Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:38:25.305Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Simone de Beauvoir, the Paradoxical Intellectual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lawrence D. Kritzman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the ethics of ambiguity (1947), Simone De Beauvoir suggests that to be human is to be subject to change and contradiction. Paradox, she claimed, was the only truth concerning human existence because of the tension created between mortality and the desire to give meaning to life. “Death,” Beauvoir suggests, “challenges our existence. … [I]t also gives meaning to our life” (Prime 731). Unlike Albert Camus, however, she clearly refuses to conceive of existence as absurd. “To declare existence absurd is to deny that I can ever be given meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed” (Ethics 129). Recognizing the facticity created by the inevitability of death and the constraints death imposes on existence, she implores us, nevertheless, to seize our freedom and give meaning to it through ethical acts.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 206 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by The Modern Language Association of America

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

Works Cited

Bair, Deirdre. Simone de Beauvoir. New York: Simon, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. All Said and Done. Trans. Patrick O'Brian. New York: Putnam, 1974. Print.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel, 1976. Print.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. Force of Circumstance. Trans. Richard Howard. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Print.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Mandarins. Trans. Leonard F. Friedman. New York: Norton, 1991. Print.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. Old Age. Trans. Patrick O'Brian. London: Penguin, 1977. Print.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Prime of Life. New York: Paragon, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1973. Print.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex” Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 35–49. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moi, Toril. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
O'Doherty, Gemma. “Simone de Beauvoir Was the Mother of Feminism … and on Her Centenary, All They Write about Is Her Scandalous Love Life.” Independent 12 Jan. 2008. Print.Google Scholar
Sallenave, Danièlle. Castor de Guerre. Paris: Gallimard, 2008. Print.Google Scholar