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Paradoxes of femininity in the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir

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Abstract

This article explicates the meaning of the paradox from the perspective of sexual difference, as articulated by Simone de Beauvoir. I claim that the self, the other, and their becoming are sexed in Beauvoir’s early literary writing before the question of sexual difference is posed in The Second Sex (1949). In particular, Beauvoir’s description of Françoise’s subjective becoming in the novel She Came to Stay (1943) anticipates her later systematic description of ‘the woman in love’. In addition, I argue that the different existential types appearing at the end of The Second Sex (the narcissist, the woman in love, the mystic, and the independent woman) are variations of a specific feminine, historically changing paradox of subjectivity. According to this paradox, women, in a different mode than men, must become what they ontologically “are”: beings of change and self-transcendence that have to realise the human condition in their concrete, singular lives. My interpretation draws on Kierkegaardian philosophy of existence, phenomenology, and early psychoanalysis.

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Notes

  1. Significant existential and phenomenological studies of Beauvoir’s work include: Le Dœuff ([1989] 1998), Kruks (1990), Lundgren-Gothlin ([1991] 1996), Bergoffen (1996), Kate and Edward Fullbrook (1998), Pilardi (1999), Tidd (1999), Arp (2001), Holveck (2002), Heinämaa (2003), and Kail (2006).

  2. The expression ‘feminine becoming’ calls for comparisons with Luce Irigaray’s claim that woman has to become the woman she is by nature, on the one hand, and with Rosi Braidotti’s feminist interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s concept ‘becoming-woman’, on the other hand. Cf., e.g., Irigaray ([1992] 1996); Braidotti (2003). Such comparisons would, however, go beyond the limits of this article.

  3. For an original and philosophically grounded discussion of the modern problem of existence, see Hannah Arendt ([1946] 2002).

  4. The phenomenological articulation of the paradoxical nature of subjectivity, in the tradition of Edmund Husserl, is another crucial source of influence for Beauvoir’s notion of ambiguity. Cf. Husserl ([1954] 1970), Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1962), Beauvoir ([1945] 2004).

  5. The word ambiguity originates from the Latin ambiguitas in ancient philosophy, where it signified the double meaning of a word or sentence (Kohlenberger 1971, pp. 201–202). Ambiguities caused controversies, and one was supposed to either avoid them or clarify their different meanings. For a related etymological consideration of ambiguity, see Monica Langer (2003, p. 89). See, e.g., also Kristana Arp (2001, pp. 47–50), who finds the origin to Beauvoir’s understanding of the ambiguity of existence in the Greek tradition of thought, and Penelope Deutscher (2008), who reinterprets the concept of ambiguity in Beauvoir’s philosophy politically through several aspects of alterity, such as gender, generational, racial, and cultural differences.

  6. Cf. Heinämaa (2003, pp. 84–85).

  7. The two essays in which Beauvoir explicates the ethical perspective underlying The Second Sex are Pyrrhus and Cineas (Beauvoir [1944] 2004) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (Beauvoir [1947] 1976).

  8. This does not exclude differences between women: being a white coffee farm owner in colonial Kenya in the 1920s, for instance, differs radically from being a black civil rights activist in Montgomery in 1955, or from being a non-Jewish writer in wartime Paris. Beauvoir’s argument is nevertheless that individual women’s lives are unique expressions of a shared, and historically changing, feminine condition. For critical studies of race in Beauvoir’s philosophy, see, e.g., Simons ([1997] 1999), Weiss (2006), and Deutscher (2008).

  9. This idea is also present in Debra Bergoffen’s (1996) study of generosity in Beauvoir’s philosophy. Bergoffen distinguishes between the specific or explicit philosophical identity in Beauvoir’s philosophical discourse and her muted voice: “what might be called the un-thought of Beauvoir’s thinking” (Bergoffen 1996, p. 2). This voice, which Bergoffen finds in the margins of Beauvoir’s philosophical texts, articulates an “erotic generosity” that challenges a traditional understanding of the subject and intersubjectivity within phenomenological and existential philosophy.

  10. In a public lecture on femininity, Freud ([1932] 1964) declares that psychoanalysis makes no attempt to explain what a woman is, but wants to explain how a girl, an originally bisexual child in his theory, becomes a woman through the losses and substitutions of love objects. Similarly, the establishment of male personality is a process, but one less complex than in the case of women.

  11. Beauvoir’s affirmation of types does not mean that she accepts any form of determinism, biological, psychological or social. On the contrary, throughout The Second Sex she argues that the human being is not first of all a natural species, but an existential situation. Biological facts constitute an essential element in this situation, but they do not establish a determined destiny for the sexes (SS, pp. 65–66; cf. pp. 83, 91).

  12. Though Beauvoir did not write systematic phenomenology, she was familiar with its method and central concepts; the French discussions on subjectivity in which she took part concern a level of existence opened up by the shift of attitude suggested by the initial moment of the Husserlian phenomenological reduction, the epoché. For detailed explications of the reduction, see Husserl ([1913] 1931, especially pp. 56–62; 131–143) and, e.g., Spiegelberg (1982, pp. 675–719) and Bernet et al. ([1989] 1993, pp. 58–87).

  13. The echo of Hegel’s understanding of the constitution of subjective and objective spirit in the central arguments of The Second Sex is somewhat surprising, considering that Beauvoir distances herself from Hegelian philosophy in both Pyrrhus and Cineas and in The Ethics of Ambiguity. The influence might, however, be explained by Beauvoir’s awakening interest in history in the 1940s, and by the general French reception of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was translated into French in 1939, and introduced by, among others, Alexandre Kojève. According to Herbert Spiegelberg (1982), both Kojève’s Husserlian misinterpretations of Hegel’s philosophy and method, and the “need of the time” for concreteness and structure, account for the French combining the two phenomenologies (Spiegelberg 1982, pp. 440–442). For a detailed discussion of the French interpretations of Hegel, and of Beauvoir’s own interpretation of Kojève’s reading, see Eva Lundgren-Gothlin ([1991] 1996, pp. 56–82).

  14. Beauvoir’s use of these concepts should be distinguished from the specific meaning Jacques Lacan later gives to the real, the symbolic and the imaginary in his psychoanalytical theory. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Beauvoir stresses the importance of Lacan’s theory of identity formation in her discussion of feminine experiences in childhood (SS, p. 296). For Lacan too, the imaginary is crucial for the development and structure of sexual identity and difference (see, e.g., Lacan [1949] 2002, pp. 3–9).

  15. The references to phenomenology in The Second Sex are not unambiguous, but are explicit and convincing, appearing throughout Beauvoir’s analysis of the feminine condition (see, e.g., SS, pp. 66, 69, 682, 725).

  16. What I here call an ‘androcentric imaginary’ functions in a similar way to what Michèle Le Dœuff ([1980] 1989) has labelled ‘the philosophical imaginary’, in that it creates that which it subordinates, represses or excludes. In the borderland between rhetoric, philosophy and psychoanalysis, the philosophical imaginary refers simultaneously to the explicit figurative language of philosophical discourse, to its imaginary world and to a textual unconscious. According to Le Dœuff, there is not only an imaginary region within philosophy, but philosophy inscribes itself as a discipline by distinguishing itself from fields like the mythical, poetical, and metaphorical (Le Dœuff [1980] 1989, pp. 114–115).

  17. Beauvoir introduces the Heideggarian concept Mitsein in order to describe the primordial unity and significance of the couple for woman’s otherness. Through the couple, woman is other in a totality founded on a biological necessity: procreation (SS, p. 19). From the viewpoint of biology, the man-woman unity is considered a fundamental mode of intersubjective existence, and a crucial element in a collectivity (SS, pp. 68–69). For specific analyses of the Heideggerian elements of Beauvoir’s thought, see Gothlin (2003) and Bauer (2006).

  18. Beauvoir is indefinite concerning the extent to which feminine authentic subjectivity would resemble masculine subjectivity as we know it; while the emancipated woman will need to attain man’s situation, she claims, it is impossible to know in advance whether her “ideational worlds” would remain different (SS, p. 724).

  19. The two main characters that lack a narrative voice are Xavière and Pierre. Their silence reinforces the impression that neither of them is particularly interested in the world about them. While Xavière’s being is sheer immanence, Pierre gives himself over unreservedly to his desire, the objects of which are either his own plays or women. In its particular solipsism, the attitude of Pierre resembles that of the adventurer in The Ethics of Ambiguity, who “throws himself into his undertakings”––exploration, conquest, war, speculation, love, politics––but never attaches himself to the ends of these undertakings, only to his own conquest (EA, p. 58).

  20. In Prime of Life, Beauvoir comments on the connections between the themes of the other and death, explaining that the consciousness of the other, when she came to realise it in actuality, was “as shocking and unacceptable a fact as death” (PL, p. 381). In She Came to Stay the two themes are combined: once Xavière is deprived of life, she loses all power over the world and over Françoise (PL, p. 381; cf. SCS pp. 386, 402, 404).

  21. “The Novel and Metaphysics” (Le roman et la métaphysique) was originally published in 1945 in Les Temps Modernes, and edited in a collection of essays entitled Sens et non-sens in 1948. All references here are to the English translation of Sens et non-sens.

  22. In the frame of Merleau-Ponty’s article, She Came to Stay is considered an example of metaphysical literature, and as sharing the aim of phenomenological and existential philosophy to formulate “an experience of the world, a contact with the world, which precedes all thought about the world” (Merleau-Ponty [1948] 1964, p. 28). Cf. Fullbrook and Fullbrook (1998), who provide an early analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s article in dialogue with Beauvoir’s 1946 essay on metaphysics and literature (Beauvoir [1946] 2004).

  23. Toril Moi (1994) offers an alternative interpretation of the triangular relations in She Came to Stay when reading Françoise’s crime as the murder of a fantasmatic mother figure (Moi 1994, p. 118). Underlying the seeming Oedipal father-mother-daughter structure between Pierre-Françoise-Xavière, Moi claims, is another configuration: from the metaphors used in the descriptions of Xavière from Françoise’s perspective, she finds it hard not to conclude that “the timeless, suffocating monster that leaves no space in the world for Françoise is the very image of the omnipotent and malevolent archaic mother threatening to devour her daughter” (Moi 1994, p. 118).

  24. In light of the tradition of existential thought, it is important to distinguish solitude [solitude] from singularity [singularité]. Whereas singularity is an existential condition that does not depend on being or not being with others, the meaning of solitude is close to the isolation of Kierkegaard’s subjective thinker, who cannot express the truth of existence in direct or objective terms. In Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Françoise’s illness in She Came to Stay, solitude has an even stronger meaning, indicating the finitude of human existence: at the hospital, Françoise has withdrawn from the human temporal world into “the natural world where she finds a frozen peace” (Merleau-Ponty [1948] 1964, p. 34).

  25. Beauvoir’s celebrated phrase on feminine becoming, for instance––“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”––appears in the opening to the chapter on childhood [enfance], and introduces her reinterpretation of the Oedipal drama (SS, p. 295). This does not suggest that the becoming Beauvoir has in mind is psychological, but that subjectivity is founded in, and must be understood with reference to, experiences of affectivity and desire, and that these experiences are sexually differentiated. For studies of Beauvoir’s description of feminine desire in The Second Sex, see Heinämaa (2003, 2006).

  26. In his classical definition, Freud’s understands narcissism as a kind of concrete self-love characterised by sexual pleasure (Freud [1914] 1957, p. 73). He then goes onto distinguish a primary and normal narcissism from various secondary, pathological, forms. What is particularly interesting from the perspective of Beauvoir’s existential description of feminine types is that Freud developed his concept of narcissism partly by studying “the erotic life of the sexes” (Freud [1914] 1957, pp. 82, 87–90). In brief, he distinguishes between an ‘anaclitic’ or ‘attachment’ type, whose choice of love-object is based on the attachment to the person who first fed, cared for and protected him or her, and a ‘narcissist type’, who has taken as the model for the object-choice his or her own self. While these types do not divide human beings into two sharply differentiated groups, Freud claims on the basis of clinical observations that “complete object-love of the attachment type” is more often characteristic of the male, and object-love of the narcissist type is more common in the female (Freud [1914] 1957, p. 88).

  27. For a detailed description of feminine masochism, see SS (pp. 418–421). Cf. Sartre’s description of masochism as one expression of the self’s attitude to its ontological “object-state” in the presence of the other (Sartre [1943] 1984, pp. 491–493).

  28. This attitude is also present in the mystic’s love of the (imaginary) person of “God Himself [Dieu même]”, rather than the real or imaginary person of a particular human man (cf. SS, pp. 679–687).

  29. In this sense, the relation between the two descriptions in The Second Sex and in She Came to Stay resembles the relation between Beauvoir’s description of inauthentic attitudes in The Ethics of Ambiguity and their concrete modes of appearing. Although it is possible to distinguish them abstractly, concretely they blend with one another. Cf. EA (pp. 34, 42–78).

  30. In most of her novels, Beauvoir explains, there is a foil to the main heroine; in the case of Françoise and Elisabeth, the latter stands as a “disturbing challenge” [inquiétante contestation] to the former (PL, p. 412). Françoise, furthermore, balances the asymmetrical relation between Xavière and Pierre (PL, p. 413).

  31. Cf. Beauvoir’s description of happy [heureux] feminine eroticism in The Second Sex (pp. 421–423). See also Bergoffen (1996). For an interpretation of Beauvoir’s idea of ‘authentic love’ that differs slightly from the one I provide here, see Rosalyn Diprose (1998).

Abbreviations

CUP:

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

EA:

The Ethics of Ambiguity

PL:

Prime of Life

SCS:

She Came to Stay

SS:

The Second Sex

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Sara Heinämaa, Iina Koskinen, Lisa Folkmarson Käll, and Laura Werner for helpful comments on previous versions of this text.

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    Ulrika Björk

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Björk, U. Paradoxes of femininity in the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. Cont Philos Rev 43, 39–60 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9134-9

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