Sartre’s Later Work:Toward a notion of institutional violence

This chapter presents crucial elements of Jean-Paul Sartre’s approach to violence. Violence for Sartre is first and foremost a fundamental fact of reality, as evidenced by two world wars, colonialism and racism, and the resistance to the German occupation and anticolonial struggles. While violence is considered criminal and thus always destroys a right, it then gives rise to the establishment of a new right or a law. An article on Sartrean violence by Michael Fleming criticizes Ronald Santoni’s aforementioned reading of Sartre’s take on violence as characterized by ambiguity, along with Hannah Arendt’s interpretation, as a result of an overemphasis on individual violence at the expense of structural violence. According to Sartre, the main function of the school system is that of providing an ‘introduction to bourgeois life,’ and in particular, introducing children to competition, a serialized relationship in which Otherness dominates because each pupil is defined in numerical terms in relation to the others