The Apocalypse of Hope: Political Violence in the Writings of Sartre and Fanon Nicolas de Warren Every society chooses its dead. —Alfred Sauvy “The apocalypse of hope” and other comparable flourishes in the writings of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre on political violence strike an alarming tone. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advo- cates the way of revolutionary violence as the inevitable consequence of colonialism and its systematic exploitation of colonized natives. In his role of agent provocateur, Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s influential and controversial work characteristically dramatizes this redemptive promise of violence: “to gun down a European is to kill two birds with one stone . . . there remains a dead man and a free man.” 1 This notori- ous pronouncement constitutes itself as an act of violence—we must feel threatened—meant to incite the latent counter-violence behind, in Sartre’s diagnosis, the false consciousness of bourgeois toleration and understanding. Could Sartre’s bold statement be spoken today without violent condemnation? This statement claims that, against the dehu- manization of colonial oppression, only revolutionary violence allows for the colonized natives to constitute a “people” and recreate them- selves in the image of a new humanity forged from the experience of liberation. For Fanon in particular, the recreation of humanity is impossible without the birth of a national consciousness and a revolu- tionary culture. As Fanon writes, “[w]e believe that the conscious, orga- nized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore 1 Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 27, Number 1, 2006 A shorter version of this paper was presented at the 2005 Hannah Arendt/Reiner Schürmann Symposium for Political Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. I would like to express my gratitude to the partici- pants for their insightful questions and comments and to James Dodd for the invitation to speak.