The Second Sex
The Second Sex
The Second Sex
The Renaissance in
Simone de Beauvoir
Studies
Sonia Kruks
Feminist Studies 31, no. 2 (Summer 2005). © 2005 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
286
Sonia Kmks 287
Beauvoir and "The Second Sex": feminism, Rxice, and the Origins of Existentialism. By
Margaret Simons. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Edited by Claudia Card. C a m -
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Sex, Gender, and the Body: The Student Edition of "What Is a Woman;'" By Toril Moi.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. By
Sara Heinamaa. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir. By Fredrika
Scarth. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities. By
Debra Bergoffen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
for whom women's oppression was entirely cultural. She was said both
to claim that women were helpless playthings of the patriarchy and that
they were free agents, responsible for their own oppression. Moreover, it
was asserted, Beauvoir was profoundly male-identified in attributing
greater freedom to men's public activities than to women's private ones,
misogynist in her contempt for most women's lives, heterosexist, and
possibly racist.
Such disparaging readings of Beauvoir were shaped intellectually and
politically by two important shifts in U.S. (and other Western Anglo-
phone) feminism. One was the turn toward "gynocentrism." As feminine
difference, including feminine eroticism, motherhood, distinctive wom-
en's values, and feminine discourse came to be celebrated, Beauvoir was
seen as increasingly old-fashioned. She was accused of taking masculinist
values as the norm to which women should aspire, of disparaging the fe-
male body (of which she was often said to have an intense personal hor-
ror), and of dismissing motherhood as inimical to women's liberation.
With, moreover, the growing influence in the United States of the "new
French feminism," of "ecriture feminine," and of poststructuralism more
generally, she was also cast as a naJfve "enlightenment" humanist. She was
portrayed as hopelessly mired in Sartre's old-fashioned and sexist existen-
tialist problematic: in a phallocentric philosophy that celebrated freedom
as the "project" of an autonomous, masculine self.
A pivotal moment in this history was the appearance of the English
translation of Julia Kristeva's essay, "Women's Time," in Signs in 1981. With-
out directly naming Beauvoir, the essay emphatically asserted that the
time of her generation of feminists (the generation of "suffragists and of
existential feminists," as Kristeva put it) was now definitively past. With
the publication also of the key volume of translations. New French Feminisms
(1981), "French" feminism came to mean, in the Anglophone context, a
neo-Lacanian, discourse-oriented feminism, celebratory of women's dif-
ference and hostile to the alleged phallocentrism of the entire Western
philosophic tradition. This was a feminism that was not Beauvoir's, and
for whom Beauvoir most often functioned as a tacit "Other."'
In addition to these gynocentric and posthumanist shifts in feminist
theory, in the 1980s there developed (especially in the United States) an in-
Sonia Kruks 289
more generally to shift. Today, careful and creative unwindings and re-
windings of Beauvoir's arguments are proliferating, and it is clear that
Beauvoir scholarship is far more than either a personal therapeutic or an
historical exercise. To address Beauvoir is to engage in a range of current
theoretical debates about (among other issues) the sex/gender distinction,
feminine embodiment, sexual difference, and feminist ethics.
But why the shift in Beauvoir's theoretical fortunes? Beauvoir's death (in
1986) surely had something to do with it, making it easier to focus on Beau-
voir the thinker rather than Beauvoir the icon or the Mother. Further-
more, the posthumous availability of volumes of Beauvoir's letters and di-
aries have shed important new light on her life (including the revelations of
her numerous affairs with women) and on her early intellectual forma-
tion. These discoveries have invited new reflections on her significance for
feminist theory and her status as an original philosopher.' Against the un-
questioned assumptions of an earlier generation, that Beauvoir worked
faithfully in the framework of Sartre's "existentialism" and that she just
"applied" his philosophy to the question of women, recent work in femi-
nist philosophy has now indubitably established Beauvoir's importance as
an original philosopher in her own right. In addition, in the last few years,
a growing mood of caution about the benefits of poststructuralism for fem-
inism has stimulated yet further work on Beauvoir. The suggestion I made
in 1992 that "Beauvoir's account of situated subjectivity is one from which
we could begin to develop an account of the gendering of subjectivity
that can avoid both essentialism and hyperconstructivism" is now being
productively pursued by many feminist scholars.' Readings of Beauvoir
are proving pivotal in the recent turn toward what may be called post-
poststructuralism: the endeavor to move beyond poststructuralism while
continuing to heed its critiques of earlier feminisms. Thus the Beauvoir
"Renaissance" should not be considered as an isolated phenomenon but
should rather be seen as an integral element of this ongoing shift in intel-
lectual and political sensibilities.
In addition to, and partly stimulated by, the Anglophone Renaissance,
there is now also a growing body of work on Beauvoir appearing in Europe
and elsewhere. Intriguingly, this includes a growth of serious attention to
Beauvoir in France, where she was vilified and expunged from feminist
Sonia Kruks 291
decades. She begins the volume with "In Memoriam (1986)," in which sbe
describes her first meeting with Beauvoir in 1972. To her dismay Beauvoir
insisted that the only important philosophical influence on The Second Sex
was Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Simons was already convinced by 1972 that
Sartre's early philosophy could not be the philosophical origin of The Sec-
ond Sex. With its insistence on the absolute freedom of the subject, with its
dualistic core ontological distinction between being in-itself (matter) and
being for-itself (human consciousness)—a distinction that could not ade-
quately account for the complexities of human embodiment—and with its
portrayal of human relations as fundamentally conflictual ones in which
self and other struggle to objectify each other, Sartre's philosophy was
thoroughly masculinist; Beauvoir surely could not be the passive disciple
of Sartre in matters philosophical that she claimed to be. In her path-
breaking 1981 paper, "Beauvoir and Sartre: The Question of Influence"
(here republished as chapter 3), Simons begins the long, painstaking task
of intertextual reading to demonstrate that the relationship between the
two thinkers was far more reciprocal than Beauvoir publicly acknowl-
edged. Indeed, Simons shows, contrary to received opinion, there is evi-
dence that influence often ran in the opposite direction, that Sartre had
significant intellectual debts to Beauvoir.
But if many of Beauvoir's ideas were not derived from Sartre, then on
what other traditions and thinkers did she draw? Much ofthe more recent
feminist philosophical literature on Beauvoir has been concerned with
this question, tracing tbe influences on her thought of other figures in the
phenomenological and existential tradition, including Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, as well as examining how
she draws from earlier thinkers such as G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx, or
from prior French thinkers. Simons's own contributions to identifying
Beauvoir's intellectual sources are offered in the two most recent essays in
her book. One considers the African American writer Richard Wright.
Wright was a close friend of Beauvoir's in the late-1940s," and her account
of her travels in tbe United States in 19'17 makes it clear that Wright was
her cultural and intellectual guide to the world of racial segregation." Si-
mons argues that it was from Wright's analyses ofthe experience of racism
(rather than from Sartre's analyses of anti-Semitism in Anti-Semite and Jew)
Sonia Kruks 293
too, and in anticipation of more recent gender theory, Beauvoir clearly re-
jects the "either/or" of heterosexism versus lesbianism. In "The Second Sex
and the Roots of Radical Feminism," Simons positions Beauvoir with re-
gard to early radical and socialist feminism, suggesting that Beauvoir an-
ticipates certain aspects of poststructuralist feminism in "extend[ing] social
constructivism to sexuality" (155). This essay intimates that Beauvoir may
help us to think anew about the still vexed issues of sex/gender relations
and of how adequately to theorize women's embodiment. These matters
are more fully explored by Toril Moi, Sara Heinamaa, and Moira Gatens,
whose works I address in the next section.
S E X / G E N D E R , E M B O D I M E N T , AND SEXUAL D I F F E R E N C E
The distinction between "sex" and "gender" was a key analytic of early
Second Wave feminist theory; and many of the readings of Beauvoir that
criticized her for inconsistency were presaged upon it, for Beauvoir's work
simply did not line up with the distinction. The chapter on "Biology" in
The Second Sex was said to be profoundly-for some, horribly-essentialist, de-
picting woman as the plaything of her hormones and reproductive biolo-
gy. But then Beauvoir was also a radical social constructionist. She was
said to anticipate "gender" in insisting that femininity was a social con-
struct imposed by men on women who then, most often in bad faith,
complied with it. It seemed that Beauvoir could not make up her mind;
she vacillated. The poor thing was incoherent and confused, doubtless be-
cause of her own emotional baggage.
During the 1990s, with the poststructuralist tide in feminist theorizing
running high, the sex/gender distinction itself came to be put into ques-
tion: biology was not a factual science but itself a highly politicized discur-
sive practice; "sex" was as much a social/discursive construct as "gender";
and the relationship between bodily morphology and sexuality was wholly
arbitrary. The work of Judith Butler was, of course, pivotal in this shift. In
Cender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), sex, sexuality, and
gender are collapsed together; they are all the effects of discursive and per-
formative practices. None is "natural." Moreover, it is such practices that
bring the self, or subject, into being. It follows that any sense we have of
deep "inner" subjectivity, or ofthe temporal stability ofthe self, is an "illu-
296 Sonia Kruks
sion." Thus, "gender" is but a set of discrete but repeated stylized acts,
publicly performed, that produces the "illusion of an abiding gendered self,"
and it is these styles that "produce the coherent gendered subjects who
pose as their originators."" In Cender Trouble, Butler sharply differentiates
herself from Beauvoir, whom she casts as a dualist: Beauvoir's analysis of
embodiment is (like Sartre's) premised on "the uncritical reproduction of
the Cartesian distinction between freedom and the body . . . [and] any un-
critical reproduction of the mind/body distinction ought to be rethought
for the implicit gender hierarchy that the distinction has conventionally
produced, maintained, and rationalized" (12). Beauvoir, Butler argues,
naively sought to maintain the freedom of the subject-and hence also,
she believed, the possibility of women's resistance—only by sundering the
agentic self from its body. To do so, Beauvoir had to cast the body as "a
mute facticity, anticipating some meaning that can be attributed to it only
by a transcendent consciousness, understood in Cartesian terms as radi-
cally immateriar'(129).
Although during the 1990s the kind of poststructuralism epitomized by
Cender Trouble was often criticized, with some theorists arguing that it denied
subjectivity and adequate agency to individual women, others that sexual
difference is a physical reality that cannot be reduced to discursivity alone,
still it occupied a hegemonic position within feminist theory. But, as I have
suggested, there is now a more widespread probing of the theoretical and
practical limitations of—at least unmitigated—poststructuralism and a turn-
ing toward post-poststructuralism. This is one of the main factors that has
fueled the Beauvoir Renaissance," for Beauvoir's work proves to be a fertile
place to think anew about sex, gender, and sexual difference and about em-
bodied subjects that may enjoy agency and even "inner" experience, yet
which are not "immaterial" Cartesian consciousnesses. In the new post-
poststructuralist readings of Beauvoir, what were once dismissed as hope-
less contradictions or as untenable dualisms in her work now turn out to
be "operative contradictions"" or else are real ambiguities of human exis-
tence that Beauvoir's synthetic method enables us to grasp.
A m o n g new works, Moi's Sex, Cender, and the Body: The Student Edition of
"What Is a Woman'"^ is of particular interest." Because Moi was instrumen-
tal in introducing poststructualism into Anglophone feminism in the
Sonia Kruks 297
1980s (notably with the publication of her SexualjTextual Politics: Feminist Liter-
ary Theory), this new work constitutes a tacit auto-critique, as well as a
powerful plea for a more freedom-oriented feminist theory than post-
structuralism permits. Moi writes in the preface that she sets out "to find a
third way for feminist theory, one that steers a course between the Scylla
of traditional essentialism and biologism, and the Charybdis of the idealist
obsession with 'discourse' and 'construction,'" and she goes on to observe
that "for such a project, Simone de Beauvoir's feminism of freedom is an
obvious cornerstone" (vii). The book consists of two long essays, of which
I shall discuss only the first, "What Is a Woman? Sex, Gender, and the
Body in Feminist Theory," which takes its title from Beauvoir's opening
question in The Second Sex.
Moi's essay is not "about" Beauvoir so much as about bringing Beauvoir
(along with a insights drawn from ordinary language philosophy) to bear
on current impasses she sees in feminist theory. She wants to show that
the term "woman" is not (as is so often claimed) inherently essentialist or
metaphysical because its meaning is not fixed, and that the question of
what "a woman" is, is still an important one to ask. However, it is a ques-
tion to which, she insists, there will be a multiplicity of responses, depend-
ing on the concrete specificities of the lives being examined: "the answer
to the question of what a woman is, is not one" (9). She wants also to find
ways beyond what she regards as the excessive theoreticism and de facto
erasure ofthe physical body by poststructuralist feminists.
Moi's essay provides an elegant historical sweep through the history of
the concepts of sex and gender, which will be a useful classroom resource.
She begins with the history of "sex" as a biologically determinist concept
as it emerged in a late-nineteenth-century "scientific" discourse, purport-
ing to prove women's necessary incapacity for citizenship, education, and
so forth, and she shows how early Second Wave feminism turned to radi-
cal social constructionism—and so to "gender" and the "sex/gender" dis-
tinction-as effective means to combat biological determinism. Next, sbe
traces the emergence of the poststructuralist critique of this turn-that the
depiction of "sex" as it is counterpoised to "gender" is too ahistorical and
essentialist— before going on to develop her own critique of the poststruc-
turalist critique. The pivotal section of the essay focuses on Beauvoir's no-
298 Sonia Kruh
tion that "the body is a situation," in which Moi finds "a powerful and so-
phisticated alternative to contemporary sex and gender theories" (59), a
way of giving the prediscursive body its due without lapsing into biological
essentialism.
The core of Moi's critique of poststructuralism is not of its historicizing
aims, but rather that it fails to attain them. It undermines itself by tacitly
reinscribing tbe sex/gender distinction and an essentialized notion of sex
such as tbe one it has set out to overturn. For what is at stake in attempts
(notably Butler's) to insist that tbere is no "natural" body, tbat tbere is no
significant biological aspect to sexual difference, and tbat sex is effectively
indistinguisbable from gender because it is equally cultural is in fact the im-
plied proposition tbat biological sex matters; if we once let biology into the
picture it must inevitably shape oppressive social norms. "I get the impres-
sion that poststructuralists believe tbat if there were biological facts, then
tbey would indeed give rise to social norms. In this way, tbey paradoxically
share the fundamental belief of biological determinists" (42). But, Moi ar-
gues, if we really believe tbat nothing by way of social norms bas to follow
from biology (tbat, as David Hume put it long ago, facts do not determine
vcJues), tben we surely do not have to try to expunge biology from our an-
swers to tbe question "what is a woman?" Rather, we will seek for answers
tbat can better acknowledge tbe concrete experiences of women. But, as
we learn from Beauvoir, tbe body is not actually lived, tbat is, it is not expe-
rienced, as eitber biology or as culture-but ratber as an indivisible "situa-
tion." Thus an approacb tbat focuses on tbe body as a situation will also be
fluid and more attentive to particularities than is high poststructuralism. It
may avoid the pitfalls of "theoreticism" to which Moi claims poststruc-
turalists are prone: the belief, itself highly metapbysical, tbat "tbeoretical
correctness" is itself tbe guarantor of good feminist politics (59).
Contrary to tbose wbo bave wanted to retrieve Beauvoir's significance
by "rescuing" her from ber existentialism, Moi insists on the central im-
portance for feminism of Beauvoir's existential notion of freedom. How-
ever, Beauvoir's notion of freedom is not Sartre's, and Moi empbasizes its
affinities witb Merleau-Ponty's more consistently embodied and histori-
cized vision." Sbe quotes from a passage in The Second Sex that is key for ber
interpretation, in wbich Beauvoir writes: "As Merleau-Ponty very justly
Sonia Kmks 299
puts it, man is not a natural species; he is a bistorical idea. Woman is not a
fixed reality, but ratber a becoming... tbe body is not a tbing, it is a situa-
tion: it is our grasp upon tbe world and a sketcb [es^wisse] of our projects"
(cited 62). Tbat woman is not a "fixed reality" puts out of play botb bio-
logical determinism and tbe determinism tbat Moi (rigbtly) points out
may also follow from a tborougbgoing cultural constructionism (67). Yes,
tbe facts of both biology and culture are important and our lives are never
wholly free of tbem; yet tbey are not merely tbe effect of tbem eitber. As
Moi interprets Beauvoir, "a woman defines herself tbrougb tbe way sbe
lives ber embodied situation in tbe world, or in other words, tbrougb tbe
way in whicb sbe makes sometbing of wbat tbe world makes of ber. Tbe
process of making and being made is open-ended: it ends only witb deatb.
In tbe analysis of lived experience, tbe sex/gender distinction does not
apply" (72). If, in contrast to theories tbat empbasize eitber sex, or gender,
or their duality, we consider tbe body as a situation tben we grasp tbe em-
bodied subject as it actually experiences itself: tbat is as an ambiguous and
"irreducible amalgam"(74) of facticities and freedom.
Reflecting on Beauvoir's famous sentence, "one is not born, but ratber
becomes a woman," Moi's empbasis is on the word "becomes." How one
becomes a woman does indeed require having been born witb a specific
kind of biological body." However, one does not "become" only one's
sex—or one's gender. "Tbe woman I bave become," writes Moi, "is a fully
embodied buman being whose being cannot be reduced to her sexual dif-
ference be it natural or cultural" (78). Thus Moi goes on to criticize tbe
concept of "gender identity" as a reifying closure on the fluidity of indi-
vidual experience (81-83). For our lived experience is built on many otber
things tbat "per se bave nothing to do with sexual difference" (78): "a
woman is a buman being as mucb as sbe is a woman" (83).
Tbe final section of tbe essay considers some cases discussed by feminist
legal tbeorists, in order to sbow in a more applied fashion bow the sex/
gender distinction may reify difference and fail to belp us respond to the
complexities of embodied existence. However, it is not clear to me wbere
Moi's reading of Beauvoir finally leaves ber politically. Arguably it leads
ber implicitly (and consonant with her move beyond poststructuralism)
toward a post-poststructuralist revision of humanism: to a political dis-
300 Sonia Kmks
E M B O D I M E N T , A M B I G U I T Y , AND F E M I N I S T E T H I C S
In previous sections I have focused on works that estahlish Beauvoir's
theoretical distance from Sartre and that draw from her a nondualistic
and nonreductionist account of feminine embodiment. However, such
undertakings necessarily interweave also with questions ahout values and
ethics, for Beauvoir's "existential" preoccupations with individual free-
dom and responsihility and with self-other relations (be they of oppression
or mutuality) are profoundly implicated in her accounts of emhodied ex-
perience.
In her essay in The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, "Beauvoir's Old
Age," Deutscher takes Beauvoir's treatment of aging as a vantage point
from which to explore how certain specificities of emhodiment may shape
our practical possibilities and "impinge" on freedom. Analyzing old age re-
quires Beauvoir to reformulate Sartre's views on our absolute and inde-
structible "ontological" freedom, and his consequent assertions that we
have full responsihility for our own lives and fall into "had faith" when we
seek to deny it. Deutscher skillfully conjoins readings of The Second Sex and
Old Age, pointing out that "[Beauvoir's] depiction of aged bodies intercon-
nects with her depiction of sexed hodies" (301). For Beauvoir, she agues, not
only our hodily ability to act in the world hut also the incapacities of our hod-
304 Sonia Kruks
ies—the "I cannots" that we often encounter the most sharply in aging— are
at once physical and yet never merely physical. Rather, "biological facts [for
example, the shortness of hreath which makes one 'unable' to climb
mountains any more] are always already synthesized with historical, social,
and psychological factors" (289-90). For women and the aged, and especial-
ly for aged women, these "I cannots" receive their meaning within a partic-
ular social context: one of devaluation, of heing cast as Other. Deutscher
notes that in The Second Sex Beauvoir still regards many (although not all)
women who accept "feminine weakness" as in "had faith"; they hear a
moral responsihility for their oppressed status hecause, since they enjoy
"ontological" freedom, they remain free to reject such feminine character-
istics as "weakness." But in Old Age, Deutscher argues, Beauvoir acknowl-
edges a far greater "impingement" of hoth physical and social constraints
not only on our field of practical action but also, thereby, on our ontologi-
cal freedom; for, "if the social status of one's emhodiment leads to one's ex-
periences ofthe world in terms ofthe 'cannot,' the status of one's ontologi-
cal freedom is altered" (290). Responsihility for one's failures is now viewed
as profoundly mitigated by one's situation, and Beauvoir's judgmental
tone toward traditionally "feminine" women has shifted.
Fredrika Scarth, in The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de
Beauvoir, also addresses the ambiguities of freedom and embodiment as she
seeks to develop a difference-sensitive ethics from The Second Sex. Scarth,
more than Deutscher, claims that Beauvoir's account of "the subject" in
The Second Sex is already radically different from Sartre's. Beauvoir, she ar-
gues, rejects Sartre's ideal of the sharply demarcated "absolute subject" as
an illusion, and she instead emphasizes a more permeahle, less autono-
mous, embodied subject, one that in The Second Sex she descrihes as "this
strange amhiguity of existence made body" (cited on 164). It is men's fear-
ful refusal of this amhiguity and their projection onto women of the
menacing, uncontrollable aspects of their own embodiment that give rise
to the construction of woman as Other in patriarchal society. As Beauvoir
famously writes of this projection: "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute-
she is the Other." By contrast, the acceptance ofthe amhiguities of our em-
hodied existence-our acknowledgment, as Scarth puts it, of "the other
within"—initiates the possihility of a feminist ethics in which generosity and
openness to others in their differences are core values.
Sonia Kmks 305
BEAUVOIR'S T I M E / O U R T I M E
There are significant disagreements among the authors I have discussed
here about how to read Beauvoir, as well as differences in emphasis, stance,
or style. However, what these recent treatments of Beauvoir have in com-
mon is their return to her work as a site at which we may address impasses
that confront feminist theory today. Taken together, they point us beyond
unmitigated poststructuralism, toward a post-poststructuralism that reaf-
firms the importance for feminism of retrieving the lived experiences of
emhodiment and of overcoming not only biological but also discursive
forms of reductionism. Explicitly or implicitly then, they also reaffirm, with
Beauvoir, the importance for feminism of focusing (or refocusing) on
ethics: on questions of freedom and agency, of responsihility toward others
and generosity, and of formulating an ethical feminist politics.
What we also learn from these recent works is ahout the remarkable fe-
cundity of Beauvoir's texts. Each of these authors engages in a productive
reading of Beauvoir and skillfully reinserts her as a significant interlocutor
within current feminist dehates. No longer the iconic "Mother of Us All,"
today the "Renaissance" Beauvoir has hecome a major theoretical source.
She is a thinker with and through whom we may critically engage our
own present.
Sonia Kmks 307
N O T E S
1. Mary Dietz, "Introduction: Debating Simone de Beauvoir," Signs 18 (Autumn 1992): 78.
2. Preface, 245; Mary Lowenthai Felstiner, "Seeing The Second Sex through the Second
Wave," 247-76; Jo-Ann Fuchs, "Female Eroticism in The Secmd Sex," 304-13; Michele Le
Doeuff, "Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism," 277-89, esp. 277-78; all in Feminist
Studies 6 (Summer 1980).
3. Penelope Deutscher, "The Notorious Contradictions of Simone de Beauvoir," in her
Yielding Geraier (London: Routledge, 1997), 169-93.
4. Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," Signs 1 (Autumn 1981): 13-35; Elaine Marks and Is-
abelle de Courtivron, ed.. New trench Feminism (New York: Schocken, 1981). For a fine
account of how "French feminism" came to be constituted as an intellectual genre in
the United States-a genre that bore only a limited resemblance to what was actually
going on among feminists in France at the time-see Claire Moses, "Made in America:
'French Feminism' in Academia," Feminist Studies 24 (Summer 1998): 241-74.
5. Toril Moi, Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 22-23.
6. These publications include Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre, 2 vols., trans. Quintin
Hoare (New York: Arcade, 1992); youmal de guerre: septembre 1939-jamier 1941 (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1990), forthcoming in English as Beauvoir's Wartime Diary (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2006); A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, trans. Kate Leblanc,
ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (New York: New Press, 1998).
7. Sonia Kruks, "Gender and Subjectivity: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Femi-
nism," Signs 18 (Autumn 1992): 89-110, 92.1 have developed this argument more fully
in Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: C o r n e l l
University Press, 2001). See esp. chap. 2, in which I read Beauvoir with and against
Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.
8. Papers from the 1999 conference are published in Christine Delphy and Sylvie Chaper-
on, eds., Cinquantenaire du Deuxieme sexe (Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2003). Kristeva's talk,
"Beauvoir presente," was given at the Sorbonne in June 2003, at the (first ever) joint
meeting of the "Groupe d'etudes sartriennes" and the "International Simone de
Beauvoir Society." It has since been published (in French) in Simone de Beauvoir Studies 20
(2003-2004): 11-22. Also of note is the recent special issue of Lcs Temps Modemes (vol. 57,
juin-juillet 2002), edited by Michel Kail, "Presences de Simone de Beauvoir"; and
Catherine Rodgers, "Le deuxieme sexe" de Simmt de Beauvoir: Un Heritage amteste (Paris: L'Har-
mattan, 1998), which consists of interviews with French theorists-including Julia Kris-
teva, Sarah Kofman, Christine Delphy, Michele Le Doeuff, and others- about their
views of Beauvoir.
9. To give a sense of the extent of the "Renaissance," over the last decade more than a
dozen monographs have been published in English (or translated into English) that
address the interface between Beauvoir and feminist theory and/or feminist philoso-
phy. Key works, that I do not have space to discuss here, include: Nancy Bauer, 5i>mme
de Beauvoir: Philosophy and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Sarah
Fishwick, The Body in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir (New York: Peter Lang, 2002); Miriam
308 Sonia Kruks
Fraser, Identity without Selfhood: Simone de Beauvoir and Bisexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir: A Criti-
cal Introduction (Maiden, Mass.: Polity Press, 1998); Eleanore Holveck, Simone de Beauvoir's
Philosophy of Lived Experience: Literature and Metaphysics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield,
2002); Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex," trans.
Linda Schenk (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Joseph Mahon, Existen-
tialism, Feminism, and Simone de Beauvoir (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997); Jo-Ann Pilardi,
Simone de Beauvoir: Writing the Self—Philosophy Becomes Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Gree
wood Press, 1999); Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir, Gender, and Testimony (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999); and Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Si-
mone de Beauvoir (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996).
In addition, since 1995 there have been several introductory books designed for
teaching purposes and at least eight edited volumes and special journal issues on
Beauvoir. There are also numerous articles, extensive treatments of Beauvoir in more
general books on feminist theory, and a growing number of "nonfeminist" discus-
sions of her work within the disciplines of philosophy and French literature. For a
sampling of further sources, a bibliography of recent scholarship on Beauvoir may be
found in The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, and Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoi
(New York: Routledge, 2004), includes a helpful annotated bibliography.
10. Beauvoir's book was published in French as Le deuxieme sexe, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard,
1949) and was translated into English by the American biology professor, H.M. Parsh-
ley (New York: Knopf, 1953). Parshley was not trained in philosophy, made many
basic errors of translation, and extensively cut Beauvoir's text. The Second Sex has been
published in several editions, most recently in the United States with a new introduc-
tion by Deirdre Bair (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). However, Knopf has never
given permission for a new translation to be made. On the inadequacies ofthe transla-
tion see Margaret Simons, "The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What's Miss-
ing from The Second Sex" (1983), reprinted as chap. 5 of her Beauvoir and "The Second Sex."
For a more recent treatment of this topic, see Toril Moi, "While We Wait: Notes on
the English Translation of The Second Sex," Signs 27 (Summer 2002): 1005-35.
11. Richard Wright, whose novel Native Son Beauvoir had read in 1940, had extensive con-
tact with her in the postwar period. Les Temps Modemes, the radical monthly journal of
politics and ideas that she, Sartre, and others founded in 1945, published several trans-
lations of Wright's work (including Black Boy and various political pieces), and during
his visit to Paris in 1946 a friendship began that was to last many years.
12. Simone de Beauvoir, L'Amerique au jour le jour (Paris: Morihien, 1948). Translated by
Carol Cosman as America Day by Day (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
13. Simons is editing a series of seven volumes, forthcoming from University of Illinois
Press, that will provide translations into English of all of Beauvoir's presently untrans-
lated (and in some instances unpublished) works. The first volume, Simone de Beauvoir:
Philosophical Writings, was published in 2004, and the diary will be published in two vol-
umes, with volume one. Diary of a Philosophy Student, 1926-1927, appearing in late 2005.
14. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1990), 140. Emphasis added.
Sonia Kruks 309
15. It is striking that Butler has also dramatically shifted tone and preoccupations. Her re-
cent book. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004),
dwells extensively on inner experience and on ethical questions that would be hard to
accommodate within the framework of Gender Trouble. Her contribution to The Cam-
bridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, "Beauvoir on Sade: Making Sexuality into an Ethic,"
is notably more sympathetic toward Beauvoir.
16. The term is Michele Le DoeufFs, cited in Deutscher, Yielding Gender, 173-74.
17. Moi's volume consists of a new preface and the two long essays that were previously
published in her 1999 collection. What Is a Woman' and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1999).
18. For the earliest treatment of the affinities between Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, see
my essay, "Simone de Beauvoir: Teaching Sartre about Freedom," Simone de Beauvoir
Studies 5 (1988): 74-80.1 elaborate the argument more fully in my Situation and Human Exis-
tence: Freedom Subjectivity and Society (London: Routledge, 1990).
19. Moi (in Sex, Gender, and the Body: The Student Edition of "The Second Sex," reviewed in this
essay) is not unaware of the complex issue of transexuality as she makes this claim.
However, she points out that "a concept ('man,' 'woman') that is blurred at the edges
is neither meaningless nor useless. . . . Hemaphroditism, transvestism, transsexuality,
and so on show up the fuzziness at the edge of sexual difference, but the concepts
'man' and woman' or the opposition between them are not thereby threatened by
disintegration" (39).
20. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 103: "Human existence will force us to revise our usual
notion of necessity and contingency, because it is the transformation of contingency
into necessity by the act of repetition." We might also want to know whether this no-
tion of repetition is significantly different from Butler's notion (in Gender Trouble) of
gender as repetitive performance under duress-or whether perhaps Butler's notion is
not more indebted to French existentialism than she acknowledges!