In Politics with Beauvoir Lori Jo Marso treats Simone de Beauvoir's feminist theory and practice as part of her political theory, arguing that freedom is Beauvoir's central concern and that this is best apprehended through Marso's notion of the encounter. Starting with Beauvoir's political encounters with several of her key contemporaries including Hannah Arendt, Robert Brasillach, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Violette Leduc, Marso also moves beyond historical context to stage encounters between Beauvoir and others such as Chantal Akerman, Lars von Trier, Rahel Varnhagen, Alison Bechdel, the Marquis de Sade, and Margarethe von Trotta. From intimate to historical, always affective though often fraught and divisive, Beauvoir's encounters, Marso shows, exemplify freedom as a shared, relational, collective practice. Politics with Beauvoir gives us a new Beauvoir and a new way of thinking about politics—as embodied and coalitional.

"[Marso's] work on de Beauvoir demonstrates convincingly the inaccuracy of reading feminist theory as a species of thinking separated from politics." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"A gripping and novel reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s politics of freedom and Beauvoirian feminism. . . . A welcome contribution to Beauvoir scholarship and feminist political theory." - H-France, H-Net Reviews

"Marso brilliantly demonstrates the way in which encounter is at the very center of everything Beauvoir wrote . . . . An important new contribution that extends studies on Beauvoir." - Review of Politics

"This book has a wide appeal. . . . Informative and accessible." - Feminist Theory

"“Politics with Beauvoir is an essential text for any scholar who is interested in expanding their engagement with Beauvoir’s work. Just as the Beauvoirian encounters Marso stages in this text illuminate the fecundity of real engagement with alterity and difference, so, too, does the text itself show the possibilities for encounters in a world where Beauvoir truly becomes ours.”" - Asian Journal of Social Science