Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt

Political Theory 40 (2):165-193 (2012)
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Abstract

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, ana 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

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10.1177/0090591711432700

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Lori Marso
Union College

Citations of this work

The Poetics of Failure in Simone de Beauvoir’s Les bouches inutiles.Ani Chen - 2023 - Contemporary Political Theory 22 (4):506-528.
Simone de Beauvoir and the politics of ambiguity.Lori Marso - 2012 - Contemporary Political Theory 13 (4):e1.

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