Political Writings offers an abundance of newly translated essays by Simone de Beauvoir that demonstrate a heretofore unknown side of her political philosophy. The writings in this volume range from Beauvoir's surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic eighteenth-century pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to a co-written 1974 documentary film, transcribed here for the first time, which draws on Beauvoir's analysis of how socioeconomic privilege shapes the biological reality of aging. The volume traces nearly three decades of (...) Beauvoir's leftist political engagement, from exposés of conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard-hitting attacks on right-wing French intellectuals in the 1950s, to the 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article arguing for what is now called the "two-state solution" in Israel. Together these texts prefigure Beauvoir's later feminist activism and provide a new interpretive context for reading her multi-volume autobiography, while also shedding new light on French intellectual history during the turbulent era of decolonization. (shrink)

Written from September 1939 to January 1941, Simone de Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary gives English readers unabridged access to one of the scandalous texts that threaten to overturn traditional views of Beauvoir’s life and work. The account in Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary of her clandestine affair with Jacques Bost and sexual relationships with various young women challenges the conventional picture of Beauvoir as the devoted companion of Jean-Paul Sartre, just as her account of completing her novel She (...) Came to Stay at a time when Sartre’s philosophy in Being and Nothingness was barely begun calls into question the traditional view of Beauvoir’s novel as merely illustrating Sartre’s philosophy. Most important, the Wartime Diary provides an exciting account of Beauvoir’s philosophical transformation from the prewar solipsism of She Came to Stay to the postwar political engagement of The Second Sex. Cast in the crucible of the Nazi Occupation, Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics reflects dramatic collective experiences, such as joining the tide of refugees fleeing the German invasion in June 1940, as well as the courageous reaffirmation of her individuality in constructing a humanist ethics of freedom and solidarity in January 1941. (shrink)

The Useless Mouths" and Other Literary Writings brings to English-language readers literary writings--several previously unknown--by Simone de Beauvoir. Culled from sources including various American university collections, the works span decades of Beauvoir's career. Ranging from dramatic works and literary theory to radio broadcasts, they collectively reveal fresh insights into Beauvoir's writing process, personal life, and the honing of her philosophy. The volume begins with a new translation of the 1945 play The Useless Mouths, written in Paris (...) during the Nazi occupation. Other pieces were discovered after Beauvoir's death in 1986, such as the 1965 short novel "Misunderstanding in Moscow," involving an elderly French couple who confront their fears of aging. Two additional previously unknown texts include the fragmentary "Notes for a Novel," which contains the seed of what she later would call "the problem of the Other," and a lecture on postwar French theater titled Existentialist Theater. The collection notably includes the eagerly awaited translation of Beauvoir's contribution to a 1965 debate among Jean-Paul Sartre and other French writers and intellectuals, "What Can Literature Do?". (shrink)

In this article de Beauvoir defends a conception of literature as a kind of unveiling of something that exists outside itself, a mode of action which reveals certain truths about the world. What we call “literature” is eminently capable of grasping the world—a world which de Beauvoir, following Jean-Paul Sartre, conceives of as a “detotalized totality”; one that is real and independent of us, which exists for all, but is only graspable through our own projects and our perspectives. (...) Yet far from keeping us stranded within our unique subjectivities, literature restores to subjective experience its generality; it allows other to “taste” the world as it exists for others. We can communicate through literature because in it our world, our languages, and our projects overlap. Ultimately, for de Beauvoir, literature is what allows us to see the world as others see it—all the while remaining, irreducibly, ourselves. (shrink)

New translations tracing decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement during the turbulent era of decolonization, from articles exposing conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard hitting attacks on right-wing intellectuals in the 1950s, to a 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article calling for the 'two state solution' in Israel. The texts range from a surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic 18th c. pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to the transcription (...) of a co-written 1974 documentary film on the aged in France. (shrink)

This article returns to Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical oeuvre in order to offer a way of thinking beyond contemporary feminist divisions created by ‘gender critical’ or trans-exclusionary feminists. The ‘gender critical’ feminist position returns to sex essentialism to argue for ‘abolishing’ gender, while opponents often appeal to proliferated gender self-identities. I argue that neither goes far enough and that they both circumscribe utopian visions for a world beyond both sex and gender. I chart how Beauvoir’s ontological, ethical (...) and political positions can be used to overcome the material/cultural, sex/gender bind that the contemporary divide perpetuates. I outline Beauvoir’s ‘ambiguous’ non-foundational ontology that attends to both the cultural origins, and material effects, of both sex and gender, and to the extent that humyns are fundamentally social. After outlining Beauvoir’s definition of freedom as purposive action, I then outline how the existence of the humyn-made and intersubjectively-upheld ‘situations’ of both sex and gender delimit this, urging feminists to return to the lost question of eradicating both. I use the utopian impulse in Beauvoir to argue that an ethics of reciprocity is an alternative mode of understanding the self and others. Beauvoir also calls for a political strategy that I call a ‘utopian realism’ that I apply to the contemporary divide. A way forward that is attentive to the concerns of both positions is the pragmatic use of identity politics that is nonetheless mindful of identity’s limits, alongside Beauvoir’s proto-intersectional vision of solidarity politics based not on identity but on a position of alterity and shared political strategy. Ultimately, I use this to argue that feminism would do better to unite around a shared commitment to challenging alterity, rather than further contributing to it. (shrink)

One of the key insights of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is the idea that gender-based subordination is not just something done to women, but also something women do to themselves. This raises a question about ethical responsibility: if women are complicit, or actively implicated in their own oppression, are they at fault? Recent Beauvoir scholarship remains divided on this point. Here, I argue that Beauvoir did, in fact, ethically criticize many women for their complicity, (...) as a sign of what she called “bad faith”. I challenge recent accounts by Nancy Bauer and Manon Garcia, who both read Beauvoir as exonerating complicit women. According to this reading, women emerge as human “freedoms” within a social world where a “destiny” of inferiority is already prepared for them. Their self-subordination is then an inevitable product of acting in a patriarchal world. I argue, however, that this interpretation generates a crucial tension, leading Bauer and Garcia to call on women to stop being complicit, while also claiming they cannot avoid complicity. I propose instead a different interpretation, on which feminine complicity is often fueled by criticizable ethical attitudes that are far from inevitable. By revisiting Beauvoir’s notion of “bad faith”, I show that this account is compatible with recognizing the limitations imposed on women’s agency and I show that this feminist ethical criticism is itself an important part of a collective project of social transformation. (shrink)

This article explores Simone de Beauvoir's conceptualization of childhood and its importance for her existentialist thought. Beauvoir's theorization of childhood, I argue, offers a sophisticated portrayal of the child and of the adult–child relationship: the child is not a normal ‘other’ for the adult, but what I call a temporal other, perceived by adults as an ambiguous being; in turn, childhood is conceptualized as the origin of the ambiguity of adulthood. This foregrounding of childhood has important implications (...) for Beauvoir's existentialism, in particular regarding her ethics. Through the adult–child relationship, her vision of an ethical relation to otherness emerges — one which foregrounds both the violence and the mutual liberation involved in encounters with the other. (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)

Reading Beauvoir's “Must We Burn Sade?” alongside the chapter called “Sexual Initiation” in The Second Sex, I argue that the problem with Sade is not his perversity, but his perpetual virginity. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir advances a new understanding of sexual initiation as a physical and spiritual movement toward the other, disqualifying any purely physical machination as sufficient to initiate one into “authentic erotic reality.” Sade's refusal of Eros as described in “Must We Burn Sade?” demonstrates that (...) the Marquis's commitment to his characteristic Sadism in fact condemned him to a barren promiscuity, a trenchant and joyless virginity that he elected to perpetuate. Finally, I argue that we should reread Sadism not as a perversion but as based on the Greek model of the “virgin ailment.” As such, Sadism may turn out to be a more genuine and widespread threat than we ordinarily acknowledge. (shrink)

Between 1946 and 1965, a period during which her contemporaries are calling into question the value of traditional novelistic realism, Simone de Beauvoir develops an extended and nuanced account of the philosophical significance of the realist novel in essays such as “Littérature et métaphysique”, “An American Renaissance in France”, and “Que peut la littérature?”. Beauvoir’s central claim is that novels do philosophical work not by articulating theoretical positions or illustrating abstract themes but by reorienting philosophical ways of (...) understanding truth, world, and reality in and through their very form. Her analysis delineates key.. (shrink)

In her feminist classic The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir refers to ‘the myth of Woman’ to denote images of womanhood that rest upon and reinforce beliefs in a static, feminine essence. This article aims to understand what makes this myth mythical. The author argues that Beauvoir employs the term ‘myth’ to establish a parallel between the way in which modern men relate to women and the worldview of so-called primitives – who she portrays as ruled (...) by a specific, non-rational mode of thought. Beauvoir could thus be read as appropriating an early anthropological discourse on myth, the representatives of which linked myth to non-Western ‘primitive’ societies, while they depicted Western modernity as haunted by its own primitive-mythical past. However, when situated against this background, Beauvoir’s writings on myth are also shown to challenge the very premises upon which this still influential anthropological discourse rest. Whereas the early anthropologists attributed the survival of ‘primitive’ elements in modernity to a defiance of rationality, Beauvoir’s argument suggests that this is better explained by examining how such elements serve the interests of those allegedly rational individuals and groups in power – who she describes as having employed rationality to defend their mythical beliefs. (shrink)

In this essay we investigate several moments in Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical and literary texts in which she refers to echoes and echoing. We notice that echoes help Beauvoir to figure and amplify the ethical character of her concept of ambiguity, which is so central to her thought. We argue that, for Beauvoir, literature has privileged access to the ambiguity of existence and therefore maintains a special status in exposing us to alterity and bringing us face (...) to face with ethical responsibility. Considering her literary portrayals of echoing helps to explain why, despite her life-long philosophical engagement, Beauvoir preferred not to call herself a philosopher. Finally, Beauvoir's phenomenological insight is that in order to carry ethical resonance, the form of a written work must mirror the fundamentally ambiguous or echolalic ontological structure of human existence. (shrink)

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2016 by the New York Times, a spirited account of a major intellectual movement of the twentieth century and the revolutionary thinkers who came to shape it, by the best-selling author of How to Live Sarah Bakewell. Paris, 1933: three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who (...) raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called Phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!" It was this simple phrase that would ignite a movement, inspiring Sartre to integrate Phenomenology into his own French, humanistic sensibility, thereby creating an entirely new philosophical approach inspired by themes of radical freedom, authentic being, and political activism. This movement would sweep through the jazz clubs and cafés of the Left Bank before making its way across the world as Existentialism. Featuring not only philosophers, but also playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries, At the Existentialist Café follows the existentialists' story, from the first rebellious spark through the Second World War, to its role in postwar liberation movements such as anti-colonialism, feminism, and gay rights. Interweaving biography and philosophy, it is the epic account of passionate encounters--fights, love affairs, mentorships, rebellions, and long partnerships--and a vital investigation into what the existentialists have to offer us today, at a moment when we are once again confronting the major questions of freedom, global responsibility, and human authenticity in a fractious and technology-driven world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual WomanCatharine Savage BrosmanSimone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, by Toril Moi; xii & 324 pp. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, $54.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.Eschewing linear patterns and other conventional ways of writing lives, feminist critic Toril Moi has undertaken instead to construct a “personal genealogy” of Beauvoir, using notions derived partly from Michel Foucault and (...) Pierre Bourdieu (Jacques Lacan and Freud are cited likewise). This manner of understanding what the French existentialists called the human project seeks “to achieve a sense of emergence or production and to understand the complex play of different kinds of power involved in social phenomena” (p. 7). The human subject is viewed as a product of forces; individual choice—emphasized continually, and probably excessively, by existentialists—is secondary. All types of evidence, not only writing, are considered germane: social institutions and the subject herself are “text,” part of a “discursive network” (p. 5). The point is to illuminate Beauvoir’s “speaking position” (p. 9) and what it means, for herself and others, and concurrently to explain the rather low disregard in which she appears to be held in France presently.The chief social factor identified is, not surprisingly, what is called the patriarchal order, which Moi sees even today as powerful enough to threaten thinking women’s chances for fulfillment. “Displaying a pernicious imagery of ugly bluestockings and dried-up spinsters, patriarchal ideology seeks to enforce the split between body and mind with particular rigor in the case of intellectual women” (p. 256). Cited in this connection are novels by Germaine de Staël and George Eliot; but, although Eliot influenced the young Beauvoir, these nineteenth-century models pertain little to today’s situation in America and England, for instance (where Moi, a Norwegian, has resided). But Moi needs to believe that such strictures still operate, in order to argue for Beauvoir’s unique position as “a mythological figure, an imago that has made its presence felt in the thoughts and dreams of every intellectual woman in the Western world since the early 1950s” (p. 5)—a claim no less absurd for being unoriginal.The study investigates three “moments” or crucial questions. The first is Beauvoir’s discovery in 1929 (justified or not, and made chiefly perhaps through sexual desire) that she was intellectually inferior to Sartre, despite her stellar academic performance; this led to her positioning herself as second among equals. Moi explores this momentous choice in personal and sociological terms, examining the French academic establishment that formed her and asking what it meant to be a woman agrégée in philosophy, in love with a brilliant man.The second major topic is Beauvoir’s writing itself, as it springs from and refers to her self-image, especially in She Came to Stay and The Second Sex. The former provides telling evidence of what happens when an intelligent woman persuades herself that her lover considers her an equal, whereas actually the [End Page 417] authority remains his. Moi views this novel as more revealing, although oblique, because it is more affectively nuanced and apparently genuine, than direct accounts in Beauvoir’s memoirs of the triangle involving her, Olga Kosakiewicz, and Sartre. The Second Sex—said to be unrivaled in any field in this century, in terms of influence—is examined in light of Beauvoir’s tardy revelation in the 1940s (if one believes her) that being a woman meant something different from being a man. Beauvoir’s understanding of woman’s position is compared to Sartre’s (expressed in fiction and essays, and deduced from his behavior) and to Frantz Fanon’s concept of racial oppression.Lastly, Moi focuses on the bitter conclusion to Force of Circumstance, in which Beauvoir confesses, in her fifties, feeling cheated by life. The problematic quality of this admission can escape no one, in light of her repeated assertions elsewhere that her relationship with Sartre—central to her self-image—constituted an unreserved success, involving utter transparency and union of thought. Moi studies this in terms of other statements—some by Sartre—and Beauvoir’s true accomplishments, and shows how Beauvoir’s... (shrink)

In this essay, I focus on two biographical works by Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir that I read as political texts: Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess and “Must We Burn Sade?”. Reading Arendt's Varnhagen and Beauvoir's “Sade” side by side illuminates their shared preoccupation with lived experience and their common political premises: the antagonism between freedom and sovereignty, and the centrality of action and constructive relations with others. My argument is that these texts constitute (...) an original style of political thinking, which I call politico-biographical hermeneutics, or reading the life of others as exercises in political theory. Politico-biographical hermeneutics, as I take it, is not a systematic methodology, but an approach to interpreting sociopolitical forces as they come to bear and are embodied and inscribed in the lived experiences, struggles, and works of representative or exemplary individuals. This approach identifies the political lessons of lived experience and supports one of the central claims of feminist philosophy, namely, that the personal and the political are not antithetical, but relational. (shrink)

The relationship between languages and philosophy is so strong that French philosopher Barbara Cassin speaks of 'philosophising in languages'. This paper aims to show how translation can be a means to help disseminate philosophical ideas. It might even be called a political tool, when circulating feminist philosophical thoughts is concerned. The article uses the latest English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's Le deuxième sexe to address the pitfalls philosophy presents translators with. It also aims to defend the Interpretive (...) Theory of Translation as a translation strategy particularly relevant to philosophy. The novelty of the paper lies in the fact that the translation of feminist philosophy is largely underanalysed in the field of Translation Studies. Therefore, the article intend to bridge the gap between those disciplines, in order to enhance the reception of feminist philosophy. (shrink)

Michèle Le Dœuff considers the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as a paradigmatic case of what she calls an "erotico-theoretical transference" relationship: De Beauvoir devoted herself to Sartre theoretically by adopting his existentialist perspective for the analysis of reality in general and the analysis of women's oppression in particular. The latter is especially strange since Sartre used strongly sexist metaphors and adopted a macho attitude towards women. In her book Hipparchia's Choice, Le Dœuff (...) speaks in this context of "theoretical masculinism." She convincingly shows in this book that Sartre without using images could not have closed his existentialist philosophy: without the feminine drawback he would not have been able to explain why man cannot become god. Sartre not only understands gaining knowledge as a rape of a woman he also fears that the possessed feminine (body) could reverse its position from being dominated to the dominating force by appropriating the masculine through slime. In Being and Nothingness Sartre states that "slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sickly–sweet, feminine revenge." Despite of the fact that De Beauvoir used Sartre's heterosexist ontology and metaphysics she managed to provide a highly influential depiction of women's condition and offered an original approach to the understanding of selfhood which places woman inside the subject. (shrink)

In these interviews from 1982 and 1985, I ask Beauvoir about her philosophical differences with Jean-Paul Sartre on the issues of voluntarism vs social conditioning and embodiment, individualism vs reciprocity, and ontology vs ethics. We also discuss her influence on Sartre's work, the problems with the current English translation of The Second Sex, her analyses of motherhood and feminist concepts of woman-identity, and her own experience of sexism.

Collects essays, articles, and plays by the French writer, including "A story I used to tell myself," and "What can literature do?".

Contents: "Analysis of Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine," "Two Unpublished Chapters from She Came to Stay," "Pyrrhus and Cineas," "A Review of The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty," "Moral Idealism and Political Realism," "Existentialism and Popular Wisdom," "Jean-Paul Sartre," "An Eye for an Eye," "Literature and Metaphysics," "Introduction to an Ethics of Ambiguity," "An Existentialist Looks at Americans," and "What is Existentialism?".

Ensayo -- Palabras finales -- Selección de textos.

It has been commonly argued that there are traces of Jean Paul Sartre on the philosophical system of his partner, Simone de Beauvoir. Some claim that Beauvoir was not original enough when constructing her system and developing her thoughts; according to some others, she even was not a philosopher. From the perspective of Beauvoir, she didn’t even consider herself as a philosopher but as an author. For her, to call somebody a philosopher, they should be like (...) Spinoza, Hegel, or Sartre who constructs a comprehensive philosophical system, loves philosophy, teaches philosophy, understands philosophy, and uses philosophy in their works. Given these criteria, Sartre was a philosopher for her and she admits that Sartre’s philosophy influenced her a lot. Furthermore, she clearly expresses that there was a mutual influence indeed, which means she also influenced Sartre, but her impacts on him were in terms of literature, not philosophy. To give an example, after writing his biography books, Sartre wrote The Words where the traces of Beauvoir can be seen quite easily. This point can also be derived from Sartre’s admittance that he got the clarity and truth in his works--especially when describing a gesture, analyzing a situation, or observing an incident--by means of Beauvoir’s meticulous style and rich experiences. Sartre also indicates that Beauvoir was a perfect complement and privileged reader for him.In this work, our primary focus will be on the details of the influence of Sartre on Beauvoir. Here, I have to point out that even though the title of this paper is determined as “The Impacts of Sartre on Beauvoir” indeed the word “benefit,” instead of “impact,” would do better for our purpose. It is because though Beauvoir was influenced from Sartre’s philosophical identity, when building her thoughts we must say she mostly “benefited” from Sartre’s philosophy. We can easily see the examples of this point in several contexts: first, in the notion of ambiguity, and second, in her analysis of the position of woman. Also, in her notion of “the other” which is a threat for the independence of an individual, she shares the same ideas with Sartre in her early writings, but later, she changed her direction and adopted a different view.If we examine the notion of Beauvoir’s “ambiguity,” though it has various meanings, what she means is that a person is a free and unique subject on the one hand; and on the other hand that person is an object for others. Here, Beauvoir benefits from Sartre’s existential types. She agrees with Sartre on the idea that human existence contains both being-in-itself and being-for-itself; however, she thinks that having these two types of being together in their existence leads to an ambiguity for human beings. Sartre sees humans as beings that are always in a relationship with the other. And in this relationship, when being-for-itselfsubmit to the other, it becomes an object for the other’s freedom. While being-for-itself perceives the other as subject, she, herself, becomes an object. This fact expresses an ambiguity for Beauvoir.Another issue we can associate with the notion of “ambiguity” is related to the relationship between self and the other, the relationship that relies on the confrontation of the consciousness of the self with the consciousness of the other. At this point, the “I” who identifies himself as an absolute being sees the other’s consciousness as a threat and acts like an enemy towards it. It is because the subject that was exposed to the perspective of the other becomes an object now and she loses her freedom due to the intervention of the other. The other makes her an unguarded being. Now, the subject is not an active being but the object of the other. Thus, due to these restraints of the other on the subject’s freedom, the subject must deny the hegemony of the other and get over the problem by making the other an object. Similar to Sartre, Beauvoir, too, sees the existence of the other or others as a danger for her own freedom at the beginning. She considers freedom in individualistic way and sees the others as barriers for her freedom. But later, she changes her stance, and begins to consider the other as a necessary condition for her own freedom.The last point I am going to focus on is the philosophical source of The Second Sex. One of her masterpieces, The Second Sex, in which she gives the explanation of the oppressions women face and established the principles of modern feminism, is about the women who represent “the other gender” due to fact that women are always identified in terms of the differences of their oppressors, men. In The Second Sex, she examines the essential features that make a woman a woman and at the end she comes up with the notion of “the other.” When reaching this notion, in order to show how she applied existentialist ideas of ontology and ethics, she says that men perceive themselves as “I” or “the subject” and women perceive themselves as “the other.” Beauvoir improves the claims of Sartre in The Second Sex in a unique way, and further put forwards that women are regarded as “the other” and men are called as “the subject.” At this point, if the other becomes a threat for the subject or “I,” then, it can be said that women, too, become a similar threat for men.Surely, there are other points that can be said about the impacts of Sartre on Beauvoir. We will also be examining those points as well as the above ones in this work. (shrink)

This article begins by asking if the project to write a philosophical novel is not inherently flawed; it would seem that the novelist must either write an ambiguous text, which would not create a strong enough argument to count as philosophy, or she must write a text with a clear argument, which would not be ambiguous enough to count as good fiction. The only other option available would be to exemplify a preexisting abstract philosophical system in the concrete literary world. (...) To move beyond such an impasse, this article turns to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's unique aesthetic theory in “Literature and Metaphysics” envisions philosophy as an integral part of the literary text and sees the novel not as an argument but as something called a “philosophical appeal”. In her first novel, She Came to Stay, such a concept of the philosophical novel allows Beauvoir to make an original contribution to the philosophical tradition—one in which Beauvoir rethinks the problem of solipsism—while still creating a stunning literary work. A study of the theory and the novel together thus provides a solid understanding of what philosophers stand to gain from the philosophical novel. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “Introduction” to the Second Sex.

In this classic introduction to existentialist thought, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with her French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms in existentialism carry with them certain ethical responsibilities. De Beauvoir outlines a series of ways of being (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual), each of which overcomes the former’s deficiencies, and therefore can live up (...) to the responsibilities of freedom. Ultimately, de Beauvoir argues that in order to achieve true freedom, one must battle against the choices and activities of those who suppress it. The Ethics of Ambiguity is the book that launched Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist and existential philosophy. It remains a concise yet thorough examination of existence and what it means to be human.--Description from an alternate version. (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)

Album photographique consacré au philosophe et écrivain français. Au total, 181 documents en noir et blanc assortis de commentaires assez brefs, répartis dans un ordre thématique (le professeur, l'écrivain, etc.) et en partie chronologique.

Simone de Beauvoir, still a teen, began a diary while a philosophy student at the Sorbonne. Written in 1926-27—before Beauvoir met Jean-Paul Sartre—the diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and times and offer critical insights into her early intellectual interests, philosophy, and literary works. Presented for the first time in translation, this fully annotated first volume of the Diary includes essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical, and literary significance. (...) It remains an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir’s independent thinking and her influence on philosophy, feminism, and the world. (shrink)

In these letters, de Beauvoir tells Sartre everything, tracing the extraordinary complications of their triangular love life; they reveal her not only as manipulative and dependent, but also as vulnerable, passionate, jealous, and...

Résumé Dans cet entretien, Claudia Bouliane interroge les principaux.ales éditeur.trice.s de la Pléiade consacrée aux Mémoires de Simone de Beauvoir au sujet des choix qu’ ils ont fait quant à la manière d’ encadrer le lectorat dans sa (re)découverte des écrits autobiographiques de l’ autrice et philosophe. L’ échange s’ organise autour des différentes parties critiques des deux volumes ainsi que de l’ album et soulève des questions d’ ordre méthodologique, en plus d’ éclairer les rapports particuliers de (...) Beauvoir à l’ Histoire, à l’ identité, à l’ amitié, à l’ écriture et à la réception de ses écrits. (shrink)

Dating from her years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, this is the 1926-27 diary of the teenager who would become the famous French philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir.

Revelatory insights into the early life and thought of the preeminent French feminist philosopher Dating from her years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, this is the 1926-27 diary of the teenager who would become the famous French philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir. Written years before her first meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, these diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and offer critical insights into her early philosophy and literary works. Presented here for the (...) first time in translation and fully annotated, the diary is completed by essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical and literary significance. The volume represents an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir's independent thinking and influence on the world. (shrink)

Sentada en un bar, mientras Simone de Beauvoir lee mi artículo de la semana pasada, la miro. Ninguna madre burguesa tendría de qué quejarse: la señora Beauvoir tiene una blusa cuidadosamente planchada; está fresca como una rosa, su rostro es terso y limpio, de ella emana un discreto perfume, es verdaderamente perfecta. Su rebelión contra su familia y su entorno, tan bien descrita en las Memorias de una joven formal, no se muestra en los detalles de la (...) vestimenta. No, definitivamente, Simone de Beauvoir no tiene la agresividad "amazónica" al límite. (shrink)

French Feminism Reader is a collection of essays representing the authors and issues from French theory most influential in the American context. The book is designed for use in courses, and it includes illuminating introductions to the work of each author. These introductions include biographical information, influences and intellectual context, major themes in the author's work as a whole, and specific introductions to the selections in this volume. This collection includes selections by Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Delphy, Colette (...) Guilluamin, Monique Wittig, Michele Le Doeuff, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Helene Cixious. (shrink)

Résumé Dans cette transcription d’un enregistrement audio fait en 1947, Simone de Beauvoir définit le fond philosophique et la forme esthétique du théâtre existentialiste pour le public américain. Elle présente les deux dramaturges les plus importants de ce mouvement, Jean-Paul Sartre et Albert Camus, ainsi que les thèmes principaux et le contexte mythologique de leurs premières œuvres théâtrales : pour Sartre, Les Mouches et Huis clos ; pour Camus, Caligula. Beauvoir souligne au terme de ce survol le (...) message optimiste de ces pièces, surtout pour le public d’après-guerre en France et aux États-Unis. (shrink)