Janine Jones

In this chapter, the author argues that the Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s translation of “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient” as “One is not born, but rather, becomes woman” is neither a standard grammatically correct rendering of the French sentence nor a translation capable of expressing the rhetorical power of Beauvoir’s thesis. The chapter, utilizing examples such as the great film _Jules et Jim_ by François Truffaut, discusses some of the ideas in Beauvoir’s work that might lead one to graft the philosophical idea—one becomes WOMAN—onto her thesis, as the translators have admittedly done. Finally, through other examples, it argues that a better way to understand Beauvoir’s “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient” is “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

Résumé Dans cet entretien, la politologue et militante féministe décoloniale Françoise Vergès met en lumière le rôle du féminisme civilisationnel dans les luttes subversives menées par les féminismes décoloniaux du Sud pour mettre en échec le capitalisme racial, l’impérialisme, le (néo)colonialisme et le patriarcat. Vergès revient sur ses positions dans A Decolonial Feminism et place le problème « qui nettoie le monde? » aux fondements du capitalisme racialisé et sexué : l’incapacité à dépasser ce problème garantit l’échec de toute révolution visant à donner naissance à un monde nouveau, décolonisé.

This paper argues that in L’ Invitée and in The Second Sex, Black presence, especially “Black female presence,” functions as the fundamental field against which White female consciousnesses are able to make sense of themselves as subjects and objects in their relationships with Others, including when the Others are themselves. Considering The Second Sex and L’ Invitée as together providing Beauvoir’s understanding of gender allows for an account of how “Black female presence”—in the form of the White imaginary’s idea of Black women—is present and operational in The Second Sex.

Given Kripke’s semantic views, a statement, such as ‘Water is H 2 O’, expresses a necessary a posteriori truth. Yet it seems that we can conceive that this statement could have been false; hence, it appears that we can conceive impossible states of affairs as holding. Kripke used a de dicto strategy and a de re strategy to address three illusions that arise with respect to necessary a posteriori truths: (1) the illusion that a statement such as ‘Water is H 2 O’ possibly expresses a falsehood, (2) the illusion that conceivability can fail to latch on to a genuine metaphysical possibility, and (3) the illusion that one can access a real metaphysical possibility by conceiving that water is not H 2 O. In this paper I argue that while Kripke’s de dicto strategy dispels (1), his strategies do not enable him to dispel (2) and (3).