Simone de Beauvoir Writing the Self: Philosophy Becomes Autobiography (review)

This book is a welcome contribution to Simone de Beauvoir studies and, more particularly, to critical studies of Beauvoir's autobiographical project. It aims to analyze "Beauvoir's notion of the self and its use within her auto-biographical writing" (Pilardi 1998, 1). This short study is divided into six chapters. The first two chapters usefully explore Beauvoir's notions of selfhood, drawing on her moral essays of the 1940s, Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, as well as analyzing what Jo-Ann Pilardi terms the gendered self in The Second Sex. The following four chapters are concerned with how Beauvoir represents various notions of selfhood and existential themes in her four volumes of formal autobiography. As such, then, this is an ambitious project for it seeks to interrelate two substantial areas of Beauvoir's corpus and invites us to see how she developed her philosophical thinking through the representation of her singular life. The introduction and the first two chapters are particularly interesting for they attempt to tackle—in a regrettably brief discussion—what the self might be for the existential-phenomenological tradition and Beauvoir's own contribution to these debates. In the subsequent chapters, Pilardi relies too much on quotation from the primary autobiographical texts to make her points about selfhood, despite her recognition that autobiography is a literary construct. Given the importance of the Other in Beauvoir's notions about selfhood and literature, it is perhaps surprising that no discussion is included concerning the importance of the author-reader relation in the production of the autobiographical self and how significant Others and readers constrain what it is possible for Beauvoir—in her situation as a woman writer—to represent in autobiography. References to some of Beauvoir's key statements on literature are absent here—such as her lecture "Mon expérience d'écrivain" or her contribution to the "Que peut la littérature?" debate published in 1965. This is perhaps unfortunate given the centrality of the notion of "writing the self" in this discussion. Moreover, the major impact of history on the development of Beauvoir's notion of self-Other relations—specifically her experience of the German Occupation of France during World War II—is only mentioned briefly in the last few pages of chapter 6. Yet this discovery of history is highly significant in terms of the central importance of testimony in Beauvoir's autobiography and her notion of the self's ethical obligation to the Other. On the whole, however, this text raises some useful issues about Beauvoir's notions of selfhood in the context of her formal autobiographical self-representation.