2025 HPI Annual Lecture
Event description
Simone de Beauvoir on independence, freedom, and happiness: Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016).
Presented by Professor Marguerite La Caze.
The University of Queensland's School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry invites you to join us for the 2025 HPI Annual Lecture delivered by Professor Marguerite La Caze.
Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex contends that in considering women’s emancipation, we should not take happiness to be the aim, as it is a confining emotion. Instead, using the perspective of existentialist ethics, we should aspire to freedom. I examine how Beauvoir’s distinctions between happiness, independence and freedom illuminate Mia Hansen-Løve’s film Things to Come and how the film’s portrayal of a philosophy teacher’s, Nathalie Chazeaux, existential crisis enhances understanding of these ideas’ potential and relations. Nathalie’s husband Heinz ends their long marriage, her mother dies, and her book series is cancelled. Rather than despairing, Nathalie continues to pursue her projects and claims to be experiencing total freedom for the first time. We might see Nathalie as an example of what Beauvoir calls the independent woman and possibly even a free woman able to live without her ex-husband. I argue that closer analysis of the film does not support the view of Nathalie as completely free or happy. This interpretation of Things to Come shows how Beauvoir’s insights have contemporary relevance and throws light on the ambiguous situation of an independent woman.
About the presenter
Professor Marguerite La Caze’s research interests include: European philosophy, feminist philosophy, moral psychology, especially the emotions, and aesthetics, including philosophy and film.
Professor La Caze holds a BA (UQ); MA (Melbourne); and PhD (UQ), and is an Australian Research Fellow 2003-2007. She held an ARC Discovery Grant 2015-2018 on ‘Ethical Restoration After Oppressive Violence: A Philosophical Account’ and was a visiting Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland in 2022.
Her current research projects include:
Film philosophy and non-violent resistance
Ontologies of force: Violence, non-violence, and resistance
Hannah Arendt and power
Beauvoir and cinema
Marguerite has successfully supervised 26 PhD and Master’s students on a wide range of topics and is currently supervising students on projects including analogy and philosophical reasoning, authenticity and politics, on the work of Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir on political judgment, on the emotion of shame, and on non-violence and resistance in Australian and Indian texts.
Event details
Date: Thursday 23 October 2025
Time: 5:15pm for 5:30–6:30pm lecture. Followed by a reception 6:30–7:30pm.
Venue: Room 358, Physiology Lecture Theatres (Building 63), UQ
RSVP: Monday 20 October 2025
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