PHILOSOPHY IN THE BOOKSHOP with Manon Garcia

Living with Men

Gisèle Pelicot's story outraged the world. The sickening parade of crimes to which she was subjected and her betrayal are dark pages in our history. Feminist philosopher Manon Garcia decided to attend the trial and to analyse its resonance for our future.

It became the trial that demonstrated that trials will never suffice to serve justice. If the perpetrators, for the most part, seemed so unashamed of what they had done, can we see in their sentencing anything meaningful? If their lawyers defend their clients by relieving them of responsibility for their actions, how will these men, their families, their friends see this trial as anything other than an injustice? If, even as the most explicit proof streamed before the court, the victim was stonewalled with the bland denial of facts, what can juries achieve in cases when the evidence is lacking? The threat of incarceration will never be powerful enough to stop men raping. If trusting the justice system, as those who fret about feminist overreach counsel us to do, gets us nowhere, what do we do?

Above all, one question haunted Garcia: under such circumstances, can we live with men? And at what price?

Manon Garcia

Manon Garcia is a philosopher whose primary research is in political and moral feminist philosophy. She also works on questions in 20th Century French philosophy, critical theory, philosophy of social sciences (esp. economics), and phenomenology.

She is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Paris and holds a Master in Economics and Public Policy (Sciences Po/Polytechnique/ENSAE), having passed the agrégation in philosophy. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2017. Since then, she was an Edmond J. Safra Post-Doctoral Fellow-in-Residence, a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and a Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Kate Kirkpatrick

Kate Kirkpatrick is a philosopher based in Oxford, where she is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Regent’s Park College.

She is author of Sartre on Sin, Sartre and Theology, and the internationally acclaimed biography Becoming Beauvoir: A Life, which was selected as one of the best books of 2019 by the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and The Telegraph, and has been translated into a dozen languages. In 2021 she was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her current project, a philosophical commentary on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

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