(Benny Le ́vy) at the time. He even named its proposed subject and
title: “Power and Freedom.”^5
In that book I will provide the first principles of morals. We are doing it in dialogue
form, because I can no longer write [after a serious stroke that left him virtually
blind] so that it is a dialogue just like ours, whereby each says what he has to say and
the other answers. And I will try to show that morals and politics can only make
sense from the moment when the concept of power and the reality of power are truly
removed. A society without power starts to become an ethical society, because a new
form of freedom is established, which is the freedom of reciprocal relations of
persons in the form of a we.^6
Despite mention of an ethic based on principles found inCDR, Sartre
moves immediately into what we shall be calling his “Dialogical” ethics
with Le ́vy, as if the hundreds of pages devoted to his “Dialectical” ethics
a decade earlier had never been written. Emphasizing the break from his
earlier work, he continues:
Speaking more generally,Power and Freedomreturns to concepts which lie before
BN, as for example contingency inNausea, more generally as everything that I said
inNausea. And I am trying to recover it, because it seems to me that it is the starting
point of my thought. And I am trying to close the circle, to link up my first thoughts
with my latest, by giving up some of my ideas fromBNandCRD.^7
These claims may give us pause when assessing his dialogue with Benny
Le ́vy, as we shall do shortly, but it is certainly worth keeping in mind
when we do. Yet before turning to this dialogical ethics and its apparent
repudiation of some of Sartre’s ideas inBNandCDR, let us examine
rather closely the “dialectical” ethics that lies between theCritiqueand
Power and Freedom.^8
Sartre’s second, “Dialectical” ethics
Like the thoughts recorded in hisNotebooks for an Ethics, the remarks
from which we must reconstruct this second ethics are scattered over
(^5) Leo Fretz, “An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” trans. George Berger, in Silverman and
6 Elliston (eds.),Sartre. Contemporary Approaches,^233. Recorded Nov.^25 ,^1976.
7 Ibid.,^233.
8 Ibid.,^234.
Benny Le ́vy,Pouvoir et liberte ́, notebooks set out, presented and annotated by Giles Hanus
(Paris: Verdier, 2007 ); hereafterPL.
Sartre’s second, “Dialectical” ethics 357