Reading the Lives of Others
Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12146504 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Verónica Zebadúa Yáñez (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 94-110 |
| Publication date | 2017-11-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Hypatia (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0887-5367 • E-ISSN: 1527-2001 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1111/hypa.12383 |
| OpenAlex | W2769890084 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 17 |
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
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Biography · Epistemology · Hermeneutics · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Sociology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre
Songs of Experience
Hannah Arendt
Political Theory
Political Writings
The Human Condition
In Defense of Experience
Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on Labor
On the Style of the Coming Philosophy
Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt
Rahel Varnhagen
Rahel Varnhagen, the Life of a JewessArendtHannah Rahel Varnhagen, the Life of a Jewess Baeck Institute of Jews from GermanyEast and West LibraryLondon, 1957, 21
Only paradoxes to offer
Feminist Theory
Rahel Varnhagen and Goethe
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.4 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2024 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |