Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 First published in Sobre la Responsabilidad – No Matar – (Ediciones del Cíclope/La Intemperie, Córdoba, Argentina, 2007). 2 I cannot resist the temptation to irony here: Why doesn't Marx figure in Del Barco's list of ‘serial killers’? Is it perhaps the fact that he was ‘badly interpreted’ that exempts the greatest theoretician of modern revolutions from the responsibility of having given some justification for those bad interpretations? The answer is obvious: History (malgré the ‘post’ neo-historicists/neo-rhetoricians/neo-hermeneuticists à la Hayden White et al.) is not just a question of interpretation. 3 What is striking and suggestive is the way the name of Sartre keeps cropping up through this exchange. Is this a mere effect of ‘the Year of Sartre’ that we have just entered? I'd like to think that there was something more: year in and year out, and whatever ‘generational’ references Del Barco makes to those who could be his ‘children’ (a topic that you could devote a whole issue to, with its easy apportionment of paternity and filiation), there is no doubt that our generation, for good or evil, is inevitably Sartrean. It is the generation that could do no less than see itself obliged to discuss, sooner or later, the dilemma of ‘getting your hands dirty’ or the dialectic of violence in the prologue to Fanon. As was said with regard to Spinoza in his centenary, all of us had two philosophies: our own (whatever it was) and Sartre's. Or to paraphrase a former president of Argentina: we are all Sartreans. 4 Let us insist with Sartre: ‘One writes to escape the subjective: but how does one do it, if not because one has already begun to take a distance from it? The externalization of singularity already converts the latter into a universal-singular.’ And some paragraphs further on, something which in the context of this discussion is at least troubling for us (for everyone): ‘Morbid universalization is here falsely objective and can engender no rule or content: at best it can, to flatter itself, produce symbolic and sado-masochistic stories, where everything is sorted out to demonstrate that virtue is rewarded or vice punished.’ Translator's notes i Contemporary Argentine linguist and literary critic. ii A mass rising in the city of Córdoba in 1969 involving workers, students and others and which marked a significant setback for the dictatorship of Onganía, in part leading to the latter's replacement by Levingston in 1970.