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's Varnhagen and 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.
Cette dimension a gagné de l'importance depuis la montée en puissance du mouvement mondial de contestation, à partir de deux dates symboliques: la victoire des ONG internationales face aux laboratoires pharmaceutiques en République d'Afrique du Sud en 1997, et la Conférence de l'OMC à Seattle en décembre 1999. 2 Où des acteurs économiques et sociaux jouent un rôle plus important que dans d'autres pays, aux côtés des acteurs politiques et administratifs. 3 La théorie de la gouvernance vise à prendre en compte la multiplicité des centres de pouvoir dans les Etats modernes, sous les effets notamment des décentralisations par le bas (local) et par le haut (régions). 31 MONDIALISATION, POUVOIRS ET RAPPORTS DE GENRE 4 Au-delà des approches traditionnelles, purement sociologiques, politiques ou économiques. 8 Cinq cents de ces entreprises contrôlent un tiers du PNB mondial et trois quarts du commerce international. 15 Cf. par exemple le cas de l'Union européenne. 43 MONDIALISATION, POUVOIRS ET RAPPORTS DE GENRE 16 Cf. «Gouvernance démocratique», sur le site Internet de l'Unesco,
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