Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T04:25:50.172Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Verónica Zebadúa Yáñez
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this essay, I focus on two biographical works by Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir that I read as political texts: Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (Arendt 1957) and “Must We Burn Sade?” (Beauvoir 2012). Reading Arendt's Varnhagen and Beauvoir's “Sade” side by side illuminates their shared preoccupation with lived experience and their common political premises: the antagonism between freedom and sovereignty, and the centrality of action and constructive relations with others. My argument is that these texts constitute an original style of political thinking, which I call politico‐biographical hermeneutics, or reading the life of others as exercises in political theory. Politico‐biographical hermeneutics, as I take it, is not a systematic methodology, but an approach to interpreting sociopolitical forces as they come to bear and are embodied and inscribed in the lived experiences, struggles, and works of representative or exemplary individuals. This approach identifies the political lessons of lived experience and supports one of the central claims of feminist philosophy, namely, that the personal and the political are not antithetical, but relational.

Type
Found Cluster: Recent Scholarship on Simone de Beauvoir
Information
Hypatia , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , Winter 2018 , pp. 94 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1957/1997. Rahel Varnhagen: The life of a Jewess, ed. Weissberg, Liliane. Trans. Richard Winston and Clare Winston. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1989. Lectures on Kant's political philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1994. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1995. Men in dark times. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Between past and future. New York: Penguin Classics.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 2007a. The Jew as pariah: A hidden tradition. In The Jewish writings, ed. Kohn, Jerome and Feldman, Ron H.New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 2007b. A way toward the reconciliation of peoples. Trans. John E. Woods. In The Jewish writings, ed. Kohn, Jerome and Feldman, Ron H.New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 2013a. Hannah Arendt: The last interview and other conversations. Brooklyn: Melville House.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 2013b. Rachel Varnhagen and Goethe. Trans. Haun Saussy. Critical Inquiry 40 (1): 15–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arendt, Hannah, and Jaspers, Karl. 1993. Correspondence 1926–1969. Trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber. San Diego: Mariner Books.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1992. After the war: Force of circumstance, 1944–1952. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Paragon House.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1994 All said and done: The autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir, 1962–1972. Trans. Patrick O'Brian. New York: Marlowe & Company.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2000. The ethics of ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. Princeton: Citadel.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2012. Must we burn Sade? (1952) In Simone de Beauvoir: Political writings, ed. Simons, Margaret A. and Timmermann, Marybeth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 1995. The pariah and her shadow: Hannah Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen. In Feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Honig, Bonnie. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Richard J. 1996. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish question. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Blanchard, Marc. 2004. On the style of the coming philosophy: “Le style, c'est la femme” (Buffon). MLN 119 (4): 696–717.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holland‐Cunz, Barbara. 2012. Gefährdete freiheit: Über Hannah Arendt und Simone de Beauvoir. Opladen: Budrich.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
hooks, bell. 1999. Feminist theory: From margin to center. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.Google Scholar
Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of experience: Modern American and European variations on a universal theme. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. 2001. Hannah Arendt: Life is a narrative. Trans. Frank Collins. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leopold, David, and Stears, Marc. 2008. Political theory: Methods and approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marso, Lori J. 2012. Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt: Judgments in dark times. Political Theory 40 (2): 165–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maslin, Kimberly. 2013. Rahel Varnhagen: Arendt's experiential ontology. New German Critique 40 (119): 77–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moynagh, Patricia. 2006. Beauvoir on lived reality, exemplary validity, and a method for political thought. In Simone de Beauvoir's political thinking, ed. Marso, Lori J. and Moynagh, Patricia. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Oksala, Johanna. 2014. In defense of experience. Hypatia 29 (2): 388–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sade, Marquis de. 1795/2006. Philosophy in the boudoir: Or, the immoral mentors. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Scott, Joan W. 1997. Only paradoxes to offer: French feminists and the rights of man. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tidd, Ursula. 2004. Simone de Beauvoir, gender and testimony. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veltman, Andrea. 2010. Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on labor. Hypatia 25 (1): 55–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weissberg, Liliane. 1997. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, and the writing of (auto)biography. In Rahel Varnhagen: The life of a Jewess, ed. Weissberg, Liliane. Trans. Richard Winston and Clare Winston. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, Lynn R. 2004. Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between storytelling and theory. Comparative Literature 56 (1): 77–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young‐Bruehl, Elisabeth. 2004. Hannah Arendt: For love of the world. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar