R. Maxwell Racine

This article examines the form and language of Simone de Beauvoir’s novella “The Woman Destroyed” to argue that the story is a philosophical work in two ways. First, it contributes to scholarship on narrative self-understanding: it moves beyond Anthony Rudd’s and Peter Goldie’s theories by revealing how the instability of language complicates self-understanding. Second, it invites philosophical introspection by representing life as it is and generating questions about self-understanding for readers to ponder instead of giving them ready-made answers.

Paul Ricœur says that our narrative identity depends on how others understand us. This claim, however, does not explicitly address the fact that not everyone receives the same recognition: it underexplains how certain groups are systemically not acknowledged, respected, or taken seriously. More recent work on narrative co-authoring starts to address this fact by examining how people’s vulnerability to co-authoring depends on the context in which they live. But I argue that this work should be extended to attend to the kinds of vulnerabilities that result from what José Medina calls recognition deficiencies, which become more normalized due to structural oppression, specifically what Iris Marion Young calls cultural imperialism. I then illuminate the kinds of vulnerabilities that result from recognition deficiencies in cases of structural oppression by bringing in work in Black feminist thought and epistemic injustice, particularly that of Audre Lorde and Veronica Ivy, into conversation with narrative scholarship.