Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt

Judgments in Dark Times

Bibliographic Data

ID6350529
AuthorsLori J Marso (0000-0001-9990-4613, Union College, Schenectady, NY, USA, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume40
Issue2
Pages165-193
Publication date2012-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0090591711432700
OpenAlexW1988858722
LanguageEN
Citations received8

This article compares Hannah Arendt’s famous essay on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel in 1961 to Simone de Beauvoir’s little studied piece, “An Eye for an Eye,” on the trial of Robert Brasillach in France in 1945. Arendt and Beauvoir each determine the complicity of individuals acting within a political order that seeks to eliminate certain forms of otherness and difference, but come to differing conclusions about the significance of the crimes. I explain Beauvoir’s account of ambiguity, on which she draws in her judgment of Brasillach and elaborates in her 1948 Ethics of Ambiguity, and measure it against Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness and its effects on the destruction of conditions of worldly plurality. Linking the failure of ethical judgment on the part of individuals to prior systemic political conditions, Beauvoir helps us recognize struggles over the meaning of bodies and conditions of inequality as central to politics

Ambiguity · Complicity · Epistemology · Meaning (existential · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre

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