Sartre's second century

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 169
Age is, in fact, important. For not only is Sartre dialoguing with L£vy,
but in a sense he is dialoguing with himself, thirty years prior, through
L6vy. In his blindness and old age Sartre cannot read or recall the details
of everything he wrote earlier in his career, and he remarks to L6vy: "[I]t
is important that you remind me from time to time of what I said in 1945
or 1950, and that you confront me with what there may be in my present
ideas that contradicts or reasserts my past ideas." 36 His conversation with
his past work, however, is not an attempt at consistency. Sartre makes it
clear that he is not concerned about contradicting himself. In fact, Hope
Now is an explicit risking of identity on Sartre's part for the sake of
continuing philosophy and thinking new thoughts. Indeed, throughout the
course of Hope Now, Sartre makes a number of criticisms about his past
work but perhaps none more appropriate for our purposes, than when he
says of Being and Nothingness: "I hadn't determined what I am trying to
determine today: the dependence of each individual on all other
individuals." 37
Whichever conclusion one draws concerning Sartre's intentions, I hope
to have made this much evident: there is, by Sartre's own standards, a
literary element to Hope Now and our approach to the text should take it
into account. In appreciating this literary element we need not lose sight of
the philosophical argument put forth by Sartre and Ldvy. Ideally, we
should be able to follow both the literary and philosophical aspects of
Hope Now and let each inform the other. Of course, the way in which a
reader engages with a literary-philosophical hybrid is quite individual and
any attempt to draw up guidelines for reading Hope Now is well beyond
the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, before concluding, I propose to
give an example of how one might approach the interviews in a way that
reopens them and attends to their literary character.
The final four sections of the interviews are in many ways the most
controversial. In these sections, Sartre surprisingly discusses the idea of a
common mother and Messiah that can unite all humanity. Neither one of
these ideas—the mother or the Messiah—is supposed to be taken literally.
In reference to the mother, he says that she "can just as well be a totemic
bird", 38 and about the Messiah he remarks: "[I]t's not the Name that has
36 Ibid., 74.
37 Ibid., 72.
38 Ibid., 89. To be clear, Sartre does seem to have an interest in "the mother" over
and beyond pure symbolism. In my view, however, this has more to do with the
actual physical dependence and connection between a mother and her child as a
sort of condition of possibility for the filial / fraternal feeling and obligation that