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Reviewed by:
  • The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir
  • Sally J. Scholz
The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir. Fredrika Scarth. Feminist Constructions Series, ed. Hilde Lindemann Nelson and Sara Ruddick. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. 195 pp. $70.00 h.c. 0-7425-3475-8; $24.95 pbk. 0-7425-3476-6.

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been quoted, critiqued, dissected, interpreted, and reinterpreted for almost sixty years. It is a multilayered text with countless possibilities that continues to inspire activists and scholars alike. One such scholar, Fredrika Scarth, suggests that by paying attention to the different voices Beauvoir uses within the text, and by reading it in light of Pyrrus et Cineas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, we might discern in Beauvoir a new account of the development of subjectivity that grounds a positive assessment of the maternal body as also subject.

Scarth situates her reading of The Second Sex in response to a number of critics of Beauvoir. Three aspects of these criticisms are especially relevant to understanding Scarth's project. The first is the accusation that Beauvoir equates transcendence with masculinity and immanence with femininity. Scarth offers evidence instead that demonstrates Beauvoir's more subtle position that every existent is both immanence and transcendence. Oppression occurs when transcendence is "condemned to fall uselessly back upon itself because it is cut off from its goals" (Beauvoir 1948, 81).

The second relevant criticism of Beauvoir's work assumes that immanence is body and transcendence is consciousness. As Scarth shows, however, Beauvoir does not make such an easy equation between body as immanence and transcendence as consciousness. Our bodies are, after all, that with which we "live out this transcendence" (111).

Finally, Scarth examines the criticisms of Beauvoir's descriptions of maternity. While there is no contesting Beauvoir's negative portrayal of pregnancy and motherhood, Scarth argues, following Linda Zerilli, that attention to Beauvoir's multiple voices reveals that this portrayal is an analysis of patriarchal representations of maternity. Maternity that is freely undertaken (little more than hinted at by Beauvoir) has tremendous potential, according to Scarth, for revealing the other within.

En route to the maternal subject, Scarth identifies two types of ambiguity at work in Beauvoir's ethics. Ambiguity means the meaning of existence must constantly be won and that each existent is both freedom and flesh (112–13, 125). At times this latter form of ambiguity is described as the tension between freedom and the body (e.g., 60, 110), freedom and facticity (110), "our essential solitude and our essential bond with others" (112), and as "assuming ourselves as both transcendent and immanent at once" (71, see also 40, 112). A difficulty [End Page 248] arises with the terminology as it is easy to slip from saying the body is the site where the ambiguity is lived to saying it is a pole within that ambiguity. Scarth tries to clarify the difference by saying that oppression, like childhood, is marked by a reduction of the body to its immanent mode and a denial of its aspect in subjectivity; authentic subjectivity is embodied.

Scarth focuses on maternity in her interpretation of The Second Sex. She argues that, like an erotic encounter, pregnancy demonstrates a new form of risk that replaces Hegel's patriarchal risk in the formation of subjectivity. Risk in both eroticism and pregnancy is an assumption of otherness within. Scarth argues that we must recognize the other within ourselves if we want to truly have a reciprocal relationship. Such a recognition is an acknowledgement of our own difference. In Hegel's master/slave dialectic, subjectivity is won through a hostile encounter with the other. Beauvoir, according to Scarth, sees the erotic encounter as providing a new type of risk-taking, a generous giving of the self. Hegel's is a risk of death; Beauvoir's is a risk of the self as both body and freedom (the second form of ambiguity). In subjectivity as generosity, "we can assume our situation, and come to recognize the reciprocity of otherness: that each subject is, for the other, also an other, and that we...

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