Simone de Beauvoir (Philosophy)

Une introduction à l’œuvre de l’écrivaine et philosophe française à travers une sélection de douze textes commentés qui présentent les différentes facettes et les grands thèmes de sa pensée : l’existentialisme, le marxisme, la morale, la justice, la liberté, l’aliénation, l’oppression et le rapport à la littérature.

No se nace mujer: se llega a serlo. Ningún destino biológico, psíquico o económico define la figura que reviste en el sen de sociedad la hembra humana; es el conjunto de la civilización el que elabora ese producto intermedio entre el macho y el castrado al que se califica de FEMENINO. únicamente la mediación de otro puede constituir a un individuo como un Otro . En tanto que existe para sí, el niño podría concebirse como sexualmente diferenciado. Entre las chicas y los chicos el cuerpo es al principio la irradiación de una subjetividad, el instrumento que efectúa la comprensión del mundo.

Feminist epistemology seeks to position knowledge as embodied and situated. In Le deuxième sexe, Simone de Beauvoir established the difficulty of claiming knowledge when one stands outside the dominant viewpoint: a woman is viewed as a peculiarity and her knowledge discredited because it is said to come only from her own experience, also a peculiarity. Much later, in a similar vein, Haraway would argue for a situated epistemology; and black American scholars called for a feminism that takes into account the lived experiences of women of color, that is, the intersection of oppressions of race, class, and gender, as in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s seminal article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1988). To what extent does de Beauvoir’s work set the stage for later feminist epistemology and foreshadow intersectional feminism? Part of the answer to that question is found in de Beauvoir’s texts that highlight privilege. Examining de Beauvoir’s Privilèges (1955), Sonia Kruks writes that, for de Beauvoir, those of the ruling class have great trouble honestly understanding their situation; to reconcile their dominant position with a critique of inequality and/or injustice requires Sartre’s “bad faith,” because their privilege depends on the exploitation of others. In Les belles images (1966) illustrates this difficulty. The protagonist Laurence questions her position as a fairly wealthy woman and her responsibility to those who are less fortunate. She wonders about the significance of feminism; it has not given her a method to analyze her position as a privileged white woman. When Laurence critiques the detached way of thinking she has learned from her academic father, the novel foreshadows feminist epistemology that calls for situated knowledge, and as she begins to empathize with the poverty others face, it hints at a feminism that deals with more than privileged women’s position in relation to men.  

The dissertation is available here (open access after an embargo period) https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/3423aaa4-b224-4d51-bfe1-20f66fb049ca

What does it mean to be of a particular gender? I answer this question with an account of genders as dynamic categories, exploring the analogy between what genders are (e.g., men or women) and what genres are (e.g., Novels, Ballads, or Hip-Hop). For instance, due to its relation to other and earlier pieces, we recognize, e.g., a particular song as Hip-Hop. However, the piece will also develop that genre further. Likewise, e.g., the category of men emerges, persists and transforms through a specific sort of response of individuals to earlier supposed men, which emerges in social interactions.

Drawing on critical and (trans-)feminist theory, phenomenologist, enactivist, and systems theoretical approaches, I show that gender categories themselves develop in a dynamic between three elements: (1) at any given time, there is an enactment class of individuals ambiguously belonging to the category in question; (2) these individuals are, in an embodied and intersubjective way, enacted as practical reinterpretations of earlier members of that category; (3) this unfolds in a matrix of hermeneutic and material relations, which loop with both the class and the enaction.

Thereby, that an individual is gendered, emerges between two levels of enaction, that of bodily people and that of the dynamic between them. As what an individual is gendered in enaction, however, is constituted by relations within and beyond that situation. This responsive realization gives rise to feedbacking histories of acts, people, relations, and enactment classes, thus explaining how gender can be both solid and open to change.

Interrogée au sujet de son autobiographie par Madeleine Chapsal lors d'un entretien paru en volume, Les Écrivains en personne (Julliard, 1960), Beauvoir eut, au sujet de l'interprétation des Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, une réaction pour le moins inattendue lorsque l'intervieweuse suggéra que Zaza avait échoué là où l'écrivaine avait réussi : « Elle n'a pas échoué, elle est morte. » Aux yeux de tous les lecteurs, tel est pourtant bien le cas : la mort, quelle qu'en soit la cause, est bien un échec. Comment expliquer, sans cela, la culpabilité sur laquelle Beauvoir achève son autobiographie ? Plus étonnant encore, Beauvoir ajoutait : « mourir est la solution la plus absolue », et inversait l'interprétation la plus vraisemblable des Mémoires : « on pourrait dire que j'ai échoué dans la mesure où j'ai vécu et qu'elle a réussi dans la mesure où elle est morte. Qu'elle soit morte ou qu'elle ait vécu, cela ne change rien à la qualité qu'elle avait à 20 ans 1 ». Jouant avec l'idée sartrienne selon laquelle la mort transforme « la vie en destin » (selon une formule initalement malrucienne), Beauvoir suggérait, semble-t-il, que le sens d'un destin est indépendant de la mort. Mais peut-être sa relecture était-elle plus radicale, anticipant ici sur l'idée que la vie, quelle que soit l'authenticité des choix pris par un individu, est une série de renoncements, autrement dit est toujours en deçà des espoirs qu'une jeunesse a pu nourrir – « je croyais, quand j'étais jeune, que j'avais une vie devant moi ; mais une vie n'est jamais ni devant ni derrière soi, ce n'est pas quelque chose qu'on a, c'est quelque chose qui passe 2 … » Échec ou non ? La question reste posée. Plus encore, elle confère au récit une puissante tension narrative, autrement dit sous-tend les destins conjoints de Simone et de Zaza d'attente faite d'« anticipation » mais « teintée d'incertitude » et propre à conférer « des traits passionnels » à notre lecture.

Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 masterpiece, The Second Sex, is rarely considered a canonical text worthy of being studied within the history of political thought. Even within feminist scholarship, although it is often cited or acknowledged, only short excerpts, usually the introduction, are read carefully. This essay argues that the reception of The Second Sex has been marred by overly emotional and ambivalent responses, in part a result of its literary style. The Second Sex is written as a situated dramaturgical staging of conversation. Beauvoir puts men into conversation about women in Volume I and invites women into conversation with each other about their experiences in Volume II. These literary techniques invite readers of The Second Sex to also participate in the conversation, a conversation Beauvoir hopes will change the way we see and talk about sexual difference, conditions of oppression, and how to enlarge the space for freedom.

Le rapport de Sartre à l'oppression féminine peut être analysé en observant le moyen par lequel, dans ses oeuvres littéraires, le philosophe reproduit des stéréo-types misogynes ou, comme le dit Simone de Beauvoir, sédimente des traces de phallocratie. Dans ce sens, on peut dire qu'il y a une nette dissymétrie entre personnages masculins et personnages féminins dans la fiction et le théâtre de Sartre. Tandis que les premiers sont principalement définis par leur action et les choix que ces actions expriment, au contraire les seconds ont une marge de manoeuvre fort limi-tée. L'oeuvre littéraire sartrienne manque complètement d'héroïnes et, même si Sartre a toujours refusé toutes formes d'essentialisme, les femmes finissent cons-tamment par se conformer à des stéréotypes essentialistes. A la différence des personnages masculins, qui sont tenacement projetés vers la transcendance, elles sont toujours représentées comme des êtres sans action, éthérées, presque sans corps, comme la jeune poitrinaire rencontrée par le professeur Gaillard dans L'ange du morbide. Si le réel est le lieu de l'action morale, de l'engagement, les femmes, au contraire, finissent par représenter la tentation de l'imaginaire, de l'intériorité, de la passivité. Privées de chaque attitude à la transcendance, elles sont perçues comme des obstacles à l'action ou comme des instruments utiles au dynamisme masculin. La défense du philosophe, selon laquelle le romancier n'a pas de responsabilités pour les tòpoi contenues dans ses oeuvres, car il a simple-ment représenté la femme sociale telle qu'elle est dans la société, n'est que par-tiellement convaincante. De fait, la représentation des femmes est gouvernée par un seul schéma essentialiste, celui de l'opposition entre physis et antiphysis. La réalité qui veut que leurs corps soient annexés, par essence, à la nature, à travers la mise en évidence des aspects les plus triviaux de leur matérialité, comme les fesses adipeuses et tombantes et la chaire molle est, dans ce sens-là, une autre caractéristique de l'oeuvre sartrienne. 1 Il semble donc être valable pour Sartre ce qu'il reprochait à l'esthétique du Tintoretto: la réduction de la femme à de pures oripeaux de l'oeuvre d'art, à un prétexte pour la narration, à un objet de l'histoire, où la belle devient instrument pour la sanctification de l'acte masculin, comme dans le San Giorgio uccide il drago ou la Strage degli innocenti. Toutefois ce n'est pas sur ces points que nous nous arrêterons. Notre tentative, au contraire, sera plutôt de chercher à tracer les contours de la présence ou, plu-tôt, de l'absence d'une théorie sartrienne de l'oppression féminine, qui constitue le deuxième moyen pour approcher l'oeuvre de Sartre d'un point de vue du genre. Ainsi, on peut d'abord se référer à l'élaboration de sa philosophie politique et, en particulier, au thème de la liberté, véritable fondement de sa pensée.

La película LOS AMANTES DEL CAFE FLORE despierta una serie temas e inquietudes que permite abrir el juego de la filosofia, de la historia, las relaciones humanas, del amor, del clima de época de una Europa que pasa por todas las etapas y experiencias en los años que van desde 1929 a 1960. Y alli SARTRE y SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR que cruzan definitivamente sus vidas, sin atarse mutuamente , pero sin separarse nunca.

ÖZET
Kadına yönelik olan düşmanlık ve önyargı tekelinin kırılması için bir mücadele hareketi başlatan feminist hareket, kadının ikinci cins olmadığını ve erkeklerle eşit haklar ve özgürlüklere sahip olduğunu dile getirmek suretiyle kadınların her alanda haklarını arama çabasını dile getirmektedir. Kadına yönelik ötekileştirme ve önyargı ilkçağlardan modern zamanlara kadar her dönemde var olmuştur. Modern dönemde bunların aşılması için çaba harcayan feminist hareket, sanatta da kadın çalışmalarının gücünü gösterme ve kadın sanatçıların varlığını duyurma çabası içinde olan feminist sanat hareketiyle işbirliği içinde hareket etmiştir. Kadın çalışmalarının gücünü fırsat eşitliği için bir hak arama çabası olarak gören feminist sanat ve sanatçılar, kadın çalışmalarını duyurmak ve kadın emeğinin değerini göstermek için görsel, yazılı ve eylemsel hareketlerle seslerini duyurmaya ve sessiz kalan kadınların sesi olmaya çalışmışlardır. Bunun için şimdiye kadar üreten ve düşünen sanatçı, düşünür ve eleştirmen pek çok kadının eserlerini sergileme ve her alanda kadının da üretici, yaratıcı olduğunu gösterme çabasına girişmişlerdir. Birer düşünür olan Weil ve Murdoche, eserlerinde daha önceki paradigmaların erkek egemen olduğunu ve bu nedenle erkek aklın kadınları ötekileştirerek erkekleri egemen ve aşkın hale getirdiğini söylemişlerdir. Kadınlara yönelik güzellik, çirkinlik, aptallık, yücelik, kıskançlık gibi birtakım klişe kalıplandırmaların dışında, kadının üretken gücünün her şeyden bağımsızlığını göstermek temel amaçları, kadının ahlaksal, dinsel, mitsel gelenekten gelen önyargılara cesaretle karşı duruşu da hareketin itici güç ve motivasyonu olmuştur.
ABSTRACT
The feminist movement, which initiated a struggle for the breaking of the monopoly of hostility and prejudice towards women, states the effort of searching for women's rights in every field by expressing that the woman is not the second sex and has equal rights and freedoms with the men. Women's marginalization and prejudice existed in all periods from the early ages to the modern times. The feminist movement, which strives to overcome them in the modern era, has worked in collaboration with the feminist art movement, which strives to show the power of women's work in art and to promote the existence of female artists. Feminist art and artists, who see the power of women's studies as a search for rights for equality of equality, tried to make their voices heard in visual, written and action movements and to be the voice of women who remain silent in order to announce women's work and to show the value of women's labor. To this end, the artist, thinker and critic who has been producing and thinking so far has attempted to exhibit the works of many women and to try to show that women are creative and creative in every field. Weil and Murdoche, one of the thinkers, stated that earlier paradigms were male-dominated in their works, and thus male mind alienated women, making men more dominant and transcendent. Apart from some stereotypical moldings such as beauty, ugliness, stupidity, exaltation, jealousy for women, the main aims of women's productive power to show the independence of all, the boldness of women against the prejudices of moral, religious and mythical tradition has been the driving force and motivation of the movement.

'The explanatory power of the concept of the Other has led to its broad adoption in cultural and social criticism. Like all concepts the concept of the Other can illuminate, but it can also obscure meaning. Routine application of a received idea can become a barrier to thinking. Specifically in the case of the concept of the Other, as a consequence perhaps of its promiscuous reproduction in the social sciences, the unspoken presuppositions in the theory of the Other are rarely made explicit.

If we trace the intellectual development of the theory of the Other we can see that it always contained an absolute opposition that could not be overcome. The theory of the Other is in essence a revision of Hegel's 'Master-Slave dialectic'. It was from Hegel's account of the clash between Master and Slave that Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre took the categorical opposition of Self and Other and made it into an absolute.

Phenomenologically grounded research on pregnancy is a thriving area of activity in feminist studies and related disciplines. But what has been largely omitted in this area of research is the experience of childbirth itself. This paper proposes a phenomenological analysis of childbirth inspired by the work of Merleau-Ponty. The paper proceeds from the conviction that the concept of anonymity can play a critical role in explicating the affective structure of childbirth. This is evident in at least two respects. First, the concept of anonymity gives structural specificity to the different levels of bodily existence at work in childbirth. Second, the concept of anonymity can play a powerful explanatory role in accounting for the sense of strangeness accompanying childbirth. To flesh these ideas out, I focus on two attributes of birth, sourced from first-person narratives of childbirth. The first aspect concerns the sense of leaving one's body behind during childbirth while the second aspect concerns the sense of strangeness accompanying the first encounter with the baby upon successful delivery. I take both of these aspects of childbirth seriously, treating them as being instructive not only of the uniqueness of childbirth but also revealing something important about bodily life more generally. Accordingly, the paper unfolds in three stages. First, I will critically explore the concept of anonymity in Merleau-Ponty; second, I will apply this concept to childbirth; finally, I will provide an outline of how childbirth sheds light on the broader nature of bodily life.

This paper has a double purpose. Firstly, it is meant to present an intellectual tool for analyzing the possibilities in the way relationships evolve; I call this tool the tree model of proximity. (The name comes from the fact that the development of this tool has been inspired by an Aristotelian idea, which has come to be referred to as the tree model of reality.) The tree model of proximity is a tool for modelling interpersonal closeness and understanding how closeness arises via consensual decisions. Secondly, this paper is an attempt to apply the tool to analyze a specific kind of relationship within the polyamorous conceptual framework: a metamour relationship, meaning a non-romantic bond between persons x and z, who are both romantic partners of person y. By focusing my analysis on metamour relationships, I wish to draw attention to them. I claim that although romantic bonds typically rouse more interest when discussing and defining polyamory, we should not underestimate the importance of non-romantic connections within the polyamorous network. Despite being less visible, these bonds are significant and constitutive of polyamory.

One of the most dated aspects of The Second Sex might seem to be its portrayal of the dynamics of romantic love between women and men. Beauvoir suggests that women seek to channel their lack of access to transcendent projects through attachments to male lovers and husbands. Yet, in the nearly seventy years since The Second Sex was published, women in Western societies have gained access to sites of transcendence traditionally reserved for men by means of going into the workplace and gaining greater access to education. Nonetheless, I argue in this presentation that Beauvoir's account of romantic love remains one of the most relevant aspects of her feminist legacy. Even as women have made great strides in many domains of social life, including those that closely relate to romantic love (such as sexual expression, marriage, and parenting expectations), contemporary practices of dating reveal a strikingly enduring asymmetry among men and women in heterosexual romantic love. I draw on recent arguments from sociologist Eva Illouz that suggest that the advances made by the feminist movement in the latter half of the twentieth century led to a reaction in the conception of masculinity: specifically, masculinity was redefined in terms of the ability to withhold affection toward women. This structure of 'commitment phobia' has become all the more ubiquitous with the rise of online dating platforms, apps, and millennial hookup culture. Precisely in an age when women have greater access than ever before to actualizing their own transcendence, reactionary impulses lead to heterosexual women's continuing efforts to seek transcendence through men by valorizing finding a romantic partner above all other pursuits.

Among philosophers, Simone de Beauvoir is unique in treating childhood as a philosophical phenomenon. In both The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, she examines the relationship between childhood and human freedom and considers its role in the development of subjectivity. Despite this, few sustained analyses of her treatment of the phenomenon exist. I argue that Beauvoir’s conception of childhood is not uniform, but changes from The Ethics of Ambiguity to The Second Sex. While the former presents children as lacking moral freedom, as not fully sovereign individuals, the latter suggests that children are just as free as adults. When children do not fully possess or exercise freedom, it is not because they are not in a position to do so, but rather because they are hindered by various social institutions. I find this position useful for developing a phenomenological account of childhood as a site for freedom. Hence, Beauvoir becomes a source for thinking of issues in philosophical anthropology concerning the temporality of human existence and the nature of human agency over a lifespan.

"30 años sin Simone. Reflexiones sobre el pensamiento de una joven formal" es un libro sobre Simone de Beauvoir que reúne colaboraciones de las integrantes del Taller de Teoría y Crítica Literaria Diana Morán, editado por Nora Pasternac y Berenice Romano Hurtado. La descarga es gratuita

Hayatımız boyunca kıskançlığa dair pek çok sözü işitmişizdir. Bununla ilgili sözleri işitmemizin yanında kıskançlık denen duyguyu yaşamışızdır. Peki, kıskançlık denen o duygu, kişilerde değişiklik gösterir mi? Erkek ya da kadın fark eder mi? Doktor, mühendis, filozof der mi?
Kıskançlığa dair duyduğumuz sözlerden bir tanesi de şudur: ‘’Başkalarını kıskanma, onlarla uğraşma.’’diye başlayan ve devamında ‘’Ha bire kıskançlık duyan insan, iç huzurundan yoksun olan bir insandır.’’ Sözün doğruluğu su götürmez bir gerçek olarak hayatımızda örnekleriyle yaşatmaktadır kendini. İnsanlar, bugün uzaktan da olsa başkalarının sahip olduklarını, yeteneklerini vb. kıskanırlar. Kıskanma eylemleri içerisinde ‘’neden bende yok’’, ‘’niye ben bu şeye sahip değilim’’tarzından sorular sormaya başlarlar. Halbuki bu sorular, kıskanan insana bir şey katmaz, kıskanan insandan götürür. Üstelik bu sorular, insanların iç huzurundan da götürür ve geriye huzursuz bir insan bırakır. Söz konusu olan duygu erkek kadın, doktor, mühendis yahut filozof fark etmeksizin her çeşit insanda görülür. La Rocherfauld’un dediği üzere ‘’Kıskanç olmayan bir insan bulmak, çıkar düşkünü olmayan birinsan bulmaktan daha zordur.’’ Yazıda kıskançlığı Simone de Beauvoir’nın ‘’Kadınlığımın Hikâyesi’’isimli eserindeki ‘’Kıskançlık’’bölümünden ve de Simone Weil ekseninde karşılaştırarak incelenecektir.

Is feminist phenomenology just a phenomenological inquiry into the specific phenomenon of "woman," or carried out from the specific point of view of a woman? In other words, is it a species of applied phenomenology, where phenomenological method or practice is taken as complete and competent, and simply put to work by a new subject or in relation to a new object? If this is the case, sexed embodiment may be disclosed as the origin of meanings and values that have previously been missing from the phenomeno-logical account-but it is a version of phenomenological practice that has already been established which yields the disclosure. When feminist phenomenologists commit to this line of thinking about what feminist phenomenology is, they find all the resources needed to do feminist phenomenology already there in Edmund Husserl, or Emmanuel Levinas, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, waiting to be set to work on the phenomenon of woman. But does the phenomenon suffer in the process? Or does feminist phenomenology pose a challenge or even a threat to phenomenology as it has been practiced? Is it, in other words, disruptive and transformative in its nature and its aims? Does the object of concern for feminist phenomenology or the particularity of the subject undertaking the inquiry shape things in such a way that the inherited practice is not simply deployed, but destroyed? And if so, what emerges as the practice of feminist phenomenology from the ashes? If feminist phenomenology is not simply an act of destruction , what else is it? In other words, what is the difference of feminist phenomenology? In what follows I approach these questions first through an examination of what two feminist phenomenologists, Sara Heinämaa and Johanna Oksala, each with very different relations to the phenomenological canon, have to say about feminist phenomenolog-ical practice. I then turn to Simone de Beauvoir, whom we might credit with the distinction of being the first feminist phenomenologist, to try to articulate what is different about her phenomenology, i.e., what those of us who practice feminist phenomenology might count as a positive inheritance. Both of these discussions require talking about feminist phenomenology rather than doing it, while the real difference of feminist phenomenol-ogy only emerges in the practice itself. In order to try to capture something about this difference, I take the phenomenon of shame as a case study, and compare three recent phenomenological accounts of shame. 1 Before embarking on this undertaking, however, it is necessary to clear away some debris. There is something that stands in the way, not only of feminist phenomenology, 1 Both in my account of Beauvoir's phenomenological practice and in my discussion of shame, I draw heavily on my other published work. I've designated these sections with footnotes in the text.

El siguiente artículo presenta de manera breve las líneas generales
que integran y caracterizan el proyecto de escritura de Simone de
Beauvoir, de la mano de la denominación que le ha otorgado la Dra. Olga
Grau Duhart: “escritura como proyecto global”, con el fin de posibilitar
una mejor lectura e interpretación de las múltiples obras de Beauvoir
que revelan un entretejimiento de ideas, conceptos, problemas y planteamientos
a través de un modo de escritura que difumina los límites
definitorios existentes entre la literatura y la filosofía.