: This paper explains the discipline of somaesthetics, which emerges from pragmatism's concern with enhancing embodied experience and reconstructing the aesthetic in ways that make it more central to key philosophical concerns of knowledge, ethics, and politics. I then examine Beauvoir's complex treatment of the body in The Second Sex, assessing both her arguments that could support the pragmatic approach of somaesthetics but also those that challenge its bodily focus as a danger for feminism.

In the last decade, the importance of Simone de Beauvoir’s contribution to 20th-century French philosophy has been beyond debate. However, it can be tempting to read her contributions as the dated beginnings of feminist philosophy, and to believe that her work is only interesting from the perspective of the history of philosophy. To the contrary, this article claims that contemporary philosophers can and should take Beauvoirian philosophy as a source of fruitful insights on contemporary issues in political and moral philosophy (...) by showing the limited scope of two classic critiques of Beauvoir and by defending the relevance of her work for thinking about female submission and the importance of erotic experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The View from Pȏle NordSartre, Beauvoir, and Girard on Mimesis, Embodiment, and DesireMartha J. Reineke (bio)Simone Beauvoir's novel She Came to Stay immerses readers in a 1930s Parisian social scene, thanks in part to the character Françoise. Eavesdropping with Françoise on a man and woman seated at a table in the Pȏle Nord café, readers of the novel hear the woman confide, "I've never been able to follow the (...) rules of flirting. I have a morbid horror of being touched."1 As Françoise invites us to turn our gaze toward another couple seated nearby, we observe a possible instance of the very discomfort to which the first woman has attested. A hapless female looks "uncertainly at a man's huge (grosse) hand that has just pounced on hers (s'abattre sur)."2 Of these two scenes from She Came to Stay, Jean-Paul Sartre memorializes only the second.3 As described by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, a man and a woman on their first date are seated at a table. The man "takes" (prend) the hand of a woman and holds it between "his warm hands" (les mains chaudes) while the woman makes her hand inert, even as she "permits herself to enjoy his desire."4 Thanks to the pervasive influence of Being and Nothingness on the philosophical canon, the disquieting scene Françoise describes in She Came to Stay largely has been forgotten. Sartre sets the [End Page 1] terms for the unfortunate woman's ongoing life: She is a paradigm of "bad faith." Two decades later, her immortality is secured by René Girard: The woman is a prime exemplar of coquetry, a "fundamental" concept in the development of Girard's theory of mimetic desire.5In the wake of today's #metoo headlines, we may find ourselves eager to weigh in anew on the scene at Pȏle Nord. Are we witnesses to flirtation? Seduction? Unwanted sexual attention? Debates about coercion and guile, predators and prey, are unlikely to be productive; after all, Girard has advised that participants in such debates flounder in a problematic victimology.6 Nevertheless, Sartre and Girard's fascination with the mise en scène at Pȏle Nord warrants reexamination on other grounds. Sartre's discussion of the young woman beset by bad faith in Being and Nothingness is one of several instances in which Sartre is shown exerting a significant influence on Girard. Focusing closely on these occurrences, we can identify features of Sartrian existentialism that contribute constructively to the development of Girard's thought. So also can we uncover a problematic view of the body in mimetic theory. Girard shares with Sartre a profound ambivalence toward embodiment. An alternative perspective visible in Beauvoir's writing could enhance the treatment of the body and eroticism in mimetic theory.Girard's early work attests to Sartre's influence. Writing in Evolution of Desire, Cynthia Haven introduces the topic of Sartre's impact on Girard by recounting Parisian intellectuals' responses to tensions between Camus and Sartre: "Everyone took one side or the other." Girard's friends reported that Girard "was on the Sartre side."7 In an interview with Rebecca Adams, Girard states that "I was influenced by Sartre and Camus, like other people of my generation, especially by Sartre."8 Girard acknowledges Sartre's influence in several other contexts. In a 2007 interview with Pierpaolo Antonello, Girard recalls his early philosophical interests: "… From Sartre I went to Merleau-Ponty and all the authors related to phenomenology, which fascinated me and for a while I wanted to write in the phenomenological style."9 Commenting in the 2008 preface to La Conversion de l'art, Girard states that he is struck by the Sartrian "tone" of his own writing.10 Scholarly explorations of the specifics of the influence of Sartre on Girard have cataloged the most important Sartrian concepts: a lack of being, the in-itself/for-itself (en-soi/pour-soi); the "projet"; patterns of desire (e.g., masochism and sadism), and bad faith.11 These themes are discussed in what follows, with special attention to Girard and Sartre's perspectives on human... (shrink)

This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir’s reading of the 18th century writer and libertine Marquis de Sade, in her essay “Must we Burn Sade?”; a difficult and bewildering text, both in pure linguistic terms and philosophically. In particular, Beauvoir’s insistence on Sade as a “great moralist” seems hard to reconcile with her emphasis, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, on the interdependency of human beings and her exhortation to us to promote other people’s freedom, as well as the aspiration of The (...) Second Sex to equal relations between the genders. While earlier scholars addressed the ethico-political implications of Beauvoir’s essay, they insisted that the ambiguity so fundamental in her philosophy is denied by the Sadean hero, and that the Other can never be attained in his system. In this essay, I argue that Sade paradoxically emerges as an ethical model in Beauvoir’s text: as a writer, he assumes the ambiguity of the human condition in the extreme. Further, Sade reveals the potential of sexuality if it is explored in a form of eroticism that largely transgresses behavior constructed as normal: his writings open up new forms of existence, where, contrary to prevailing ideas, woman’s sexual freedom is claimed as equal to man’s, where genders are unstable and heterosexuality no longer the standard. Beauvoir’s fascination with Sade in this essay can be linked with the seemingly unresolvable asymmetry in the relation between men and women in The Second Sex: in his writings is revealed sexuality’s potential to subvert patriarchal norms and mystifications, and perhaps, in the end, even gender itself. (shrink)

This article concerns itself with the ways that Black women have taken up #BlackGirlMagic as a critical reimagining of their subject positionalities as Black women. I argue that #BlackGirlMagic is a resistant imaginary that has significantly altered the contemporary western social imaginary and suggest that the intersectional ambiguity that Black women animate builds community among Black women toward collective liberation. Bringing together Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality, Simone de Beauvoir's concept of ambiguity, and María Lugones's concept of oppressed←→resisting subjects, I (...) argue that #BlackGirlMagic's so-called “magic” is both produced by and produces what José Medina has termed a guerrilla epistemology. In outlining the contours of this epistemology, I demonstrate how #BlackGirlMagic resists through the transmission of knowledge, the creation of a critical genealogy, its visionary orientation, and the development of an insurrectionary counterdiscourse. To illustrate, I briefly discuss how #BlackGirlMagic provides white women with an opportunity for a beneficial form of epistemic friction. In the end, I suggest that #BlackGirlMagic's ability to unite Black women transnationally bodes well for its continued effects on the western social imaginary. (shrink)

While Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of alterity has been the topic of much discussion within Beauvoir scholarship, feminist theory, and social and political philosophy, it has not commonly been a reference point for those working within ethics. However, Beauvoir develops a novel view that those concerned with the ethical import of respect for others should consider seriously, especially those working within the Levinasian tradition. I claim that Beauvoir distinguishes between two forms of otherness: namely, existential alterity and sociopolitical alterity. While (...) sociopolitical alterity is a contingent and surmountable form of otherness that results from oppression of individuals and groups, existential alterity is a necessary feature of the human condition that discloses the foreignness of the other as a freedom. Out of this view of existential alterity, I argue, Beauvoir develops an ethic of asymmetrical reciprocity. In contrast with Levinas, who dismisses reciprocity as a symmetrical or reversible model of relation that minimizes difference, Beauvoir promulgates a view of reciprocity that does not fall into the problems that Levinas diagnoses. Moreover, asymmetrical reciprocity more successfully figures the ethical relation to the other than the absolute asymmetry one finds in Levinas, which becomes evident through revisiting Levinas’s account of eros and contrasting it with that of Beauvoir. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments – embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part I evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part II defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part III examines Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the (...) view from nowhere, a totalizing God’s-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from everywhere. Normativity is no longer deferred to higher authorities such as duty, utility or the valorized virtue, but through the perceptual gestalt it is returned to the perceiving embodied subject. This... (shrink)

This paper may be read as a reclamation project. It argues, with Simone de Beauvoir, that patriarchal marriage is both a perversion of the meaning of the couple and an institution in transition. Parting from those who have given up on marriage, I identify marriage as existing at the intersection of the ethical and the political and argue that whether or not one chooses marriage, feminists ought not abandon marriage as an institution.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's elaborations of the project of philosophy and styles of minoritarian literature, it becomes possible to reveal new dimensions in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. In this work she uses a minoritarian philosophy, which is an accessible and collaborative mode of philosophizing, to create a concept of Woman as an incarnate-becoming. This concept overcomes the dichotomizing of transcendence and immanence, and revalues feminine existence within philosophical discourses.

In an attempt to start rectifying a lamentable disparity in scholarship, we evince fruitful points of similarity and difference in the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, paying particular attention to their views on long-term projects. Endorsing what might be called an “Ethic of Resolve,” Rand praises those who undertake sustained goal-directed actions such as careers. Beauvoir, however, endorses an “Ethic of Ambiguity” that makes her more skeptical about the prospects of carrying out lifelong projects without deluding oneself. (...) Our study teases apart the strengths and drawbacks of these views. (shrink)

Though it has gone unnoticed so far in Beauvoir Studies, the term “singularity” is a technical one for Simone de Beauvoir. In the first half of the essay I discuss two reasons why this term has been obscured. First, as is well known Beauvoir has not been read in the context of the history of philosophy until recently. Second, in The Ethics of Ambiguity at least, singularité is translated both inconsistently and quite misleadingly. In the second half of the essay (...) I attempt to demonstrate the importance of this term in The Ethics. The will to disclose being is the will to disclose the singularity of the other, whether human, land, sky or painting. Ambiguity, which Beauvoir distinguishes from absurdity in Camus, is an image suggesting this necessarily mutual disclosure of singularity. (shrink)

This paper develops a new account of Beauvoir's "Hegelianism" and argues that the strand of contemporary interpretation of Beauvoir that seeks to represent her thought in isolation from that of Jean-Paul Sartre constitutes a betrayal of the philosophy of recognition that she denves from Hegel. It underscores the extent to which Beauvoir influenced Sartre's Being and Nothingness and shows that Sartre and Beauvoir both adapted Hegel's ideas and agreed in rejecting his optimism.

Celem artykułu jest analiza koncepcji heterogeniczności w teorii Simone de Beauvoir, której praca przyczyniła się zarówno do rozwoju filozofii i etyki feministycznej jak i badań nad macierzyństwem. Punkt wyjścia stanowi złożona krytyka instytucji patriarchalnego macierzyństwa, przymusowego macierzyństwa, demistyfikacja instynktu macierzyńskiego oraz mitu Matki. Antyesencjalistyczna perspektywa Beauvoir umożliwiła artykulację ucieleśnionego doświadczenia, ambiwalencji oraz alienacji w macierzyństwie. Artykuł stanowi zatem próbę reinterpretacji pism Beauvoir w kontekście etyki niejednoznaczności oraz „antropologicznej rewolucji”, które stały się wyrazem oporu, walki o prawa i sprawiedliwość reprodukcyjną. Autorka (...) podejmuje również kwestie dobrowolnej bezdzietności, wykluczenia matek oraz problem płciowego podziału pracy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper presents an analysis of motherhood as potentially ambiguous and empowering, using the Beauvoirian concept of the erotic. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of the erotic can allow us to reevaluate “nonproductive,” repetitive, apparently immanent activities—such as going through pregnancy, giving birth, breastfeeding, and raising a child—as projects through which we disclose freedom, and, thus, as projects that possibly lead to transcendence.It is often argued that Beauvoir considered these experiences to be ways of embracing immanence and avoiding transcendence. (...) Yet even supposing Beauvoir’s argument was against not maternity per se, but the oppressive construction of the institution of motherhood under patriarchy, can maternal engagement be viewed as an existentialist, phenomenological project? I claim that Beauvoir’s own premises show that it must be so considered once motherhood is recognized as potentially joyful, ambiguously erotic, and creative. (shrink)

One of the most fundamental premises of feminist philosophy is the assumption of an invidious asymmetry between the genders that has to be overcome. Parallel to this negative account of asymmetry we also find a positive account, developed in particular within the context of so-called feminist philosophies of difference. I explore both notions of gender asymmetry. The goal is a clarification of the notion of asymmetry as it can presently be found in feminist philosophy. Drawing upon phenomenology as well as (...) feminist difference theory, I argue that a gender asymmetry does exist that cannot-as in the first assumption-be transformed into symmetry. (shrink)

The paper argues that the philosophical starting point of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is the phenomenological understanding of the living body, developed by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It shows that Beauvoir's notion of philosophy stems from the phenomenological interpretation of Cartesianism which emphasizes the role of evidence, self-criticism, and dialogue.

This essay relates scenes from Beauvoir's novels to her views of female eroticism and frigidity in The Second Sex. Expressions of frigidity signal unjust power relations in Beauvoir's literature. She constructs frigidity as a symbolic means of rejecting dominance in heterosexual relations. Thus frigidity need not be interpreted, as it sometimes is, as a form of bad faith. The essay concludes with some thoughts on the relevance of Beauvoir's view of frigidity to contemporary feminism.

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)

Sandra Harding is working on the reconstruction of scientific objectivity. Lorraine Daston argues that objectivity is a concept that has historically evolved. Her account of the development of "aperspectival objectivity" provides an opportunity to see Harding's "strong objectivity" project as a stage in this evolution, to locate it in the history of migration of ideals from moral philosophy to natural science, and to support Harding's desire to retain something of the ontological significance of objectivity.

Hypatia's twenty-fifth anniversary in 2009, coming on the heels of Simone de Beauvoir's 100th birthday in 2008, provides an ideal moment to reflect on the past and future of research on Beauvoir's philosophy—the subject of two past Hypatia issues. Reviewing these early issues in the light of more recent publications reveals both the progress in Beauvoir scholarship and a scholarly impasse that must be confronted if that progress is to continue.

Reading Beauvoir’s descriptions of love in The Second Sex (TSS), one would be forgiven for being pessimistic about the possibility of authentic love. What I will do in this paper is, using Beauvoir’s diagnosis of inauthentic love under patriarchy, construct a set of conditions that an authentic love would be guided by and strive to manifest. I will then defend the importance of Beauvoir’s views by demonstrating its explanatory power. Firstly, I will show how Beauvoir’s account can deal with two (...) common contemporary problems that are often raised as objections against accounts of love that include a moral element. Then, in the third section, I will also show the value of this account by demonstrating its ability to explain why different kinds of love feel differently. The kind I will focus on will be unrequited love; this will be in dialogue with vision-based accounts to highlight Beauvoir’s unique contribution. (shrink)

For Simone de Beauvoir, the opposition of subjects is not inescapable as it may be resolved by a relation of reciprocal recognition. I discuss formulations of reciprocity and the problem of the other as outlined in Beauvoir's 1927 diary and her memoir, La Force de l'âge, then turn to examine the account of lesbianism in Le Deuxième sexe.

This article examines how some of Simone de Beauvoir's ethical notions about the Self-Other relation explored in her theoretical philosophy of the 1940s were developed in her subsequent autobiography. It argues that Beauvoir represents reciprocal alterity in these autobiographical texts through a testimonial engagement with autobiography conceptualized as an act of bearing witness for the Other, through the privileging of various interlocutors and privileged others with whom "the real" is experienced and through a negotiation with the reader. The article also (...) explores the wider question of how Beauvoir's engagement with autobiography might constitute a mode of ethical engagement with the Other. (shrink)

One of the most fundamental premises of feminist philosophy is the assumption of an invidious asymmetry between the genders that has to be overcome. Parallel to this negative account of asymmetry we also find a positive account, developed in particular within the context of so-called feminist philosophies of difference. I explore both notions of gender asymmetry. The goal is a clarification of the notion of asymmetry as it can presently be found in feminist philosophy. Drawing upon phenomenology as well as (...) feminist difference theory , I argue that a gender asymmetry does exist that cannot-as in the first assumption-be transformed into symmetry. (shrink)

Kojève’s lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit generated two ideas – otherness is something threatening that must be overcome and one’s relationships with others are inexorably violent – that fundamentally shaped the way many exponents of early French phenomenology regarded intersubjectivity. This essay shows how Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel in The Ethics of Ambiguity offers a perspective on intersubjectivity that defies the other-conquering Cartesian hero implied by Kojève and celebrated in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Beauvoir appreciates the degree to which Hegel (...) makes subjectivity indebted to otherness. Like Hegel, she defines oppression as the failure to recognise the otherness of the other. Beauvoir shares Hegel’s optimism that individuals can sublate their naïve solipsism. She associates reciprocal recognition between subjects with ethical freedom, which she distinguishes from Sartre’s concept of freedom. From the analysis of ethical freedom it is concluded that both conflict and friendship are side-effects of the essential bond between subjects and their mutual need for one another. The Hegel-inspired hopefulness at the core of The Ethics of Ambiguity is further demonstrated by Beauvoir’s rejection of the absurd in favour of ambiguity, her positive rendering of failure, her appeal to outrageousness, and focus on the joy of existence. (shrink)

This paper explains the discipline of somaesthetics, which emerges from pragmatism's concern with enhancing embodied experience and reconstructing the aesthetic in ways that make it more central to key philosophical concerns of knowledge, ethics, and politics. I then examine Beauvoir's complex treatment of the body in The Second Sex, assessing both her arguments that could support the pragmatic approach of somaes-thetics but also those that challenge its bodily focus as a danger for feminism.

This paper reads Simone de Beauvoir's travel journal America Day by Day for its philosophical content. I argue that this work provides a unique approach to feminist, embodied philosophy, one that has been overlooked by the categorization of her writing into philosophical works and feminist ones. Such an approach, I contend, is enacted here through her use of Heidegger's concept of the everyday to inform her own treatment of understanding and experience.

Beauvoir's distinction between romantic and authentic love offers us an opportunity for thinking through the complex refotions among phihsophy, reading, and love. If we accept her account of romantic love as a flawed, dependent mode of being, and her suggestion that an authentic love—one that engages maturely with the other—is possible, then we might take the risk of thinking of reading in these terms.

This essay concerns Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of blame and punishment in “Œil pour œil” and the irreconcilable tensions that haunt it. I study these tensions—between the desire to blame and punish and the inability to provide moral justification for these practices—and locate their source in Beauvoir's conception of ethics in Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté. According to my reading, her ethics implies that violence violates freedom, the grounding principle of ethical life. Retaliatory and retributive judgments and the punishment they (...) uphold, regardless of whether they are exerted by individuals or by official state powers, are forms of violence and are therefore unjustifiable. The aporias of blame and punishment in “Œil pour œil” suggest that Beauvoir's ideal of ethics necessitates an abolitionist position regarding punishment. The essay ends with a reflection on the affinity between the position constructed from Beauvoir's work and feminist abolitionist theories that seek to undermine the legal, social, and political institutions that perpetuate, rather than resolve, economic, racial, gender, sex, and class inequality. (shrink)