Posts tagged beauvoir
Judith Butler. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.“ in: Yale French Studies. Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century. No. 72, pp. 35-49, Winter 1986. (English)
Simone de Beauvoir does not directly address the burden of freedom 8 that gender presents, but we can extrapolate from her view how constraining norms work to subdue the exercise of gender freedom. The social constraints upon gender compliance and deviation are so great that most people feel deeply wounded if they are told that they are not really manly or womanly, that they have failed to execute their manhood or womanhood properly. Indeed, insofar as social existence requires an unambiguous gender affinity, it is not possible to exist in a socially meaningful sense outside of established gender norms. The fall from established gender boundaries initiates a sense of radical dislocation which can assume a metaphysical significance. If existence is always gendered existence, then to stray outside of established gender is in some sense to put one’s very existence into question. In these moments of gender dislocation in which we realize that it is hardly necessary that we be the genders we have become, we confront the burden of choice intrinsic to living as a man or a woman or as some other gender identity, a freedom made burdensome through social constraint.
(via arielnietzsche)
(Source: freyjageist)
subject, verb, object.
(Source: firstwavefeminist)
Simone de Beauvoir et Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris, 1959. Photo: Georges Pierre.
(À gauche, Évelyne Rey, actrice, soeur de Claude Lanzmann, qui avait une relation amoureuse avec Sartre).
(Source: beauvoiriana)
Tete-a-Tete, by Hazel Rowley, is an account of the complicated relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The book chronicles their lives together and apart, and shows how they influenced each others’ work. It is hands-down one of the best books I have ever read, and I recommend it to anyone interested in Sartre or Beauvoir, existentialism, or who is just looking for a good read.
Simone de Beauvoir says: celebrate International Women’s Day!
Some other inspiring French women you might want to read up on today include Fadela Amara, Louise Michel, Ségolène Royal and the 343 salopes.
“No one would take me just as I was, no one loved me; I shall love myself enough, I thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was entering a world whose newness stunned me. I learned to distinguish between distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize the hesitations of the heart, and its ecstasies, the splendor of great renunciations, and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills; I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself… My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.”
— Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir (via planetcaravan)
…men walk past each other, they pass each other without looking. Or then they stalk a woman. A woman is standing there and four men direct their steps more or less toward the spot where the woman is standing. It occurred to me that I can never make a woman in any other way than motionless, and a man always striding; when I model a woman, then motionless; a man, always walking. It’s the totality of this life that I want to reproduce in everything I do.
— Giacometti in discussing his bronze “Places.”
Dusk is about to fall, but it is still warm. It is one of these heart-touching moments when the world is so well attuned to men that it seems impossible that they should not all be happy.
(via simevoyhoy)
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
Claude Lanzmann, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
“No one would take me just as I was, no one loved me; I shall love myself enough, I thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was entering a world whose newness stunned me. I learned to distinguish between distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize the hesitations of the heart, and its ecstasies, the splendor of great renunciations, and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills; I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself… My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.”
— Simone De Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (via nefertiti)
The Ethics of Ambiguity
“…and it is by ambiguity that […] Satre, in Being and Nothingness, fundamentally defined man, that being whose being is not to be, that realizes itself only as being a presence in the world, that engaged freedom, that surging of the for-oneself which is immediately given for others.” - de Beauvoir, Simone (The Ethics of Ambiguity, 10)
