Abstract

This chapter focuses on the dialectic of desire in She Came to Stay. What it seeks to show is that this dialectic is not strictly a Hegelian or Kojèvean one but in fact introduces a similar transformation of this dialectic similar to the one we find in Lacan. As such, She Came to Stay is not an incomplete or insufficient restaging of the dialectical constitution of the subject of consciousness; instead it presents the dialectic of desire as constitutive of a split subject – what Lacan will describe as the subject of the unconscious. This chapter interprets Beauvoir's account of the dialectic of desire in She Came to Stay in Lacanian terms, and to take up The Second Sex in light of this thesis.