Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence
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Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253220370 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/19/2009 |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Beauvoir and Sartre
The Riddle of Influence
By Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2009 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35265-1
CHAPTER 1
Getting the Beauvoir We Deserve
Debra Bergoffen
The Second Sex may be read as driven by a simple question: Why don't women rebel? Or, in Beauvoir's words, "Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty? ... Whence comes this submission ... of women" (SS, xviv)? Insofar as it concerns the matter of exploitation, women, like other dominated groups, are marked as the Other. When Beauvoir writes, "thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. ... She is defined and differentiated with reference to man ... she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential" (SS, viii), she could easily have substituted markers of race for man and woman. The sentence could read, "thus humanity is white and white people define native people, or black people, not in themselves but as relative to them." Beauvoir herself suggests such possibilities when she compares the situation of women to that of the slave. This substitutability accounts for some of the impact of The Second Sex. Its category of the Other resonates beyond the confines of the text.
Beauvoir insists, however, that there is a radical difference between the otherness of women and the otherness ascribed to other oppressed groups. Other oppressed groups, remembering the moment when they were transformed from sovereign subjects into objects to be used by others, see their exploitation as a historical injustice that must and can be opposed. Appealing to their memory of life before their transformation, they call to each other in solidarity and rebel. They follow the script of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic.
No such script exists for women. There seems to be no "before," no moment when women's subjectivity was stolen from them. In this, women's otherness is more akin to that of Hindu untouchables than to that of the colonized or enslaved. It appears to be ahistorical — a matter of natural law or divine ordination. Believing in the inevitability of their otherness, women exist in a mystified condition. As mystified, they accept the "fact" of their passivity, weakness, and need for male protection. Accepting the naturalness of their condition, they accept the necessity and justness of male domination. We see the vicious circle. Women are said to be passive by nature. They are therefore by nature incapable of action — rebellion.
Were it simply a matter of women's mystification, the riddle of why women fail to rebel might be solved and resolved by combing historical archives for the moment when the transformation of women from subject to object occurred. To some extent Beauvoir takes up this quest. She soon discovers, however, that were such a moment to be discovered, it would not create the conditions of solidarity necessary for rebellious action. To understand the complexity of women's situation, we need to understand the forces at work that sustain women's otherness, that support their ongoing mystification. Furthermore, we need to understand that, given the unique situation of women as the second sex, the idea of a violent rebellion is unthinkable.
Rejecting a simple answer to her simple question, Beauvoir writes, "thus woman may fail to lay claim to the status of the subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other" (SS, xvii). This sentence is philosophically packed. It identifies the position of woman as the Other as both a consequence of a unique situation and as a matter of complicity. It identifies economic, sexual, and existential roots of women's continued status as the Other.
In speaking of the heterosexual bond, Beauvoir alerts us to the ways in which heterosexuality, by figuring women as the birthing body, structures them as dependent on men and in this way creates a situation where women, seeing themselves as requiring male protection for themselves and their children, elevate the value of the bond that ties them to husband and children above the value of their bonds to other women and above the value of intersubjective reciprocity. Instead of identifying with each other, women identify with the men of their culture, race, or class. Ignoring their solidarity with other women and forgoing reciprocity with men for the value of the bond, women's alignment with men is also tactical. The system of patriarchy renders them economically dependent on men.
Beauvoir's first two explanations of women's failure to rebel, that they lack definite resources and that they prefer the value of the bond to the reciprocities of equality, refer to economic-social-structural issues. Her third explanation, however, is existential. Women, for realistic, practical, and existentially unethical reasons, are content with their status as the other. It protects them from the anxieties and responsibilities of freedom. They are happy.
Beginning with the question: Why don't women rebel? and led by it to focus on Beauvoir's three-pronged answer alerts us to Beauvoir's unique contribution to Continental political thought. Though the answer's reference to economics alerts us to the Marxist strain of The Second Sex's analysis of women's situation, the reference to the bond of the heterosexual couple and to women's satisfaction indicates that, from Beauvoir's point of view, the complexity of the oppressive structures of patriarchy cannot be captured through the single lens of economics. Taking Beauvoir's answer to the riddle of women's failure to rebel as my point of departure, I situate Beauvoir as an existential phenomenologist whose engagement with existential phenomenology is at the root of her feminist critique. Attending to the details of Beauvoir's deployment of phenomenological existential categories, I find that Beauvoir engaged Merleau-Ponty's and Sartre's phenomenological analyses of embodiment, perception, and desire to create a unique phenomenological, existential, and political position.
In previous writings I have focused on the role of the erotic in Beauvoir's thinking. This chapter brings the idea of bad faith to Beauvoir's discussions of the ways in which the erotic experience of ambiguous subjectivity refutes the structures of masculine autonomous subjectivity central to patriarchal ideologies. It finds that although the erotic event has the potential to destabilize patriarchal gender codes, the long-term effects of this destabilization will depend on the extent to which bad faith loses its hold on those who embrace their patriarchal status.
In taking up the question of bad faith, I am of course calling up the figure of Sartre and treading in the mire of the Sartre-Beauvoir relationship. In taking up the concept of bad faith within the context of Beauvoir's concept of ambiguity, however, I intend to complicate this relationship so that instead of returning to the time when linking Beauvoir's name to Sartre's meant losing the name Beauvoir, we situate ourselves in a time where, instead of threatening Beauvoir's name, the name Sartre takes its place alongside another name circulating in her texts, that of Merleau-Ponty. Attending to these names, we come to a better understanding of the complexities of Beauvoir's thinking and come closer to getting the Beauvoir we deserve.
In titling this chapter "Getting the Beauvoir We Deserve," I am miming the title of Douglas Crimp's essay "Getting the Warhol We Deserve." I crib that title to signal the affinity of this piece with the project of Crimp's piece. He is concerned with Andy Warhol and the situated scholarship of cultural studies. I am interested in the current state of Beauvoir scholarship and its relationship to feminism. Pointing to Crimp is my way of signaling that we are at a unique and interesting moment in Beauvoir scholarship. We no longer have to justify Beauvoir's status as a philosopher. We can speak of her relationship with other philosophers, notably Sartre, without risking her philosophical credentials. Recalling this title also signals that the state of feminism, like the state of cultural studies, remains contested. It also speaks to my conviction that Beauvoir's work continues to operate in this contested space and that to understand its operation, itself a matter of dispute, we need to attend to the ways in which her ideas cut into the ideas of other philosophers, and the ways in which ideas that she often developed in isolation from each other form constellations of thought that remain relevant for current philosophical and feminist concerns.
The concept of ambiguity is at the center of Beauvoir's thought. It is at work in Beauvoir's depiction of intentionality and is critical to her analyses of our ethical and political relationships. It signals her debt to a phenomenological tradition that muddies the subject-object distinction. It appeals to the method of thick descriptions as it pursues the project of identifying the essential structures of the life world. Once we appreciate the ways in which the concept of ambiguity anchors and permeates Beauvoir's thought, we cannot help but turn to the thinking of Merleau-Ponty; for he, like Beauvoir, chooses the term "ambiguity" to develop the insights of the phenomenological turn.
The affinities between Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty go beyond sharing an affinity for a particular word, however. The matter of the shared term may have drawn Beauvoir's readers to the name Merleau-Ponty, but once there, we discovered important affinities between her work and his. This strategy of reading Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty through each other has never fallen into the traps of Beauvoir-Sartre readings. There was no extra-philosophical Beauvoir-Merleau-Ponty couple as a decoy and no directive from Beauvoir to subordinate her work to his. As these readings came on the scene in the wake of the movement to disentangle Beauvoir's voice from Sartre's, noting the affinities between Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty became a way to erase Sartre.
If we ignore Beauvoir's affinities with Sartre, however, we risk forgetting that The Second Sex's existential-phenomenological analyses of women's situations are taken up in the name of a political liberatory project. If Beauvoir's only goal was to decipher the lived experience of being a woman, showing the ways in which her phenomenological analyses are indebted to Merleau-Ponty might be sufficient. But The Second Sex is not an epistemological treatise. It is an ethical and political work. In showing us the how and what of the lived woman's body, Beauvoir intends for us to see that women are oppressed. Getting us to see this is the first step in enlisting us as her allies in the political and ethical project of liberating women from their subjection.
To get the Beauvoir we deserve, we need to read her as an engaged existential phenomenologist, whose central concerns were ethical and political. In the Second Sex, as the riddle and the answer that opened this chapter show, Beauvoir understood that the endurance of patriarchy relied on a unique intertwining of political and existential structures that implicated women and men intimately, socially, and politically. She discovered that a structural analysis that ignored what Sartre called bad faith, and/or an existential analysis that ignored what Merleau-Ponty identified as the anonymous structures of experience, would miss the mark — would have no political or existential effect. Thus, paying her debts to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty but beholden to neither, Beauvoir created a unique phenomenological political liberatory text — The Second Sex.
Taking advantage of this interpretive moment when we can call up the name Merleau-Ponty without erasing the name Sartre, and when we can speak of Sartre without marginalizing Beauvoir, I read The Second Sex as the scene of a ménage à trois, where the angles of Sartre's and Merleau-Ponty's thoughts are triangulated through the cutting edges of Beauvoir's thinking. Though neither Sartre's concepts of bad faith and the look nor Merleau-Ponty's idea of ambiguity can by themselves adequately account for women's failure to rebel, taken together, they can, when properly spliced, satisfy Beauvoir's desire to birth the independent woman.
To understand how Beauvoir's concept of ambiguity differs from Merleau-Ponty's and to understand the role Sartre's bad faith plays in this difference rely on an un-Cartesian understanding of Sartre's categories of freedom and facticity. If we read Sartre as establishing a Cartesian dualism between the domain of the fact and the domain of freedom, if we equate the domain of the fact with the en-soi and the domain of freedom with the pour-soi, we will have trouble finding a productive way of understanding the ways in which Sartre's and Beauvoir's ideas cross. Sartre, as I read him, is not a Cartesian, however. He does not understand the givens of our situation as pure materialities devoid of human intentionalities. They are facticities. That is, consciousness is not, as with Descartes, a passive meaning finder as much as it is an active meaning giver. In disclosing the meanings of the world, consciousness also constitutes them. Given that every materiality we confront is already sedimented with historical, social, political, economic, and cultural layers of intentional acts, and given that consciousness finds meaning already inhering in the materialities that confront it, it appears that materialities are meaningful in themselves. Facticities, materialities imbued with human meaning, that is, appear to be facts, material givens that seem to be immune from, and independent of, our intentionalities.
The Being and Nothingness category of bad faith destabilizes the apparent fact status of the facticities of our lives. Reading the vignettes of the waiter in the café, the woman on a date, the gambler, and the homosexual, we discover the ways in which the category of bad faith obfuscates the relationship between intentionality and materiality. It is true that the point of Sartre's discussions of bad faith is to reveal the powers of freedom. Freedom is not, however, privileged to the point of throwing us into the pitfalls of an idealistic constructivism. The waiter's need to earn a living is a material reality that cannot be willed or wished away; the homosexual's desires and the gambler's addictions are not mere matters of the will. The point of Sartre's bad faith is not to deny the power of these materialities, desires, and habits, but rather to refuse to treat them as facts: determining conditions immune to the meaning-giving powers of consciousness. In the process of earning a living, it is not necessary for the waiter to reduce himself to a social role. The gambler and the homosexual are responsible for the meaning they assign to their addiction and desire.
A fact is a facticity whose intentional structure is obscured by the bad faith that negates the reality of our freedom/intentionality. Reading Sartre's account of bad faith through Beauvoir, we discover that, at bottom, the category of bad faith is a political category that calls us to the task of resisting the powers that would transform facticities into facts. Comparing Beauvoir's image of the serious man in The Ethics of Ambiguity to Sartre's discussions of seriousness is instructive here. For both Sartre and Beauvoir, the serious man is a man who lives in a world of facts — a world where the meaning-giving powers of intentionality and the responsibilities for the meaning of the world are refused. For Sartre, seriousness is a reaction to the anguish of freedom. It is a "reassuring, materialistic, substantiation of values ... as coming from the world rather than from my freedom" (BN, 78). This flight from anguish is understood by Sartre as a bad faith strategy that carries ethical and psychoanalytic implications (BN, 797). At the end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre promises to devote a future work to these ethical considerations (BN, 798). That work never appeared during his lifetime.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beauvoir and Sartre by Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb. Copyright © 2009 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
List of AbbreviationsIntroductionChristine Daigle and Jacob Golomb1. Getting the Beauvoir We DeserveDebra Bergoffen2. Where Influence Fails: Embodiment in Beauvoir and SartreChristine Daigle3. The Question of Reciprocal Self-Abandon to the Other: Beauvoir's Influence on SartreGuillermine de Lacoste4. Beauvoir and Sartre on Freedom, Intersubjectivity, and Normative JustificationMatthew C. Eshleman5. Sartre and Beauvoir on Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic and the Question of the "Look"Debbie Evans6. Beauvoir, Sartre, and Patriarchy's History of IdeasEdward Fullbrook7. Psychoanalysis of Things: Objective Meanings or Subjective Projections?Sara Heinämaa8. Beauvoir, Sartre, and the Problem of AlterityMichel KailTranslated by Kevin W. Gray9. Moving beyond Sartre: Constraint and Judgment in Beauvoir's "Moral Essays" and The MandarinsSonia Kruks10. Simone de Beauvoir's "Marguerite" as a Possible Source of Inspiration for Jean-Paul Sartre's "The Childhood of a Leader"Eliane Lecarme-TaboneTranslated by Kevin W. Gray11. Taking a Distance: Exploring Some Points of Divergence between Beauvoir and SartreWilliam L. McBride12. Anne, Ou quand orime le spirituel: Beauvoir and Sartre Interact—from Parody, Satire, and Tragedy to Manifesto of LiberationAdrian van den Hoven13. The Concept of Transcendence in Beauvoir and SartreAndrea Veltman14. Freedom F/Or the OtherGail WeissBibliographyList of ContributorsIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), French philosopher and novelist, is perhaps best known as the intimate companion/friend of existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Over the decades, she has been a second banana, overshadowed by Sartre because of his huge literary and philosophical reputation. This international collection of scholarly essays attempts to rectify this assessment by claiming that she was a significant philosopher in her own right and that she influenced and contributed to many of Sartre's works. Editors Daigle (Brock Univ.) and Golomb (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) bring together 14 essays that exalt Beauvoir to a higher philosophic plane, even though she consistently said that Sartre was the philosopher, and that she was merely a writer. Contributors disagree with her self-effacing remarks. (Unbelievably, one writer even refers to her as a giant of 20th-century philosophy.) This reviewer sees the existentialist The Ethics of Ambiguity as derivative of Sartre's work. The Second Sex is Beauvoir's original feminist essay, and her voluminous autobiographies suggest, perhaps, vanity. Altogether, this feminist-inspired book assumes a very advanced knowledge of Sartre and Beauvoir. Readers should see Hazel Rowley's Tête-a-Tête (2005) for a very enjoyable account of their personal relationships. Summing Up: Recommended. Women's studies collections supporting graduate students and faculty/researchers. —Choice"
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), French philosopher and novelist, is perhaps best known as the intimate companion/friend of existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Over the decades, she has been a second banana, overshadowed by Sartre because of his huge literary and philosophical reputation. This international collection of scholarly essays attempts to rectify this assessment by claiming that she was a significant philosopher in her own right and that she influenced and contributed to many of Sartre's works. Editors Daigle (Brock Univ.) and Golomb (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) bring together 14 essays that exalt Beauvoir to a higher philosophic plane, even though she consistently said that Sartre was the philosopher, and that she was merely a writer. Contributors disagree with her self-effacing remarks. (Unbelievably, one writer even refers to her as a giant of 20th-century philosophy.) This reviewer sees the existentialist The Ethics of Ambiguity as derivative of Sartre's work. The Second Sex is Beauvoir's original feminist essay, and her voluminous autobiographies suggest, perhaps, vanity. Altogether, this feminist-inspired book assumes a very advanced knowledge of Sartre and Beauvoir. Readers should see Hazel Rowley's Tête-a-Tête (2005) for a very enjoyable account of their personal relationships. Summing Up: Recommended. Women's studies collections supporting graduate students and faculty/researchers. —Choice
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), French philosopher and novelist, is perhaps best known as the intimate companion/friend of existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Over the decades, she has been a second banana, overshadowed by Sartre because of his huge literary and philosophical reputation. This international collection of scholarly essays attempts to rectify this assessment by claiming that she was a significant philosopher in her own right and that she influenced and contributed to many of Sartre's works. Editors Daigle (Brock Univ.) and Golomb (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) bring together 14 essays that exalt Beauvoir to a higher philosophic plane, even though she consistently said that Sartre was the philosopher, and that she was merely a writer. Contributors disagree with her self-effacing remarks. (Unbelievably, one writer even refers to her as a giant of 20th-century philosophy.) This reviewer sees the existentialist The Ethics of Ambiguity as derivative of Sartre's work. The Second Sex is Beauvoir's original feminist essay, and her voluminous autobiographies suggest, perhaps, vanity. Altogether, this feminist-inspired book assumes a very advanced knowledge of Sartre and Beauvoir. Readers should see Hazel Rowley's Tête-a-Tête (2005) for a very enjoyable account of their personal relationships. Summing Up: Recommended. Women's studies collections supporting graduate students and faculty/researchers. —Choice
This collection of essays is a remarkable achievement. It allows readers access to the exciting domain of existential philosophy, fiction, autobiography, and more.