FJHP – Volume 30 – 2014 21 ISIS, Al Qaeda and The Wretched of the Earth Matt Fitzpatrick The 1991 Australian coming-of-age film Flirting features a central character, Danny Embling (played admirably by Noah Taylor), who asks himself before being drawn into a boxing match, ‘I wondered if my old friend Jean-Paul Sartre would have fought in a situation like this’. Embling climbs into the ring, is duly knocked down and is thereupon offered a cigarette by a hallucinatory Sartre, ringside but distant from the concerns that had seen Embling laid out on the canvas. If Embling had read more than Sartre’s philosophical novels, and had moved on to Sartre’s Sorel-inspired introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he would have had a good sense of precisely when and under what circumstances Sartre would have seen violence as appropriate. Shifting from his usual interrogation of the dialectic between facticity and freedom, Sartre laid out a strong endorsement of radically violent subaltern revolt against the systemic violence of the coloniser. Discussing the Algerians’ turn to violence in the war of decolonisation against the French, and Fanon’s defence of it, Sartre maintained that this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten