The New Orleans Session— March 2002

Abstract

I would like to shift the question. I don't think the important ques tion is what Sartre would say after September 11, but rather, What should we say about Sartre after September 11? Writing in the New Tork Times during the week after September II Michael Walzer called for a critical engagement against those ideas and those thinkers who appear to justify terrorism or are soft on terrorism—or—he did not say this in so many words—uncritically embrace violence as a mode of struggle. We should, in other words, ask under what conditions violence is permissible. We should see vio lence itself as something which may become destructive, which can develop a logic of its own, and which needs to be channeled, focused and limited. For Walzer, September 11 confronts many intellectuals with their bad habits: valorizing violence, or tolerating it, or remain ing fuzzy about it. Among Sartreans there has been a good deal of all three, especially the valorizing of violence in Sartre's thought. Violence is praised as the emancipatory moment, the moment of becoming human, the ethical moment. From my point of view, our efforts should be focused on clarifying, thinking through, and critiquing the one great philosopher who has put violence at the center of his thought. I would say that September 11, if it means anything to us, should have given us this burden. I am critical of all of us, I include myself here, for saving this issue until the end of the conference, because if any one should be rethought after September 11, it is Sartre. Sartre was after all the playwright of The Flies and Dirty Hands and the screenwriter of In the Mesh. Sartre's own radical politics are inextricable from his embrace of violence. In the Devil and the Good