Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism

Dœuff, Michèle Le

doi:10.2307/3177742

Cited by 34 publications

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“…131 Beauvoir, in what is another example of what Michèle Le Doeuff has described vis-à-vis Sartre as her 'operative philosophy', appropriates Bataille's egregiously misogynistic thought and develops it into her own. 132 Without reading her as failing to differentiate human beings from any composite being, if we allow her to share with Bataille the idea that human beings are never singular but are only more-or-less autonomous (her subject is essentially ambiguous after all), we may also allow her the idea that woman's being is simply more heterogeneous than man's. This interpretation is supported by Beauvoir's descriptions of embodied sexual difference and women's lived experience.…”

Section: Beauvoir's Use and Critique Of Bataille/hegel 571mentioning

confidence: 97%

The Sovereign Subject and Its Heterogeneous Other Beauvoir's Use and Critique of Bataille/Hegel

Lloyd

2013

Intellectual History Review

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The question of Beauvoir's relationship to Hegel is at the forefront of Beauvoir scholarship.Research until now has proceeded on the assumption that the relationship's dominant feature is Kojève's reading of the master-slave dialectic. I will argue that Beauvoir's relationship to Hegel is more sophisticated than so far suggested largely because it is not sufficient to read her use of Hegel only in these narrow terms. This paper will argue that Beauvoir's Hegelianism is at least as mediated by Bataille: to understand Beauvoir's use of the term 'sovereign' we must avoid reading it as a mere synonym for 'master' but must also take Bataille's use of the term into account. This paper will focus on Bataille's ontology, his concept of sovereignty, and his presence in the Ethics of Ambiguity. It will develop this reading in the context of The Second Sex and of Beauvoir's analysis of woman as Other. This paper will argue that central to Beauvoir's understanding of sexual difference is a notion of the heterogeneous being of woman vis-à-vis the unified being of man.

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Section: Beauvoir's Use and Critique Of Bataille/hegel 571mentioning

confidence: 97%

The Sovereign Subject and Its Heterogeneous Other Beauvoir's Use and Critique of Bataille/Hegel

Lloyd

2013

Intellectual History Review

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“…Many scholars suggest that when Beauvoir discusses temporality in her works, she adopts and/or appropriates canonical figures and frameworks in the history of Western philosophy. More specifically, it has been said that Beauvoir adopts a Marxist‐Hegelian account of temporality (Lundgren‐Gothlin ; Veltman ), works from Husserl's and Merleau‐Ponty's respective accounts of temporality (Arp ; Tidd ; Holveck ), uses Nietzsche's description of temporality (Miller ), adopts or challenges a Sartrean conception of transcendence (Lloyd ; Le Doeuff ; Kruks ; ; Arp ; Bauer ; Busch ; Moi ), or follows Heidegger's account in Being and Time (Tidd ; ; Heinämaa ). Recently, in spite of calling Beauvoir one of “the influential feminist thinkers who combine phenomenology with feminist theoretical reflections on time ,” the contributions in the important anthology, Time in Feminist Phenomenology, do not consider Beauvoir as part of the classical or feminist phenomenological considerations of temporality (Schües , 1; Schües, Olkowski, and Fielding ) .…”

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confidence: 99%

“… Among Beauvoir scholars, there is little agreement on how to understand immanence and transcendence. The most dominant understandings of immanence and transcendence suggest that they ought to be read as either existentialist notions or as Marxist‐Hegelian ones, but not first and foremost as temporal categories (Lloyd ; Le Doeuff ; Kruks ; Lundgren‐Gothlin ; Kruks ; Arp ; Veltman ; Deutscher ; Moi ). Deutscher's work is an exception (Deutscher ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Gender as Lived Time: Reading The Second Sex for a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality

Burke¹

2018

Hypatia

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This article suggests that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers an important contribution to a feminist phenomenology of temporality. In contrast to readings of The Second Sex that focus on the notion of "becoming" as the main claim about the relation between "woman" and time, this article suggests that Beauvoir's discussion of temporality in volume II of The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir understands the temporality of waiting, or a passive present, to be an underlying structure of women's existence and subordination. Accordingly, I argue that Beauvoir does not see "woman" as a mere becoming, as that which unfolds in time, but instead understands becoming a woman to be realized as lived time. As such, Beauvoir's account shows that gender and temporality are deeply entangled, and thus she challenges the classic phenomenological account of temporality as a general, given structure of human existence. More specifically, I argue that her account shows how a particular experience of time is an underlying structure of sexual objectification, a claim that expands on the feminist phenomenological claim that a particular relation to space becomes a way in which women take up and negotiate their own subordination and objectification.In this essay, I show that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers a feminist phenomenology of temporality. I argue that by paying attention to temporality as a central theme in Beauvoir's descriptive account of becoming a woman, we see that gender and temporality are co-constitutive phenomena.

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“…He is familiar to us, being constituted as white, bourgeois, heterosexual and masculine. Michelle Le Doeuff, writing on the work of S h o n e de Beauvoir, argues that this structure of Same and Other is embedded both in what it means to be masculine and in the production of knowledge about the world (Le Doeuff 1979). He sees them only in relation to himself.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In this sense, the masculine subject is referred to in terms of the Same, while that which is not the Master Subject is the Other (Irigaray 1985, Haraway 1988). Michelle Le Doeuff, writing on the work of S h o n e de Beauvoir, argues that this structure of Same and Other is embedded both in what it means to be masculine and in the production of knowledge about the world (Le Doeuff 1979). Within poststructuralist feminist philosophy, epistemological binaries, predicated upon an originary gender binary (Cixous 1981), cast the feminine as the Other of the rational.…”

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confidence: 99%