Simone de Beauvoir and the art of loss

newstatesman.com

63 points·apollinaire··15 comments

Thank you! Paywalls be damned.

Here's a fascinating interview with de Beauvoir around 25 years after writing her seminal work The Second Sex, where she explains why feminism is necessary: https://youtu.be/g6eDMaDWquI

Well worth watching. Most of what she says still rings true today.

I have a deep respect for Simone de Beauvoir, so I clicked this link with interest, but I cannot find anything interesting in this article. It reads like a cross between a Tumblr post and a freshman essay. The writing is stilted, and the literary references are tenuous at best. If the article is trying to convey ideas, I am not sure what those ideas are, and if it is trying to create an emotional state, I don't think it succeeds. Not to be too ungenerous, but I half expected a recipe to follow the article.

For anyone interested, I would recommend simply picking a Simone de Beauvoir book yourself. They're not nearly as impenetrable as they're made out to be, and they contain much more meaning. (de Beauvoir is no Derrida, which I mean as a compliment.)

I can see where you're coming from — but perhaps you are not the target audience for the piece. I know of Simone de Beauvoir only from a Lloyd Cole lyric from the 80's and the article has piqued my interest in her.

I have only recently found on these pages a new promising source, The Collector.

It publishes divulgational articles, mostly about History, Philosophy and the Arts.

If you may be interested in e.g. Simone de Beauvoir, you could check the articles selected with:

https://www.thecollector.com/search/beauvoir/

What's the différance? [I'll leave now]

In Spring, man built a tower. In Summer, another. Through Autumn, they held, but in Winter, one fell.

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