Ask anyone outside academic circles and Simone
de Beauvoir is best known as the partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, the ‘other
half’ of the existentialist movement. The myth of the de Beauvoir/Sartre
romance through which de Beauvoir wrote some of her most agonizing stories (A
Woman Destroyed) is legend, yet she was much more than a mere ‘slave of
passion’ an oppressed partner who struggled to gain the philosophical and
literary acclaim of her so-called ‘better half’. To some extent the Cambridge Companion manages to
re-address this balance €“ by setting out her major thoughts and philosophical
achievements alongside those of her contemporaries. However, as a collection of
14 essays aimed at re-setting de Beauvoir amongst her (male) philosophers, the
authors of this collection face an immediate problem: de Beauvoir did not class
herself as a philosopher and her feminist sympathies remain doubtful – an issue
which is best illustrated in Susan J. Brison’s paper: ‘Beauvoir and feminism:
interview and reflections.’

A further discrepancy is that, whilst the Cambridge
Companions are marketed at general readers, they presuppose not only a
thorough knowledge of the author under consideration (whether Hobbes, Foucault
or, in this case, de Beauvoir) but the author’s relation to other
philosophers.  This is not intended as a criticism of those scholars who have
sought to place de Beauvoir in context (re: Eva Gothlin’s excellent essay on
the links between de Beauvoir and Heidegger) for it would be an impossible task
to grapple with, in this case, the language of Heidegger in such a brief paper.
That his language is difficult to define and would require a chapter in-itself
to explain key terms such as ‘thrownness’ may be forgivable, but it soon
becomes clear that de Beauvoir’s own use of language, e.g. ‘ambiguity’ fares no
better. If philosophy often repeats itself in twists and turns but swims
ultimately in its own history, then the original thought of any thinker surely
lies in questioning its own tradition which Claudia Card recognizes as
intrinsic to de Beauvoir’s thought, specifically to her major philosophical,
and much ignored, text, The Ethics of Ambiguity. Yet even here, it is
unclear how, standing alone (that is, alone from Sartre) her work should be
read. Though Barbara S. Andrew’s essay "Beauvoir’s place in philosophical
thought" focuses her work within the existentialist movement, its opening
claim ‘Simon de Beauvoir was an existentialist phenomenologist’ sets the tone
for the kind of readership the Companion expects. Though Andrew offers
interesting biographical information and later attempts to define both ‘existentialism’
and ‘phenomenology’ their meanings remain unclear for the non-academic, as when
she says, ‘existential literature tries to express €¦ the human tendency to ask:
why?’ (Andrew, 26). Arguably most literature and certainly all philosophy aims
to question why (?) Notwithstanding these discrepancies more prominent
admittances relate to what de Beauvoir meant by ‘meaning’ and ‘freedom’.
Freedom is a term which for de Beauvoir remains confused and, in its dependence
on the other (which echoes Martin Buber and Levinas) an impossible realization.
If one accepts Judith Butler’s assertion that freedom for de Beauvoir is "an
unconscious dimension" (Butler 178) it would seem to fly in the face of
what most of us, even those limited in philosophical understanding, would recognize
as being "free", for if unconscious, it would seem to be our greatest
passivity.

Though this collection will be invaluable for
anyone studying a PhD on de Beauvoir, its focus on de Beauvoir’s philosophical
discourse should be disconcerting to any woman working in philosophy today
(noting of course that the entire collection is written by women writers); for
it would seem impossible to be a woman & a writer/philosopher who writes on
femininity or female oppression without being labeled ‘feminist’. This may not
be problematic for those philosophers who regard their work as particularly
integral to the woman’s movement and have no issue to make between woman’s
rights and human rights but it is a label that most women academics cannot
escape €“ and conveniently puts us in a box in which the mainstream is still
that of the agent/subject. For those of us who were born during or after the
feminist movement and who distinguish human rights (including women’s rights)
from those of feminist theory €“ there is nothing "feminist" in a
personal politics which seeks to include all persons in its polemic
whilst recognizing difference.

That de Beauvoir’s feminism remains
controversial is illustrated in Judith Butler’s paper, ‘Beauvoir on Sade:
making sexuality into an ethic’ which reveals the ambiguities that lie deep
within de Beauvoir’s political thinking. Although, reasonably, there are no
examples of de Sade’s work, it is difficult for those readers who remain
unaware of de Sade’s blatant misogyny and description of torture to make sense
of de Beauvoir’s comments. Whilst Butler is not uncritical, her analysis of de
Beauvoir on Sade falls far short of a realistic (or indeed, feminist)
interpretation for if Sade had aimed his desire not at ‘woman’ but Jews, blacks
or gay men it is doubtful whether his works would now (still) receive any kind
of critical acclaim. Given that his infliction of cruelty and nihilism is aimed
at the female body surprisingly (and somewhat infamously) de Beauvoir does her
best to empathize, and at one point seems genuinely to offer sympathy for his "plight"
(as sadist), in her text "Must We Burn Sade?"

When Butler comments,
‘Beauvoir makes it clear that feminism and philosophy ought not to participate
in anti-intellectual trends’ (Butler 169) the only appropriate response would
seem to be: then why write about Sade, let alone to try to empathize with him?
If we accept de Beauvoir as a feminist then we must accept her as one of those
feminists €“ whom do not fill a unique place in feminist theorizing €“ whose
philosophy does not appeal to women and is unlikely to liberate women’s
identity from patriarchal culture because it is clearly illustrative of a
female condition that de Beauvoir herself €“ according to the writings in the
Companion, failed to recognize. The fact that De Beauvoir attempted to turn de
Sade into a serious philosopher surely underpins her failure to recognize her
own €“ or other women’s €“ oppression, which one does not have to be a "feminist"
to realize. Making recourse to de Sade champions his anthropocentric tendencies
to harm and dominate women. This is reminiscent of those battered women who
seek excuses for their partner’s behavior. As Butler admits, ‘she makes
allowances for Sade that may seem questionable.’ (Butler 186)

The Cambridge Companion offers a view of De
Beauvoir that shows her work to fill an insubstantial part of twentieth century
philosophical thinking but one which may, for all we know, have heralded
post-feminism in response to de Beauvoir’s post-war text The Second Sex,
held in the 1970s as the principal text of the feminist movement. For all its
controversy (see Susan James ‘Complicity and Slavery in The Second Sex‘
and Susan Brison’s paper ‘Beauvoir and feminism: interview and reflection.’),
it is questionable whether this alone is sufficient to place de Beauvoir within
the (male) academic tradition. This is not the fault of the authors of this
collection €“ although they could be criticized for attempting to add depth to a
thinker whose greatest achievement lies in her novels (see Mary Sirridge’s
excellent essay: ‘Philosophy in Beauvoir’s fiction’). As for De Beauvoir
herself, the feminist/anti-female stance remains complex and certainly
ambiguous.

In conclusion, the Cambridge Companion to
Simone de Beauvoir is not a general introduction to a woman writer of the
twentieth century €“ one whom once wrote that she aimed to express metaphysics
in everyday descriptions €“ hence the novel form, but a series of essays aimed
at the postgraduate student who has already fixed de Beauvoir’s place within
both the feminist movement and the pre-postmodern era of existentialist
thought. Her real power and critical claim lies not in her philosophical texts
€“ in which the subject is always deluded, always in a losing position (see Penelope
Deutscher ‘Beauvoir’s Old Age) and always subject to dominant forces of
which s/he has little power but in the power of her literature which would
seem, contrary to de Beauvoir’s existentialism, to express something
essentially feminine, something tantamount to a female condition.

©
Eccy de Jonge, 2004

Eccy de Jonge is lecturer in philosophy at Middlesex University and the author of Spinoza
and Deep Ecology; challenging traditional approaches to environmentalism (Aldershot and Burlington, VA: Ashgate: 2004)

Categories: Philosophical