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Spring 2008
Volume 07, Number 2

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

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The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir
Emily R. Grosholz (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). 200 pages. $29.95. ISBN 0-19-926536-4 (paperback).

Reviewed by Ada S. Jaarsma
Sonoma State University, jaarsma@sonoma.edu

This new edited collection emerges out of a conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and contains a well-balanced range of essays that are both richly personal and critically passionate. As Emily R. Grosholz asserts in her editor’s preface, this collection is therefore in part “homage” (xxiv), seeking to recognize The Second Sex for its specifically philosophical significance. The essays included examine the text’s position in the canon and its challenge to philosophy as a methodology for achieving actual social change. At the same time, however, several thinkers raise innovative possibilities for reading older philosophical texts in light of The Second Sex.

One strength of the collection is that many of the contributors are well-established Beauvoir scholars. Michèle Le Doeuff, Toril Moi, and Nancy Bauer each advance arguments based on previous work, and consequently they offer the reader insights into the specific challenges of undertaking sustained study of Beauvoir.[1] For instance, Le Doeuff asserts, in her essay “Towards a Friendly, Transatlantic Critique of The Second Sex”: “The interest of an ongoing interpretation of a text lies in the fact that what must be explained in the text changes from generation to generation” (23). There is a cultural and historical context to those questions which emerge as urgent, problematic, or in need of new clarification. Le Doeuff’s own suggestive observation is that feminist philosophy will benefit from interrogating nationalist approaches to the study of The Second Sex, which read it, for example, as essentially a French text, pointing instead to transnational exchanges which have played important roles in the development of feminism.

Along similar lines, Nancy Bauer revisits the claim that she makes in an earlier text that to assert the philosophical importance of The Second Sex is at the same time to undertake one’s own act of philosophical appropriation, “grounded in the reader’s own investments and concerns” (2001, 3). According to Bauer, Beauvoir’s distinct way of appropriating the philosophical tradition is recognizable only when it itself is taken up and reappropriated (2001, 4). Bauer’s point—which is a challenge to contemporary feminist philosophers—is admirably put into practice throughout the essays in this collection. Exegetical analyses of Beauvoir’s texts are combined with strong reflexive thinking about the task of philosophy itself, as the essays attempt to grapple with the multiple Second Sexes which emerge from a commitment to taking seriously not only the arguments outlined by Beauvoir but also the lines of thought which extend beyond.

One way that this is carried out is through the inclusion of arguments by several early modern scholars, including Grosholz herself, who seek to situate Beauvoir’s thought within the history of philosophy. Especially worthy of note is Susan James’s “Complicity and Slavery in The Second Sex,” which focuses on the animating question of The Second Sex, namely: Why do women choose to be complicit with their own subordination? Rather than examining the question in light of Beauvoir’s contemporaries, the most prevalent hermeneutical strategy among Beauvoir scholars, James makes the convincing case that a much longer historical assessment is needed—in this case, establishing the relevance of seventeenth-century discussions of social hierarchy and the affects of admiration and contempt. Focusing on Malebranche, James argues that “the acceptance of social subordination is to be explained by the ways in which differences of power are embodied, and therefore shape the way we understand ourselves, the way others understand us, and what we can do” (83). James’s approach not only excavates the term complicity by identifying its roots in early modern conceptions of bodily affects and psychic interpretations but also models a successful methodology for incorporating Beauvoir within the history of philosophy.

In contrast, Claude Imbert’s essay “Simone de Beauvoir: A Woman Philosopher in the Context of her Generation” offers a particularly rich exploration of the post-war intellectual environment in which Beauvoir and others, including Simone Weil, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévi-Strauss, were striving to rectify the apolitical abstractions of philosophy by attending to concreteness and situatedness. Imbert argues that what makes Beauvoir’s contributions unique concerns the “double bind” of The Second Sex: its commitments as a philosophical project to interrogating a canon whose terms and methods are ultimately incapable of answering Beauvoir’s central question, “Whence comes this submission of women?” This point echoes Grosholz’s description of Beauvoir’s text as reflective and iconoclastic—identifying the internal limits of the discipline of philosophy while expanding its reach and methods.

On the one hand, as Imbert’s essay makes evident, Beauvoir is capable of being understood as a thinker who called existentialism into radical question, exposing the limitations of the ontological premise of radical freedom by describing the compulsions of the situations which women must negotiate; according to this approach, there is thus a need to either thoroughly revise existentialist concepts and methods or move on entirely. In the most extreme example of this line of thought, Imbert calls existentialism a “cul-de-sac” (16) which evaporated during the sixties. We must end oppression by critiquing male pretensions to universality and turn instead to concrete social problems. On the other hand, essays like those exemplified by Le Doeuff argue for the affirmation of the impartial and universal powers of rationality while at the same time committing to the critique of totalization. Similarly, Catherine Wilson emphasizes the normative commitments of Beauvoir’s text, explaining that given Beauvoir’s shared commitments with Kant, “we are obliged to cultivate the material conditions under which social dignity is universally attainable” (100). One of the ways in which this collection is most valuable is in the internal debates it stages about Beauvoir’s precise role in transforming philosophy.

Perhaps as a result, the collection contains impassioned directions for further study. To highlight an example, several essays take up the question: What does it mean to be engaged philosophically? This is not simply a descriptive question about Beauvoir’s approach in The Second Sex but rather reflects a commitment to enacting the kind of philosophy that makes a difference, philosophy that contrasts with what Grosholz describes as philosophy that leaves us unmoved and indifferent (xxiii). In Anne Stevenson’s essay, committed writing involves practical deliberation, modified through experience, praxis, and dialogue. Similarly, Bauer makes the stakes of engaged thinking explicit, directing philosophers to come back to the real world (116). While nearly every essay in the collection undertakes challenging analyses of the nature of engaged philosophy, the text itself does not include specific examples that would model how Beauvoir’s commitments to studying the “drama of woman” can equip us with productive tools for carrying out urgent critique today—critique, for example, of racist ideology or of class-based forms of subordination. There is, however, a clear directive to us as Beauvoir’s readers—that to study Beauvoir is also to commit to a kind of philosophy that seeks to overturn social injustices.

In some ways, this reflects the self-expressed intention of the collection to pay “homage” to Beauvoir. As such, the text should prove to be of considerable interest to feminist philosophers, as it signals important new directions for continued research on Beauvoir. The book also highlights an important reminder about Beauvoir’s neglected status in the discipline of philosophy, the most obvious sign of which is the severely limited English translation of The Second Sex. Toril Moi’s essay “While We Wait: Notes on the English Translation of The Second Sex” expands upon the extensive critiques already issued against the translation, the first and most influential of which is by Margaret A. Simons.[2] Moi clearly documents the philosophical shortcomings of Parshley’s translation, pointing out its ideological assumptions which have served to undermine the philosophical value and perpetuate misinterpretations of The Second Sex. For example, Moi identifies numerous technical terms which are either completely absent or thoroughly obscured in the English translation, including such key concepts as authenticity, existence, subjectivity, and alienation. Bauer also takes up this theme in her essay, and in a footnote, she invites readers to join her in demanding of the publishers Knopf and Gallimard that they at least permit, if not support, a new scholarly edition of The Second Sex.

Especially for scholars and students reading Beauvoir in English translation, the collection will serve as a convicting reminder of the limitations of the Parshley translation and can serve to expose for students the constructed and fallible nature of the production of the philosophical canon. Indeed, the text should lend itself wonderfully to the classroom, with its threefold emphasis on the historical, literary, and philosophical contexts of The Second Sex.

Endnotes

1. Nancy Bauer. Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Michèle Le Doeuff. Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991); Toril Moi. What is a Woman?: And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Toril Moi. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1994).

2. Margaret A. Simons. “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex.” Women’s Studies International Forum 6:5 (1983): 559-64.

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