ABSTRACT
Hope Now, the interviews on ethics with Benny Lévy, is Sartre’s most controversial text. It will always be associated with his death. Even now, it continues to be a flashpoint for his critics. No matter how diligently scholars have labored to forge an ethics from Sartre’s work, efforts are limited by the fact that Sartre never published an ethics despite his promise to do so at the end of Being and Nothingness (1943) and his attempts in Notebooks for an Ethics (1947–48). The Hope Now interviews have tantalizing hints of a post-Critique Sartrean ethics. Conducted over the last five years of Sartre’s life, they first appeared in the French news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, weeks before his death in 1980 at the age of 74. Most of Sartre’s closest friends, including his longtime companion, Simone de Beauvoir, strongly opposed their publication, and understandably so. Read against the totality of Sartre’s work, Hope Now is a disruptive text and it raises serious questions of its authenticity. Are the views attributed to Sartre in Hope Now really his own? Or, in poor health, was he misled into supporting the ideas of his interviewer, his young secretary Benny Lévy? How can we know the truth here? If we join Beauvoir and others in rejecting the Sartre of Hope Now, have we discredited him? If we embrace his final interviews, how do we adjust our understanding of Sartre’s philosophy?
