Simone de Beauvoir

At the end of 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person, went viral. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, it depicted a ‘toxic date’ and a disturbing sexual encounter between Margot, a college student, and Robert, an older man she meets at work. The story was widely viewed as a relatable denunciation of women’s powerlessness and routine victimization. In this paper, I push against this common reading. I propose an alternative feminist interpretation through the lens of Simone de (...) Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism: a form of alienation that consists in making oneself both the subject and the ultimate project of one’s life. Framing Margot as a narcissist casts her as engaging, not in subtly coerced, undesired sex, but rather in sex that is desired in a tragically alienated way. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism is an important tool for feminists today – well beyond the interpretation of Cat Person. It presses us to see systematic subordination not just as something done to women, but also as something women do to themselves. This in turn highlights the neglected role of self-transformation as a key aspect of feminist political resistance. (shrink)

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues that women are often complicit in reinforcing their own unfreedom. But why women become complicit remains an open question. The aim of this article is to offer a systematic analysis of complicity by focusing on the Heideggerian strands of Beauvoir's account. I begin by evaluating Susan James's interpretation of complicity qua republican freedom, which emphasizes the dependent situation of women as the primary cause of their complicity. I argue that James's analysis is (...) compelling as far as it goes, but that it implies complicity is the inevitable outcome of women's current existence and fails to adequately account for Beauvoir's claim that women actively embrace their own unfreedom. I then draw out the Heideggerian strands of Beauvoir's analysis, demonstrating how this enables us to systematize Beauvoir's account of women's oppressive situation with her claims regarding the active role women can play in reinforcing their own unfreedom. I argue that this approach preserves the strengths of the republican interpretation, but provides a better account of cases where complicity may not be inevitable and yet some women still act to reinforce rather than resist their own unfreedom. (shrink)

A review of Butler's first book. An English version has been posted.

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex presents phenomenolog¬ical analyses that are intertwined and political proposals that posit that the individual ought to acknowledge the ambiguity of her own experience as human as well as the ambiguity of her relations with the Other and enact this ambiguous encounter. This is possible only with the rejection of the patriarchal system of values and meaning which negates ambiguity through its determinations of the feminine and the mascu¬line. A radical transformation of the social imaginaries (...) permeating our lives is needed. The Second Sex functions as a call to its readers to undertake this transformation. My claim is that in addition to putting forward a concept of political subjectivity as fundamentally ambiguous, Beauvoir also addresses us, the readers, as such subjects. I explain that this work is an instance of what Beauvoir defines as metaphysical literature that performs an appeal to ambiguous agents. (shrink)

This is a review of Margaret Simons's book, Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism.

English Title “Living Philosophy: Beauvoir’s Memoirs as a philosophical ‘œuvre’”. This paper seeks to remedy the lack of philosophical analyses of the philosophical dimension of Beauvoir’s autobiographical work in using the existentialist link Beauvoir establishes between life and philosophy to make three points: first, her Memoirs constitute a crucial documentary resource to understand Beauvoir’s essays and the original philosophical stance she defends in them. Second, Memoirs show a two-way relationship between philosophy and life, on an epistemic and on a practical (...) level. Third, autobiography is a way to overcome the inherent flaws of philosophy when it’s written in 3rd person: only a literary account allows to make appear a singular universal that displays the tension between situation and freedom in an authentic way. (shrink)

This is a short introduction to a special issue of Philosophie on Beauvoir's The Second Sex. It provides a survey of the reception of Beauvoir's work in France and elsewhere.

English Title: From Oppression to Independence: the Philosophy of Love in The Second Sex -/- Beauvoir’s philosophy of love has been studied in a few papers but these papers focus mainly on a description of the forms of love that are analyzed in The Second Sex without questioning the role that Beauvoir’s philosophy of love plays in her general argument on women’s oppression. Although one could think that philosophy of love plays a minor role in The Second Sex, this paper (...) argues that for Beauvoir the transformation of heterosexual love may well be the main way to convert oppression in emancipation at the individual level. Beauvoir’s philosophy of love is this crucial to link her analysis of women’s oppression with her proposing paths towards emancipation. (shrink)

This paper will address René Girard’s critique of the “humanization of nothingness” in modern Western philosophy. I will first explain how the “desire for death” is related to a phenomenon that Girard refers to as “obstacle addiction.” Second, I will point out how mankind’s desire for death and illusory will to self-divinization gradually tend to converge within the history of modern Western humanism. In particular, I will show how this convergence between self-destruction and self-divinization gradually takes shape through the evolution (...) of the concept of “the negative” from Hegel to Kojève, Sartre and Camus. Finally, we shall come to see that in Girard’s view “the negative” has tended to become an ever-preoccupying and unacknowledged symptom of mankind’s addiction to “model/obstacles” of desire. (shrink)

We find meaning and value in our lives by engaging in everyday projects. But, according to a recent argument by Samuel Scheffler, this value doesn’t depend merely on what the projects are about. In many cases, it depends also on the future generations that will replace us. By imagining the imminent extinction of humanity soon after our own deaths, we can recognize both that much of our current valuing depends on a background confidence in the ongoing survival of humanity and (...) that the survival and flourishing of those future generations matters to us. After presenting Scheffler’s argument, I will explore two twentieth century precursors—Hans Morgenthau and Simone de Beauvoir—before returning to Scheffler to see that his argument can not only show us why future generations matter, but it can also give us hope for immortality and a blueprint for embracing a changing future. (shrink)

This paper discusses Simone de Beauvoir’s views on the meaning of life as presented in The Ethics of Ambiguity. I argue that Beauvoir’s view matches contemporary hybrid views on the meaning of life, incorporating both subjective and objective elements, while connecting them in a distinct way—through the tension between self and other. I then analyze the meaning of excessively competitive projects through Beauvoir’s ethics and conclude that success that amounts to denying other people’s access to the things one values is (...) absurd. I use the case of contemporary academia as an illustration of extreme competition, then employ Beauvoir’s views to suggest a shift towards more meaningful practices. (shrink)

This essay aims to motivate a different way of reading Simone de Beauvoir's feminist philosophy than that which has become dominant in Beauvoir scholarship. I wish to argue that we can read Beauvoir as articulating what I will call a "feminist art of living." To substantiate this thesis, I highlight a crucial feature of her art of living—one that is connected to her reflections on the body—namely, what I refer to as Beauvoir's "sensualism." By "sensualism," I have in mind a (...) subjective experience of the body from an intimate, first-person perspective that is not derived from the body's appearance.Before delving into the idea of sensualism, let me preview the stages of my argument. I first discuss examples of how... (shrink)

This paper begins with a brief survey of recent attempts to identify the nature of Beauvoir’s contested relation to philosophy. It then discusses the transition from her early, more conventionally philosophical essays to her much more unconventional great work The Second Sex. It argues that the philosophical innovations of The Second Sex were dependent on Beauvoir’s relations to other disciplines and intellectual fields, such that Beauvoir’s philosophical originality has interdisciplinary conditions of possibility. The paper then argues that The Second Sex, (...) like feminist and gender theory more generally, has more in common with the twentieth-century tradition of critical theory than with any ‘disciplinary’ conception of philosophy. The paper concludes that, as the meeting point of critical theory and feminism, The Second Sex can best be seen as an example of ‘philosophical transdisciplinarity’, paving the way for the late-twentieth and twenty-first traditions of gender theory. (shrink)

The most original discovery in Beauvoir’s book is one more Columbus’s egg, namely that it is far from obvious that a woman is a woman. That is, her discovery is that a woman is the result of a process that made so that she is like she is. The paper discusses two aspects of the, so-to-say ‘ideology’ inspiring the work. The first is its ideology in the proper, Marxian, sense. My claim is that the work still pays a heavy price (...) to the dominating ideology in the sense of leaving unquestioned still too much of what was assumed at the time, in 1949, as obvious, necessary and unchanging. This ballast depends firstly on the inherited prevailing climate of opinion, corresponding to a situation of alienation, producing two distorted views of the male and female gender. On the other hand it depends on an unquestioned legacy from the modern episteme (in Foucault’s sense of the word) carrying some kind of presupposed Cartesian dualism. The other side of the work’s ideology, that is, the positive program presented or better the utopia it formulates is less innovative than it could be, In a few passages, where she seems to make use of suggestions from Merleau-Ponty, she points at a view where the bodily and emotional dimension is rescued from its negation in the male-dominated Capitalist society, but these suggestions are forgotten in the bulk of the work. -/- The making of a philosophical work does not depend just on the kind of philosophical influences behind it. A book is also the produce of an author with a story living in one society at a given time of social history. In this case, the book was written in the after war when women were being pushed again back home from the wartime labour market, when several of the goals reached by the first phase of feminist movements had gone lost in several European countries under Fascist or semi-Fascist regimes and were being eroded in America by the reactionary climate of Maccartism. It was a book written by an intellectual young woman in almost total isolation. This accounts for some more naïve suggestions from the work: for ex., the idea that the alternative to the strategy once adopted by nineteenth-century emancipationist movements should be an individual inner process of transformation confined within the boundaries of one woman’s consciousness, or also, the idea that the goal of women’s liberation should be to bring all women to a condition similar of Simone de Beauvoir herself who, as an educated woman, earning her life by her own work, and living in an allegedly equal condition with an enlightened man (Jean-Paul Sartre!) in a relationship free from constraints (an unmarried couple!), was already exemplifying what a liberated woman’s life would be. The reconstruction of the idea of femininity is still the most fruitful part of the work. It rejects the idea of femininity as an essence, depending on biology or other factors and explores the idea of a making of this image as a result of a factual condition made of social and economic state of affairs but as revived and actively mirrored through and by the consciousness of the very subjects suffering an oppressive situation. And the main novelty is the ‘discovery’ of asymmetry between the self-image of the male and the (self)-image of the woman, an asymmetry depending on the fact that the woman sees herself through the other’s eyes. Later feminist writers, for ex. Shulamit Firestone, remarked that the Second Sex was heavily conditioned by key-ideas from Sartre existential ontology. One crucial aspect is accepting the mind-body dualistic framework without any suspicion that such dualism could have been itself a projection of the basic experience of the male-female duality. I suggest that the philosophical legacy inherited from Sartre is on occasion an asset for Beauvoir’s innovative existential analysis of the feminine ‘condition’ but on several occasions it creates unnecessary obstacles for her project of a new comprehension of the feminine ‘situation’, aimed at rescuing women from an 'inauthentic' self-definition. The first among these poisoned gifts is Sartre’s idea of the individual as pure freedom and project. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism is well-known: Sartre draws a picture of the world as containing no more than ‘human beings and things’, thus denying any substance to social relations, institutions and culture. The second is Sartre’s reconstruction of dialectics, understood as a dialectic without a synthesis. This is an enlightening tool when used to describe conflicts, in so far as it accounts for emergence of the ‘other’ as what is excluded. But is becomes a boomerang when it is used to interpret any kind of relationship, leading to equate inter-subjectivity with conflict. Suggestions coming from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach would tend to admit that the bodily dimension as such has positive value, and hence the feminine bodily dimension is not just indifferent, but rather gives women a point of view on the world different from the male point of view. These suggestions, yet, are evoked here and there but never fully spelled out. The most shocking consequence of acceptance of the Cartesian or Sartrean dualist view is an almost total de-evaluation of sexuality, understood as an activity involving just one tiny part of the human body, going with the idea that overcoming the oppression of women implies de-empathizing bodily differences that are after all tiny and devoid of value. and Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that bodily differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for such step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation. (shrink)

The paper reconstructs Beauvoir's interpretation of the Marxist and the Freudian contributions to our understanding of the feminine condition. A number of epistemological assumptions derived from Sartre's philosophy are pointed out. Beauvoir's reading of Marx, Engels, and Freud is discussed claiming that her reading is biased by humanistic and historicist assumptions.

How much violence can a society expect its members to accept? A comparison between the language theories of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan is the starting point for answering this question. A look at the early stages of language acquisition exposes the sacrificial logic of patriarchal society. Are those forces that restrict the individual to be conceived in a martial imagery of castration or is it possible that an existing society critically questions those points of socialization that leave their members (...) in a state of homelessness? The following considerations should help to distinguish between unavoidable and avoidable forms of violence. (shrink)

Dès l’abord, le livre de Nancy Bauer intitulé Simone de Beauvoir. Philosophy, and Feminism nous apparaît différent de ce qui a été publié récemment sur cette auteure peu discutée en philosophie. Nous avons essentiellement affaire à une discussion des problèmes centraux de la philosophie de Beauvoir. Cependant, ce livre partage avec les ouvrages de Margaret A. Simons, Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism, Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic (...) Generosities et Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir une tentative de justification de la place de Beauvoir en philosophie, la philosophie de Sartre et de Hegel ainsi que la philosophie féministe servant de points d’appui. À cela s’ajoute, chez Bauer, heureusement, la discussion de l’appropriation de Hegel. Bauer montre, comme les auteures de l’actuelle relecture de Beauvoir, comment celle-ci développe une pensée qui lui est propre. (shrink)

Dans cette introduction, Edward Fullbrook et Kate Fullbrook se sont donné pour objet l'étude des éléments principaux de la philosophie de Simone de Beauvoir. Les auteurs entendent ainsi compléter les autres lectures qui ont été publiées sur cette œuvre, notamment sur sa composante littéraire. Cette approche peut surprendre quand on sait que récemment, on a insisté sur la relation d'osmose entre la fiction et les écrits théoriques chez de Beauvoir. Mais l'Introduction des Fullbrook ne fait pas autre chose, finalement, que (...) de montrer plus avant comment la philosophe ne va pas sans l'écrivaine. Le livre comporte aussi une autre dimension: les auteurs veulent lever les obstacles à la compréhension de Simone de Beauvoir, en élucidant notamment son association avec Jean-Paul Sartre, l'image que de Beauvoir donne d'elle-même et l'originalité de son approche. Or cette originalité tient principalement au fait, écrivent-ils, que fiction et théorie sont intimement liées. (shrink)

Required reading for anyone who believes in the equality of the sexes. A long awaited, highly acclaimed new translation of Simone De Beauvoir's landmark work.

Cet ouvrage comble un vide dans l'histoire des femmes et du féminisme, qui ne s'était guère intéressée jusqu'ici à la période qui va de 1945 à 1970, à l'exception de travaux comme ceux de Dominique Loiseau sur le militantisme des femmes à Nantes ou notre recherche commune ­ Michelle Zancarini-Fournel et moi-même ­ sur des parcours de femmes à Saint-Étienne, incluant les années 1950. Grâce à ce livre, nous disposons maintenant, d'une bibliographie assez complète sur le féminisme françai..

Led by the conviction that Beauvoir's The Coming of Age (1970) has been overshadowed by The Second Sex for too long, this book sets out to redress that neglect and to bring Beauvoir's reflections on old age into dialogue with different perspectives and approaches in feminist philosophy. It does so superbly. Several secondary works on Beauvoir discuss The Coming of Age, including The Cambridge Companion to Beauvoir, Stella Stanford's How to Read Beauvoir, and (from a literary perspective) Oliver Davis's Age (...) Rage and Going Gently, but there is no similarly comprehensive treatment of Beauvoir's philosophy of age. [...]. (shrink)

Jonathan Webber articulates an original interpretation of existentialism as the ethical theory that human freedom is the foundation of all other values. Offering an original analysis of classic literary and philosophical works published by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon up until 1952, Webber's conception of existentialism is developed in critical contrast with central works by Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. -/- Presenting his arguments in an accessible and engaging style, Webber contends that Beauvoir and Sartre (...) initially disagreed over the structure of human freedom in 1943 but Sartre ultimately came to accept Beauvoir's view over the next decade. He develops the viewpoint that Beauvoir provides a more significant argument for authenticity than either Sartre or Fanon. He articulates in detail the existentialist theories of individual character and the social identities of gender and race, key concerns in current discourse. Webber concludes by sketching out the broader implications of his interpretation of existentialism for philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy. (shrink)

This paper explores the compatibility between the Daoist art of emptying one’s heart-mind and the art of creating close relationships. The fact that a Daoist sage is characterized by an empty heart-mind makes him somewhat different from an average human being: since a full heart-mind is characteristic of the human condition, the sage transcends what makes us human. This could alienate him from others and make him incapable of developing close relationships. The research goal of this paper is to investigate (...) whether – in spite of being an unusual human being – a Daoist sage has the abilities necessary for creating close bonds with others. (shrink)

The essays in this volume seek to resituate the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray both historically and in light of the demands of contemporary feminist theory by examining unexplored aspects of their thought. Authors also highlight the commonalties in thought between the two philosophers, articulating points of dialogue in logic, ethics, and politics.

My thesis offers an account of the phenomenon of bodily alienation. Bodily alienation marks the failure to realize oneself in one’s bodily activities. I argue that realizing oneself in one’s bodily activities requires the pursuit of bodily activities for their own sake—not for the appearance they produce, and the ability to deal skillfully with one’s environment. I characterize bodily alienation by examining three cases concerning gender and race: the tendency, inflected by gender norms, to identify with certain fetishized body parts (...) and to modify one’s body accordingly, the physical incapacitation that the gaze of a member of a dominant group can provoke in a member of an oppressed group, and the personal transformations that members of non-oppressed groups achieve when they reform the bodily habits that alienate members of oppressed groups. I vindicate the use of the concept of bodily alienation for ontologies of the body that aim to ground social criticism. I explain that the concept of bodily alienation can accomplish this task because it is descriptive and normative. Applying this concept both describes someone’s relation to her body and judges that relation as defective. Describing social practices as alienating entails that things are not as they should be. And that raises the question of how they should be changed. My use of the concept of bodily alienation for a critical project concerning gender, race, and the body sets this project apart from other forms of social critique, such as social constructionism. Social constructionists typically make descriptive claims about the relative naturalness of a state of affairs and then make the case for changing it. For example, feminist social constructionist critiques move from the claim that gender differences are not merely a matter of biology and can be reformed, to arguments about why they should be reformed. My account avoids this two-step argumentative strategy. The concept of bodily alienation simultaneously uncovers and evaluates phenomena, while tying them to a conception of human flourishing as embodied. (shrink)

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine. Only the mediation of another can establish an individual as an Other. In so far as he exists for himself, the child would not be able to understand himself as sexually differentiated. In girls as in boys (...) the body is first of all the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that accomplishes the comprehension of the world: it is through the eyes, the hands, and not through the sexual parts that children apprehend the universe." -/- My aim is to develop an interpretation of this passage, which starts with one of the most iconic sentences in the history of feminist thought. Beauvoir asserts that only in virtue of the significance others attribute to their sexual parts do children come to understand themselves as sexually differentiated. This is the phenomenon Beauvoir refers to when she speaks of “the mediation of another.” Her claim here, I argue, is that becoming a woman is predicated on developing such a self-understanding. -/- Many readers have argued that this passage epitomizes Beauvoir’s conviction that there is an important difference between sex and gender. On such a reading, Beauvoir might be said to describe the transition between two states: the state of the newborn who has a sex but no gender identity yet (“who is not a woman”) and that of the grown person who has both a sex and a gender identity (“who has become a woman”). I argue that this reading is untenable, and for two reasons. First, there is no evidence in The Second Sex that Beauvoir means to establish a distinction between a person’s biological properties and her social identities. Second, this distinction does not make sense of Beauvoir’s understanding of the body as a situation. Being a woman, I will argue, is an aspect of the body-as-a-situation. The body-as-a-situation is the instrument through which freedom is exercised, and it is shaped by the social significance of bodily features. By contrast, biological properties cannot be predicated of the body-as-a-situation. As such, they are not properly speaking attributes of the self. In other words, Beauvoir does not theorize a nature/culture distinction, but aims to describe the social significance of bodies and constraints on women’s freedom. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière's work has challenged many of the assumptions of contemporary continental philosophy by placing equality at the forefront of emancipatory political thought and aesthetics. Drawing on the claim that egalitarian politics persistently appropriates elements from political philosophy to engage new forms of dissensus, Devin Zane Shaw argues that Rancière's work also provides an opportunity to reconsider modern philosophy and aesthetics in light of the question of equality. In Part I, Shaw examines Rancière's philosophical debts to the 'good sense' of (...) Cartesian egalitarianism and the existentialist critique of identity. In Part II, he outlines Rancière's critical analyses of Walter Benjamin and Clement Greenberg and offers a reinterpretation of Rancière's debate with Alain Badiou in light of the philosophical differences between Schiller and Schelling. -/- From engaging debates about political subjectivity from Descartes to Sartre, to delineating the egalitarian stakes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art from Schiller to Badiou, this book presents a concise tour through a series of egalitarian moments found within the histories of modern philosophy and aesthetics. (shrink)