The lived experience of doubling

Simone de Beauvoir's phenomenology of old age

Sarah Clark Miller

pp. 127-147

in: Lester Embree (ed), The existential phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir, Berlin, Springer, 2001

Abstract

This essay demonstrates that Beauvoir "s La vieillesse is a phenomenological study of old age indebted to Husserl's phenomenology of the body. Beauvoir's depiction of the doubling in the lived experience of the elderly—a division between outsiders' awareness of the elderly's decline and the elderly's own inner understanding of old age—serves as a specific illustration of Beauvoir "s particular method of description and analysis.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

de Beauvoir Simone