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Save Pdf (0.34 186 Hypatia -. 1979. Deux chapitres inedits de “L‘invit6e.” (Two unpublished chapters of She Came to Stay). In Les Ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier. Paris: Gallimard. -. 1982. When things of the spirit come first. Trans. Patrick O’Brian. New York: Pantheon. -. 1990. She came to stay. Trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse. New York: Norton. Fullbrook, Kate, and Edward Fullbrook. 1994. Simone de Beauvoir andlean-Paul Sartre: The remaking of a twentieth-century legend. New York: Basic Books. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library. Simons, Margaret A. 1998. Beauvoir and “The second sex”: Feminism, race, and the origins of existentialism. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman &. Littlefield. Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader. Edited by ELIZABETH FALLAIZE. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Kris tana Arp As this special volume attests, there has been a recent resurgence of inter- est in Simone de Beauvoir. A number of books on her have been published in the last several years. However, Elizabeth Fallaize’s book, Simone de Beau- uoir: A Critical Reader (1998), occupies a special niche. Many of its essays are excerpts from studies done of Beauvoir’s work before this latest renaissance. Some of these studies are not in print in the United States. Some are perhaps unfamiliar to present-day readers or those from different disciplines. In addi- tion, the articles reprinted here are otherwise not easily accessible. Fallaize has performed an important service by gathering them all in one place and by carefully editing, presenting, and, in some cases, translating them. The book is divided into three sections, the first entitled “Readings of The Second Sex.” Aside from Judith Okely’s piece that assesses Beauvoir’s chapter on myths from an anthropological standpoint, the essays mainly address the philosophical aspects of this work. Beauvoir herself of course swore that she was not a philosopher and that Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1953) was the sole philosophical foundation for all her work. Some recent analyses have attempted to turn this picture on its head by arguing that Beauvoir was a central influence on, or even the origin of, the philosophical doctrines put for- ward in Being and Nothingness. None of the writers in this book addresses this issue. But two emphasize Beauvoir’s intellectual independence from Sartre. The Swedish scholar Eva Lundgren-Gothlin argues that Beauvoir turned to G. W. F. Hegel to find a satisfactory theoretical model with which to explain the subjugation of women (Lundgren-Gothlin’s essay is taken from her book Book Reviews 187 Sex and Existence [1996] ). In opposition to other scholars, she argues that the French Hegelian Alexandre Kojsve, not Sartre, influenced Beauvoir’s in- terpretation of Hegel. Following Hegel and Kojsve, Beauvoir envisioned a possible resolution to the struggle for recognition-reciprocal recognition- whereas Sartre’s view of self-other relations in Being and Nothingness rules such reciprocity out. However, Lundgren-Gothlin judges, Beauvoir was not critical enough of the sexist presuppositions of Hegel’s thought, citing the same pro- nouncements Beauvoir makes that subsequent feminists have criticized. Another piece that stresses Beauvoir’s philosophical originality is “Beau- voir: The Weight of Situation,” taken from Sonia Kruks’s book Situation and Human Existence (1990). For some time, Kruks has been doing excellent work placing Beauvoir within the wider phenomenological tradition. In this piece, she argues that, starting with the early essay Pyrrhus et Cine‘as ( 1944) and cul- minating in The Second Sex (1989), Beauvoir elaborated a more nuanced po- sition on the nature and extent of human freedom than Sartre did in Being and Nothingness. According to Beauvoir, human freedom, which Sartre dra- matically proclaims is absolute, can under some conditions, notably condi- tions of severe oppression, “be reduced to no more than a suppressed potenti- ality” (Fallaize 1998,57). In The Second Sex, Beauvoir definitively breaks with the philosophical framework of Being and Nothingness by implying that a wom- an’s situation is a general one, not individually self-constituted, and one that she cannot transcend by an act of free choice. The phenomenology of Mau- rice Merleau-Ponty provides a better foundation for Beauvoir’s conception of subjectivity as socially mediated and embodied than does Sartre’s philosophy, Kruks suggests. Another piece in this section, Judith Butler’s landmark essay “Sex and Gen- der in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex” (1986), highlights Beauvoir’s philo- sophical originality in a different way. In her introduction, Fallaize points out how this essay served as a foundation for Butler’s own subsequent work on a performative theory of gender. Butler argues that Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but becomes a woman implies that gender is socially constructed and not natural, as people have insisted for centuries. But to the extent that we become women, gender is not something imposed solely from the outside. We must also construct ourselves as women, which leaves open the possibility that we could construct ourselves as something else. The “emancipatory potential” (Fallaize 1998,35) for women (and men) that this possibility contains should be embraced and acted on, Butler implies. Of course, the heavily voluntaristic reading that Butler gives of Beauvoir’s account of gender formation clashes with Kruks’s reading of Beauvoir’s treatment of oppression. Butler says that Beauvoir “gives Sartrean choice an embodied form” (Fallaize 1998,41), where- as Kruks holds that Beauvoir had jettisoned the Sartrean notion of choice by this point. Like Lundgren-Gothlin, Butler sees Hegel’s masterlslave dialectic as central to Beauvoir’s account of the roots of women’s oppression, but her 188 Hypatia description of this dialectic is unrecognizable or at least at odds with Lundgren- Gothlin’s description. That tensions between different interpretations should arise in an anthology like this is inevitable, though, and even fruitful for discussion. The remaining essay in this section is an excerpt from Tori1 Moi’s book Simone de Beauuoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman ( 1990). Moi focuses more narrowly on Beauvoir’s role as a theorist of female emancipation. Read- ing Beauvoir in conjunction with Franz Fanon, Moi criticizes Beauvoir for not recognizing “the strategic value of a politics of difference” (Fallaize 1998, 88)’ as well as for offering a confused account of female sexuality, specifically les- bian sexuality. Actually this excerpt from Moi serves as a bridge to the next section of the book, “Readings of the Autobiography,” in that she views Beau- voir’s theoretical shortcomings through the prism of what we now know of Beauvoir’s personal life. It was Beauvoir’s refusal to come to terms, publicly or privately, with her own lesbian experiences that rendered her unable to ad- dress the subject coherently, Moi speculates. Also Beauvoir’s position as an independent woman did not let her see “femininity as a potentially positive force for change” (Fallaize 1998, 87). The three readings included in the next section on the autobiographical writings were written within the time span of 1966 to 1994. That they all adopt a psychoanalytic point of view is not surprising, given how well-entrenched psychoanalysis has become in twentieth century intellectual discourse. The differences in approach among them testify as to how much the psychoana- lytic point of view itself has changed, however. Francis Jeanson’s excerpt from 1966 analyzes Beauvoir’s relation to her father in classical Freudian terms. Written twenty years later, Elaine Marks’s piece, on the other hand, focuses on certain sexual associations embedded in the language of the autobiographi- cal accounts, betraying the influence of poststructuralism. Alex Hughes’s ar- ticle from 1994, “Murdering the Mother in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,” is even more up-to-date in that it incorporates the perspectives of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Nor would Beauvoir object, I think, to commentators choosing to take this approach to her autobiographical writing. She and Sartre were far from hostile to psychoanalysis. But by attempting to write honestly about some of her most intimate experiences, Beauvoir opened herself up to being endlessly analyzed and sometimes judged harshly. In her early commentary on Beauvoir’s account of her mother’s death included here, for instance, Elaine Marks portrays her as a cold, selfish, globe-trotting careerist fixated on Sartre to the exclusion of everyone else. But in an imaginative bit of editing, Fallaize has paired this con- demnatory piece with an extract from a later article by Marks that views Beau- voir’s descriptions of her mother’s and Sartre’s death in a positive light as transgressions of the literary boundaries of phallocentric discourse. Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre and Nelson Algren were published in the 1990s, Book Reviews 189 after most of these pieces were written. They present a picture of her life some- what at odds with the official version put forward in her memoirs and inter- views. But I do not think that these documents, or any other documents wait- ing to be discovered, allow us to glimpse the true Beauvoir that she hid from public view. Rather, we now have many Beauvoirs. Indeed, someone attempt- ing to write today about her life must wander through a veritable hall of mir- rors. In her second later piece in this volume, Marks adopts the convention of putting the names of the people Beauvoir wrote about in single quotation marks (for example, ‘Sartre,’ ‘Franqoise de Beauvoir’) to show that she is talk- ing about the figures appearing in the texts, not the actual people. Beauvoir’s name itself is not treated in this way, but perhaps it should be.
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