Gendering resistance and philosophy? Simone de Beauvoir’s Vichy

Decades of scholarly reception of Beauvoir in (Anglophone) philosophy and literary studies have positioned her within feminism, yet her Les Bouches inutiles ( Useless Mouths alt: Who Shall Die? , written 1943) and Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) provide not only political commentary on the Vichy government and canonical French culture, but also evidence of the author’s calculations about her own options as a public intellectual in postwar France. How she adapted her source materials (a medieval French chronicle and a text from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives ) signals her active renunciation or France’s traditional intellectual culture. Using tactics more familiar from the Theatre of the Absurd and 1970s French feminist philosophy, these texts reveal her claims to an intellectual agency far beyond conventional political feminism, enacted through her inversion of Classicism and the national mythmaking of the postwar era – a part of her intellectual biography she often suppressed but never actively denied.