Examining and contesting the emergence of ‘third world theatre’ in the mid twentieth century, Brueton traces how Jean-Marie Serreau, the director feted for his inaugural productions of absurdist plays by Ionesco and Beckett, sought to disrupt the Eurocentric nihilism of the post-war dramatic canon. Serreau brought the anticolonial drama unfolding throughout the Empire to Parisian stages. Producing seminal works by the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine, Martinican poet, playwright and politician Aimé Césaire, and French iconoclast Jean Genet, Serreau pursued a radical new humanism that aimed to decentre the intellectual and artistic hegemony of the West. He envisaged a third world theatre that would not only eschew the ghettoization of major Francophone playwrights but also contest the very values of colonial humanism that had developed under France’s Third Republic. Brueton compares Kateb’s representation of the anticolonial uprisings in Algeria in Le Cadavre Encerclé (The Encircled Corpse, 1958); Genet’s critique of French imperialism and Algerian neo-nationalism in Les Paravents (The Screens, 1966); and Césaire’s tragic exposition of Congolese independence from Belgium in Une saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1967), to argue that they refuse forms of understanding where cultural difference is reduced to one decolonial agenda.

The worldviews of Jean Genet, Marquis de Sade, and Anton LaVey are presented in this chapter. All of them accuse society of being morally hypocritical. Empirical research vis-à-vis hypocrisy in the psychology of morality is discussed. A moral-pluralistic approach is proposed in which different moral positions are prominent and can come into conflict with each other. In this context, Max Weber’s “ethic of responsibility” is discussed as relevant to political leadership. Then, the monopositionality of utopian visions, such as fascism, communism, religions, and neoliberalism, are criticized as being focused on one ideal end-position that does not allow counter-positions or alternative points of view As practical implications of this chapter, I offer three guidelines for dealing with hypocrisy: the role of self-awareness, perspective-taking, and the stimulation of moral multiplicity.