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

Abstract

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.

What Do Incels Want? Explaining Incel Violence Using Beauvoirian Otherness

“…25This erotic ambivalence can be found, for example, in pornography (Griffin 1981, 34, 38–41), and in narratives of colonial conquest of “feminized” lands (McClintock 1995, 25–28). For a helpful comparative analysis of Beauvoir and Bataille's thinking “about the ambiguity of the object of man's sexual desire,” see Direk 2011, 53; Lloyd 2013.…”