Sur les Inséparables

The International Simone de Beauvoir Society is happy to present the 1st session the Beauvoir Webinar Series 2022! 
We are delighted to welcome Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir to talk about The Inseparables with Claudia Bouliane (University of Ottawa, Simone de Beauvoir Studies). Their conversation will be followed by a talk, "Zaza and Truth-Telling", by Francis Walsh (Sorbonne University, Simone de Beauvoir Studies).

THE INSEPARABLES (from Editor):
"The Inseparables (or Inseparables) is a new short novel by Simone de Beauvoir that evokes her great love of youth for her friend Zaza, whose tragic death caused by the prejudices and diktats of the society of the time, haunted her all her life. But beyond that, the novel depicts the sexual and intellectual education of two young girls who are « orderly » (rangées) and rebellious in a world that pretends to forbid them to become free and thinking women and instead confines them to the role of wife and mother at the service of society. This autobiographical text evokes with emotion and lucidity the founding experiences of the revolt and the work of the great feminist philosopher: her turbulent emancipation and the fundamental antagonism between intellectuals and the self-righteous, which will form the basis of the Memoirs of Dutiful Daughter."

French edition: https://www.editionsdelherne.com/public.../les-inseparables/ 
English edition (trans. Lauren Elkin): https://www.penguin.co.uk/.../the.../9781784877002.html 
American edition (trans. Sandra Smith): https://www.harpercollins.com/.../inseparable-simone-de...

ZAZA AND TRUTH-TELLING, by Francis Walsh
In Inseparables and, more generally in Beauvoir's life and work, Zaza is intimately linked to truth and selfhood. Fictional or real, Zaza, in addition to having "personality", an authentic vitality, is the "true friend", the one with whom it is possible to have "true conversations", and the one to whom it is possible to tell the truth about oneself. However, truth and truth-telling are also what is at stake in this friendship; it is what unites the young girls, and what ultimately separates them. This is, at least, the intuition that will be guiding my initial reading of Inseparables. Moreover, as Éliane Lecarme-Tabone showed, Inseparables, Beauvoir's final attempt to translate Zaza's story into fiction, is a pivotal moment in Beauvoir's transition from novel to autobiography, that is, from a truth discourse to another. Why does the coming to autobiography have to pass through the fictionalized account of the death of the "true friend", if not because true friendship is intimately linked not only to the truth about oneself, but also to the general problem of truth and writing, that is to say, written enunciation of truth? The Diary of a Philosophy Student and Beauvoir's epistolary exchanges with Zaza will allow me, in a second step, to shed light on this point, to grasp how truth-telling, selfhood and friendship got entangled. This analysis will not aim to re-establish, in the light of the notebooks and letters, a truth that fiction (or autobiographical writing) would have betrayed; rather, my goal is to understand a recurrence - the entanglement in Beauvoir’s oeuvre between truth-telling, selfhood and Zaza -, and to re-read self-writing and fictional narrative as a set of discursive operations that model in different ways a common enunciation scene: existence, and absence.