so, when the action comes to its conclusion, it differs a little from what it was at the outset...
...S.: There was no unified policy, but one does feel that throughout the 19th and in the early 20th centuries men of the left, in general, put their faith in political and human principles and through them they conceived their ideas and actions...
...It's obvious that in 20 or 30 years the big parties of the left will no longer be what they are now...
...You have always made that a basic in a writer's work...
...That is the sacred moment, and that of fraternity/terror, too...
...I have always thought that everyone lives with a measure of hope, which is to say he believes that something he has undertaken or that matters to him or that concerns the social group to which he belongs is in the process of being achieved, and will be propitious for him as it will be for the people who make up his community...
...S.: I mean that it could show what a man is...
...J.-P...
...Jupiter had connections with men, he slept with women—in a word, he changed himself into a man when he wished to, so there's nothing new about that...
...J.-P...
...It came principally from Heidegger...
...no, "son of violence...
...I said that they never attain exactly what they seek, that there is always a failure...
...J.-P...
...It's one of the notions people were making use of, but to me it meant nothing...
...Marx set those principles forth in Das Kapital, and presented them in his writings in general...
...B. L.: One possible result of this fellowtraveling business: Romain Rolland arrives in the Soviet Union during the '30s—the period of forced collectivization, the liquidation of the peasants by the hundreds of thousands, a darkness of spirit—and he declares, "I have seen in the Soviet Union a remarkable enlarging of the rights of the human spirit...
...One must find out whether today people are living in democracy and democratically, and find out what they mean by "democracy...
...S.: Exactly...
...B.L.: At the end of Being and Nothingness, you believe you're opening up a new perspective on morality, but then what follows is not a book on morality but your own dispute with Marxism...
...Then the war did end...
...It was the notion that something was lacking in my personal self-knowledge, but that this something could not cause me to despair...
...Absolutely not...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...He actually means that men are brothers...
...B. L.: Before 1939, you were telling us that humanism is so much shit...
...J.-P...
...That is, a society in which the relationships among human beings are moral...
...Ours is now a planet that belongs, on the one hand, to the poor who are extremely poor, who die of hunger, and, on the other hand, to the small number of rich people who are beginning to be less rich but who, even so, are still comfortably off...
...Somehow, the insurgent has need of his adversary, the way two lips need each other in order to part...
...What did this unity of the left consist of in 1914...
...And that's exactly what we were denying when we used to shout "Elections are a trap for morons...
...S.: Marxism had the leftist principles of Marxism...
...We are looking for something else...
...An action must be carried out, but there comes a moment when, because of pressure emanating from other actions outside, the original action may be able to follow its course only by slightly modifying itself—which is to say, if those who execute it will accept competition from other persons or other actions of a different origin, by accepting compromises...
...Sure, inasmuch as the soldier is identified with the obstacle to be removed, he's a misguided brother, not a real brother...
...I found it very disagreeable to be against my country...
...as a result, they are all brothers...
...There is not anything that concerns human beings...
...It is the moral modality...
...S.: The fact that there is a morality...
...B. L.: Funny, since you don't really like Kierkegaard...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...S.: If I saw, and wished, that the Algerians might be less violent than they were, I would have been compromising with other Frenchmen...
...But at the same time, you were assuring me that if that war were won, I would discover what I dreamed of discovering—that I am a man, not a Jew...
...One or two may even have given up the ghost...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...S.: At the outset, yes, it was...
...S.: Absolutely, because this proves that there is a real unity of Jews in historical time, and that real unity is not due to their being gathered together on a historical territory but to actions and writings and bonds 419 that do not derive from the idea of a homeland, or haven't done so for some years...
...And it's true: in a sense, everything is possible...
...Is it the adversary who confers unity, or has one acquired a positive unification...
...As Kantian morality would have it, intention is primary...
...On the other hand, there's a tendency toward a rebirth of the cold war...
...J.-P...
...S.: I know that well enough, but since the unknown reader is the person for whom we are writing...
...Well, let's not go back over this since it has nothing to do with what we are looking for...
...J.-P...
...In the 18th century, and during the Rev410 olution, life was not broken up as it is today...
...J.-P...
...By obligation I mean that at every moment in which I am aware of no matter what and in which I do no matter what, there exists a kind of requisition that extends beyond the immediate reality and makes the action I wish to take include a kind of inner restraint, which is a dimension of my conscience...
...B. L.: It used to be freedom that was required, now it's "dependence...
...It is other people who are my old age...
...In a certain sense it was myth, no doubt about it, but it was also truth...
...they see me, they say "this nice old fellow," and they're kind because soon I'll be dying and so they're respectful, and so on...
...A cafe waiter, a public leader—Hitler or Stalin—a Parisian drunk, a Marxist revolutionary militant, and Jean-Paul Sartre—all these people, it seems, have this much in common: while they all assign themselves goals, all of them fail...
...I see that in many philosophers, in connection with despair or any other philosophical idea...
...It comes to tempt one constantly, especially when one is old and so one thinks, "Well, anyhow, I'm going to die in five years at the outside"—actually, I am thinking in terms of ten years, but it could be five...
...There's a party that calls itself the Communist party and people vote for it in the normal course of events, the way one would vote for any other party...
...Contrary to the Christian concept, they—the Jewish dead—have no existence other than that of the grave, but they will be reborn as living beings in this new world...
...it doesn't conjure away the category of "all," without which "fraternity" is in danger of no longer meaning anything...
...I talked about it because it was fashionable...
...I saw how they were misled, how something was a total failure even when they believed they had succeeded...
...I've taken pains to look for what the inner reality of the Jew could be...
...Thousands of years ago, the initial social division was the clan, which was distinguished by its totem...
...How can the mind avoid stumbling into mythology when the problem is getting to the essential of how to be together—that is, how to practice fraternity...
...It wasn't any double game...
...They have a common origin and, in future, a common end...
...Militant stupidity was at issue...
...He doesn't even succeed in thinking what he wants to think, or in feeling what he wants to feel...
...S.: Because the end-goal of the non-Jews with whom I identify is revolution...
...The Jew thinks that the end of this world and the rising up of the other will mean the emergence of the ethical existence of men who live for one another...
...S.: It's his metaphysical character, which has come from his religion...
...Leninism is a good case in point...
...Today it is cold...
...There was a collective responsibility...
...Always, even when not talking about it, I thought of hope as one way to achieve the goal I set myself...
...You're describing, in fact, the very movement that led leftism to its death...
...That's the marvellous revelation that comes at the beginning of an uprising...
...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...
...So, to be old is nothing that, in and of itself, teaches me anything...
...As a result, I have a much broader view of Jewish concerns...
...That distinction of Marx's about superstructures is a fine bit of work, but it's utterly false, because the primary relationship—individual to individual—is something else again, and that is what we must discover now...
...I also thought that one had to look elsewhere, which is what I am doing now...
...We know that street demonstrations have less and less impact...
...So I wanted to take it into account in my own philosophy...
...It was because in the book the reality of the Jew is lacking...
...What's more, I haven't written the second volume...
...S.: It's true that I thought well of it, if less so than you appear to think I did...
...It's not a question of denying the nastiness, the shit, the blood...
...You felt it that way, and I think other people may have taken it in the same way...
...You must admit that it's amazing to hear you — J.-P...
...The colons never envisaged a solution that could have been acceptable to the Algerians...
...What's changed...
...B. L.: Let's take an example—Jean-Paul Sartre...
...S.: Yes, but parties that used to claim they were leftist suddenly no longer do...
...J.-P...
...But perhaps I have been too rigid...
...if I am in need, you give to me, and if you are in need I give to you—that is the future of morality...
...B. L.: From this point of view, the present intellectual moment presents a danger...
...What does the institution known as the vote mean, for example...
...Those who go to the polls come from the same neighborhood, sometimes from the same family...
...I'll try to explain what I mean presently...
...B. L.: Let's go back, if you don't mind, to your arguments with the revolutionaries...
...No, my question is less broad: Can violence really have the redemptive role you invested it with at that time...
...Their solution is, in some cases, one means of securing a true rapport among men...
...he comes as do I from, let's say, mother-humanity, from motherearth, as Socrates said, or from mother — B. L.: What is this mother, humanity, earth...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: Yes...
...And, as I said to you, I do not think that this hope is a lyrical illusion...
...S.: I'm no longer of that opinion...
...420 B. L.: Can you put that more exactly...
...B. L.: Yes...
...But there is an exchange that no doubt I could not have dreamed of making except when I grew old...
...B.L.: This is very important...
...That's understood...
...But who's died...
...He was a fellow traveler because there was a Party...
...yet little by little, we see that they are pursuing very different goals...
...Their new government is on the right, although for years Sweden stood to the left...
...B. L.: The question is, Does one come to know brotherhood through the labor that consists in killing one's enemy...
...EDS...
...It is not the relationship of equality...
...B. L.: It's the presence of the unknown reader that distorts it...
...B. L.: ' Right...
...It is finality that is to reunite humanity in the end...
...B. L.: Is that true of anguish, too...
...S.: My idea was indeed my own idea, but the heading I put it underdespair— was alien to me...
...B. L.: But, in order to construct this system of practical tactics, you were obliged to refer to some configuration of the ultimate aim of history...
...B. L.: Why is fraternity the primary relationship...
...S.: We non-Jews are searching for an ethic, too...
...It was just the reverse...
...This is what one must try to study...
...B. L.: Neither of the two definitions you proposed is satisfactory, obviously...
...J.-P...
...Morality is indispensable, for it signifies that men or submen have a future based on principles of common action, while simultaneously there is shaping up around them a future based on materiality—which means, basically, on scarcity...
...So, as it turned out, you were extremely useful...
...B. L.: How does it happen that some intellectuals had a need to cling, a need to find a support, in that garbage...
...Nor am I asking you, Is violence necessary on certain occasions...
...But to me that is not the essential thing...
...Which is to say the relationship between a man and his neighbor in a society in which they are brothers is, first of all, affective/ practical...
...That's the very best way to produce a stupid idea...
...J.-P...
...They no longer suffer certain restraints but they will find others elsewhere to replace them—as in Algeria...
...And that, perhaps, is one of my remaining naivetes...
...Fraternity first appears at the end of a long maturation, the birth of a relationship lived as a human experience...
...Therefore, a theme of this kind can give rise to a humanist statement...
...It should be looked into a little more closely...
...B. L.: You used to say, This fraternal love [of the Algerian rebels] is the opposite of the hatred they feel for us...
...Their common origin and end—that's what constitutes their fraternity...
...There was something else that mattered a great deal: you began to think about philosophy when you were fifteen, starting with my books, and you remember them very well...
...I do not consider that there is such a thing as the power of the people...
...B. L.: In your early works, you were already characterizing conscience as moral: freedom was the sole source of merit...
...In other words, what is the relationship among the different individuals who go to drop their ballots into the ballot boxes when what will emerge from the voting is a constitution, or a law—in a word, a certain way of being "all," as you put it...
...S.: We're not falling into the trap: all men are brothers in the clan inasmuch as they are born of the same woman, who is represented by the totem...
...J.-P...
...Such is the tranquil despair of an old man who will die in that despair...
...I have always rejected that kind of humanism, and I reject it still...
...S.: Which is a third moment...
...Violence that one could call just, the violence of the colonized against the colonizer...
...So there's something that doesn't entirely jibe with what you're saying...
...In 1975, I was still the same man who had been stirred by May '68 and who, basically, was trying to associate his ideas with those of the Sixty-eighters without too many conflicts...
...S.: No...
...B. L.: You told me one day—apropos of your Introduction of The Wretched of the Earth—that you wrote a first draft and then, systematically, revised the style of your Introduction to reinforce the violence in Fanon's book...
...If we maintain that this or that action must be radical, that it must be carried out to the very end, and if we fail to take into account the fact that an action always takes place in the context of other actions that naturally are going to modify it, we are talking nonsense...
...B. L.: Are people brothers inasmuch as they are the children of violence...
...B. L.: Verbal violence as national selfflagellation...
...I thought that what you could say to modify an idea coming from me, your objections or your having another way of seeing the idea, and so forth—I thought that this was the essential thing, essential because it placed me in a new position, no longer facing an imagined public behind a sheet of paper, which is how it had always been for me, but facing the actual reactions that my ideas must arouse...
...I think that, to begin with, we must take the term as it is popularly understood, and examine the idea of democracy in its political form, because that is the simplest...
...Now, you offer elements that should suffice: date of birth, 1792...
...In a word, the other is always there, and is conditioning me and my response, which is not only my own response but also a response that others have conditioned from the moment of my birth—and that is a response of a moral nature...
...In that sense, we are brothers...
...Before 1941, the left was more of a great mass movement, with a few men who could provide leadership at a given moment but who were not yet party bosses...
...All right, there were times when the first vote was a hot vote...
...If, on the contrary, I take society as being the result of a bond among people that's more fundamental than politics, then I take it that people should have, or can have, or do have a primary relationship, which is that of fraternity...
...The first is not, since you abandoned it for the second, and the second is not, since, if I may say so, our period is abandoning it...
...S.: I'm not saying a fellow traveler is perfect...
...S.: Absolutely...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...Before that, I was acquainted with some, of course, but I had no close ties with Jews...
...There will be immense economic problems, of course, but, quite contrary to what Marx and the Marxists claim, they are not the essential problems...
...J.-P...
...S.: Because it was a question of finding a future for society...
...BENNY LEVY: For some time now you've been questioning yourself about hope and despair...
...B. L.: That's hitting the bull's eye...
...Therefore, to say that the intention is radical is to say that it envisages a radical goal...
...France is something that is real for me...
...Of necessity, hope is deceived...
...We saw that one had to think of the human assembly in the context of an absence of political power...
...S.: I think that the idea of immortality I often indulged in when I was writing was a reverie...
...If we reject radicalism, we ourselves contribute in no small way to the death of the left...
...Let's see what is crumbling about the image of 1793...
...J.-P...
...they have long shared their ideas...
...For example, why the exaltation of violence in your Introduction to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth...
...B. L.: You said to me once, "I've talked about despair, but that's bunk...
...In any case, it is an important document in contemporary intellectual life.—I.H...
...Workers who have established themselves in the city, inhabit the same neighborhood, who in a general way do the same kinds of work, and who will go to the polls...
...S.: The finality—to which every Jew is more or less consciously inclined...
...And hope is bound to this absolute goal as, it must be added, is failure, in the sense that true failure is related only to this goal...
...S.: The Resistance fighters who were blowing up railroad cars and the people who were writing were one and the same...
...This Jew knows that he is threatened when a mob starts to think of itself as a mystical body...
...So there is no reason to appeal to mythology, which is always of the past...
...For example, the great event that changed the life of the Jewsconsiderably— and that made them people who, in general, suffered as exiles or martyrs was the advent of Christianity...
...Not a patsy, necessarily, although in certain circumstances he could be...
...they've merely picked it up from other people...
...The party is the death of the left...
...Once you put the law in parentheses, or bracket it, you prepare the way for the abolition of all law...
...B. L.: But you build it up so...
...they bear my mark alone...
...And please note, I didn't think that at the time...
...S.: Because Gustave Flaubert gave me much more information than a Jew does...
...What is it that is collapsing...
...You see, my books have failed...
...This does not mean that the action must necessarily achieve its aim, but that it must present itself as the achieving of a goal posited in the future...
...Either it was an abomination, which is to say my ideas were being diluted by another person...
...There was a people under the old regime, and in 1793...
...But we must not think of this intention in terms of the schema of radicalization, of show-of-hands sovereignty, of direct participatory democracy as opposed to fraudulent representative government—no...
...How does it happen that this need finally led you and many others to cling to the Stalinist rock...
...Ergo, it becomes obligatory to understand the idea, to restore its meaning...
...That is the difference...
...You were just a fellow traveler...
...J.-P...
...S.: The whole has worked out quite well...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...But the fact remains that, in principle, the thinking in Search for a Method tends to maintain that there is an ultimate goal...
...Whence, of course, his failure...
...More important for me was the idea of failure...
...S.: Yes, intimately...
...In the past, to vote for the Communists was looked up on as a revolutionary act...
...Man set himself goals, yes, but basically the only goal he desired was to be God, to be what you called the cause of himself...
...So there were two monotheisms, and the second monotheism—although it took its inspiration from the first and took the Bible as its holy book—was nonetheless instantly hostile to the Jewish people...
...The Jew believes that he has a destiny...
...And it has tried to do so by relying simultaneously on that sentimental togetherness of the 19th century and on the very minor currents of leftist opposition running through the 20th...
...It must be that the two things are intimately connected...
...S.: At the time I was seeing a lot of Fanon, who was deeply violent, and that certainly accounted for the style of his book...
...Their vote is nothing but the expression of all that communality...
...B. L.: You stated that a human action projects a goal into the future, but that this transcendant movement must end in failure...
...There still are such times—for example, right after the Pink Revolution in Portugal, where they hadn't voted for almost 40 years...
...S.: Yes, but only roughly...
...B. L.: Yes, but the Jew isn't waiting for the end of this world as you've described it to accept his responsibility for an ethical system...
...And if, in spite of everything, I believed that the Nazi might would recede and that the war would end, it was because of something in me—hope—which was never routed for long...
...We must try to 411 study what it means to be a person, and to be capable—together with one's neighbor who is also a person—of producing laws, institutions, of making of oneself, via the vote, a citizen...
...But what "society" means here will have to be clearly defined...
...B. L.: At the time of Anti-Semite and Jew, you thought that the Jew—let's put this provocatively—was an invention of anti-Semites...
...Then the international scene became what it is now—that is, a triumph for rightist ideas, at least on the part of governments, in almost all nations...
...The fact remains, of course, that a displacement occurs in the course of the insurrectional process: it was very apparent in [the Paris student revolt of] 1968 that the significance of the event was no longer the emerging, the birth, but rather the confrontation—the "tearing," in both the social and erotic sense Georges Bataille meant...
...417 B. L.: I'm talking, of course, about the Jew who has continued to be a Jew...
...Therefore, people have an initial relationship among themselves that exists prior to the vote and without which the vote would be impossible...
...On my own account I have never felt despair, nor envisaged despair as something characteristic of me...
...We are not complete human beings...
...And let me tell you that the search for the true social aims of morality goes together with the idea of finding a guiding principle for the left of today...
...Today I think everything that passes for a conscience is necessarily linked to, and often is even engendered by, the presence of another—even at a given moment by the absence of that other but, in all events, by the existence of an other...
...J.-P...
...Everybody treats me like an old man...
...S.: According to me, yes...
...A person says simply, I'm for the left...
...And at that moment, the individuality of the woman is not at issue...
...S.: It is trans-historical...
...Essentially, morality is a matter of one person's relationship to another...
...JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: First, that although the leftist bloc always votes left, it has lost hope...
...J.-P...
...S.: I think you're not wrong...
...But what was registered on those ballots was a liaison of individuals among themselves...
...This is to say that what I have is yours, what you have is mine...
...J.-P...
...Early in their work they talk about an idea from hearsay, they give it importance...
...Because an old man never feels like an old man...
...BENNY LEVY: How would you account for the fact that in your work there is a profound inclination toward an ethic of violence...
...Fraternity is what human beings will be in relation to each other when through all our history they will be able to say of themselves that they are all bound to each other in feeling and in action...
...The only way I then saw to get quit of colonialism was violence...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: It's the same thing, isn't it...
...J.-P...
...In other words, they invent—without knowing that they are inventing-a creature that has engendered them all...
...To give a more effective meaning to the "all...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: You're including the Soviet Union among the nations with rightist ideas...
...What with this third world war that can explode one day, and the wretched hodgepodge of things our planet has become, despair has come back to tempt me with the idea that there is no end to it all, that there is no goal, that there are only little individual objectives for which one fights...
...J.-P...
...It is not doublethink, it's that I find every political party is, of necessity, stupid...
...Whether I was or wasn't blowing up railway tracks, everyone was up to his neck in the same business...
...And we see that what is common to all the groups is a more or less uncertain formulation of purpose, but not the goal itself...
...Modern man has hoped he could circumvent rules from below...
...J.-P, S.: No, but the family relationship is primary with respect to any other relationship...
...What I think is that when, at last, man truly and totally exists, his relations with his fellowman and his way of being in himself 403 will have the content of what one can call humanism...
...But has anyone stopped to ask himself what messianism, Hebraic messianism, is...
...It was the act for the sake of which one was politically involved, for which, in a way, one existed...
...Of course, I wasn't thinking clearly...
...One might simply ask oneself, What does that "all" mean...
...This constraint has something surreal about it inasmuch as it is not determining...
...B. L.: I must say, the fellow traveler has some weird intellectual habits...
...B. L.: It's functioned as a principle, as a point of reference...
...We used to criticize leftist parties for being election-oriented...
...J.-P...
...In short, I cannot know Jewish reality in depth, but I am able to see some principles, some beginnings of the roads that could lead me to it...
...B. L.: What do you mean, no...
...than in any other country...
...But in our discussion, one does not sense your true importance in what we are doing...
...S.: No, I do not think so...
...This is why, since I was twenty, I have loathed the mere notion of the political party...
...B. L.: Why did you move from necessary evil to — J.-P...
...Morality will have to do with the way in which men form their thoughts, their feelings — B. L.: Yes, but the Jew has thought that it is possible to go beyond the law—if the term can still be used innocently—go beyond it from above, not from below...
...B. L.: Your indictment of the idea of the political party is very ambiguous...
...I laugh at them...
...The term "Stalinism" is used today to signify no matter what...
...I think there is something in the very idea of fraternity that prevents one's developing the principle...
...The uprising is just one moment in the long labor of human unification, only one facet of the fraternal experience, say, a facet of our relationship to the mother...
...It is this reality—the self considering itself as self for the other, having a relationship with the other—that I call moral conscience...
...You shared their aims, you used to say...
...There were two absolutely opposed points of view that could lead only to violence...
...Obviously, you were saying aloud what many people are surely thinking to themselves...
...There is always less than there should be, less food to meet human needs, and fewer people who are engaged in producing that food...
...But there is a Jewish history, obviously...
...So, the mother, the mother you're talking to me about, thanks to a pious or a cynical lie, risks becoming the Earth in the Greek sense of the term, and can become Earth in the modern sense of the term—the nation...
...I say, the left is dead because the principles it habitually made use of were never recorded on paper or registered in people's minds...
...Because, in a party, ideas come from above, and affect what is thought below...
...On the other hand, he can distinguish between what in a revolutionary movement springs from fraternal truth and what comes from the sacred and terrorist threats...
...In another area, one does not know the connection between what people very often teach their children as morality for everyday life and morality in exceptional circumstances...
...S.: We now come to a contradiction I've not yet resolved, but I think I may through these conversations...
...J.-P...
...In any case, the history of a sovereign political entity that has its own territory and relations with other states like itself...
...It's a strange sort of notion, but the two of us share it as, for that matter, do we all...
...B. L.: In what way has this "we" been a factor in modifying your thinking, and why have you accepted a "we...
...J.-P...
...Human action is transcendant in the sense that it always aims at a future objective beyond the moment in which we conceive of the hope and try to realize it...
...B. L.: What is there about this that interests you...
...B. L.: What principle...
...S.: A book that never got finished...
...B. L.: A party—stupid in the sense in which you've defined it—and a fellow traveler, which is to say an intellectual who, as such, would have some idea of truth: the one plus the other adds up to something that has failed miserably, as you well know...
...It's important to know that you did not speak about hope, and that when you talked about despair it was, basically, not your own idea...
...So there I was, envisaging something that needed to be further developed...
...J.-P...
...Well, one can truly think of this kind of ethic as the ultimate goal of revolution through a kind of messianism...
...S.: I assumed that the evolution through action would be a series of failures from which something unforeseen and positive would emerge, something that was implicit in the failure but that had been overlooked by those who had hoped to succeed...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: But can't one take this difference as a point of departure...
...He led strikes, movements, and parliamentary action in the Chamber...
...Because what is dead there is the leftist rearguard...
...that is, of another religion with one god...
...J.-P...
...Mitterand and Rocard, for example...
...Is it a vision...
...S.: It is dependence, but not a dependence like slavery...
...S.: In a sense, yes, except that I don't believe the relationship of production is the primary one...
...It's Michelet and his account of July 14, 1789, it's the universal fraternity of Valles and the Communards...
...J.-P...
...I mean, for one thing, the electoral orientation of the leftist parties makes even the idea of a great and total change, the idea of revolution, impossible...
...That is a key philosophical notion of the '30s...
...Whereas we work out ideas together...
...God spoke to the Jew, the Jew heard His word, and the reality to emerge from all this was a first metaphysical liaison of Jewish man with the infinite...
...B. L.: Doesn't one detect a trace of doublethink here...
...Or, more exactly, it is morality...
...B. L.: For a long time you've been receptive to the idea that, basically, the individual is mandated...
...Ever since the formation of a left, around 1792, I'd say, and up through the 19th century these principles have always existed, people have believed in them, have been guided by them, but what's interesting is that they remain obscure...
...S.: When I was writing Anti-Semite and Jew, for me messianism was a meaningless idea...
...One must recognize that a political party does not possess truth, that it doesn't dream of any such thing...
...Every conscience must do what it does, not because what it does is so valid but, quite the contrary, because no matter what objective the conscience has, it presents itself as something in the nature of a requisition...
...B. L.: In Search for a Method, one does meet with failure, it's true, because every time one expects to encounter brotherhood one bumps into terror...
...From the moment there was confusion about the goal, confusion was inevitably going to ensue about the unity of end and means, and that confusion could have negative, even criminal consequences...
...B. L.: There's been no lack of spelling out...
...B. L.: Jean-Paul Sartre arrives in the Soviet Union in 1954, he makes a little official tour, and when he gets back home he declares in a big evening paper that there is more freedom in the U.S.S.R...
...But we should reject the false solution, which consists of yelling hot hot hot, down with warm...
...J.-P...
...in part, surely...
...It was necessary for me to see the Algerians as men who were mistreated, crucified by France, who were fighting against the French because the French were unjust...
...I know that I have not always said the same thing, and on this score you and I are at odds, for I believe that my contradictions are of little moment and that, contradictions notwithstanding, I have always held to a continuous line...
...S.: It was not Stalinism...
...It is closed off by the group...
...I'm not asking, Does violence exist or not...
...All in all, at the time of Being and Nothingness I saw despair merely as a lucid view of the human condition...
...One must assume there is a body of people who will struggle as one...
...flowering of this togetherness, in all its confusion, in the 19th century...
...There 409 was a flaw in that line of reasoning...
...he has been a monotheist, and that's what distinguished him from all the other ancient peoples who all had many gods, and that's what made the Jew autonomous and absolutely essential...
...It is the tendency one or more others have to break into the group, to crash the frontier that binds fraternity within it, which gives birth to violence, the very opposite of fraternity...
...From that time on, I have had a life that has not always been happy but has been strongly marked by altercations, causes to be defended with intellectual beliefs that sometimes threatened to give way to despair—as during the Korean War—but quickly recovered...
...S.: While I was reading Baron, I realized that the point of view I held at that earlier time would not have been shaken...
...S.: Yes, I need men who are joined together, because one unit alone or even several separate units will not be able to shake the social corpus and make it collapse...
...In any event, according to you there was no such thing as Jewish thought, no such thing as Jewish history...
...One would have had to conceive of Jewish history not only as a dissemination of Jews throughout the world but also as the unity of the Diaspora, the unity of dispersed Jews...
...Perhaps the answer to that must be: by not pushing it to the absolute test...
...406 11 Violence and Fraternity BENNY LEVY: You said recently that the left no longer exists...
...There are two approaches, and both are human but seem not to be compatible...
...The answer is on the tip of one's tongue, I think...
...B. L.: Let's talk plainly...
...otherwise, after all, I would have noticed the enormous contradiction...
...There are two men here—the difference in their ages matters little—to whom the history of philosophy and the history of my own thinking is well known, and who are associated in ajoint work about morality, a morality that will, furthermore, often be in contradiction with some ideas that I have had...
...B. L.: Don't forget that the Jew has a long experience with false messiahs...
...Doesn't that lead us to the following conclusion: the Jewish experience is essential to a rethinking of the revolution, and one must take the full measure of that experience...
...S.: I think so...
...B. L.: But taking off from what...
...J.-P...
...The vote, I agree, started out being hot...
...Yet, through all that, they will be trying to draw nearer to being the Active Citizen, who still is as far removed from Man as he is from the colonized subman of yesterday...
...J.-P...
...At that point, one notes how hatred is almost totally absent...
...In the case of the Algerians, they were not the same...
...Let's try, all the same, to specify where things are today as against that concept incarnated in 1792...
...I was confronting a world of suffering, of evil, and of despair, But I rejected the possibility of falling into despair, as was happening so often around me, and I allied myself with friends who were not despairing, who believed that you could fight for an auspicious future although there was no possibility whatever that this future might exist...
...In other words, the fact that for others I am old is to be profoundly old...
...That I would have to accept you in my meditation, even—in other words, accept our meditating together...
...but, basically, they're all brothers...
...And it is not what I want...
...J.-P...
...S.: We have said it, but we must recognize that we were wrong...
...And I would like to remind you of something you wrote in your Introduction to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth [also published as The Damned...
...In other words, our goal is to arrive at a genuine constituted body in which each person will be a human being and in which collectivities will be no less human...
...And in line with this reasoning, submen were regarded as raw material from which the new whole and total man might be built...
...It was the matter of a moment...
...The Jewish religion implies that this world will end and, at the same moment, another world will appear—another world that will be made of this one but in which things will be differently arranged...
...But in your writing about the Resistance, you did not exalt violence — J.-P...
...It is characteristic of morality that while an action seems to be subtly enjoined upon us, it also offers itself as capable of not being done...
...Very different, of course, but of the same kind with respect to certain basic matters...
...We are living beings who contend among ourselves to establish human relations and arrive at a definition of what is human...
...J.-P...
...That's my experience as a fellow traveler...
...B. L.: And you have put distance between yourself and that tradition by disengaging yourself from the definition of the self-caused being, the man-God...
...S.: Precisely because it has no Marxist aspect...
...Consider power the absolute evil, and steer clear of it...
...B. L.: But to consider the whole of it in relation to your decision...
...Later, I adopted my daughter, who is Jewish—Arlette—and as a result we were often living together, and I know how she thinks...
...S.: In humanism, I've hated a certain way man has of admiring himself...
...S.: Well, I haven't entirely broken away from this idea of failure, although it is at variance with the very idea of hope...
...Nonetheless, their appeal was to brotherhood...
...J.-P...
...But in all truth, I still don't see clearly the real relationship between violence and fraternity...
...And men have specific needs, which their external situation does not allow them to satisfy...
...The attempt to go back to the time before the concept of the political party, to return to the earlier 1793 scene—and that's what is dead...
...But an intellectual needs to find something to cling to and, like many other people, I found that...
...Today one can no longer act as people did in '68, going on strike or staging a street demonstration...
...Power was in the street—not in the National Assembly, not at Versailles, not in the Tuileries...
...B.L.: Let's go back to this idea about the intention that becomes the very doorway to radicalism...
...S.: Because at the time I said there was no Jewish history I was thinking of history in a certain well-defined sense—the history of France, the history of Germany, the history of America, of the United States...
...Doesn't this backtracking smack a little of mythology...
...you assumed that your earlier conclusion was unjust and, in order to invest in the future, you joined the group...
...Or does one discover fraternity first and then, when one runs into obstacles that cannot be surmounted by other means, one resorts to the tactic of forced growth...
...And that is enough...
...So, the word "fraternity," which has been used to characterize the confused and emotional ensemble we term the "left," contains an element we must pick up, and that is the fraternal intention, the suggestion of a genuine experience of fraternity...
...S.: Without ever forgetting failure...
...423), it is a "disjointed, moving text .....marked by a "quiet hope" that "in spite of the disasters of our era, some day men will reconquer fraternity (or will conquer it for the first time...
...S.: I'd say, a person who's not bad...
...The first time was in the years from 1939 to 1945...
...But this isn't enough...
...S.: I've never taken Socrates' phrase to be a pious lie, really...
...No, he elaborated his own ideas without holding himself accountable to anyone...
...It was not a matter of two enclosed "wholes" that made one wonder how they ever got in contact with each other since both were closed...
...it provides the 416 strength, the almost miraculous strength of insurrection...
...J.-P...
...But we know that now the vote is going from hot to cold...
...And, of course, leftism wanted to identify itself with the sansculottes and 1793 radicalism...
...In such mass movements, the notion of fellow traveler no longer makes any sense...
...One can perfectly well say no to political parties and effect a pure and simple retreat like the one you outline...
...Experience makes it impossible for him to see the plebe as a simple example of resistance...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: The enemy was brutal during the Occupation...
...This leads to absolute pessimism, which is something I did not claim in Being and Nothingness but am obliged to acknowledge today...
...Therefore, in doing it one is making a choice, and it is a free choice...
...S.: You're forgetting that the other—the enemy—is constantly on the move, and that this is what provokes the way in which each of the two moments you described manifests itself...
...I have not said all I wanted to say, nor said it in the way I wanted...
...human beings have no relationship with each other except through their work and for the fact that here in France every five or six or seven years they perform one very specific act, which is to get a piece of paper with some names on it, [mark it] and drop it in a box...
...I had not determined what I am trying today to determine: What is the dependence of each individual with respect to all other individuals...
...Of course, I knew grief or boredom or poverty, but — B. L.: Poverty...
...If you like, revolutionaries from '92 on until the Commune were brothers yet at the same time they were not brothers...
...In the beginning, for the demonstrator, the riot policeman or the ordinary solider—no matter which—is practically a brother, like a fellow demonstrator...
...B. L.: Be careful of the word "provokes...
...That something would be a series of partial, local successes, decipherable only with difficulty by the people who were doing the work and who, moving from failure to failure, would nonetheless be achieving a certain progress...
...This is what will give all we have done and will do a kind of immortality...
...Yet this response seems to me untrue...
...Originally, people shared awareness of that, you might say, but now it is a gift that has to be rediscovered...
...All this indicates that the unity of the left, which was already seriously threatened as early as 1920 by the existence of the Communist party, now is wrecked...
...S.: I have never known anguish...
...So what does it mean to say, The left no longer exists...
...J.-P...
...Has he not experienced the perversion we're now trying to criticize...
...First of all, he cannot help but recognize the messianic idea, which is at the source of the revolutionary idea, all its perversions notwithstanding...
...I now think there is a Jewish reality beyond the ravages anti-Semitism has inflicted on Jews...
...The death of leftism is the key to that...
...A plural thought enjoys no preferential reception...
...There have always been categories of people from whom other people have wished to withhold the right to vote...
...The attitude of other people makes me understand what old age means to the person who looks at it from the outside, but I don't feel my age...
...So, if you agree, we will say that the essence of radicalism lies not so much in the end pursued as in the intention to pursue the end...
...It cannot be reprinted without permission...
...What our collaboration has brought to me is this: plural thoughts, which we have formed together and which constantly yield me something new although I am a priori in agreement with their content...
...S.: Develop your idea further...
...S.: Actually, the same thing has happened to me twice in my life—to be tempted by despair, I mean...
...JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: Not in the same way...
...But in any case, the essential thing is the formation of this fraternity...
...B. L.: Tell me, how does the relationship to a single god, this destiny of Israel, matter to you...
...No, the flaw is in the goal, the worm in the fruit...
...They are united, they say the same things...
...But fraternity is not so simple to define...
...It is through the search for this definition, through this action that will be truly human—beyond humanism, of course—that we will be able to consider our striving and our goal...
...yet we must try to live with both at the same time...
...It was an immediate relationship that the Jews had with what they used to call YHWH, Yahweh, which is to say, God...
...J.-P...
...What does that mean...
...J.-P...
...Sometimes we are not in agreement...
...You could do such a thing...
...I mean, it is not an end that is defined in terms of the present situation and then projected into the future, one that will be attained by stages through the development of certain facts of existence today...
...this is the moral relationship...
...S.: Yes...
...But he doesn't manage to say it right, to define the kind of truth that the statement must be made to convey...
...If you like, I saw it...
...or it was something new, which is to say a thought was taking shape between two people...
...but however that may be, there is a slow movement in History whereby man is becoming aware of his fellowman...
...the other is there if only in the form of an object—if I am alone in my bedroom, then in the form of some reminder: a letter lying on the bureau, a lamp that has been made by someone, a painting that has been painted by someone else...
...And then what...
...Most of the significant things about the Jews are written in foreign languages— especially in Hebrew, sometimes in Yiddish...
...B. L.: Why were you able to do it with Gustave Flaubert...
...So, the idea that insurrectional unity comes about thanks to confrontation, to the fact that people become brothers against the Other, the compact enemy, is obviously going to bring about the radicalization we were criticizing a moment ago, a kind of Machiavellianism of the insurgent who will try to provoke the enemy in order to strengthen the corps of insurgent brothers...
...The first thing is to define clearly what trans-historical means, and to specify what goal we can talk of since, historically, seizing power used to be a goal: in a given society, at a given moment of its development, one seized power, and that meant that some very specific people by the name, say, of Louis XVI or Robespierre got their comeuppance...
...But don't stop at 1914...
...B. L.: But it does...
...Simply, radicalism derives from the intention itself, not from the goal as such...
...The left was at once diverse and united—it had a principle...
...404 Are there moments when one is not moral without, for all that, being immoral...
...With respect to the vote, it is primary, yes...
...For me, this is the beginning of morality...
...To restore meaning, if possible, to the idea of revolution, it is essential to settle the fraternity/terror business once and for all...
...S.: The word "democracy" has a meaning that has become obsolete...
...J.-P...
...Ergo, we must restudy the problem that lies at the root of the false reaction—namely, the problem of democracy...
...Intentions are different because behind what appears to be their common meaning, the different groups see their own truths...
...S.: Unquestionably...
...he has simply to learn it...
...There are some factions that are tearing each other apart, there is inertia, the inability to resolve long-concealed problems, and at this point one uses the weapon par excellence—hatred for the Other—like the hatred for the aristocrats in 1789, or for Americans today in Iran...
...Understand me, now...
...J.-P...
...Of course, one thinks of what we have all learned from July 14th [Bastille Day, July 14, 1789...
...That is my tradition, I have no other...
...The fundamental question is,What is the nature of the goal...
...S.: No, I believe not, because what I mean is that the myth is invented by the people in the group only in order to account for a relationship among them—the group relationship...
...Have you changed your way of thinking...
...J.-P...
...It seemed to me that what he was saying could have real meaning for other people...
...Otherwise, one is saying "fraternity" but could as well say something else, no matter what—equality, for example...
...Anyway, that's all finished...
...People no longer know clearly whether they are brothers or are brothers only inasmuch as they are attacking a soldier...
...S.: Through man...
...Afterward, I got to know Claude Lanzmann, who became one of my very good friends...
...This choice of choices, which was yours—has it been a failure...
...S.: Taking off from nothing, taking off from anti-Semitism, which I wanted to combat...
...B. L.: Of course...
...I think I have done just about what I was capable of doing, and it's worth whatever it's worth...
...J.-P...
...You yourself put it more or less in those words...
...B. L.: When one is confronted with the difficulty of simultaneously conceiving and living the failure and its implications, with all the risks of losing one's way, one might better abandon the idea of a goal — J.-P...
...they are brothers in that they all have killed...
...Etymologically, it means government by the people...
...What has always been the ultimate goal of insurgents or revolutionaries, the thing they wanted without being able to name it, without perceiving it clearly...
...Beyond all such things, everyone has a goal that I call transcendant or absolute, and all the practical goals have meaning only in relation to this goal...
...B.L.: Our problem today is simple...
...But at this moment, I think neither the one thing nor the other...
...B. L.: Why for other ends...
...J.-P...
...But if, as we tend today to express it, the goal—by which I mean the radical perspective of the intention—moves throughout history —. J.-P...
...Universal suffrage has at least one merit—it points to a numerical unity, a complete series...
...What was there was the fact that every citizen, every voter lives in a milieu, lives in a group together with other people who at least partly condition him—for example, in the area of ideas from outside that introduce him to large general theories that he will be expressing in his vote...
...It was clean, it was moral—and we'll later see what that means...
...I was coming to the end of my youth, I was not active politically, I was busy and concerned with literature, I was living among friends, I was happy, my life lay before me...
...Because originally they felt they were brothers...
...My personal sense of history deprives me of them...
...It was then that I felt the nonexistence, the daily banality that was threatening every Frenchman and was threatening me...
...My question had to do with a relationship of each to each, which preceded the creation of the closed whole or even prevented the "wholes" from ever being closed...
...S.: I was looking for it, but I was looking for something else, too...
...S.: I don't say no...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...S.: A moral system requires that the idea of fraternity be extended until it becomes the manifest, unique relationship among all human beings, this being first of all a group relationship—appropriately, of small groups bound somehow to the idea of family...
...And then I met you, and we have worked together, and we also have had some time for being together in a more relaxed, daily-living kind of way...
...The men whom we can prefigure through our best action...
...They are universal, which is to say that each person who reads them will formulate these thoughts, well or badly, for himself...
...So in this idea of a freedom that is mandated, but one does not know mandated by whom, are you sketching the idea of a requisitioned freedom...
...J.-P...
...But please note that despair is hardly mentioned in my work from then on...
...B. L.: What do you mean today by "morality...
...We're not all offspring of the same father...
...Now let's add it all up...
...The definitions Marxism gave — J.-P...
...S.: Yes, and I think that the morality we envisage is not connected with the Christian tradition...
...When there is only a single author, an idea bears his imprint: one enters into his thought and circulates along paths that he has traced, although the thought is universal...
...However, I resist, and I shall, I know, die in hope...
...Yet we've had a lot of trouble challenging the idea of sovereignty by show of hands...
...B. L.: Let's talk about this need the intellectual has to cling...
...S.: I'm simply saying that the parties are done for...
...So you borrowed it from Marxism: the working class was charged with responsibility for completing human pre-history...
...That's what leftism has wanted, it has wanted to go back to before the Communist or Stalinist idea of a political party...
...B. L.: I was about to ask you...
...That's what the Self-Taught Man in Nausea was supposed to make clear...
...B. L.: You could perhaps have overcome that obstacle...
...I would like our discussion here to do two things—both outline a moral theory and find a true guiding principle for the left...
...Or is there nothing more than a triviality in this difference...
...Take it as a whole, and see what the relationship is between democracy and fraternity, which is the primary principle that established democracy and has always been part of it...
...That's what makes the demonstrator say, "Everything is possible...
...Must one deny power...
...Once the Jew was deprived of metaphysical and subjective characteristics, he could not exist as a Jew in my philosophy...
...J.-P...
...S.: What is not mythological but what is real is, I think, the relationship of you to me and of me to you...
...And in The Idiot of the Family[ your book on Flaubert] you added, quoting Kafka, "but one doesn't know by whom...
...One lives democratically and, in my view, today human beings should live in that way and in no other...
...I hope that others will endure...
...J.-P...
...And that's it...
...S.: Yes, insofar as that is possible...
...A plural thought has only one meaning, of course, but it is one that each person produces because he takes off from different preoccupations, and because he understands its structure by means of different examples...
...But there, precisely, is an example of good radicalism, of good radicalization: all the battles fought in the 19th century and for a part of the 20th to radicalize universal suffrage, to win true universality for the ballot...
...It must contribute the power of morality...
...B. L.: I understand...
...J.-P...
...The rules-and-prescriptions aspect of morality that prevails today will doubtless no longer exist—as has often been said, for that matter...
...Violence is here the midwife of history, as in Engels...
...One more thing is required: all those people must be made to believe that they are brothers, they must be made to believe that they are all sons of the same mother, and—well, let's say that this mother is Earth...
...B. L.: You have said that human action aims at a goal in the future, but you have immediately added that this action is futile...
...The point is, if I were to consider society as I viewed it in Search for a Method, I would claim that fraternity has little place in it...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: So, when we try to reject the idea of an association that simply may be based on a misunderstanding, we're looking instead for an association based on intentions...
...Does one then use this or that type of limited violence, without ethical finality, which comes from the experience of fraternity...
...B. L.: Be that as it may, one must really decide to give this principle a name, to describe this togetherness...
...In short, in all nations today the right is riding high...
...Whereas one would have had to conceive of history differently if one wanted to say that there is a Jewish history...
...it is the intention that must be radical...
...At the outset, this totally independent intellectual, who was not worrying his head about the Communist party, wrote Being and Nothingness, and he did not succeed in establishing hope, in providing a positive content to this transcendance that was projected toward future goals — J.-P...
...J.-P...
...I would have been recaptured by France again...
...On the contrary, insofar as hope is the relation of man to his goal—a relation that exists even if the goal is not attained—that is what remains most present in my thinking now...
...S.: Let's understand each other...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...When Marx used to go to discuss his doctrines with the German revolutionaries, he would talk with them, and they would take decisions together...
...In 1793, voting was not merely an isolated action in a person's life...
...And, for another thing, the insurrectional aspect of leftism has disappeared, too...
...B. L.: But how did you do it...
...B. L.: In our current experience, how can one say "fraternity" without resorting to mythology...
...In a way, one could even say that it was they who led the revolution...
...B. L.: Exactly...
...S.: It's not entirely the same thing...
...Didn't it make for a system of doublethink...
...At issue is the brotherhood of the insurgents of '93...
...At that moment, it will be possible to say that men will all be the products of a common origin, not because of the sex of mother or father but thanks to an ensemble of measures that will have been taken 413 over thousands of years and in the end produces human beings...
...Then there will be true fraternity...
...This is not coming through clearly in our conversation now because, as always when you are not completely alone with me, you stay rather in the background, so that what one sees in this exchange is an old man who has taken a very intelligent fellow to work with him but who is, even so, the essential figure...
...ergo, what truly is a human being is not yet established...
...But also the fact that the Jew has a destiny...
...What we must envisage and the goals we must look for in morality are certainly not the goals that Christianity offers...
...It's not simple...
...S.: No, but all the same I was influenced by him...
...In Being and Nothingness, my theory of others left the individual too independent...
...In fact, I was impressed because the Communist party called itself the party of the workers...
...But couldn't one say that today, through a long experience with Universal suffrage, we have traveled the whole road, running from hot to cold...
...But that will have to be rethought in terms of its being subordinate to a trans-historical goal...
...J.-P...
...We'd thought that, in opposition to the leftist parties, one should resort to radicalism...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: In Plato's Republic, Socrates has just spelled out all the requirements of the just city—each class has its place, and so on—and then he says, Oh dear, oh dear, I've one more thing to add, it's tiresome to mention it but I really should...
...S.: I didn't say exactly that, you're exaggerating...
...Against the illusion—which is in no way poetic—that human unity has been achieved and prevails in current social conditions, a rebellion raises the true, profound issue of unification...
...B. L.: I was seventeen years old when I read the book, and it served admirably to justify my wanting to fight anti-Semitism...
...A party has intentions, it follows a given path...
...You're no longer of this opinion...
...But to come closer to us in time, Foucault said he had seen the general will on the streets of Teheran...
...B. L.: We used to say this back in the leftist days...
...S.: Absolutely...
...If one really wanted to do something to revive this unfortunate left, which is dead, one would have to try to articulate !fljl these principles, learn their nature, discover how they could come to life again...
...B. L.: After all, the idea of causa sui simply comes from a specific theological tradition...
...there are only disorders...
...B. L.: It was one hell of a mistake to say, the way we used to: We have a goalrevolution— and since you don't make an omelet without breaking eggs, to reach this goal it's okay to get your hands dirty...
...B. L.: And yet, we have said just that— you as well as I. J.-P...
...Did we not see something different in '68...
...from time to time, you remind me of what I said in 1945 or in 1950, in order to bring me face to face with what there can be in my present ideas that contradicts or even retracts my past ideas...
...Gods have always had relationships with men, of course...
...In a remote past, fraternity was just that...
...The goal is no longer to seize power, as Lenin thought...
...J.-P...
...And the Americans, the Swedes — B. L.: The Swedes...
...And with hope...
...At bottom, until writing Anti-Semite and Jew, I was hostile primarily to anti-Semitism, and that book is a declaration of war against anit-Semites, nothing more...
...B. L.: Will such a pact of trust send us back, somehow, to a social aspiration that is at least as basic as the desire to exist...
...J.-P...
...If you like, it's the beginning of the existence of men who live for each other...
...This is how I always understood history...
...The question is to find the final end—that is, the moment when, in truth, morality will be simply the way in which human beings live in relation to each other...
...The Jew is doubly concerned by our problem...
...S.: Well, I experienced it through others...
...How will we avoid the trap Socrates fell into...
...One difficulty we meet in almost all the classical ethical systems—in Aristotle's as well as in Kant's—is this: Where does one place morality in the human conscience...
...it presents itself as a constraint, yet the choice is free...
...Today, there is no longer anything one could call the people, because the way men live is entirely particularized by the division of labor...
...One had to resist, no question about 421 it, but the true fortunes of war lay outside our hands, with the British, the Americans...
...J.-P...
...The essential thing for me is that the Jew has lived, and still lives, metaphysically...
...S.: I've often said that on the metaphysical plane it was a failure...
...And what does one mean by "revolution...
...S.: Romain Rolland was not a remarkable thinker...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: Speak plainly...
...S.: Working for society .. . B. L.: Is there not—in this working for society—the expression of a desire that is at least as basic as the desire to be, which you talk about in Being and Nothingness...
...In fact, I'm not trying now to defend the fellow traveler because the unfortunate thing is, his ideas are intended for the Party and the Party never accepts them...
...It no longer believes that voting answers a larger purpose...
...It is the relationship of being born of the same mother...
...J.-P...
...The philosophy of history is not the same if there is or if there is not a Jewish history...
...Around 1954 I went to the U.S.S.R., and almost immediately afterward, after the developments in Hungary, I broke with the Party...
...J.-P...
...S.: In a certain way, people form a single family...
...This was the milieu of the left...
...When this happens, all that has been done in the past will fall into place, everything will assume its true value...
...All the sansculottes from the outskirts of town had to do was to pour into the street, brandishing their pikes, in order to strip the constituted authorities of their legitimacy...
...Nonetheless, the fact remains that he's tripped over a difficulty that is very much of the moment, and that threatens the whole structure...
...J.-P...
...I think that in the way I wanted immortality, the way I conceived of it, I was not so different from the cafe waiter or from Hitler, but the way in which I worked at my writing was different...
...As soon as positive unification runs out of steam, Leninism is tremendously effective...
...Does one live morally all the time...
...S.: It's not the same...
...B. L.: Marx, too, said that in the end man will be truly whole...
...S.: There was to have been a second part, dealing with the ultimate goal and, as you know, I haven't written it...
...Or a basically good person...
...Sartre reviews here a host of problems, from his attitudes toward hope and despair to his earlier collaboration with the Communists in France...
...There is hope, too, in the way man acts, in the very fact that he establishes a goal...
...As a boy he decided he would be a writer, and this decision dedicated him to immortality...
...We call the relationship of a man to his neighbor fraternal because they feel they are of the same origin...
...B. L.: Why not...
...J.-P...
...Today you're telling us, One must create the human being...
...Yet they are not plural, in the sense that they are not produced by a meeting of several minds...
...And the whole history of the Jews consists in the primary relationship...
...It is a very different kind of relationship among men...
...S.: And yet, the Jewish reality must remain in the revolution...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: In earlier days, would you not have denounced this recourse to morality as categorical or, what's worse, bourgeois...
...From now on, we must consider the solution of the 1793 insurgent a false solution, and therefore that of the leftist false, too...
...Jaures, for example, was more a leader than a boss...
...But now this collaboration could no longer be a lesser evil...
...And then a few years after that, at the time of the colonial wars, you proceeded to explain to us that humanism was a jock-strap for colonialism...
...S.: That's right...
...Now to vote left is clearly looked on as an act of classic republicanism...
...S.: Very often...
...B. L.: I love to hear you say that...
...In fact, the positive move toward unification is halted, and the resort to this form of negative unity, which has been brought about by the old authority, serves to camouflage the standstill...
...B. L.: In other words, the history that Hegel established in our intellectual landscape sought to have done with the Jews, and it is the Jew who will make it possible to emerge from the view of history Hegel wanted to impose on us...
...Of course, I am not Shakespeare or Hegel...
...Something different is going to come into exis401 tence, in which there will no longer be any fellow traveler...
...Because for me, and I believe for you, too, democracy seems to be not only a form of government, or a way of delegating power, but also a way of life...
...Which is to say, a left that has let everything go, that currently is crushed, that allows a wretched right to triumph...
...I wrote without any documentation, without reading one Jewish book...
...Of course, violence is not going to step up the pace of history and draw humanity together...
...the unity of the human enterprise is still to be formed...
...I think that there is a modality other than the primary modality of seriousmindedness...
...S.: To me, radicalism has always seemed an essential element in the leftist stance...
...Of course, the Jew is the victim of anti-Semitism...
...We are constantly in the presence of others, even when we are going to bed or falling asleep...
...The idea of failure is not deeply rooted in me at this moment...
...Four years...
...S.: Because fraternity lies in the future...
...People act as if everyone knew...
...The future will gainsay many things I have affirmed...
...But I want a more developed description of the first two—and even of the third...
...But in your writing in the past, you've hardly touched on these subjects...
...You didn't write "son of the mother...
...J.-P...
...I keep that as a superficial description of the Jew as he is in the Christian world, where, for example, he is constantly being snapped at from all sides by anti-Semitic ideas, where an anti-Semitic way of thinking consumes him, tries to seize him at the very deepest part of his being and turn him into what it conceives him to be...
...B. L.: And is failure here inevitable...
...This is to say that the action, being at the same time an act of hoping, cannot fundamentally be doomed to absolute, inevitable failure...
...But anguish and despair, no...
...Pretty much everywhere, messianism is being pictured as the source of all our ills...
...B. L.: So your fellow traveler is giving up the ghost...
...J.-P...
...Why didn't you work out an ethic of regenerative violence at that time...
...The first is factual: there are rebellions...
...As you know, I set Search for a Method aside because it seemed not to have matured within me...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...no one ever analyzes it, and I should like us to...
...B. L.: Perhaps too little attention has been paid to the significance of a certain distrust of the revolutionary mob on the part of Jews...
...J.-P...
...Violence merely breaks up a kind of enslavement that makes it impossible for one to become a human being...
...B. L.: Of course...
...B. L.: You believed that the impasse that Being and Nothingness led to could be circumvented if the meaning of history were what Hegel and Marxism said it was...
...One must not manage things so that ideas take off from above...
...We always lack something...
...Remember La Cause du Peuple and its complicity with Pere Duchesne.* That's what collapsed...
...And there is the battle against scarcity...
...At this moment, we are in the thick of battle, and no doubt it will go on for many years...
...When we used to do that in an editorial in La Cause du People it was normal, if I may say so...
...They were to collaborate on a major work on ethical problems...
...So, I consider that a certain number of ideas that necessarily accompany an action—the idea of immortality, for example—are suspect, murky...
...The meaning of a man's action, then, 398 is this goal, which is variable, of course—it varies from man to man—but it has the special characteristic of being absolute...
...So, one must find a formulation that accepts the biological reference as an assumption but can also be expanded on a level that is no longer biological and that is not mythological...
...B. L.: What do you think today of this aspect of your own activity...
...B. L.: It's not that it's the simplest, it's the only approach there is...
...But how does the idea of a goal offer itself today...
...I did not suppose I was going to change the world all by myself and on the strength of my own ideas, but I did discern social forces that were trying to move forward, and I believed that my place was among them...
...B. L.: From Christianity to Hegel...
...That's essentially what has changed, I think...
...That is what we must define...
...I think that is a mistake...
...First, and you know this, for me there is no a-priori essence...
...And the moral modality implies—at that level, at least—that we no longer want to be God, no longer want to be causa sui...
...But one must define the battle: we are seeking to live together like human beings, and to be human beings...
...While eating a piece of bread or drinking a glass of wine, does one feel moral or immoral, or is it a matter of no importance...
...When faced with a problem, fall back on myth...
...No, the power vacuum is merely the knowledge, which is essential, that below the government, in the political meaning of the word "government," a void has formed...
...J.-P...
...Political parties, like the socialist left, do nothing anymore except make gestures that are stymied by power struggles among political leaders and by various concepts of socialism...
...J.-P...
...What I mean to say is this: in history, very often, we encounter individuals or social groups who seem to be pursuing the same goal...
...And that relationship was fraternity...
...We'll see to this in the book we will devote to a study of moral thought...
...It was a funny world, for that matter, which we other pro-Marxists couldn't acknowledge because it was socialist, yet not Marxist...
...J.-P...
...S.: In part, yes...
...B. L. Fine...
...That is to say, voting is a fragmentary act that has no connection with his work or with the totality of his personal concerns...
...This violence brought about the return of the colons to France...
...The goal appears in history but does not belong to history...
...there is a profound Jewish reality, as there is a Christian reality...
...Rightly speaking, and in terms of the facts and of the submen who surround us—and we are submen ourselves, no matter whether we are bourgeois or proletarian—humanism can only be achieved, lived, by human beings...
...B. L.: People form a single family...
...The conjunction of Jew and leftist, even assuming a redefinition of "leftist," is certainly not to be taken as a matter or course...
...Not the empirical mother, of course, but a mother without eyes, without a face...
...S.: No...
...J.-P...
...S.: Which is to say, study democracy without thinking of it in terms of either direct or indirect democracy...
...S.: We ourselves were people who 415 were employing violence, directly or indirectly...
...B. L.: Is it not possible to see one important point more clearly...
...S.: — did not succeed, but was not even trying — B. L.: Our independent intellectual did not turn himself inside out to find truth in the bosom of the CP and its garbage...
...But it is quite obvious that in modern democracies there is no "people" to govern because "the people" does not exist...
...It means that to date revolutionary associations have been based on misunderstandings...
...In Being and Nothingness, you described a life that projected goals in complete seriousness, but to no point whatever...
...And then, on the other hand, since 1945 I have come more and more to think—and now believe completely—that, as I was saying a moment ago, an essential element of an action is hope...
...J.-P...
...S.: A lot of things, as you know...
...B. L.: There's a problem about the use of means, the techniques of action...
...J.-P...
...Another theme I like is that the Jewish dead—and others too, for that matter—will be reborn, they will return to earth...
...none of that means anything now...
...Yet I had to consider that despair must exist for other people since many were talking about it...
...S.: I know, I know...
...Be mindful of this: in spite of the way in 405 which you are sharing this dialogue— effacing your own personality and talking about me—we are working together...
...Now it has acquired a richer meaning, and that is thanks in part to our talking together...
...Fellow traveler—to me the term means the fellow outside the Party who tries to think the truth, hoping that the Party will make use of it...
...And there is even a kind of necessity in hope...
...J.-P...
...q Translated by ADRIENNE FOULKE 422...
...Can people possibly still forget that what we find at the bottom of anti-Semitism is ignorance...
...J.-P...
...S.: You're right...
...but I have written works that I've nurtured as carefully as I could, and some have been failures, surely, but others less so, while still others have been successes...
...The two things blend from there on...
...And what today prefigures this end result...
...I would tell myself that the fact of my thinking that and of my writing it meant that there I was succeeding—that, in a more general way, I was carrying out my work well...
...If Kant is right in reducing the idea of an ethical community to the ideal of a totality of men, then the uprising is a call to an ethical order: the forgotten are making themselves heard...
...But those were Marxist principles, they were not purely leftist principles...
...However, this does not imply that along the road we then follow toward the realization of the end we have purposely and radically wanted to be radical—it does not imply that we cannot be led to use means different from those we had first conceived...
...At the present time, a man who votes does not do it in the same way as the man who lived under the Terror, or earlier...
...So you don't think that falling short of the mark is inevitably bound to your position that the end can only be realized in the absolute...
...S.: It's not an absolute obstacle for a Frenchman who doesn't know Hebrew...
...And that, then, is what interests you...
...What unites them more profoundly than bonds of production, what makes them mean something to each other that is more than their being producers is the fact that they are human beings...
...In my opinion, each conscience has this moral dimension...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: But still you seem to be making some kind of posthumous eulogy of the fellow traveler...
...A person can think something like that...
...If, on the other hand, one considers that these submen of today have in them principles that are human—which is to say that basically they have certain seeds that tend toward man and that are in advance of the submen—then, thinking of the relationship of man to man in terms of the principles imposed today, we could call that humanism...
...J.-P...
...But that is not what takes place between us...
...This new world is to be the end...
...Actually, that is how people define the human species—in terms not so much of biological characteristics as of a certain relationship that obtains among us, the relationship of fraternity...
...Marxism appeared as a theory, a rigorous theory—or so it tried to be—that strove to study facts through deduction and analysis...
...On the other hand, I do recognize that radicalism leads to an impasse...
...Including, and I say this to you again, hatred for the soldier...
...To belong to the same species is, in a way, to have the same parents...
...Old age is my reality, which others feel...
...It is precisely the human side that already exists in the subman, it is precisely those beginnings that tend toward man, which forbid man's being utilized as raw material or as a means in order to achieve an end...
...Like the sansculottes, who had pushed the revolution's initial proposition to an extreme—the proposition of popular sovereignty...
...This is because their intentions are different...
...But I forebore thinking ill of it...
...To this there are two objections...
...For that matter, if one wants to nit-pick, one can take the view that I never thought for myself but for others...
...Also, as I have told you, in a France that had been schooled before the war to feel a profound repugnance for violence, we were not people who liked to say, Violence is splendid, it's right to do that...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...Yes, Kierkegaard greatly influenced me in this...
...Let's put it that way, and then people will believe that they've all come from the same earth, therefore they are all brothers...
...B. L.: That wasn't my question...
...408 J.-P...
...B. L.: But the worm was in the fruit...
...When I write, the thoughts I offer people in writing are universal...
...On the one hand, I hold to the idea that a man's life appears to be a failure: what he has attempted he has not succeeded in doing...
...It's a woman who simply has the womb that will develop, the breast that will nourish, perhaps the back that will carry...
...Which is to say simply, humanism will be man's way of being, his relations with his neighbor, and his way of being within himself...
...B. L.: Do you mean to repeat what Marx used to say—that the vote is the expression of political man and is derived from the fundamental expression of concrete social relationships, relationships of production...
...J.-P...
...S.: If you like, yes, I agree...
...S.: It's possible...
...S.: No...
...To put it differently, each conscience seems to me now simultaneously to constitute itself as a conscience and, at the same time, as the conscience of the other and as the conscience for the other...
...When the "new right" chooses messianism as its target, it cashes in...
...Nor is it the socioeconomic relationship Marx envisaged...
...My work has not been guided by the wish to be immortal...
...S.: I see another cause for the collapse—the transformation of elements that, in a way, had existed on the left before 1914 into political parties...
...But doesn't this notion of the corps in itself testify to a degeneration of the fraternal experience...
...S.: That's it...
...It was the Party that made the whole thing unbearable...
...But at bottom, you always felt a measure of distrust: if only they won't achieve those aims...
...But beyond that, it existed in an intellectual and emotional atmosphere that was broader than the theory itself and that, in certain respects, was deceived by the theory...
...Because, as you know, ever since the age of nineteen, my one political response was to loathe colonialism...
...What's most serious is the fact that the left, too, finds it good form to attack all forms of messianism...
...J.-P...
...Of course, the nature of each differs, which explains why one will be a warrior, another a ploughman, another a magistrate...
...UI Hope, Now...
...B. L.: Agreed...
...Only, I confined the existence of the Jew to that...
...Either the left is going to die, in which case man dies at the same moment, or new principles must be discovered for it to live by...
...The significance of the vote has changed, which is why we are not ahead of but losing momentum with respect to the French Revolution...
...To be radical, then, would be to pursue in a radical way a scattering of intentions to the point where they achieve a unity...
...We're still mixed up with mythology...
...Immortality exists, I think, 399 but not like that...
...J.-P...
...it is a society, one might say, of right...
...J.-P...
...For a long time I've thought that the Communist party is the worst enemy of revolution...
...S.: When I use the term "right," for me it means dirty fellows...
...In the days of Being and Nothingness I was not talking about hope...
...You answered yourself, Yes...
...And what to do to keep this revelation from foundering in political delirium...
...And you were going to write a nearly 800-page book to establish a system of practical tactics...
...S.: Necessarily, even by definition, the intention is the apprehension of the goal...
...A part of the public still votes left, there are still leftist parties...
...Among other things, what I have written...
...That government lacks a foundation...
...But they are not plural...
...It is, in fact, the violence of repression that gives insurgents the necessary unity...
...Then the war came, and little by little, especially after the defeat and during the German Occupation, I felt as if I was completely denied the world I had thought I had before me...
...S.: It came from being more often with Jews after the Liberation...
...S.: Yes, if you like...
...S.: No...
...S.: Because in my earliest studies, I, like the great majority of moralists, was looking for morality in a conscience that had no reciprocator, no other...
...J.-P...
...The value of hope was gradually borne in on me only later...
...It is beyond matters of politics, say, or education...
...To say that the phenomenon of fraternity is sustained essentially by recourse to violence would be, in a way, like saying that for a child to be born calls not for the union of a man and a woman and the maturation of the embryo, but that what basically counts is the surgery...
...I agree about the vote's being no final solution, since in moving from hot to cold one loses heat progressively...
...That is what I would say today...
...you could conceive of a demonstration that would march to the Bastille, that would be set upon by the police, and that would perhaps rough up a few cops...
...S.: Originally, as you know, I needed to have a dialogue with someone who, at first, I supposed would have to be a secretary—I was obliged to converse because I was no longer able to see to write...
...There will be mass movements for definite, specific goals...
...The problem does not lie there...
...We had to think of the murders, the bombs that were exploding, and so forth, as something we were forced to do, of violence almost as a necessary evil...
...Over the years, of course, we have had very sharp political disagreements with Sartre, some of which Paz discusses, but perhaps I am not mistaken in thinking that this last record of his thought shows that he was moving in a direction closer to our own...
...S.: That's exactly what I've tried to understand...
...I will have to explain how I came to think that...
...Nonetheless, I did consider that each conscience in itself, and each individual in himself, was relatively independent of the other...
...And that's what one must try to clear up...
...When I see a man, I think, his origin is the same as mine...
...S.: Don't forget that there were a considerable number of Jews in the Communist party in 1917...
...But this is my question: Can humanity be engendered in violence like that...
...B. L.: But our problem is that we must not go back to myth in order to formulate this original idea of fraternity...
...A pro-left scoundrel, a dimwit, a patsy...
...J.-P...
...How one is to understand it, exactly...
...In any event, the world seems ugly, evil, and without hope...
...B. L.: How do you understand this primary connection...
...You quickly came to posit the group as the key element in a concept of revolution, ergo of the future—the union of 402 a plurality of men who will act...
...S.: Then why live...
...Of course, one can choose to abandon all idea of revolution by taking it for a very costly, poetic illusion...
...and we who exist in an antecedent period, who are pushing on toward being the men we should be, the men those following us will be, we experience humanism only as that which is best in us, which is to say, our striving to live beyond ourselves in the society of men...
...A few years later, without our having realized that you had changed, you gave a lecture during which you asked, Is existentialism a form of humanism...
...What's more, this relationship with God was very special...
...B. L.: Whence comes violence, according to your Search for a Method...
...But today—how can this Jewish messianic end interest you today...
...What does teach me something is the attitude of other people toward me...
...At certain moments I would persuade myself that the Party's pseudoideas must contain some truth, and that what seemed stupidity was only on the surface...
...B. L.: Is the experience of age contributing to modify your ideas...
...There was also the fact that we were in a troubling position since, however one looks at it, we were struggling against France and for the Algerians, who didn't care very much for us even though we were on their side...
...S.: I think they're the same...
...S.: In general, I agree with your account of the three moments in which violence appears...
...We make little revolutions, but there is no human goal...
...This woman can just as well be a totemic bird...
...J.-P...
...Was that person a failure, was he one of the group of failures that undermined leftist thinking over the last 40 years...
...It refers to the positive moment, but it functions totally by taking off from a negative unity: according to Leninism, it's a question of building an ironclad unity in response to governmental unity...
...S.: Well, true enough, in 1792 there were no parties...
...It is a relationship in which the motivations for an act come from the affective realm, while the action itself is in the practical domain...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...to some extent, they were ashamed to be brothers...
...What does Sartre say in the evening of his work, what does he say about this decision...
...S.: None...
...And yet no definition of it has had much substance...
...Which is to say, it is a moral end...
...J.-P...
...You talk to us now about forbidding this or that, you talk to us about what is human, but once upon a time all that would have made you laugh...
...any meaning for me...
...But at least the vote allowed for a linkage between hot and cold, if I may put it so...
...S.: Yes, I used to talk about despair but, as I often said, it was not the opposite of hope...
...For several years toward the end of his life, Sartre could no longer read because of failing eyesight, and Levy served as a mixture of apprentice, secretary, and collaborator, meeting with Sartre four times a week...
...But there you are: to be able to understand the Jew from within—that I really cannot do...
...This I have not studied in my philosophical works, and for that matter, few people have studied it as such...
...Why...
...And that's precisely the problem we want to resolve—this going from hot to cold...
...But the moment violence has destroyed the colonized character, that is, the slave character, what remains are still submen...
...There was a consciousness of self that I stripped of all individual characteristics that would have come from within and that I then caused to be found on the outside...
...S.: Yes, but I think it must be defined...
...B. L.: But you do agree, don't you, not to eliminate reference to a biological origin...
...A third world war is not impossible, due to causes that are all wrong, all badly thought out...
...That's exactly where we stand with morality at the moment...
...Everybody was reading Kierkegaard then...
...Without anyone's actually saying so, what presided over their agreement was the left—it was the idea of their coming together to attempt some leftist action...
...The thought should, of course, be forged below...
...400 B. L.: The first rough formulation is that a leftist principle must have some connection with social aspirations...
...Second, he stands to be the first to suffer from perversions of this idea...
...J.-P...
...The idea of failure in relation to what could be termed an absolute goal...
...B. L.: All right, Socrates' meaning can be salvaged...
...So he makes it into a myth...
...One sees that you were blown off course by your having first defined the ultimate end as failure and then pushed on to a second definition of the ultimate end as the completion of history by the proletariat...
...S.: But leftism has disappeared, too...
...J.-P...
...S.: Wait...
...Despair was the belief that my fundamental goals could not be achieved, and that, as a consequence, human reality entailed essential failure...
...The situation would remain exactly the same...
...What is new is the relationship this God entered into with men...
...But this task has nothing to do with humanism...
...it is in the very nature of the action...
...It's not the democracy or pseudodemocracy of the Fifth Republic...
...J.-P...
...J.-P...
...Taking off from the present collapse...
...B. L.: But when you wrote your book surely you had put together some documentation...
...When he gave in to Party pressure, he became a dimwit or a patsy...
...But we have not reached that yet...
...But, in fact, you have seemed to me very much drawn to the idea of fraternity, and no longer as attached to the idea of equality, as you used to be...
...B. L.: But what is it, then, that makes the difference, with regard to the desire to be, between the cafe waiter, charged as he is with his own spirit of seriousness, and Sartre's desire for immortality...
...B. L.: Didn't you feel you'd found it in Search for a Method...
...it was still not the vote, for that had still to take place...
...You will note that essentially this reality is metaphysical, as is the Christian's, and at that time that reality held very little place in my philosophy...
...Much better than I. So in our talks that is important...
...414 J.-P...
...And I proposed to you that you be that, but I realized immediately that you could never be simply a secretary...
...B. L.: A sluttish right...
...Now you are modulating your idea...
...And I was French, I was unjust like other Frenchmen...
...That is why, moreover, for me messianism is an important thing that only the Jews have thought of in this way, but that non-Jews could utilize for other ends...
...I think hope is a part of man...
...That put us in quite a special situation, which found expression in that book, a situation of malaise, of greater violence, and because it came more easily, of intransigence...
...And I have never envisaged hope as a lyrical illusion...
...This concept of revolution has existed for a long time...
...S.: For every person birth is the same phenomenon that it is for his neighbor, so much so that, in a way, two men who talk to each other have the same mother...
...S.: It has nothing to do with myth...
...The replacement of present-day society by a more just society in which people will be able to have good relationships with each other...
...but at the same time I approved—and that is where I set myself apart from the majority of other Frenchmen—I approved these tortured people's struggle against the French...
...S.: I wrote what I thought...
...JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: There, I can say, it resulted from the wars in Algeria and Indochina, both of which filled me with horror...
...J.-P...
...Go back to the beginning—to 1792...
...By that I mean I haven't produced a phenomenal body of work, on the order of a Shakespeare or a Hegel, and that therefore, in relation to what I should have liked, it is a failure...
...But all things considered, I believe that with the Jew the essential thing is that for several thousand years he has had a bond with a single god...
...Speaking of colonized man, you say, "He is the son of violence, every moment he draws his humanity from violence...
...B. L.: In your exhaustive dispute with Marxism, weren't you basically looking for what is now, by common consent, called social aspirations, so that you could escape from the dialectic of bad faith in Being and Nothingness...
...That's what I meant...
...But it could also happen that he did not give in, and then he was not so bad...
...B. L.: Is this a true, a thinkable experience...
...S.: Naturally...
...Neither the Eastern nor the Jewish tradition...
...Revolutionaries want to bring about a society that will be humane and satisfying for all human beings, but they forget that a society of this kind is not a society of fact...
...There is the effort to engender Man, to achieve human beings...
...B. L.: Aren't you doing now what Socrates tended to do...
...S.: Ah, well, yes, but that's absurd...
...Certainly not...
...Sovereignty moved into the street...
...nevertheless, that's what I thought...
...J.-P...
...If the idea of revolution becomes identified with the idea of terrorism, it's done for...
...The book also obscurely 418 justified a kind of self-denial...
...S.: If we take the case of Algeria, of which I was talking in my introduction to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, I state first of all that it was never a question of there being a solution other than through violence...
...J.-P...
...Is there any way to break away from the mythological level...
...Afterward, their invention gave a certain sense to this fraternity, but it was not the invention that gave the sense of fraternity...
...S.: Well, it's not YHWH that has B. L.: So it is the metaphysical character of the Jew that interests you...
...Because I believe that this dependence is free...
...J.-P...
...S.: That's not quite exact...
...B. L.: In short—since we have to stop this talk now soon—you're beginning afresh at seventy-five...
...So, at that moment you became infinitely interesting for me...
...I don't follow you at all...
...S.: That...
...The left can be nothing else...
...In this connection, we can recognize our relationship to the rebel of 1792...
...But you ran into an impasse, and then through the Resistance you glimpsed a possible line of conduct...
...What I did not say in Being and Nothingness is that everyone has a goal beyond the practical or theoretical goals of the moment...
...The invasion of Afghanistan is a particularly disturbing fact...
...B. L.: I don't see why not...
...Could not the Jew, especially a Jew who lives in a Christian society, sense in the revolutionary mob a potential of the pogrom mob...
...If one considers living beings as completed, closed, total entities, humanism is not possible in our time...
...men's minds are mute, they don't find words to express what they believe...
...In other words, one must believe in progress...
...that's done for...
...We are surrounded by scarcity, which is a real fact...
...J.-P...
...To us that seemed a suspect quantity...
...J.-P...
...When will they recognize that we do not all know, but that we most urgently need to know...
...Hope means that I cannot undertake an action without expecting that I am going to complete it...
...Yes, I would have laughed, I would have talked about bourgeois morality—in a word, I'd have run off at the mouth...
...And that completely changed my mode of inquiry, for until then I had always worked alone—seated at a table, with a pen and paper...
...J.-P...
...And then, little by little, once again something began to become undone...
...S.: I have always said that what I thought differed from what the Party thought...
...Stalinism died with Stalin...
...The second touches on the legitimacy of the rebellion: the legitimacy derives from what we used to call social aspiration...
...S.: That is true, but that is because it has not been sufficiently developed...
...At times in my life, this has caused me great distress, and at other times I haven't seen my mistakes, thinking I had indeed done what I wanted to do...
...J.-P...
...S.: I've not been all that much of a fellow traveler...
...S.: By "morality" I mean that every conscience, no matter whose, has a dimension of obligation...
...That, I believe, is the primary definition of the ancient Jew, the man whose entire life was somehow determined, governed, by his relationship with God...
...Wasn't that partly a mistake...
...B. L.: According to you, what does this unity of Jewish reality come from...
...I'd like him to be issued a death certificate...
...I did raise some questions that showed the relationship-to-others in a new light...
...Fraternity is the relationship members of 412 the species have with one another...
...Obligation" is a poor word, but to find a better term you would almost have to invent one...
...J.-P...
...B. L.: In his deepest reality, then, the Jew can permit himself to drop out as far as the philosophy of history is concerned...
...B. L.: Just so...
...397 J.-P...
...But you, what pushed you to do it...
...So, then, what is this relationship between one human being and another that will be called fraternity...
...You speak to us about your writing as if it were an openhanded pact, a pact of trust between reader and author...
...I would have to be one...
...I mean that the great concept of the clan, its matrilineal unity—deriving from an animal, for example, that allegedly engendered them all—that's what one must rediscover today, for that was true fraternity...
...Perhaps we have not examined closely enough what this distrust may conceal...
...B. L.: I wonder whether one must not rethink the workings of insurrection and analytically distinguish its several elements or phases...
...But there is a lot of time between when he begins and when he will be able to read the books that matter to him...
...If you like, one could say that we are submen, beings who have not yet arrived at a final point that perhaps, for that matter, we never will arrive at but toward which we are moving...
...There is something flawed in this dynamic...
...Today I see men differently...
...J.-P...
...The totem embraced the entire clan, and it provided a profound reality for all members of the tribe in their relationship with one another—for example, it prevented them from intermarrying...
...then, little by little, they don't talk about it because they realize that for them the substance of it doesn't exist...
...Society had to stop being the shit it is everywhere today...
...S.: Yes...
...By breaking them or by decreeing that all idea of law was null and void...
...S.: And, in that sense it does not belong to history...
...Whereas in the past, these actions offered the left some satisfaction, and what we have to discuss is whether this was an illusion...
...J.-P...
...This interview appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur on March 10, 17, and 24, 1980—copyright © 1980 by Jean-Paul Sartre and Le Nouvel Observateur—and is reprinted here in English translation by permission of that journal...
...B. L.: If you'd opened no matter what book—for example, Salo Baron's history of the Jews, which you've just read—perhaps it would have persuaded you not to write that there is no Jewish history...
...In 1951-52 I was...
...B. L.: Perhaps you used not to talk about hope, but you did talk about despair...
...At such a moment, the employment of certain forms of violence is akin to a cesarean section: the problem is to remove an obstacle to birth...
...I couldn't manage to cope with it...
...What's more, with me it was secondary, since I was doing other things at the time...
...J.-P...
...On the other hand, in a second moment, the sacred moment, just as the tearing becomes essential, the insurgent is chained to the policeman who is trying to shoot him down...
...But this hope must be well grounded...
...And there you have the moment at which revolutionary policy is perversely applied...
...This is a moral theme that will endure when man will truly exist as man...
Vol. 27 • September 1980 • No. 4
