Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and note on texts
- Introduction
- I Germany, 1790–1890
- II Germany and America, 1900–1968
- III France, 1945–2004
- 10 The future and freedom: Jean-Paul Sartre
- 11 The future and the disclosure of being: Simone de Beauvoir
- 12 The future as rupture: Michel Foucault
- 13 The future and hope: Jacques Derrida
- IV Onwards, 2011–
- Further reading
- Bibliography
- Index
11 - The future and the disclosure of being: Simone de Beauvoir
from III - France, 1945–2004
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and note on texts
- Introduction
- I Germany, 1790–1890
- II Germany and America, 1900–1968
- III France, 1945–2004
- 10 The future and freedom: Jean-Paul Sartre
- 11 The future and the disclosure of being: Simone de Beauvoir
- 12 The future as rupture: Michel Foucault
- 13 The future and hope: Jacques Derrida
- IV Onwards, 2011–
- Further reading
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
On 26 August 1944, a triumphant Charles de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées in a still-not-fully liberated Paris. In the cheering crowd was a tall, elegant woman accompanied by another woman. Suddenly shots rang out. They missed de Gaulle, but several other people fell to the ground. The two women, along with everyone else in the vicinity, ran from the snipers and eventually took refuge in a basement. In spite of the danger, Simone de Beauvoir spent the next couple of days moving around Paris, covering the liberation for a newspaper.
The sniping signalled the end of the German occupation of Paris. The war itself, and the Nazi government responsible for it, would last only another year. Beauvoir captured the joy of that time of transition:
The age I lived in, which for ten years had revolved on a firm axis, now abruptly shifted out of orbit and dragged me with it. … The earth turned and revealed another of its faces to me. … No blade of grass in any meadow, however I looked at it, would ever again be what it had been. The ephemeral was my lot. … I seemed to have grown wings; henceforth I would soar above the confines of my personal life and float in the empyrean that was all mankind.[…]
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- Information
- Time and PhilosophyA History of Continental Thought, pp. 287 - 312Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2011