ISBN: 0316314749
Godina izdanja: 1995
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Francoise Giroud, Bernard Henri Levy - Women and Men: A Philosophical Conversation
Little, Brown & Company, 1995
240 str.
tvrdi povez
stanje: vrlo dobro

Richard Miller (Translator)

A translation of the French best-seller presents a subjective conversation between a journalist and philosopher, offering their respective and often clashing opinions about love, sex, marriage, fidelity, and politics.

During the course of a single summer in Paris, in the shade of a fig tree, a journalist and a philosopher meet to participate in an age-old pastime: the contemplation of love. The result is Women and Men, a book about the relationship between the sexes, but more than that, a book about the nature of longing and the character of the human heart. In ten provocative discussions - presented here exactly as they occurred - Francoise Giroud and Bernard-Henri Levy wrestle with human history`s most powerful preoccupations, questions and yearnings which have animated lovers since the beginning of time, inspiring symphonies, volumes of poetry, masterpieces of art and literature, even wars. How do we love those we love, and what are the bounds of passion? What, finally, is the nature of desire, what do we most hunger for, most need? The mysteries of romantic love yield themselves up to thrilling scrutiny in these dialogues: seduction, eroticism, the power of beauty, the problem of jealousy, the struggle for fidelity, the wish for pure rapture, and the enduring belief in eternal love. Drawing easily and usefully on an astonishing knowledge of intellectual history - using Stendhal, Proust, Freud, Sartre, and many more as touchstones for their ideas and intuitions - Giroud and Levy achieve a conversational depth and insight in these pages that is a joy to witness, a pleasure to over-hear. Their meditations on love and on the mighty and sometimes mystifying appetites of the human heart and body are both tremendously edifying and great fun.

Françoise Giroud, born France Gourdji was a French journalist, screenwriter, writer and politician.

A bestseller in France, this set of opinionated conversations on male-female relations serves up a very Gallic intellectual discourse on love, sex, jealousy, seduction and infidelity. Giroud, former government minister, feminist journalist and cofounder of L`Express, advocates women`s independence and financial autonomy, even advising women to avoid living with a man if possible. Levy, a philosopher (Barbarism with a Human Face), believes in Freudianism, endorses the ideal of monogamous fidelity and is skeptical of the claim that a sexual revolution ever occurred. Sparks fly as these conversationalists discuss love at first sight, physical attraction and ugliness, why couples succeed or fail, divorce, the erotic as an energizing component of marriage and the chilling impact of AIDS on sexual behavior. Alternately insightful and pretentious, their witty talks sparkle with allusions to Balzac, Proust, Sartre, Anais Nin, Georges Bataille, Goethe, Joyce and many other writers.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This book, the result of taped conversations between Giroud (author, journalist, politician) and Levy (author and leader of a group of Leftists known as the `nouveaux philosophes`), explores age-old themes like love (seduction, `loving` vs. being `in love,` platonic love, promiscuity, AIDS); marriage (jealousy, fidelity); women`s liberation; and ugliness vs. beauty in the game of seduction. The subject of love is not new for Giroud, whose Alma Mahler: Or the Art of Being Loved (LJ 2/1/92) includes bios of Alma and Gustave Mahler. Neither author draws on autobiographical anecdotes; rather, both invoke their experience and knowledge of literary works. A candid exchange of views between two old friends first published in 1993 (Les Hommes et les Femmes, Editions Olivier Orban), this `odd book,` as the authors themselves describe it, became a best seller in France soon after publication.?Danielle Mihram, Univ. of Southern California
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Contents:
On women`s liberation as a subject of derision
On ugliness as a basic injustice
On `being in love` as an outmoded expression
On jealousy as consubstantial with love
On love as Heaven and Hell
On the erotic as a component of marriage
On the pleasures of fidelity
On the immutability of sexual difference
On seduction and its games
On the couple as will and idea


Nonfiction, Philosophy, 0316314749