Jennifer Hansen
Gettysburg College

Day One

After the "Legacies of Simone de Beauvoir" conference at Penn State (November 19-21, 1999), I found myself feeling that I had attended a workshop or working seminar on feminist theory, rather than a conference of experts on a single scholar. Further, each panel or plenary speaker opened up discussions that one could hear echoing throughout the hallways of the Nittany Lion Inn, discussions that opened up new interpretations and insights into de Beauvoir’s work outside of what had already been prepared for presentation.

The conference included several noted invited speakers, and discussion panels made up of philosophers, literary theorists, political scientists, and French and Women’s Studies professors. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference added depth to the discussions concerning the role of de Beauvoir’s work for contemporary feminist practice, theory, and philosophical investigation. I offer here descriptions of only some of the highlights and strands of conversations that were on-going throughout the conference.

The first speaker Toril Moi, from Duke University, gave a rigorous presentation of the translation and publishing problems of The Second Sex in order to motivate de Beauvoir scholars and academic presses to pay more scholarly respect to de Beauvoir’s work by giving us both faithful French and English editions. There seem to be three principal problems with the various French editions and the single available English translation of the Le deuxième sexe. First, many French editions of Le deuxième sexe leave out significant sections of the original text. For example, in the 1979 Folio edition, 2/3 of the biology chapter is missing and all of the Ides editions leave out the literature section in Volume I. Further, French publishers have misprinted passages. Consider the variations of this passage between the Folio and Blanche editions:

(1) Folio: "elle se découvre et se choisit dans un monde ou les hommes lui imposent de s’assumer contre l’Autre" (31).

(2) Blanche: "elle se découvre et se choisit dans un monde ou les hommes lui imposent de s’assumer comme l’Autre" (31).

Moi points out that the Blanche edition is obviously correct to use "comme." Otherwise, the translation of the sentence would read (roughly) as "she finds and chooses herself in a world where men compel her to take up against the Other." Such an assertion would be at odds with de Beauvoir’s critically important assertion that "woman" is the Other.

The French publishers also mistranslate a quotation from the section in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, substituting ‘rotique’ for ‘thique’. Furthermore, Parshley, the English translator, completely leaves out this same quotation from Hegel’s Phenomenology. Such an omission demonstrates the second major problem that Moi pointed out concerning the unscholarly treatment of de Beauvoir’s text, namely, that Parshley did not treat Le deuxième sexe as a philosophical text. Failing to see the philosophical nature of her work, Parshley renders sentences in ways that undercut the real objective of Le deuxième sexe: to demonstrate the ways in which "woman" is not born, but made. As just one example, consider this mistranslation:

(1) "…leur attitude ontologique…" (Folio Edition 1986, 76)

(2) "…their essential nature…" (Vintage Edition 1989, 7)

Furthermore, when de Beauvoir speaks of ‘réalité humaine’ (which is Jean-Paul Sartre’s translation of Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’), Parshley translates this as ‘the real nature of man,’ an oxymoron for an Existentialist. In brief, choosing a zoologist to translate Le deuxième sexe was a poor choice by the English publishers; Parshley clearly did not understand the philosophical content of de Beauvoir’s ideas, and therefore grossly misrepresented many of them.

The third major criticism that Moi leveled against the mishandling publishers of de Beauvoir’s text is that the mistranslations and misprints have led many readers of de Beauvoir, including sophisticated feminist theorists, to misread her. Moi reproduced passages from Penelope Deutscher, Drucilla Cornell, Tina Chanter, and Moira Gatens in which these thinkers erroneously characterize de Beauvoir’s project. For example, Moi claimed that Deutscher characterizes de Beauvoir as seeing the body as a limitation. She shows that Deutscher’s mischaracterization comes from a poor translation of a passage in the text. In essence, Moi argued that not only are the presses doing a disservice to de Beauvoir, but feminist scholars fall short in their scholarship when they rely on a poor translation. Moi contented is that this kind of reliance on a single, unacceptable translation would not occur with any other figure in Western philosophy.

After Moi’s talk, Peg Simons spoke about a 1927 handwritten diary that she discovered among a pile of de Beauvoir’s memorabilia. De Beauvoir wrote the diary when she was a 19-year-old student at the Sorbonne, two years before she met Sartre. Part of Simons’ interest in this diary is to trace de Beauvoir’s intellectual development, as well as to clearly demarcate de Beauvoir’s thought from Sartre’s. Simons seems invested in repairing de Beauvoir’s reputation of merely parroting Sartre’s philosophical insights. In fact, Simons went so far to suggest that perhaps de Beauvoir had a more profound influence on Sartre’s ideas than vice versa.

The major philosophical themes that Simons culled from de Beauvoir’s diary are (1) the rejection of philosophical universalism, (2) the embrace of narrative and literature in order to answer Humean skepticism concerning self-identity, (3) a morality without foundations (the first sketches of Ethics of Ambiguity), (4) the problem of the relation between the self and the Other (a view erroneously attributed to Sartre), (5) the temptation to amalgamate oneself with another (first sketches of the chapter "The Woman in Love" from The Second Sex), (6) the importance of human relationships in order to disclose the world, and (7) the difficulty in reconciling love and freedom. Moreover, Simons suggested that de Beauvoir may have directly influenced Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the "lived body."

In her first autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, de Beavoir claimed that Sartre was the philosopher and she was the writer. However, Simons showed how de Beauvoir, in her diary, develops a different kind of philosophical methodology that relies on narrative and literature to probe ethics. Simons argued that de Beauvoir wrote this diary, in the spirit of Pascal, in order to provide a justification for life. Simons also argued that writing her diary was a way for de Beauvoir to unify the seemingly fragmented parts of her self; the diary allows for a recollection and unification of the self. However, the diary is not merely a recounting of a life; it is also a creation of self. The self is made, according to de Beauvoir, in the act of writing one’s autobiography; one gives birth to oneself in narrative. Narrative also becomes a way of achieving authenticity: by writing our life stories, we must confront the various ways in which we deceive ourselves and evade our freedom to become who we are.

Simons’ talk was, in a sense, an answer to Moi’s challenge to be more scholarly in the treatment of de Beauvoir’s work, since she traced de Beauvoir’s philosophical development through closely studying her diary in the manner in which many historians of philosophy do archival work to support claims about how to interpret various key figures of the canon. However, many participants in the conference, such as Moi and Hazel Barnes, were reluctant to accept Simons suggestion that de Beauvoir might have influenced Sartre more than he influenced her, and that de Beauvoir’s ideas pre-existed her rapport with Sartre. Barnes and Moi argued that it would be wrongheaded to assume that Sartre and de Beauvoir did not significantly shape each others ideas, and furthermore, because both were students at the Sorbonne, taking similar courses, their early ideas were bound to be similarly shaped by their Sorbonne professors.

The Moi and Simons talks foregrounded two themes that were continually invoked in others sessions: the misreading of de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, and de Beauvoir’s philosophical independence from Sartre.

After the morning sessions, two concurrent panels covered a variety of issues inspired by de Beauvoir’s work. I attended a session with three presenters from three different disciplines. Ann Cothran, from French at Wittenberg University, discussed de Beauvoir’s phenomenological analyses of the lesbian in light of Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work in Gender Trouble. Cothran argued that de Beauvoir’s work on the lesbian was crucial to laying the groundwork for contemporary queer theory. For example, Cothran claimed: "In the lesbian chapter especially, de Beauvoir comes close to implying that sex is constructed as well, thereby anticipating Butler’s idea that ‘sex will be shown to have been gender all along’." Carren Irr, from the English Department at Brandeis University, argued that The Second Sex serves as an important foundation for feminist criticisms of political economy. Particularly, de Beauvoir’s work highlights the way in which socialism will not liberate women from the position of the Other, because women’s situation is a product of economic oppression as well as ideological oppressions that lead to a shaping of female psychology. Irr then analyzed various feminists criticizing political economy to judge de Beauvoir’s legacy. Finally, Sarah Miller, from the Philosophy Department at SUNY, Stony Brook, presented an analysis of how de Beauvoir’s later work and fiction challenged the invisibility of aging women in culture. Miller argued that by valorizing finitude and embodied existence, de Beauvoir’s work undoes the binary of infinite/finite which influences our cultural preference for eternal youth over aging and bodily transformation.

Hazel Barnes, translator of Sartre and friend of Sartre and de Beauvoir, gave the final talk of the first day. Barnes suggested that she would give an account of her own life and the historical limits and attitudes that shaped her as a philosopher as a means to perhaps get insight into how de Beauvoir would consider recent trends and debates in feminist theory. Barnes explained that in many ways she and de Beauvoir were shaped by similar cultural forces, and so one might reasonably extrapolate from Barnes’ views to understand de Beauvoir’s.

One of the most interesting claims that Barnes made was that neither she nor de Beauvoir would have accepted any kind of essentialist claims about the female sex, for neither would accept that anything human is ever purely genetic. Furthermore, Barnes stressed that what would appeal to de Beauvoir is an all-embracing concept of humanity as a regulative ideal, rather than an emphasis on sexual difference, as in the work of Luce Irigaray. This implies that de Beauvoir would be suspicious of theories claiming that humanity or the concept ‘human’ are mere fabrications of language. De Beauvoir had a sophisticated view of the relationship between biology and culture, which did not involve reducing one to the other. In general, Barnes pointed out, de Beauvoir’s philosophical project was to think about the possibility of the liberation of human beings, and therefore she would not be interested in abandoning certain metaphysical concepts such as ‘human.’

Day Two

The second day began with an early morning workshop with Toril Moi, in which she further discussed the problems and issues with both The Second Sex and Le deuxième sexe. Next, after a welcome coffee break, we had five successive speakers: Penelope Deutscher, Australian National University; Claude Imbert, from the Ecole Normale Supérieure; Catherine Wilson, from the University of British Columbia; Susan James, from the University of Cambridge; and Tina Chanter, from the University of Memphis. These five talks ranged from a discussion of aging in de Beauvoir (Deutscher), to a account of the context of de Beauvoir’s philosophical development (Imbert), to a translation of de Beauvoir’s observations in The Second Sex, to a theory of justice (Wilson), to a analysis the role that the passions and body image determine capacity for action (James), to the demarcation of the clean/proper and unclean/improper in de Beauvoir’s work (Chanter).

Two concurrent sessions followed lunch. I moderated a session with Nancy Bauer, from Tufts University, and Elaine Miller and Emily Zakin from Miami University of Ohio. All three papers in this session dealt with philosophical issues of universalism, sexual difference, essentialism, de Beauvoir’s debt to Hegel, and her influence on the contemporary work of Luce Irigaray. Nancy Bauer argued that The Second Sex offers us a rethinking of what philosophy is; that is, philosophy gives us a methodology for describing and analyzing ‘women,’ without relying on essentialist notions of definition. Because de Beauvoir doesn’t rely on abstract philosophical definitions or essences for her analysis of the condition(s) of women, but rather personalizes the question of sexual difference, Bauer claimed that she avoids the terms of the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate. Elaine Miller argued that because de Beauvoir was a close and careful reader of Hegel, she developed her concept of the feminine in a way such that it eluded the Hegelian Aufhebung. Because Hegel claims that woman gets left behind as man enters the social world, the feminine becomes a counterpoint to the Hegelian dialectic which aims to both negate and preserve difference. Because Woman cannot be ultimately negated and preserved, in her role as Other, she figures as continual challenge to a model of subjectivity that assimilates all difference, including sexual difference. Finally, Emily Zakin demonstrated that de Beauvoir’s work is continuous with the contemporary work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray on questions of subjectivity, sexual difference, and a rethinking of the universal as generated out of the particular. On this last point, Zakin claimed that because one has access to the universal through his or her particular experiences, any attempt to assimilate particular experiences in order to articulate an abstract universal is vexed by conflict. While we will continually attempt to negotiate the universal out of a dialogue over our particular experiences as subjects, that dialogue will always involve conflict over the correct interpretation, which ultimately calls for perhaps an infinite, on-going discussion about how to define the universal.