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Ambiguity and Certitude in Simone de Beauvoir's Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sonia Kruks
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Extract

Simone De Beauvoir's political writings pose a puzzle. Politics is the stuff of much of her fictional and autobiographical, as well as more philosophical and sociotheoretical, work. Across all these genres she repeatedly explored the ethical and epistemological ambiguities that political action presents. That is, she wrote continually about politics. But she also sometimes wrote to intervene in politics, and when she did so, she wrote in a strikingly different manner. The writings she intended as political interventions are stridently opinionated and judgmental; they do not attend to nuances or complexities, and they stand in stark contrast to her embrace of ambiguity elsewhere. Why, I want to ask, this striking difference? And what is its significance?

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 214 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by The Modern Language Association of America

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