by Nancy Bauer
9. It’s not, again, that the infant is presumed by Beauvoir to harbor some sort of preexisting image of himself; it’s that he reacts to the abandonment (of, e.g., weaning) by looking for himself in the other’s reflection. This reaction to what in Hegelian terms we might call a crisis of self-certainty is itself, I think, essentially Hegelian. The difference between Beauvoir and Hegel, I am claiming, is that Beauvoir regards the infant as directly desiring self-petrifaction—thinghood—while Hegel suggests that the (formerly) subjectively self-certain being wishes to find in the other’s eyes an image of himself as essentially “for-itself,” so that the desire for self-petrifaction is, at best, deeply hidden.
10. I’m putting the word other in quotation marks here to flag the fact that my use of this concept here is not precisely that of any of the authors I’m discussing in this context.
11. Answering the question of why this is demanded of little boys and not little girls will require our coming to see how Beauvoir explains our investment in a certain picture of what it is to be a grown-up little boy, that is, a man. Certain feminists, prominently Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein, have famously argued, in their appropriations of the “object-relations” school of psychoanalysis, that the demand that boys become independent is to be explained in large part by the fact that they are raised in a sexist culture by women, from whom the culture forces them to distinguish themselves. One of the minor motivations of the present section of this chapter is to distinguish this approach from that of Beauvoir.
12. Parshley translates “il peut au moins partiellement s’y aliéner” as “he can at least partially identify himself with it.” Throughout this crucial section of Beauvoir’s text, Parshley tends to translate the French word for “alienation” as “projection” or “identification.” This is an instance of the kind of translation that makes Beauvoir’s use of terms such as “alienation” seem cribbed and arbitrary to many English readers.
13. I don’t think we need take as a sign of an incorrigible racism on Beauvoir’s part her failure to note that some black people are women, or that some women are black. Her obtuseness here is compatible with the idea that black women’s lives are perhaps torn in different ways from those of white women. (This is in fact the thesis of Angela Harris’s critique in “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory” of the way white women have conceptualized black women—namely, as merely doubly oppressed, rather than as differently oppressed.) For evidence that Beauvoir was ordinarily far more sensitive to the insidiousness and complexities of racism, see her numerous discussions of the situation of American blacks in America Day by Day.
14. See, again, both Evans and Leighton for versions of this charge.
15. Poulain de la Barre wrote two astonishingly progressive books advocating women’s liberation from sexual oppression, De lÉgalité des deux Sexes (1673) and De léducation des Dames pour la Conduite de l’Esprit dans les Sciences et dans les Mœurs (1674). Beauvoir’s quotation comes from the former and is quoted on p. xxvii of The Second Sex.
16. I should note, however, that in 1943, during the German occupation of France, Beauvoir was “expelled” from her job after the mother of one of her students, Nathalie Sorokine, accused her of “corrupting a minor.” In her autobiography Beauvoir writes, “My name was restored after the Liberation; but I never went back to teaching” (Prime of Life 428).
17. For a discussion of Beauvoir’s achievements as an “intellectual woman,” see Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, especially part 1.
18. See Bergoffen, “Out From Under: Beauvoir’s Philosophy of the Erotic,” material that is developed in her book The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. See also my brief discussion of Bergoffen in chapter 5.
19. Again, this is certainly true of forms of nonheterosexual erotic love, although given Beauvoir’s preoccupations in The Second Sex she is concerned to focus on the perils and promises of relationships between women and men. For the record, book 2 of The Second Sex contains a chapter on lesbian experience.
20. Many feminists have suggested, for instance, that fathers ought to take a more active part in the rearing of their children. As I mentioned above, Nancy Chodorow comes to this conclusion through an “object-relations” analysis of children’s relationships to their mothers; see her book The Reproduction of Mothering. Another familiar feminist line of argument is that women’s special “ways of knowing” ought to be acknowledged, explored, and culturally validated; see, e.g., Mary Field Belenky et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing. In the last decade or so, the idea that gender is “socially constructed,” an idea that of course takes its bearings, however loosely, from The Second Sex, has produced a spate of books and articles suggesting that individual acts of defiance or “performances” against sex and/or gender norms can disrupt these norms more easily than if they were biologically determined; by far the most influential of these writings is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (although Butler in her later book Bodies That Matter claims that this [common] reading of Gender Trouble oversimplifies things).
21. I don’t deny, and neither does Beauvoir, that social conditions can be so horrific that one doesn’t have the luxury to undertake this encounter with the self. Indeed, as I have been stressing throughout this book, one of the most dramatic differences between Beauvoir’s understanding of human freedom and Sartre’s is that only Beauvoir takes oppression seriously. By speaking of one’s most “fundamental” nemesis, I mean to suggest that even when one enjoys the most marked genuine political freedom, the struggle with self that I take Beauvoir to be detailing in The Second Sex remains.
22. Interestingly, Sartre in 1948, when Beauvoir was writing The Second Sex, explicitly endorsed the idea of authorship as an invitation to the reader’s act of judgment. See his What Is Literature?, especially the middle two chapters. (I thank Toril Moi for pressing me to acknowledge this fact at this juncture.) The irony is that Sartre’s depiction of the author-reader relationship finds no correlate in his ontology in Being and Nothingness; indeed, as I have argued, there is no room for such a relationship in that book’s understanding of things.
23. The idea of “conversation” as an emblem of what is possible in relationships between human beings is another hallmark of the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, who is particularly interested in the forms that conversation takes (or does not) between men and women, especially as epitomized in two genres of film he calls the Hollywood comedy of remarriage and the melodrama of the unknown woman. (See, respectively, his Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears). In Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome Cavell identifies the mode of conversation he is interested in as a central feature of a way of understanding the ethical life, alternative to the standard choices of utilitarianism and deontology, an alternative he calls “moral perfectionism.” The conversation that distinguishes perfectionism is evident in places as diverse as the discussion among friends that comprises Plato’s Republic, Kant’s vision of a Kingdom of Ends in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and the exchange between “interlocutors” in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. My instinct is that The Second Sex, which I’m claiming is to be read as an appeal for conversation in the Cavellian sense, belongs in this company; this is a claim I hope to flesh out and support in more depth in forthcoming work.
24. In this context I recall Cavell’s memorable observation that “among friends the taking of pleasure is an offer of pleasure, and the showing of pleasure at pleasure offered is the giving of pleasure” (Contesting Tears 10).
25. At the very end of The Second Sex, Beauvoir suggests that social revolution is one—but only one—of the prerequisites for the improvement of women’s—and men’s—situations: “We must not believe, certainly, that a change in woman’s economic condition alone is enough to transform her. This factor has been and remains primordial in her evolution. But until it has brought about the moral, social, cultural, and other consequences that it promises and requires, the new woman cannot appear” (TSS 725, TM
; LDS 2:655).
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