ABSTRACT
Removing the typical Hegelian interpretation from Sartre’s ontological and concrete intersubjectivity, the previous chapter reconstructed a Sartre that does not have at its ontological basis a violent intersubjective structure but instead sees ontological intersubjective relations as circular between opposing attitudes that subjects choose when responding to their encounter with the Other situated in concrete reality. It follows that violence is a response in concrete relations aimed at breaking this cycle of opposing attitudes. Based on these foundations, this chapter outlines the phenomenological structure of ‘violence’ by comparing it with ‘oppression’ and also outlines the ethical structure of violence, using the Critique of Dialectical Reason and Notebooks for an Ethics and making occasional reference to Sartre’s later ethics found in the unpublished “1964 Rome Lecture Notes”. More fundamentally, it outlines specifi c characteristics in different projects of violence in Sartre’s political works that makes the important distinction between violence that destroys humanity and violence that is necessary in regaining the possibility of creating humanity. As I work through his early ethics and politics, the ‘violent Sartre’ continues to be reconstructed as one who saw the necessity for counter-violence as the only responsible response to severe conditions of violence before we can establish a society of ends-for-themselves. He was to establish objective descriptors of situations that justify counter-violence and a moral criterion for judging which projects of counter-violence are morally excusable in his later works on ethics and politics.
