Volume 12, 2024
The World in Crisis: What Is the Possibility of Philosophical and Eco-ethical Renewal?
Jacob Dahl Rendtorff
Pages 75-89
https://doi.org/10.5840/ecoethica202582072
Sartre and Benny L¨¦vy
The Last Ten Years of Sartre¡¯s Intellectual Life
This article presents a discussion of the relation between Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny L¨¦vy, based on the book by Laurent Touil-Tartour, Achever Sartre (Completing Sartre), Figures, Grasset, Paris 2024. L¨¦vy and Sartre worked together on the newspapers La Cause du peuple and Lib¨¦ration, and L¨¦vy was Sartre¡¯s personal secretary from 1975 to 1980. Just before Sartre died in March 1980, L¨¦vy and Sartre published a set of articles in Le nouvel observateur with the title L¡¯Espoir maintenant (Hope Now), which discussed and evaluated important parts of Sartre¡¯s philosophy. The text led to a considerable scandal among Sartre¡¯s friends and collaborators, because it implied critical challenges to many key concepts of existentialism, and because Sartre now was much closer to Emmanuel Levinas in the sense of searching for a solution to the problems of morality in Jewish humanism and Talmudic wisdom. L¨¦vy was accused of manipulating Sartre and forcing him to publish something which was very far from his usual philosophy.