La Vieillesse (Blanche) (French Edition)

Gallimard, 1970-01-23. Paperback. Good. 5x1x8. Softcover. Shelf wear. Creasing to spine. Tears to head of spine. Small markings on front wrap and end page, else unmarked. <br> "There are some thinkers who are, from the very beginning, unambiguously identified as philosophers (e.g., Plato). There are others whose philosophical place is forever contested (e.g., Nietzsche); and there are those who have gradually won the right to be admitted into the philosophical fold. Simone de Beauvoir is one of these belatedly acknowledged philosophers. Identifying herself as an author rather than as a philosopher and calling herself the midwife of Sartre's existential ethics rather than a thinker in her own right, Beauvoir's place in philosophy had to be won against her word. That place is now uncontested. The international conference celebrating the centennial of Beauvoir's birth organized by Julia Kristeva is one of the more visible signs of Beauvoir's growing influence and status. Her enduring contributions to the fields of ethics, politics, existentialism, phenomenology and feminist theory and her significance as an activist and public intellectual is now a matter of record. Unlike her status as a philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir's position as a feminist theorist has never been in question. Controversial from the beginning, The Second Sex's critique of patriarchy continues to challenge social, political and religious categories used to justify women's inferior status. Though readers of the English translation of The Second Sex have never had trouble understanding the feminist significance of its analysis of patriarchy, they might be forgiven for missing its philosophical importance so long as they had to rely on an arbitrarily abridged version of The Second Sex that was questionably translated by a zoologist who was deaf to the philosophical meanings and nuances of Beauvoir's French terms. The 2010 translation of The Second Sex changed that. In addition to providing the full text, this translation's sensitivity to the philosophical valence of Beauvoir's writing makes it possible for her English readers to understand the existential-phenomenological grounds of her feminist analysis of the forces that subordinate women to men and designate her as the Other." - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy