by Nancy Bauer
1. The quotation, my translation, is from p. 14 of volume 1 of Le Deuxième Sexe, hereafter abbreviated as LDS 1 or 2. This passage is found on p. xxi of the English translation, hereafter abbreviated as TSS. Where I have modified a translation, I will indicate so by using the abbreviation “TM.”
Perhaps the sole point of criticism on which all serious readers of the English version of The Second Sex agree is that this translation, the only one published to date, is shockingly inadequate. The rights to the translation were bought by the publishing magnate Alfred A. Knopf after his wife, Blanche, who was visiting Paris at the time Le Deuxième Sexe was published in France, told him (without reading the book) that from the stir it was creating she thought it would become the next big scandalous best-seller, on the order of the Kinsey report. Knopf enlisted the translation services of Howard Parshley, a retired professor of human biology, who upon reading the book tried, and failed, to convince Knopf that although it contained some racy passages it had unignorable philosophical pretensions. It was most likely his desire to help the general-interest reader understand “the philosophy” of The Second Sex that moved Parshley to fill the book with annotations—always indistinguishable from Beauvoir’s original prose—that sometimes seriously distort her words. For a version of the story of the translation of The Second Sex, see Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, chapter 31. Margaret Simons chronicles the problems with the English translation—including the fact that Parshley cuts, without indication, more than 10 percent of the original text and that he also regularly mistranslates key philosophical terms (e.g., pour-soi is routinely rendered as “in-itself” rather than “for-itself”)—in her groundbreaking article “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir.” See also Moi, “(Mis)reading The Second Sex,” and Okely, Simone de Beauvoir, p. 54, for further specifications of problems with Parshley’s translation.
2. I am claiming here that reading The Second Sex against Rousseau’s Second Discourse would be philosophically productive, but I don’t pursue this comparison in the present book.
3. The Claim of Reason, p. 94. Cavell develops this concept throughout his work, notably in “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses” and “Being Odd, Getting Even.”
4. These include the essays collected in Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret Simons, as well as Debra Bergoffen’s Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, Sonia Kruks’s Situation and Human Existence, Michèle Le Doeuff’s Hipparchia’s Choice, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin’s Sex and Existence, Simons’s Beauvoir and The Second Sex, Karen Vintges’s Philosophy as Passion, and the essays of Sara Heinämaa. See also Toril Moi’s What Is a Woman?, which, although not written by a professor of philosophy, finds its philosophical bearings in many of the same sources in which I find mine.
5. This is perhaps why most revisionist considerations of Beauvoir as a philosopher tend to see The Second Sex as unproblematically continuous with her earlier philosophical writing. A notable exception here is Le Doeuff; see, e.g., “Simone de Beauvoir: Falling into Ambiguous Line.” I discuss Le Doeuff’s thought-provoking work on Beauvoir briefly in the last part of this introduction. In chapter 5, I sketch her argument for the idea that there is a disjunction between Beauvoir’s earlier philosophical essays and The Second Sex.
6. Her starting with a declaration of our lack of knowledge of ourselves invites comparison with the opening passages of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. But if Beauvoir is inheriting something from these thinkers, then it is of course a question how the sex-based inflection of her remarks is to be taken. I take up this question specifically with respect to Beauvoir’s inheritance of Descartes’s Meditations, in chapter 2, and of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in chapters 3 through 7.
7. Although the English translation of The Second Sex obscures this fact, Beauvoir’s phrase querelle du féminisme obviously puns on the phrase querelle des femmes, the condescending rubric for the famous European debates of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, often in the form of heated salon conversations involving both women and men, on “the woman question.” These debates are generally considered to have been constrained in scope and seriousness, although they produced a number of extremely interesting writings by women, such as Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. I take Beauvoir’s allusion here to be a suggestion that contemporary debates about feminism are no less constrained and no more serious than those earlier conversations that contemporary interlocutors tend to dismiss and ridicule.
8. I am indebted here to Cora Diamond, whose Whitehead lectures at Harvard in the late spring of 1993 helped me to put this point in this way.
9. See, e.g., chapter 1 of Bergoffen’s Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.
10. My use of the concepts of “sex difference” and “gender identity” in this sentence indirectly raises a question about what the difference between these two terms is supposed to come to. This is a question that I do not address head-on in this book, although I do explore at length, especially in chapter 7, Beauvoir’s understanding of the relationship between cultural and biological forces on the making of little boys and girls into men and women. For the most part, throughout the book I tend to avoid the term “gender,” except when so doing would be confusing or awkward (as in the unidiomatic phrase “sex identity”). I do this first and foremost because Beauvoir, as a francophone, had no such word in her vocabulary. Second, I am reluctant to employ a word that tends to conjure up certain fixed and, from the point of view of a reading of Beauvoir, anachronistic pictures about the nature of sex difference (e.g., the familiar picture on which “sex” is biological and “gender” is social or the postmodernist picture, most memorably articulated by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, on which biological sex is no less fully “constructed” than social “gender”). In the first essay of her book What Is a Woman? Toril Moi asks searching questions about the usefulness of the so-called sex/gender distinction as a rhetorical and theoretical device in contemporary anglophone feminism. The split so often identified between sex and gender is ordinarily regarded by feminists as a direct legacy of The Second Sex, emblematized by the aphorism that opens part 2: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Moi argues compellingly that this misreading of Beauvoir goes a long way toward obscuring what is of most value in her work.
11. I am grateful to Toril Moi for pointing out to me, in an extremely helpful set of comments on a very early version of this material, the necessity of specifying what I mean by “condescension.” An overly broad conception of this term could have the undesirable effect of branding as unreasonable certain valuable modes of approach to Beauvoir’s writing, and specifically, as Moi observed, approaches grounding themselves in the terms of psychoanalysis.
12. See fn. 1 of this introduction for more on the problems with the English translation of the book.
13. “The Subjection of Women,” 49.
14. According to Beauvoir in her memoirs, “It was begun in October 1946 and finished in June 1949; but I spent four months of 1947 in America, and America Day by Day kept me busy for six months” (Force of Circumstance 186, n. 1). As Bair observes (380), this means that Beauvoir spent only about fourteen months writing The Second Sex.
15. Moi’s focus is broader than mine; her stated purpose is to document and explore what she sees as “the unusual number of condescending, sarcastic, sardonic or dismissive accounts” of Beauvoir (22), while I am interested in the gestures of condescension in particular. Moi notes that other writers (on p. 22 she mentions Elaine Marks and Anne Whitmarsh) have also written about the “hostile trend in the reception of Beauvoir’s work,” but her own discussion of this trend—as well as her command of both the critical literature and Beauvoir’s oeuvre as a whole—is by far the most thorough I know.
16. Consider the following passage, quoted in chapter 3 of Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir, from René Girard’s review of the volume of Beauvoir’s biography entitled La Force de l’Age
:
Being a particularly brilliant subject, Mme de Beauvoir could not stand the thought of forsaking the mention très bien, and she simply refused to be reconverted to home life, thus manifesting for the first time that spirit of rebellion which made her famous and which is still alive in her. However much we admire this valorous feat, we must not exaggerate the scope of the revolution. [… ] Mme de Beauvoir is the voice of all the other feminine first prize winners” (in Marks, ed., Critical Essays, p. 85; quoted in Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir, p. 90 [ellipsis Moi’s]).
17. Je, Tu, Nous, p. 9.
18. Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man, p. 2. What Beauvoir actually says in the introduction to The Second Sex is that her perspective is one of “existentialist ethics” (TSS xxxiv; my emphasis). In chapter 5, I interpret this announcement very differently from the way Nye does. Nye provides an explicit example of what she takes to be Beauvoir’s mindless devotion to Sartre in her discussion of some (“clearly deficient”) remarks Beauvoir makes in The Second Sex about Goddess worship: “It is her existentialist presuppositions that forced Beauvoir to this unreflecting rejection of the different values inherent in early agricultural societies. Because these values do not correspond to existentialist self-assertion, Beauvoir had no other recourse but to relegate them to the passive, the imminent, the animal, the not-human” (Feminist Theory 111, n. 23). See also Nye’s essay “Preparing the Way for a Feminist Praxis,” in which she argues that Beauvoir’s allegiance to Sartre’s philosophy prevented her from developing a robust notion of oppression. In chapters 5 through 7, I provide what I take to be overwhelming evidence against this view.
19. Indeed, the easiest way to put some initial conceptual if not overtly philosophical distance between Sartre and Beauvoir is to recall his association in Being and Nothingness of immanence in all its horror with the holes and slime he explicitly associates with the feminine. One might also wish to pay attention to the fact that perhaps his most memorable example of what he famously calls “bad faith” is that of a woman who goes out with a man and then pretends she doesn’t know that his wining and dining her is to compensate her in advance for the sexual favors she then, according to the conventional understanding of what a “date” is, owes him. Sartre’s most extended discussion of immanence and its relation to holes and slime and women occurs in part 4 of Being and Nothingness, in section 3 of chapter 2, “Quality as a Revelation of Being.” At one point, he writes, “Slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sickly-sweet, feminine revenge.” (777). Shortly thereafter, we find: “The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which ‘gapes open.’ It is an appeal to being as all holes are. In herself woman appeals to a strange flesh which is to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution” (782). For the “date” example of bad faith, see pp. 96–97.
20. See, particularly, Hipparchia’s Choice, which grows out of earlier essays, such as “Operative Philosophy: Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism,” bits and pieces of which are woven into strikingly new cloth in the book’s “Second Notebook.” It is very important for me to acknowledge here that this book, a brilliant and, to my mind, highly underappreciated meditation on women and philosophy, more than half of which takes Beauvoir and The Second Sex as its subject, constitutes the best discussion (or perhaps I should call it a demonstration) I know of the difficulty of committing oneself simultaneously to the demands of feminism and those of philosophy. Le Doeuff’s achievements are all the more impressive given the almost total dismissal of Beauvoir by the most influential French feminist philosophers over the last thirty years; I find her heroism and originality under the circumstances almost unbelievable.
Unlike virtually every other French reader of Beauvoir, Le Doeuff aligns the significance of The Second Sex with Beauvoir’s philosophical aspirations and achievements. I am of course in absolute agreement with her on this point. But in her envisioning these achievements as measurable mainly over and against those of Jean-Paul Sartre—a vision astonishing enough, given the cold reception of Beauvoir by her French daughters and granddaughters and her dismissal as Sartre’s handmaiden by virtually anyone who cares to comment on the two—Le Doeuff turns out to have in important respects a different emphasis from mine. The relative lack of explicit reference to Le Doeuff’s work in the present pages belies the enormity of her influence on my own thinking about feminism and philosophy. From the beginning, I have conceived of the present book as something of a response to Hipparchia’s Choice and other of Le Doeuff’s writings, notably her wonderful essay “Women and Philosophy” (cited in n. 22, this chapter).
21. “Operative Philosophy,” p. 149.
22. The oblique relationship of women to philosophy, a relationship both enabled and encumbered by desire, is perhaps the great theme of Le Doeuff’s work. The most concise expressions of her views on this subject are in the brilliant “Women and Philosophy.”
23. The paper from which these two quotations are taken was later incorporated into chapter 6 of Moi’s book Simone de Beauvoir. The first quotation is dramatically transformed in the book and reads as follows: “There is in Beauvoir’s theory a productive tension between her initial, highly reified concept of alienation, and the more mobile and fluid outcome of the process in the case of little girls. The result is that her theory of female subjectivity is far more interesting and original than her rather too neat and tidy account of male psychological structures” (160). The second is replaced by the following: “There are strong biographical reasons for Beauvoir’s misguided admiration of the male (unconscious idealization of the father, admiration for Sartre, and so on), yet the main rhetorical source of Beauvoir’s touching confidence in the penis would seem to be metaphorical.” (162).
24. I do not mean to deny either that “biographical reasons” are sometimes, even often, at the foundation of Beauvoir’s views or that the unconscious plays a role—even a very large role—in her work. In The Philosophical Imaginary Michèle Le Doeuff convincingly shows how various wishes, desires, and fears often surface in the most rigorous of philosophical texts, in the forms of images, examples, tone, etc.; I see no reason to suspect (a) that Beauvoir inhumanly fails to have such wishes and desires or (b) that her unconscious fails to manifest itself in her work. What I am attempting to draw attention to, rather, is the rapidity with which Beauvoir’s critics tend to jump to the conclusion that she is out of control of what she is saying. I am also suggesting that this feature of the reception of The Second Sex has to do with the idiosyncratic way, to be explored in this book, in which Beauvoir pioneers the writing of philosophy as a woman.
1. IS FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS? FIRST PHILOSOPHY, THE SECOND SEX, AND THE THIRD WAVE
1. My use of the word “us” here—and “you” later in this chapter—is meant to signal not that I’m taking a certain audience for granted but that one of my aspirations in this book is precisely to find my audience.
2. The word “honorable” is meant to exclude those who tolerate the feminist intervention in philosophy merely because they lack the power to do anything about it and would scarce risk appearing “politically incorrect” by challenging it publicly.
3. I do not mean to imply that no prefeminist philosophical writings have explored this possibility. Any number of philosophers have implied or argued that women’s bodily constitution prevents them from thinking rigorously; and others—perhaps most famously John Stuart Mill, in his remarkable Subjection of Women—have denounced this view. Further, phenomenologists from Hegel to, notably, Merleau-Ponty (in what I would argue in another context is his spectacularly underappropriated work in, especially, The Phenomenology of Perception) have at least tacitly and sometimes explicitly worried about the body as, at least, the interface between mind and world. And of course scores of philosophers, even analytic ones, have had their say about the nature of sex and love. What hasn’t been taken seriously—until feminism—is the idea that certain facts about one’s body migh
t have a decisive bearing not only on the state of one’s mind but indeed on what should count as philosophical truth.
4. Robert Pippin, in Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, examines this growing sense and argues (convincingly, I think) that “postmodernism” represents less a revolt against modernism than a furtherance of it.
5. Various inflections of the idea that Beauvoir contradicts herself are to be found in the work of, for example, Kristana Arp, Toril Moi, and Michèle Le Doeuff (all of whom argue that the contradictions they see in The Second Sex are often surprisingly rich and productive), as well as Penelope Deutscher and Mary Evans (who disagree).
6. I am all in favor of political manifestos. My point is that they are surely more effective when they are written for and directed at the public and not at a smallish audience of professional philosophers.
7. As will become clear later in this chapter, I believe that the sort of subliming I’m gesturing at occurs even in the most intractably antimetaphysical conceptions of philosophy; to argue philosophically against “metaphysics” ordinarily constitutes the doing of metaphysics. Cressida Heyes, in Line Drawings, also gets her bearings in her discussion of many of the issues raised in this chapter (particularly in the concluding discussion of the feminist debate between essentialism and antiessentialism) from Wittgenstein, although her approach and conclusions are importantly different from mine.
8. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Influential books in feminist ethics in recent years—not all of which exemplify at every turn the approach I’m worrying about in this section of the chapter—include Rosemary Tong’s Feminine and Feminist Ethics, Laurie Shrage’s Moral Dilemmas of Feminism, Bat-Ami Bar On’s and Ann Ferguson’s edited collection Daring to Be Good, Patrice DiQuinzio’s and Iris Marion Young’s edited collection Feminist Ethics and Social Policy, and Virginia Held’s edited collection Justice and Care.