Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

Abstract

In this essay, I focus on two biographical works by Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir that I read as political texts:Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess(Arendt 1957) and “Must We Burn Sade?” (Beauvoir 2012). Reading Arendt'sVarnhagenand Beauvoir's “Sade” side by side illuminates their shared preoccupation with lived experience and their common political premises: the antagonism between freedom and sovereignty, and the centrality of action and constructive relations with others. My argument is that these texts constitute an original style of political thinking, which I call politico‐biographical hermeneutics, or reading the life of others as exercises in political theory. Politico‐biographical hermeneutics, as I take it, is not a systematic methodology, but an approach to interpreting sociopolitical forces as they come to bear and are embodied and inscribed in the lived experiences, struggles, and works of representative or exemplary individuals. This approach identifies the political lessons of lived experience and supports one of the central claims of feminist philosophy, namely, that the personal and the political are not antithetical, but relational.