Sartre's second century

170 Chapter Eleven
any meaning for me. Bracketing off the debate over whether or not
Sartre experienced a personal conversion to Judaism, in Hope Now the
mother and the Messiah represent a common beginning and a common
end. They are symbols used to elucidate the notion of fraternity, which
Sartre defines in section nine: "We call the relationship of a man to his
neighbour fraternal because they feel they are of the same origin. They
have a common origin and, in the future, a common end—that's what
constitutes their fraternity." 40
Before using such religious terminology, Sartre and Levy had
discussed how fraternity informs their understanding of politics, ethics,
and their own project of creating plural thoughts. But when Sartre begins
to speak in terms of the mother and the Messiah, he employs a literary
technique that pushes the notion of fraternity to a level that we can all
grasp. The final four sections are the literary climax, the point at which
Sartre really starts to work within Levy's vocabulary. Here, we are no
longer talking about "the left", or about ethics as an abstract philosophical
enterprise: our subject is the fate of all humanity. Still more interesting is
that this macro-approach brings about a very particular realisation of the
subject at hand, for it makes manifest the notion of fraternity in the context
of the flow of the book. Starting in section one at a common beginning,
discussing Sartre's philosophy, which they both know well, and using
traditional Sartrean terminology (for-itself, consciousness, anguish, etc.),
and then ending the interviews with a discussion of Judaism—another
common interest, but this time in Levy's vocabulary—Sartre and Levy are
bound by a common beginning and a common end. Furthermore, the two
figures begin to take on characteristics of one another throughout this
process. Still, neither character loses his individuality entirely as a white
space continues to separate their initials. Sartre plays in Levy's vocabulary
and vice versa, and in doing so they challenge the reader to question her /
his prior conception of who "Sartre" really is, but the loaded name of the
great twentieth-century philosopher never for a moment disappears from
the page. Instead, what emerges between the book covers, over and above
the individual names of the interlocutors, is a metastable but intriguing
They. While the They is divided and works within multiple vocabularies, it
is unified by a single theme from start to finish: hope. As Aronson
obtain in every consciousness from birth (consider Sartre's earlier statements as
referenced by note 23, above).
39 Ibid., 105.
40 Ibid., 90.