Nancy Bauer

This chapter is a reprint of a book review of the new translation of _The Second Sex, which_ raises questions about its success in rendering Beauvoir’s thought into English. Siding with critical scholars like Toril Moi, Bauer argues that Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s translation is disappointing. The translation obscures Beauvoir’s philosophical insights by too often sacrificing readability and clear renditions of Beauvoir’s reasoning to word-by-word translations of Beauvoir’s long sentences and uncommon stylistic choices. This is due to the inexperience of the translators, who, Bauer claims, had never before translated such French theoretical writing and had no experience dealing with the “conceptual and rhetorical challenges” of _Le deuxiéme sexe_. Overall, Bauer’s review echoes the long history of the discounting of and underappreciation of feminist work as reflected in translation practices that assume women’s interests, writing, and scholarship to be tangential to scholarly research.

_ Winner of the 2018 Choice award for Outstanding Academic Title!_ The work of Simone de Beauvoir has endured and flowered in the last two decades, thanks primarily to the lasting influence of _The Second Sex_ on the rise of academic discussions of gender, sexuality, and old age. Now, in this new _Companion _dedicated to her life and writings, an international assembly of prominent scholars, essayists, and leading interpreters reflect upon the range of Beauvoir’s contribution to philosophy as one of the great authors, thinkers, and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. The _Companion _examines Beauvoir’s rich intellectual life from a variety of angles—including literary, historical, and anthropological perspectives—and situates her in relation to her forbears and contemporaries in the philosophical canon. Essays in each of four thematic sections reveal the breadth and acuity of her insight, from the significance of _The Second Sex_ and her work on the metaphysics of gender to her plentiful contributions in ethics and political philosophy. Later chapters trace the relationship between Beauvoir’s philosophical and literary work and open up her scholarship to global issues, questions of race, and the legacy of colonialism and sexism. The volume concludes by considering her impact on contemporary feminist thought writ large, and features pioneering work from a new generation of Beauvoir scholars. Ambitious and unprecedented in scope, _A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir _is an accessible and interdisciplinary resource for students, teachers, and researchers across the humanities and social sciences.

Simone de Beauvoir’s _The Second Sex_ is the most important work of feminist philosophy ever published and one of the great texts of the Twentieth century. Renowned for introducing the theory of woman as the ‘Other’ it is a widely-studied text that continues to exert profound influence on feminist thought. _The Routledge Guidebook to De Beauvoir and The Second Sex_ introduces and assesses: De Beauvoir’s life and the background of The Second Sex The ideas and arguments of The Second Sex De Beauvoir’s continuing importance to feminist theory and philosophy This book is essential reading for all students of feminism, gender studies, philosophy, and literary studies and ideal for anyone reading de Beauvoir’s classic work for the first time.

Résumé Comment lire la revendication de Simone de Beauvoir, dans Le Deuxième Sexe, d’être représentative du concept de « femme »? Déplaçant la question cartésienne « Qu’est-ce qu’un homme? », répondant « Je suis » à la question « Qu’est-ce qu’une femme? », Beauvoir fait du concept de « femme » le fondement d’une dialectique du quotidien et du métaphysique, en plus de s’arroger une autorité philosophique neuve. Dès lors, lire Le Deuxième Sexe en parallèle des Méditations de Descartes, c’est lire Beauvoir découvrant un cogito corporel.

Despite the advances wrought in recent years by recuperative readings of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir's views on motherhood and mothering remain under‐appropriated when it comes to both feminist metaphysics and feminist political priorities. In our radically anti‐essentialist era, we are inclined take for granted that gender is a social construct, potentially oppressive when it's understood as a biological given but potentially liberating when its fundamental arbitrariness and infinite malleability are appreciated. Though Beauvoir is in no way a gender essentialist, in the current theoretical atmosphere her insistence on the importance of physiology is more critical than ever. Under conditions in which women are told everywhere they turn that they are to gauge their worth as human beings according to the way their bodies look and work (with special emphasis on thinness and fertility), Beauvoir's reasons for emphasizing the fraught nature of pregnancy and motherhood can help us understand our continuing confusion over what it means to be a woman.

Feminist scholars reacted to news of Beauvoir's death in 1986 by initiating a reevaluation of her life's work, a task encouraged by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, her adopted daughter, who edited for posthumous publication many of Beauvoir's personal notebooks and letters to Sartre. Some of the most exciting new interpretations of Beauvoir's philosophy that have resulted are brought together here for the first time; many of them, indeed, were written expressly for this first volume of essays on Beauvoir's philosophy written since her death.

This dissertation is meant as a call for philosophers to turn, and feminists to return, to Simone de Beauvoir's landmark tome The Second Sex. My central claim is that in this book Beauvoir establishes her own genuinely original kink in the history of philosophy by discovering a way to appropriate the tradition that is grounded in questions about her being a woman. I argue that Beauvoir's discovery provides a model for a way to think philosophically about sex difference that dispels the air of self-contradiction hovering around the idea of "feminist philosophy." I further argue that Beauvoir's using her own identity as a touchstone as well as an object of investigation in her appropriation of the philosophical tradition demonstrates a surprising faithfulness to the tradition and hence opens up new vistas of possibility for the discipline. ;Specifically, I focus on Beauvoir's appropriations in The Second Sex of Descartes and Hegel. The substantial "Introduction" to The Second Sex, I claim, is to be seen as a rewriting of Descartes' first and second Meditations, during the course of which the supposedly gender-neutral question "What is a man?"--posed by Descartes directly after the famous discovery of the cogito in Meditation II--is displaced by Beauvoir's decidedly gender-specific question "What is a woman?" ;Beauvoir's attempts to come to terms with this fact issue, I claim, in her finding a way to account for her long-standing interest in the master-slave dialectic of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I prepare for describing this account by considering, first, the appropriation of the dialectic in the early work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir's life-long companion. While Beauvoir is ordinarily regarded as having simply transplanted the interpretation of Hegel's concept of the "other" found in Being and Nothingness into The Second Sex, I find that it is precisely here that her independence from Sartre is most dramatic. It is central to my view of Beauvoir philosophically and historically to specify my differences on this point--differences that stem from the way I read her relationship to Descartes and to Hegel--even from those scholars who recognize Beauvoir's originality, including Michele Le Doeuff, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Toril Moi, and Debra Bergoffen. Specifically, I characterize Sartre as committed to philosophizing at a certain level of abstraction and engaging in a particular form of fault-finding that exemplifies a limited, however common, mode of philosophical inheritance pointedly abjured by Beauvoir in The Second Sex. I also chronicle Beauvoir's pre-Second Sex attempts to express her interest in the dialectic and demonstrate that what is missing at this early stage is not a sense of the possibilities latent in Hegel's thinking but the productive terms in which to express these possibilities. Finally, I show how Beauvoir's coming to take her identity as a woman seriously, as something that can serve as the object of a philosophical investigation, opens up a way of understanding Hegel's depiction of the figures of master and slave that exposes the stake both men and women have in exploiting sex difference so as to avoid experiencing a sense of metaphysical isolation--of, this means, avoiding the starting point both of genuinely reciprocal recognition and of modern philosophy.

In this paper I attempt to further the case, made in recent years by Eva Gothlin, that readers interested in a philosophical return to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex have good reason to heed Beauvoir's appropriation of central concepts from Heidegger's Being and Time. I speculate about why readers have been hesitant to acknowledge Heidegger's influence on Beauvoir and show that her infrequent though, I argue, important use of the Heideggarian neologism Mitsein in The Second Sex makes inadequate sense apart from an appreciation of the fundamental role played by her appropriation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic in that book. I suggest a way to square Beauvoir's Hegelian claim that human beings are fundamentally at odds with one another with her Heideggerian view that we are also all ontologically with one another. Finally, I sketch out a way of interpreting Beauvoir's employment of certain concepts from Hegel and Heidegger in the service of understanding, hence beginning to overcome, women's oppression.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities by Debra B. Bergoffen, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ by Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism by Margaret A. Simons, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir by Karen VintgesNancy BauerDebra B. Bergoffen. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Pp. x + 250. Cloth, $54.50.Eva Lundgren-Gothlin. Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex.’ Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1996. Pp. xii + 329. Paper, $19.95.Margaret A. Simons. Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xx + 263. Cloth, $25.95.Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 202. Paper, $19.95.Anyone who is seriously interested in Simone de Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy must contend sooner or later with the fact that she denied, repeatedly and vehemently throughout her lifetime, that she was a philosopher. Of course, a certain species of Beauvoir-detractor will be tempted to take these denials at face value, especially since they almost always went hand in hand with Beauvoir’s plausible-sounding [End Page 688] declarations that anything philosophical about her work could be traced to the thinking of her lifelong companion Jean-Paul Sartre, who, she underscored, was the “real” philosopher in their relationship. But the very strength and frequency of her abjurations of the title of philosopher is a sign that, like Freud, Beauvoir (who wrote several straightforwardly philosophical essays, including the monograph-length Ethics of Ambiguity and Pyrrhus et Cınéas) was motivated not so much by modesty or self-abnegation but by a desire to distance herself from what counted, at least in the middle of this century, as philosophy.For most of the past 50 years, English-speaking readers of Beauvoir have simply accepted her portrayal of her relationship to philosophy. On the ordinary view, The Second Sex, while an important historical touchstone for “feminist theory” is not, or not quite, a philosophical piece of writing, and those of her publications that merit that title are mere apologetics for Sartrean existentialism. But in the years since Beauvoir’s death in 1986 allowed for the release of her voluminous and revealing letters to Sartre, more and more feminist philosophers have been taking a second look at The Second Sex and Beauvoir’s other essays and fiction as they try to engage productively both with non-academic feminist work and with the philosophical mainstream. As a result, the difficult question of just how to assess Beauvoir’s relationship both to philosophy in general and to Sartre in particular has become pressing and is at the center of the four books under review here.The authors of these books are each committed, in their own sometimes strikingly different ways, to two theses: first, that to understand Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy one must study her appropriations of the work of philosophers other than just Sartre and, second, that at the heart of Beauvoir’s enterprise in all of her work is a desire to think about how to create and sustain reciprocity between an existentially committed self and an equally autonomous other.The most historically oriented and, on my view, meticulous exploration of Beauvoir’s relationship to her philosophical influences is Lundgren-Gothlin’s superb Sex and Exıstence, which chronicles Beauvoir’s indebtedness to and interest in, especially, Hegel and Marx. Lundgren-Gothlin, a philosophically trained Swedish intellectual historian, shows decisively that one cannot make philosophical sense of The Second Sex as long as one reduces its philosophical dimension to boilerplate Sartreanism. Indeed, given Sartre’s antipathy toward Marx and his ambivalence about Hegel in Beıng and Nothingness, Lundgren-Gothlin’s work raises serious questions about the extent to which Beauvoir’s considered views in The Second Sex are even compatible with those of the early...