Simone de Beauvoir'sCérémonie des adieux, an account of Sartre's old age and death, is a violent, clinical and sometimes obscene monument to mourning. For the author of La Nausée, the end of literature is a cessation of activity, but also an acceptance of his condition, without sadness or melancholy. Going blind in 1973, Sartre could no longer write. But when he conceived L'Espoir maintenant with Pierre Victor, he created a radical, rebellious work that broke with all his previous philosophy. In so doing, he achieved the radicality required of the ultimate work according to Adorno.
Unable to write, Sartre can no longer think or work on his style, since he can no longer correct himself. What does it mean to stop writing when one's entire life has been devoted to writing ? And yet, Sartre undertook a work with his secretary. It's radical, with all the hallmarks of the senile sublime : Sartre cancels and overturns all his past works, which have blinded him with the toil they demanded. This illness and death belong to the body itself ; they do not present themselves like a thread cut by the Fates. Hope now gave rise to a great quarrel of interpretation. For its defenders, it is the final work that achieves an absolute rupture, a transcendent transformation of what has gone before. Sartre's interest in Judaism and Levinas's thought : it's a conversion in every respect. For the detractors of Benny Levy, alias Pierre Victor, this book is the result of the manipulation of an invalid, a " detour of an old man ", according to Olivier Todd. Beauvoir considers that thinking against himself, as Sartre did all his life, could not lead him to such an "easy ". What does Sartre have to say about this ? In Libération in 1977, he considered his literary career to be over, and L'Espoir maintenant to be a book beyond the written word.
