philoSOPHIA

Introduction

In this essay, I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex should be read as a paradigmatic philosophical work that provides grounds for a positive ethics and politics and in so doing provides a significant new way of understanding intersubjectivity. Reading it in conjunction with—and as a continuation of—the earlier essays, Pyrrhus and Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, unveils Beauvoir’s continued concern with the political and, furthermore, her conception of the political agent as fundamentally ambiguous. Indeed, Beauvoir’s phenomenological analyses are intertwined with both explicit and implicit ethical and political proposals that posit that the individual ought to establish an authentic relation to herself by acknowledging the ambiguity of her own experience as human as well as the ambiguity of her relations with the Other. The claim that permeates The Second Sex is that one ought to enact an ambiguous encounter between ambiguous embodied beings. Acknowledging that one’s being is ambiguous and that other’s beings are likewise ambiguous will lead one to understand that intersubjective relations, including ethical and political ones, are also permeated by ambiguity. However, the right conditions have to be put in place for this understanding. If such circumstances hold, both the flourishing of ambiguity and the emergence of authentic relations are possible. For Beauvoir, this flourishing and emergence requires a rejection of the patriarchal system of values and meaning, which negates ambiguity through its determinations of the feminine and the masculine. Therefore, Beauvoir’s ethical proposals are deeply connected to political [End Page 197] demands for radical socioeconomic changes that will allow for the conditions for the ethical project of ambiguity to unfold globally. This must happen through a radical transformation of the social imaginaries that permeate our lives.

I argue that The Second Sex is an appeal to its readers to carry out that radical transformation. For Beauvoir, the act of writing amounts to calling upon the reader’s freedom by sharing with the reader one’s subjective truth about the world. This is done with the hope that the reader will embrace the writer’s project. In Beauvoir’s case, this project is a political one, whereby one seeks to maximize freedom for oneself and for others. My claim is that in addition to putting forward a concept of political subjectivity as fundamentally ambiguous, The Second Sex also addresses us, the readers, as such subjects. I thereby read this book not only as the feminist pamphlet that it has been taken to be nor merely as a phenomenological essay but also as an instance of what Beauvoir defines as metaphysical literature that performs an appeal to ambiguous agents. By offering an ontological-phenomenological description of the lived experience of women and dismantling various facts and discourses—biological, psychoanalytical, socioeconomic—that have contributed to the historical and mythical shaping of women, the work appeals to the reader as a free yet ambiguous subject and asks her to respond by rejecting the sociohistorical patterns that support or reinstitute the sexual hierarchy. It is only because the human being is ambiguous in the way that Beauvoir describes that her appeal has the ability to resonate and generate a responsivity that entails a duty to act. This duty, the responsibility of the individual, is not only toward a single Other but toward all other human beings in the past, present, and future. Thus, authenticity as the lived ambiguity of human freedom becomes the cornerstone of Beauvoir’s ethics and politics.

In this essay, I examine the mechanisms of this appeal. More specifically, I briefly explicate Beauvoir’s notion of ambiguity as it serves as the foundation for the methodological strategy of the appeal. Once I have explained this, I show that in addition to unearthing an important aspect of ambiguity, namely, sex and interpersonal relations dominated by hierarchies of power according to sex, The Second Sex also performs the literary appeal that seemed to be reserved to literature. The book is an appeal directed to subjects who are irreducibly different by their sex and yet participate in hierarchic and subjectifying practices that are based...