Let us start with Sartre, whose creative appropriation of Being and Time’s phenomenology of death came to prominence first – in 1946’s Being and Nothingness – and probably remains the most widely known in its own right. If Sartre’s vision of existential death is rarely recognized as his alternative to Heidegger’s account, that is both because what Being and Time means by death is not widely understood and because Sartre’s alternative represents the furthest departure from Heidegger’s own view. In general, Sartre’s adoption of a subject/object dualism leads him to pervasively re-Cartesianize Being and Time, as if he were completely oblivious to Heidegger’s overarching efforts to undermine Cartesian dualism. (This obliviousness is already clear from Sartre’s oft-quoted but nonetheless false claim that the “existentialism” he shares with Heidegger can be defined by their shared insistence “that subjectivity must be the starting point.”) Sartre’s phenomenology of the objectifying “look of the other” transforms Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death so dramatically that Sartre can easily appear to be describing a different phenomenon altogether. Read carefully, however, it becomes clear that Sartre’s account of the “the look” allows him to articulate his own version of an existential phenomenon in which I experience “the death of my possibilities” – even though “I am my possibilities” – and yet I live through that experience to tell the tale phenomenologically.

Ibsen’s plays have always been taken to speak directly to feminist concerns. Socialists and feminists from Eleanor Marx Aveling to Lu Xun and Simone de Beauvoir have praised A Doll’s House as a feminist breakthrough. That play shocked because Ibsen showed that marriage and family – women’s so-called ‘natural destiny’ – might not by themselves satisfy a woman’s desire for a morally responsible life.

But was Ibsen himself a feminist? This chapter examines his famous speech from 1898 in which he appears to deny that he ever supported the ‘cause of women’, and brings out its politics by comparing it to his equally famous speech in 1885 expressing his trust that women and the working class would bring about social change.

Turning to feminist theory, the essay discusses the conflict between ‘universalist’ and ‘differentialist’ readings of Ibsen’s heroines. Must we choose between considering Nora as a human being and considering her as a woman? Or between reading Hedda Gabler as a play about modernity or a play about femininity? Drawing on the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, the chapter shows that Ibsen’s plays rehearsed these questions long before they became crucial to contemporary feminist debates.