Beauvoir's time/our time: The renaissance in simone de beauvoir studies

Feminist Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 286-309

  Kruks, Sonia ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 26444464332     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20459027     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. Mary Dietz, "Introduction: Debating Simone de Beauvoir," Signs 18 (Autumn 1992): 78.
2. Preface, 245;
3. Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, "Seeing The Second Sex through the Second Wave," 247-76;
4. Jo-Ann Fuchs, "Female Eroticism in The Second Sex," 304-13;
5. Michèle Le Doeuff, "Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism," 277-89, esp. 277-78;
6. all in Feminist Studies 6 (Summer 1980).
7. Penelope Deutscher, "The Notorious Contradictions of Simone de Beauvoir," in her Yielding Gender (London: Routledge, 1997), 169-93.
8. Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," Signs 7 (Autumn 1981): 13-35;
9. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, ed., New French Feminism (New York: Schocken, 1981).
10. 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.
11. Toril Moi, Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 22-23.
12. These publications include Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre, 2 vols., trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Arcade, 1992);
13. Journal de guerre: septembre 1939-janvier 1941 (Paris: Gallimard, 1990),
14. forthcoming in English as Beauvoir's Wartime Diary (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006);
15. A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, trans. Kate Leblanc, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (New York: New Press, 1998).
16. Sonia Kruks, "Gender and Subjectivity: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Feminism," Signs 18 (Autumn 1992): 89-110,
17. have developed this argument more fully in Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).
18. See esp. chap. 2, in which I read Beauvoir with and against Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.
19. Papers from the 1999 conference are published in Christine Delphy and Sylvie Chaperon, eds., Cinquantenaire du Deuxième sexe (Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2003).
20. Kristeva's talk, "Beauvoir présente," was given at the Sorbonne in June 2003, at the (first ever) joint meeting of the "Groupe d'études 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.
21. Also of note is the recent special issue of Les Temps Modernes (vol. 57, juin-juillet 2002), edited by Michel Kail, "Présences de Simone de Beauvoir";
22. and Catherine Rodgers, "Le deuxième sexe" de Simone de Beauvoir: Un Héritage contesté (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), which consists of interviews with French theorists-including Julia Kristeva, Sarah Kofman, Christine Delphy, Michèle Le Doeuff, and others- about their views of Beauvoir.
23. 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 philosophy. Key works, that I do not have space to discuss here, include: Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophy and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001);
24. Sarah Fishwick, The Body in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir (New York: Peter Lang, 2002);
25. Miriam Fraser, Identity without Selfhood: Simone de Beauvoir and Bisexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
26. Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 1998);
27. Eleanore Holveck, Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience: Literature and Metaphysics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002);
28. Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex," trans. Linda Schenk (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996);
29. Joseph Mahon, Existentialism, Feminism, and Simone de Beauvoir (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997);
30. Jo-Ann Pilardi, Simone de Beauvoir: Writing the Self-Philosophy Becomes Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999);
31. Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir, Gender, and Testimony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
32. and Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996).
33. 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" discussions 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,
34. and Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir (New York: Routledge, 2004), includes a helpful annotated bibliography.
35. Beauvoir's book was published in French as Le deuxième sexe, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949)
36. and was translated into English by the American biology professor, H.M. Parshley (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 introduction by Deirdre Bair (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).
37. However, Knopf has never given permission for a new translation to be made. On the inadequacies of the translation see Margaret Simons, "The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What's Missing from The Second Sex" (1983),
38. reprinted as chap. 5 of her Beauvoir and "The Second Sex. " For a more recent treatment of this topic,
39. see Toril Moi, "While We Wait: Notes on the English Translation of The Second Sex," Signs 27 (Summer 2002): 1005-35.
40. Richard Wright, whose novel Native Son Beauvoir had read in 1940, had extensive contact with her in the postwar period. Les Temps Modernes, the radical monthly journal of politics and ideas that she, Sartre, and others founded in 1945, published several translations 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.
41. Simone de Beauvoir, L'Amérique au jour le jour (Paris: Morihien, 1948).
42. Translated by Carol Cosman as America Day by Day (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
43. 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 untranslated (and in some instances unpublished) works. The first volume, Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, was published in 2004,
44. and the diary will be published in two volumes, with volume one, Diary of a Philosophy Student, 1926-1927, appearing in late 2005.
45. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 140. Emphasis added.
46. It is striking that Butler has also dramatically shifted tone and preoccupations. Her recent book, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004),
47. 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 Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, "Beauvoir on Sade: Making Sexuality into an Ethic," is notably more sympathetic toward Beauvoir.
48. The term is Michèle Le Doeuff's, cited in Deutscher, Yielding Gender, 173-74.
49. 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 University Press, 1999).
50. 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.
51. elaborate the argument more fully in my Situation and Human Existence: Freedom Subjectivity and Society (London: Routledge, 1990).
52. 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).
53. 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 notion 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?