INTERVIEWER [Paris Review]

Some people think that a longing for God underlies your works.

DE BEAUVOIR

No. Sartre and I have always said that it’s not because there’s a desire to be that this desire corresponds to any reality. It’s exactly what Kant said on the intellectual level. The fact that one believes in causalities is no reason to believe that there is a supreme cause. The fact that man has a desire to be does not mean that he can ever attain being or even that being is a possible notion, at any rate the being that is a reflection and at the same time an existence. There is a synthesis of existence and being that is impossible. Sartre and I have always rejected it, and this rejection underlies our thinking. There is an emptiness in man, and even his achievements have this emptiness. That’s all. I don’t mean that I haven’t achieved what I wanted to achieve but rather that the achievement is never what people think it is. Furthermore, there is a naïve or snobbish aspect, because people imagine that if you have succeeded on a social level you must be perfectly satisfied with the human condition in general. But that’s not the case.

“I’m swindled” also implies something else—namely, that life has made me discover the world as it is, that is, a world of suffering and oppression, of undernourishment for the majority of people, things that I didn’t know when I was young and when I imagined that to discover the world was to discover something beautiful. In that respect, too, I was swindled by bourgeois culture, and that’s why I don’t want to contribute to the swindling of others and why I say that I was swindled, in short, so that others aren’t swindled. It’s really also a problem of a social kind. In short, I discovered the unhappiness of the world little by little, then more and more, and finally, above all, I felt it in connection with the Algerian war and when I traveled.

INTERVIEWER

Some critics and readers have felt that you spoke about old age in an unpleasant way.

DE BEAUVOIR

A lot of people didn’t like what I said because they want to believe that all periods of life are delightful, that children are innocent, that all newlyweds are happy, that all old people are serene. I’ve rebelled against such notions all my life, and there’s no doubt about the fact that the moment, which for me is not old age but the beginning of old age, represents—even if one has all the resources one wants, affection, work to be done—represents a change in one’s existence, a change that is manifested by the loss of a great number of things. If one isn’t sorry to lose them it’s because one didn’t love them. I think that people who glorify old age or death too readily are people who really don’t love life. Of course, in present-day France you have to say that everything’s fine, that everything’s lovely, including death.

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Ein ebenso aufschlussreiches wie berührendes Interview, das De Beauvoir 1965 der Paris Review gab. Sie kommt mehrfachwenn auch indirekt auf  den Kern ihres Existenzialismus zu sprechen.

Alles erreicht, was sie wollte, und dann doch diese Leere, die Vergänglichkeit, die sie akzeptiert und doch darunter leidet. Ihre Abneigung gegen die “Bourgeoisie”, der sie selber entstammt und gegen die sie angeht, von der sie sich als Verräterin betrachtet fühlt und die doch ihr Publikum ist. Den Widerspruch hat sie nicht auflösen können.

Paris Review