Simone de Beauvoir — "There is an odd kind of pleasure in not being able to understand anything, in be…"
There is an odd kind of pleasure in not being able to understand anything, in being completely at sea.
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More from Simone de Beauvoir
"The only way to be truly free is to be free from yourself."
"The greatest danger for women is that they are so often brought up to believe that they are inferior to men."
"I am a woman who writes, and I am a woman who lives."
"To exist is to be responsible for one's own existence."
"The 'eternal feminine' is a concept invented by men to perpetuate the myth of woman as the 'Other'."
About Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
French existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) is the foundational text of modern feminist theory. Closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (lifetime partner and existentialist co-founder) and Albert Camus (existentialist contemporary in Paris). For an intellectual contrast, see Camille Paglia, American cultural critic and Sexual Personae author — Paglia argues for biological-essentialist roots of gender that Beauvoir's social-construction view — 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' — explicitly rejects. The two are the cleanest constructed-vs-essentialist poles in feminist theory.
The standard scholarly entry points to Simone de Beauvoir's work: Toril Moi (Duke, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor) — Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); Margaret A. Simons (Southern Illinois University, Emerita) — Beauvoir and The Second Sex (1999); Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford, Regent's Park College) — Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (2019). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Simone de Beauvoir.