Abstract

Sartre reflected on questions related to terror and terrorism throughout his career and these questions shaped his understanding of ethics and politics. In exploring these connections I link Sartre’s controversial remarks about the terrorism he observed during his lifetime to our more recent experiences of terrorism in the USA, Bali, Madrid and London. In Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism, Robert Young claims that Sartre moves from ethics to politics in his account of colonialism, understanding that shift as one from a concern with individual freedom to commitment to political causes. (2001a, viii) In contrast, Azzedine Haddour says that Anti-Semite and Jew (1995) and ‘Black Orpheus’ (2001b) demonstrate ‘the inextricable link between ethics and politics in his critiques of anti-Semitism, racism and colonialism.’ (2001a, 8) While Sartre condemns these phenomena in ethical terms, some of his statements in response to them appear to suggest that ethical assessment is irrelevant. I aim to make some sense of this seeming inconsistency in Sartre’s views, and consider how differing conceptions of ethics are inflected in his political statements, particularly those concerning terrorism.