Césaire's initial critique of alienated colonial relationality received decisive theoretical formulation in Sartre's phenomenology of political and ethical responsibility, developed during the years of the Algerian war in dialogue with Frantz Fanon. Although Sartre's explosive preface to Les Damnés de la terre and his articles condemning the Algerian war and the torture done there in the name of all French citizens are well-known, the theoretical logic that lead Sartre famously to conclude that ‘We are All Murderers’ is less clear. I believe this is because that theorization lies buried, disbursed here and there through the many hundreds of pages of his Critique de la raison dialectique, in particular in the manuscript of the second volume of that work, which would not be published until 1985, long after Sartre's star had waned on the French (and American) philosophical scene.

In fact, Sartre's theorization of what he calls the process of ‘totalization’ in those two volumes forms the basis of an ethico-political philosophy of relation and intersubjectivity, one that goes beyond the earlier and more famous, largely depoliticized model of intersubjectivity elaborated in L'Etre et le néant and plays such as Huis clos. I have argued above that that theory was the single most important model for Fanon's critique of colonial violence in Les Damnés de la terre.

Sartre's articles condemning the Algerian war and the use of torture by the French military include the 1956 speech ‘Colonialism is a System’, his 1957 piece ‘You are Wonderful’ and ‘We are All Murderers’ and ‘A Victory’ from the following year, each quite brief speeches or journalistic pieces, each searing indictments of French imperial brutality, hypocrisy, and guilt in the unfolding Algerian war. In the face of what Sartre unhesitatingly calls the ‘war crimes’ revealed in publications such as Des Rappelés Témoignent and Henri Alleg's La Question, the pieces condemn the ‘gangrene […] of the cynical and systematic use of absolute violence’ (Sartre 2006: 63). The crucial aspect of Sartre's argument in these texts (as in his description of colonialism as a ‘system’ and his call for its violent overthrow in the Fanon Preface) is not simply to denounce the use of torture or colonial exploitation.