The Politics of Legibility in Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Bouches Inutiles

• In Event: Legibility and Violence in Feminist Political Theory

Abstract

Readers of Simone de Beauvoir have often noticed that drama functions as a critical metaphor in her political thought. In particular, they have remarked on the ways in which “drama” functions to make legible what de Beauvoir called the “concrete condition” of women’s lived experiences (Bergoffen 2003, Gothlin 1999, Zerilli 1992). Yet, little attention has been paid to the ways in which de Beauvoir understood drama, more specifically the theater, was a means of exploring the limits and possibilities of making that concrete condition legible. In this paper, I look to de Beauvoir’s literary writings and her only play Les Bouches Inutiles to fill out the ways in which theater was particularly well-suited for making women’s concrete condition not only “legible,” that is able to be read, but and also “spoken.” Doing so gives critical leverage on interpreting the centrality of women’s concrete condition in Les Bouches Inutiles as “useless mouths,” seemingly unable to speak out against the decision of their brothers, fathers, and lovers to violently execute them by driving them out of the city walls. My reading has implications for the move in contemporary political theory to look to theater as a site for imagining and interrogating the tight linkage since Aristotle of voice and language with political subjectivity, as well as theater as a site for political thinking more broadly.

Author

• Ani Chen, Cornell University