Kate Kirkpatrick
@philosofemme
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Philosopher @PhilFacOx | Fellow @RegentsOx | Author of #BecomingBeauvoir | Post-Kantian European Philosophy, Feminism, Ethics, and Religion
Joined July 2014
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Proofs are in and I'm happy to share that this October Simone Weil's *The Need for Roots* is joining Penguin Classics, in a new translation by
@RosSchwartz
and with an introduction by yours truly.
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Hannah Arendt’s 1952 reader’s report on The Second Sex has more than one whiff of irony:
1. It needs more famous men!
2. Too much philosophy!
3. Ridiculously lacking in love and humour!
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Fascinating clip of Sartre and Beauvoir, in which Sartre says “I totally agree with Simone de Beauvoir” about aspects of her feminism and she says (I paraphrase): well, there are things you can’t understand…
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Today in Oxford two
#blueplaques
are being unveiled celebrating philosophers. First is Iris Murdoch’s, at 30 Charlbury Road (and the portrait of her I used to sit under as an undergraduate in the Philosophy Faculty’s old Ryle Room).
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I know it’s apt and amusing that Camus’ *The Plague* is selling well in these interesting times, but may I also recommend Simone de Beauvoir’s *Old Age*?
In it, Beauvoir described the hypocrisy of societies that claimed to value ‘human’ life. 1/
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After my critical thread about
@LRB
’s decision to publish a non-consensual nude of Simone de Beauvoir in its recent piece on Beauvoir, I wrote a letter to the editor. They published a version of it today, edited significantly – which makes their choice of heading rather ironic:
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The
@LRB
has just published a lovely essay by Joanna Biggs about Beauvoir. The accompanying image? Beauvoir naked. A photo taken without consent. Of a woman who thought pornography should be illegal & explicit images of women not displayed in public.
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"We must accept our situation, which subjects us to absolute obligations towards things that are relative, limited, and imperfect."
Happy birthday to Simone Weil, born
#onthisday
in 1909.
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For those interested in Beauvoir's contemporary relevance, today is the publication date of *Beauvoir and Politics*, a new collection of essays on thinking with Beauvoir in the 21st century
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Happy birthday to Simone de Beauvoir, born
#onthisday
in 1908, who liked to write at home in her dressing gown.
For those of you who enjoy a caption competition, you may like to know that this portrait was taken in 1957 and the sculpture on the floor is of Sartre's hands...
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Coming 6 June
The Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy, edited by Daniel Whistler and Mark Sinclair
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Sartre looks a little lonely in this ‘Existentialist tree’, doesn’t he?
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🚨 New article alert 🚨
‘Beauvoir and Sartre's “disagreement” about freedom’ is now available open access at Philosophy Compass
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Exciting book news! The publication date for Becoming Beauvoir has now been fixed for August 2019. (Here's a poster of the cover at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week.)
@BloomsburyPhilo
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Beauvoir Twitter: This month
@FitzcarraldoEds
is publishing a new edition of *Une mort très douce*, in Patrick O'Brian's translation and with an Introduction by Ali Smith
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Surprise post today! Such an honour to be part of the team bringing this Weil to
@classicpenguins
and a joy to behold the first fruit of our labour.
“We must accept our situation, which subjects us to absolute obligations towards things that are relative, limited and imperfect.”
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“Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and to diminish envy.”
—Bertrand Russell, born
#onthisday
in 1872
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I have some news!
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If you would like to see intellectual women commemorated with clothing, inviting you into conversation rather than spectatorship, here's something you might like to support:
We see a lot of debate about the
#Wollstonecraft
statue ...
Our
#VirginiaWoolf
#statue
, still in fundraising, can be seen below in progress. What are your thoughts?
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Ali Smith on Simone de Beauvoir: "She’ll never not be relevant, one way or another. She’ll never not be troubling to the people who can’t or don’t want to imagine the existence of such a powerful and influential thinking woman"
@NewStatesman
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Je suis heureuse de partager que
#DevenirBeauvoir
sortira en poche à la rentrée.
Voici la nouvelle couverture et merci
@ManonGarcia
pour sa préface. 🙏
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Today I began my new post at
@RegentsOx
. It’s a special place in Oxford, and in my own history—I read my first degree at Regent’s Park and I’m thrilled to be returning now as Tutorial Fellow & Director of Studies in philosophy.
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And, second, another opponent of subjectivism: Philippa Foot, whose work *Natural Goodness* Michael Dummett praised as “the greatest work in moral philosophy since G.E. Moore” (at 15 Walton Street).
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"Her life raises a question she had to live: are we the sum of all of our actions, or the sum of our worst?"
My piece on Beauvoir's legacy
@GuardianBooks
#BecomingBeauvoir
@BloomsburyPhilo
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Sartre and Merleau-Ponty also published phenomenologies of the body in the 1940s, and strangely they were not published with covers of naked men. 🤔
We should hope for better in 2020.
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Simone de Beauvoir on how (much) Sartre read: "He reads little, and if by chance he feels like reading, any book can delight him--he asks only that the printed pages act as a support for his imagination and his thoughts, a bit like fortune tellers who look in coffee grounds 1/
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In Simone de Beauvoir's 'An Eye for An Eye', she asks: "Can one condemn an entire man on the basis of one moment in his life?"
Seeing discussions of forgiveness and exoneration on philosophy twitter reminded me of it, and of this by
@Skye_Cleary
@TheTLS
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If you are in Oxford and free on the afternoon of 3 November and interested in Simone Weil’s political philosophy…
Please join us for the launch of the new Penguin Classics translation of Simone Weil's 'The Need for Roots', with Dr Kate Kirkpatrick, Dr Christopher Thomas, and Dr Deborah Casewell
All welcome. Details in the eventbrite!
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Thank you to the British Academy for this wonderful opportunity, and to
@RegentsOx
for their support!
Many congratulations to Dr Kate Kirkpatrick (
@philosofemme
) on the award of a
@BritishAcademy_
Mid-Career Fellowship for her next project on Simone de Beauvoir - a philosophical commentary on Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
Read more here:
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Happy birthday to Simone de Beauvoir, born
#onthisday
in 1908!
In the same decade, Rodin's colossal 'Thinker' was cast.
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Feminists: If you're dissatisfied with mainstream consent discourse—with its focus on what makes sex permissible or legal instead of good, its misapplications in policing and policy—this book insightfully analyzes these inadequacies *and* defends consent's emancipatory potential.
Today is the publication day of The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex 🥳
In it, I’m trying to hold together insights from analytic moral philosophy, legal theory, feminist philosophy, and continental philosophy in order to…
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The Second Sex, Phenomenology of Perception, Being and Nothingness
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Why write *another* biography of Simone de Beauvoir? Because there is much more to her life than erotic plots
#BecomingBeauvoir
via @
@TelegraphBooks
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It’s UK publication day for the new English translation of Simone Weil’s *The Need for Roots* (L’enracinement) by
@RosSchwartz
Here she writes for
@classicpenguins
on her translation ethos and the challenges of translating Weil:
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Interested in Simone de Beauvoir, life-writing, or the past, present, and future of feminism?
In the next few months I'm looking forward to public events on all of the above. 🧵
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This tweet reminded me of the 1946 profile Beauvoir wrote of Sartre for Harper’s Bazaar, in which she described his habits of “reading”:
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New essay alert! 🚨
Sonia Kruks and I have been thinking together about ageing and bad faith with Beauvoir’s late work:
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Happy birthday to Simone de Beauvoir, born
#onthisday
in 1908!
This photo of her reminds me of Rodin's
#thethinker
(first cast in bronze 4 years before she was born).
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For those in Berlin: If you're interested in the philosophy of Beauvoir or Weil you might like to join us for this conversation 19 May at
@HumboldtUni
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Come on,
@guardian
. Don’t say half of adults when the stat is 50% of men and 16% of women.
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While I can see why the LRB might not want to publish the parts where I call their publication of this image ‘disappointing’, guilty of uncritical myth-perpetuation, and (frankly) 'cheap', I did not include those words lightly. So here is the original letter for comparison:
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I remain unconvinced. So now I’ve sent a second letter. And I’m posting it here, where I can be confident that all of it will be seen – and shared, by anyone who wants to do so.
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This beautiful place is the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, where Simone de Beauvoir sat in the 'ladies only' section to read Lucretius, Diderot, and more in the 1920s.
#librarylife
#ladiesonly
#becomingbeauvoir
(Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen)
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Simone de Beauvoir was born
#onthisday
in 1908. Now Google Assistant cites her when you ask: What’s the meaning of life?
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January is widely believed to take its name from the two-faced Roman god Janus, who had one gaze directed to the past and one to the future. I like this sculpture for provoking the thought that whichever way you look there will be angles that escape your vision.
#HappyNewYear
!
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Every so often at Christmas a piece comes out about Sartre’s play, Bariona. It was his first play, and it is an intriguing one: during his lifetime, it was performed only once, at Christmas 1940 in the Stalag XII D camp where he was prisoner of war, near Trèves. THREAD ⬇️
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If you are interested in the thought of Simone Weil, you might like to follow this new account for the AHRC Funded UK Simone Weil Research Network
@UKWeilNetwork
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🔹🔹🔹IT'S PUBLICATION DAY! 🔹🔹🔹
So here's a little
#BecomingBeauvoir
thread to mark its setting sail.
(Did you know it has yellow endpapers? These remind me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'... Very well chosen,
@BloomsburyBooks
!) 1/
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Beyond thrilled to be awarded a Visiting Fellowship at The American Library in Paris for next spring—quel rêve !
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I wrote on Beauvoir’s ethics of love for
@aeonmag
For Simone de Beauvoir, authentic love is an ethical undertaking: it can be spoilt by devotion as much as by selfishness
@philosofemme
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This new Beauvoir novel from the mid 1950s (coming out in France later in 2020/the US next year) focuses on Beauvoir's friend Zaza. I'm especially intrigued to see how it depicts Merleau-Ponty!
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I’ve been reading some Oscar Wilde short stories to my kids, and thought Philosophy Twitter might enjoy the conclusion of “The Nightingale and the Rose,” in which a love-spurned philosophy student decides to turn to metaphysics:
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Since it’s Jean-Paul Sartre’s birthweek and
#Christianity
is trending on Twitter, here’s a little thread about why Martin Luther King, Jr. thought Sartre was wrong about freedom. But first, a photo of Dr. King’s note card on existentialism ⬇️: 1/
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Next month in Newcastle I'm looking forward to sharing some recent research on 'The Second Sex':
Simone de Beauvoir has often been called the “mother” of second-wave feminism, and ‘The Second Sex’ its bible. Join Dr Kate Kirkpatrick in an exploration of this text at a British Academy Lecture held in Newcastle on 17 Oct. Free, book now:
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It's US pub day for the new Penguin Classics translation of Simone Weil's *The Need for Roots* (L'enracinement)!
"Weil is profound, sublime, even euphoric.” (
@washingtonpost
)
Translated by
@RosSchwartz
and with by introduction from
@philosofemme
, THE NEED FOR ROOTS by Simone Weil is on sale TODAY!
Start reading now 👉
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Delighted to discover that
#BecomingBeauvoir
has been shortlisted for an AAP Prose Award in the category ‘Biography and Autobiography’!
AAP ANNOUNCES FINALISTS FOR 2020 PROSE AWARDS HONORING SCHOLARLY WORKS
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Very much looking forward to being back at the American Library in Paris next week for this conversation about women and feminism with Catharine MacKinnon!
Link ⬇️
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“Just now I do not see exactly why anybody should ever write anything. The world just as it is is so big; it exists and needs no words.”
Simone de Beauvoir on not
#writing
The Second Sex
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Thanks to
@Dauntbooks
and
@Bloomsburybooks
for hosting such a fabulous book launch for
#BecomingBeauvoir
last night! And to the friends, family, and colleagues who came to celebrate! It was such a wonderful, memorable, time.
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In this 1976 interview Beauvoir is asked what men fear about feminism:
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“Her life raises a question she had to live: are we the sum of all of our actions, or the sum of our worst?“
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In the latest of Paris’s surprises for me, tonight I had the honour of being invited by Isabelle Huppert to the opening of
#MarySaidWhatSheSaid
@TheaVilleParis
. It was perfection—well worth seeing if you can!
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Part of the reason Beauvoir has not been taken seriously is because of the paratextual bullshit that publishers chose for her. E.g. this cover for a book that built on two previous works of existentialist ethics & explored ethical formation, not just "woman" or naked woman parts:
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For those in Cambridge: next week (May Day) I’ll be speaking at the Monday Seminar
@cambridge_cpt
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Je suis vraiment ravie d’annoncer que «Becoming Beauvoir» sera publié en français chez
@Ed_Flammarion
au dernier trimestre 2020 ! 🇫🇷
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Oxford and double doses may bring other things to mind, but today its flooded fields yielded double doses of blue sky.
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This World Philosophy Day is also publication day for this book, to which I contributed a preface and some translation.
As Adrian Moore put it: “There is a vast amount to learn here, not just about how to philosophize at the margins but about how to philosophize.”
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70 years ago today the first volume of The Second Sex was published in France. Listen here to
#SimonedeBeauvoir
speaking about its reception in 1949, which focused disproportionately (in her view) on sex. “It’s not my fault”, she said 1/
#VendrediLecture
Le premier tome du livre "Le deuxième sexe" fête ce vendredi ses 70 ans. 📚 Retour sur l'oeuvre phare de Simone de Beauvoir, qui fit scandale en son temps - 1949
#DeuxiemeSexe
#SimonedeBeauvoir
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Saddened to hear of the death of Deirdre Bair, biographer of Beckett and Beauvoir
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This is my beloved friend Jeanne, who gave me my first book by a certain Simone de Beauvoir. We met fresh from university to swap French and English conversation; today she (a physicist) says her only regret is not giving me Marie Curie.
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Pour célébrer l'anniversaire de Simone de Beauvoir, née ce jour en 1908, je recommande cette serie d'émissions avec
@ManonGarciaFR
, Jean-Louis Jeannelle,
@CFroidevauxMett
et moi
@Philochemins
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One of today’s treats in Paris: a laughing lunch with Sheila Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde (translators of The Second Sex) and Madeleine Gobeil—femme extraordinaire who introduced Beauvoir to Friedan and Lessing (Doris, not Gotthold Ephraim).
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My review of Beauvoir's 'lost' novella, The Inseparables:
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Last week’s event with Catharine MacKinnon is now online. ⬇️
Thanks to
@amerlibparis
and all who attended!
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To celebrate 10 years of public philosophy at
@aeonmag
here’s an essay from the archive:
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Next week I'll be discussing Manon Garcia's *We are Not Born Submissive* with
@ManonGarciaFR
herself. If you're interested in Beauvoir or contemporary feminism, you might like to join us:
Monday 19 April, 7pm (London)
@philosopher1923
Sign up here ⬇️
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My essay on Beauvoir’s philosophy of love is featured at
@aeonmag
For Simone de Beauvoir, authentic love is an ethical undertaking: it can be spoilt by devotion as much as by selfishness. From the archive:
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Advances of
#BecomingBeauvoir
have arrived and I am *very* excited about the
#Beauvoirbling
!
Less than 6 weeks until the pub date now... 22 August
@BloomsburyPhilo
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"We would all benefit from a less punitive culture, [...] greater appetite for complexity, less anxiety over self-expression, and more allowance made for mistake-making and personal change."
@amiasrinivasan
on freeing speech
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