Sartre's second century

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 157
final project was something altogether different, regardless of the exact
motivations for its publication.
Our point of entry is a passage from The Imaginary, written in the mid-
1930s by a young, unknown Sartre who was just beginning to find his
philosophical voice. In this passage, Sartre tells us what it is like to
observe an impersonator on a stage:
On the stage of a music hall, Franconay is "doing some imitations"; I
recognise the artist she is imitating: it is Maurice Chevalier. I assess the
imitation: "It is really him", or else: "It is lacking". What is going on in my
consciousness? 3
Seventy years later, we might describe the experience of reading Hope
Now in a similar way. With the interviews compiled in book-form and
accompanied by Ronald Aronson's introduction and Benny Levy's essays,
any reader of Hope Now is put in the presence of the controversy the
moment he or she opens the book. Aware of the complexity of the
situation, we ask ourselves: is that really Sartre talking about the Messiah?
We try to situate his new ideas so they fit within his earlier philosophy. In
the same way that Sartre tries to reconcile the "essence" of Maurice
Chevalier and the physical attributes of the impersonator, we too look for a
way to smooth over the tension that exists between the "essence" of
Sartre—his true self that we claim to know—and this peculiar
manifestation of it. Once again, the appropriate phenomenological
question is: what is going on in my consciousness? Sartre's answer in The
Imaginary is revealingly similar to our own experience:
It quite often happens that the synthesis is not entirely made: the face and
the body of the imitator do not lose all their individuality; yet the
expressive nature "Maurice Chevalier" nevertheless appears on that face,
on that female body. A hybrid state follows, neither fully perception nor
fully image, which should be described for itself. These states without
equilibrium and that do not endure are evidently, for the spectator, what is
most pleasant in the imitation. 4
Similar hybrid states without equilibrium, which Sartre calls
"metastable", 5 are brought about in Hope Now. Sartre's initials appear on
3
Sartre, The Imaginary, 25.
4
Ibid., 29.
5
The term "metastable" is used by Sartre in Being and Nothingness. However, as
Robert Cumming has shown, we can retroactively apply the term to the "states
without equilibrium" that Sartre described a few years prior in The Imaginary. See