Mickaëlle Provost

This article explores how Beauvoir's argument “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient” supports the possibilities outlined in The Second Sex of no longer becoming a woman. Of deepening, for oneself, a form of singularity that escapes patriarchal gendered polarisation. Emphasising the importance of ambiguity in Beauvoirian thought, it shows how the feminine/masculine binary impoverishes experiences and forms of subjectivation, by establishing a uniform patriarchal femininity. This social destiny is nonetheless an existential temptation in the sense that the gendered patriarchal femininity appears as a mode of subjective investment, a defence against the freedom to be oneself and against the possibility of expressing one's singular voice. This article will therefore focus on re-conceiving the relation between freedom and femininity to consider the many ways of undoing an assigned, patriarchal femininity and reinventing a humanity that is not to be confused with generic masculinity.

Résumé En proposant une lecture intertextuelle de la philosophie de Simone de Beauvoir, cet article étudie la possibilité d’un « existentialisme transatlantique ». Y sont analysés le récit proposé par Beauvoir dans L’Amérique au jour le jour et la manière dont la conceptualisation phénoménologique beauvoirienne du racisme fait écho à la pensée de Richard Wright, mais aussi à celles de W.E.B. Du Bois et de Frantz Fanon. La mise au jour de ces parentés théoriques permet d’éclairer les différences et les conflits entre des vécus distincts d’oppression.

Alice Crary is a moral and social philosopher who has written widely on issues in metaethics, moral psychology and normative ethics, philosophy and feminism, critical animal studies, critical disability studies, critical philosophy of race, philosophy and literature, and Critical Theory. She has written on philosophers such as John L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Iris Murdoch and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This is the first of two parts of the interview with Crary conducted in a single exchange in the first weeks of January 2022, where she discusses ordinary language philosophy and feminism, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to feminist ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, and her own views about efforts to bring about social and political transformations. The second part on “Wittgenstein and Critical Theory” is published in the regular volume 11 of NWR.

This is the second of two parts of an interview with Alice Crary conducted in a single exchange in the first weeks of January 2022, where she discusses ordinary language philosophy and feminism, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to feminist ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, and her own views about efforts to bring about social and political transformations. The first part on “Wittgenstein and Feminism” is published in the NWR Special Issue “Wittgenstein and Feminism”, forthcoming later this year.