Johns Hopkins University Press

The title of my essay, “Feminist Theory without Solace,” sounds, well, rather manly. Who needs solace? Not feminism? Not my kind of feminism. Not I! The virility of this gesture might seem appropriate given the subject of this paper. For Simone de Beauvoir, or so the story goes, was a very male identified woman: Jean Paul Sartre in a dress. As Beauvoir scholar Toril Moi observes,

Beauvoir is a dinosaur for feminists inspired by French feminist theory because she seems to believe in reason, truth, the intellect . . . She doesn’t believe in women’s language. She doesn’t believe in the unconscious. She doesn’t believe in any of the deconstructive, anti-metaphysical theories that have been so important for feminists, and yet she is, to my mind, the most important feminist intellectual of the twentieth century. The Second Sex changed thousands of women’s lives, and it did so in spite of being written by a woman who declared herself not a feminist, and who only became one much later

(1990, 108).

It is not my purpose here to convince readers that Simone de Beauvoir is the most important feminist intellectual of the twentieth century or that The Second Sex changed the lives of thousands of women. I want to resist the temptation to shower Beauvoir with accolades or to rescue the so-called mother of second-wave feminism from her feminist critics, if not her murderous daughters. I am reticent to assume the unlikely position of knight errant—Beauvoir is no lady in distress. More importantly though, I suspect that to give in to that temptation or wish would be to contribute to what appears to be the either/or interpretive approach to Beauvoir: namely, as Moi herself notes, the twin tendencies in feminist scholarship either to idealize Beauvoir as the perfect feminist or to condemn her for having betrayed feminism. Either she criticized the masculine subject of modernity or she embraced it as a model for women. Either her relationship with Sartre was the model of free union or it was an instance of female subordination. Either she felt solidarity with women or she refused to identify herself as a woman. And so on.

What are we doing, really, when we either venerate or condemn Beauvoir? What do we hope to accomplish when we decide for or against her? What sorts of concerns motivate the impulse to categorize her work as feminist or non-feminist? What, in other words, do we have at stake in the symbolic Beauvoir: in the good and the bad “Beauvoirs” produced through generations of feminist interpretations? In posing these questions I want to treat Beauvoir scholarship as a site for thinking critically about our desire to settle what I will argue to be Beauvoir’s important teaching about the fundamentally unsettled character of feminine subjectivity and feminist politics. Whether savior or scapegoat, the symbolic Beauvoir tells us something about a persistent yearning in American feminism for definitive theories of women’s oppression and for prescriptivism in feminist theory. Our rhetorical productions of the good (feminist) Beauvoir versus the bad (not so feminist or not the right kind of feminist) Beauvoir are symptomatic of our reluctance to accept a feminist theory without solace, by which I mean a feminist theory that refuses to yield the identities of victim and victor, oppressed and oppressor, and, consequently, a feminist theory that resists our understandable but also potentially dangerous desire for directives in the face of social injustice. There are numerous other ways in which Beauvoir’s feminism denies us solace, and some of these will be elaborated as I proceed. But the central idea that I want to advance here is this notion of a feminist theory that does not tell us what is wrong and how to fix it, a theory that pushes us rather to accept incertitude and even confusion as the achievement rather than the failure of feminist theory and ambiguity as the vital condition of feminist politics. Beauvoir’s texts, and especially The Second Sex, are neither feminist nor anti-feminist: rather they open up and onto the space of feminine contradictions; they give voice to a feminine subjectivity that is at best at odds with itself.

One of the most frustrating features of The Second Sex is its elusive authorial voice. Numerous critics have complained that it is never quite clear when Beauvoir is speaking and when the male scientists, philosophers, writers, etc. are speaking. Furthermore, reading The Second Sex is hard work: it is hard work not only because it is long—the Vintage edition is a whopping 814 pages—but also because the text erodes rather than builds our sense of certainty, of our identity. But what is especially maddening for a number of readers of Beauvoir’s text is its oscillation between defining woman’s situation as one of oppression, on the one hand, and as one of complicity, on the other. If woman is the second sex, who is to blame? Is it society, men, women themselves, or some unknown agent?

Let me begin, then, with Toril Moi’s claim that The Second Sex, written and published in French in 1949, changed the lives of thousands of women (at least in this country). That may well be right, but need also to account for the incredible hurdles the book faced in the United States. As Mary Dietz observes, the English translation and publication of the text in 1952 was met with enthusiasm by a handful of intellectuals (Elizabeth Hardwick, Irving Howe, C. Wright Mills) but was for the most part ignored. The mainstream press belittled the work: Newsweek called it the production of “an alarmed male mind”- and declared it to be “a singular mixture of pedantry, nonsense, quotations from novels, case histories, and psychological, anthropological and other works” (quoted in Dietz, 77). Time magazine took a straightforwardly quantitative approach to Beauvoir’s text: The Second Sex was weighed in on a bathroom scale: 2 3/4 lbs (quoted in Dietz, 77).

But even when the feminist movement began to emerge in the early 1960s, Beauvoir’s text failed to find its audience. It was not The Second Sex but The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan that captured the early feminist imaginary. Why? Some commentators cite American cultural parochialism and disdain for philosophy; but these tell only part of the story. I think it had to do as well with the rhetorical features of Beauvoir’s text which, for the reader in search of answers, must prove less than satisfying. Like Friedan, who begins with what she calls “The problem that has no name,” Beauvoir starts with a question “What is a woman?” Unlike Friedan, who goes on to name this unnamed problem as (middle-class) women’s profound dissatisfaction with marriage and motherhood, Beauvoir adds layer upon layer of cultural representations of woman and feminine desire, most of which contradict each other and fail to yield a coherent image of what a woman is. And, even though Friedan’s final chapter on “A New Life Plan for Women” seemed to echo Beauvoir’s final chapter, “The Independent Woman,” their arguments are worlds apart. The gist of Friedan’s feminist message was: Get out of the house and get a job. (Or, more precisely, Get a cleaning lady so that you can get out and get a job). Beauvoir, on the other hand, was not only skeptical of the liberation in female wage labor, and not only critical of the class issues to which Friedan remained blind; she was also deeply skeptical of any such pragmatic approach to the vicissitudes of feminine subjectivity. In the absence of broader cultural changes, she argued, the independent woman will simply return after a day’s work to cook and clean for her family.

Beauvoir’s remarkably astute characterization of what we now call the “super woman syndrome” pointed not only to the socio-economic conditions that enforce the double day for women but also to the psychic forces at work in the feminine subject that keep her invested in the performance of proper femininity. Beauvoir writes:

It is not regard for the opinions of others alone that leads her to give time and care to her appearance and her housekeeping. She wants to retain her womanliness for her own satisfaction. She can regard herself with approval throughout her present and past only in combining the life she has made for herself with the destiny of her mother, her childhood games, and her adolescent fantasies prepared for her. She has entertained narcissistic dreams; to the male’s phallic pride she still opposes her cult of self; she wants to be seen, to be attractive. She wants a nest, a home, an interior of her own. That has always been basic in her dreams of independence. She has no intention of discarding them when she has found liberty by other roads

Despite her pleas for opening the public world to women and her powerful case for abortion rights, Beauvoir does not endorse the kinds of solutions advocated by Friedan or, for that matter, any American feminist in the 1960s or 1970s. I don’t think she endorses any particular solution at all. Even when she appears to do so, Beauvoir just as quickly retreats from her solution by offering a critique of its limitations. Why? And should this be considered a strength or a liability of her feminist analysis?

What is a Woman?

To address these matters let me return to the initial and now famous question posed at the beginning of The Second Sex: What is a woman? The need to pose such a question, let alone its answer, is not immediately obvious. Why ask the question at all? And so Beauvoir begins the book with a virtual dismissal of its topic and importance:

For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on women. The subject is irritating, especially to women, and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in the quarrelling over feminism, now practically over, and perhaps we should say no more about it . . . After all, is there really a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really?

(SS, xv).

“What amounts to a complete dismissal of the subject of women and femininity,” writes Mary Evans, is all the more curious give that in 1949 the amount of ink spilt on feminism amounted to little more than a trickle (1985, 60) Like many feminist readers, Evans finds this introduction symptomatic of Beauvoir’s refusal to identify with the plight of women, let alone with feminism. While it is true that Beauvoir did not think very much about her gender or define herself as a woman writer, as she said on many occasions, perhaps she is not simply dismissing but rather problematizing her subject in these opening lines. What does it mean to write a book on women if one is a woman? How does one gain the critical distance necessary to navigate the maze of patriarchal representations of Woman that both elicits the author Beauvoir’s critical curiosity and threatens to reinscribe her in the eternal feminine?

The very first question that must be asked, writes Beauvoir in the next paragraph, is this: “what is a woman?” The apparently straightforward answer to this question turns out to be lacking: having a womb does not make one a woman, at least among self-anointed masculine “connoisseurs” of women. And so, writes Beauvoir,

… we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear then that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the philosophical imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is hardly patenable

(SS, xvi).

If one reads The Second Sex waiting for Beauvoir’s answer to “what is a woman?” one will be sorely disappointed. This question is finally unanswerable, but not for what appears to be lack of trying. After all, in over 800 pages (a virtual textual barrage of examples, parables, facts, stories, and myths) Beauvoir directs herself to answering that very question. Elizabeth Hardwick speaks for most readers when she puzzles over Beauvoir’s “bewildering inclusiveness”: “There is hardly a thing I would want to say contrary to her thesis that Simone de Beauvoir has not said herself” (1953, 322). How indeed should we understand this frankly overwhelming source of material? I would suggest that sheer quantity can be seen as crucial to Beauvoir’s discursive strategy, be it intentional or not. That strategy disarms by overwhelming the reader with a barrage not only of facts, views, voices and the like but with a barrage of competing facts, views, and masculine voices pronouncing on the nature of femininity. While The Second Sex has been criticized for this very reason, I have argued elsewhere that the sheer volume of examples, parables, facts, stories, myths and the like in the text cast into doubt the self-evident character of Beauvoir’s initial question (1991, 1992). By the end of The Second Sex, the reader hasn’t the slightest idea of what a woman is, and that was Beauvoir’s amazing achievement.

Whatever her intent, Beauvoir’s effective discursive strategy radically defamiliarized the obvious; it defamiliarized woman. By discursive strategy I mean the creation of a place from which to speak or write when even the blank page contains the spoken/written (Zerilli 1991, 1992). It involves negotiating what Teresa de Lauretis calls “the modes of enunciation and address” that organize “the dominant discourses” of Western culture and that insist on women’s absence as speaking subjects even in the face of their presence (1984, 7). “So well-established are those modes” (ibid), says de Lauretis, that, paradoxically, the only way to position oneself outside of any master discourse is to displace oneself within it--to refuse the question as formulated, or to answer deviously (though in its own words), even to quote (but against the grain). For the feminist author, then, discursive strategy may entail a kind of self-displacement, a speaking deviously in the words of a dominant discourse, be it motherhood, reproductive biology, whatever.

Let us approach The Second Sex, then, less as an argument against the traditional formulation of the woman question and more as an exercise in the defamiliarization, dis-placement and dis-location of the term woman. Here I borrow the Freudian notion of Entstellung which, as Freud explains in Moses and Monotheism, means “not only to change the appearance of but also to wrench apart, to put in another place (SE XIII, 43). To think of Beauvoir’s refiguration of the woman question in this way, that is, as dis-placement and dis-location, enables us to see how she produces or stages the non-coincidence of woman (as masculinist representation) and women (as social, historical subjects).

The introduction to The Second Sex establishes a line of questioning that is critical both of an account of women that would contain them in notions of the eternal feminine and of feminist attempts to deny femininity as part of women’s self-understanding. Rejecting nominalist theories of women, in which women “are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman (SS, xvi), Beauvoir insists that “to decline to accept such notions of the eternal feminine . . . does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality” (xvii).

For if women cannot be contained in the language of Woman and the eternal feminine, neither can they stand as individuals wholly outside cultural definitions of femininity. This will have crucial implications for Beauvoir’s difference with Sartre on the question of human freedom, as we shall see. Before turning to freedom, however, let’s get a bit clearer about the discursive strategy at work here and what it tells us about the problem that Beauvoir is trying to address. Criticizing the flight from reality that is nominalism, Beauvoir acknowledges femininity as an internalized subjectivity. But by doing this, she must also create a critical standpoint from which it would be possible to reflect on that very identity.

To create this critical distance, Beauvoir asks, what is a woman? But in her view, an inquiry into the meaning of woman is more than a scholarly question; it is a personal question made political by the very necessity of its utterance. Unlike a man who “never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man,” the woman who would speak at all must not only “admit, provisionally, that women do exist,” she must say: “I am a woman; on this truth must be based all further discussion” (SS, xvii). For Simone de Beauvoir, then, starting with an admission that she is a woman is necessary because the woman who would deny her existence as a woman will not, despite her protestations, be taken for a human being. That is the error of the nominalists. Instead, as Beauvoir tells us, she will be reminded: “You think thus and so because you are a woman” (SS, xviii).

It is in the midst of such conversation that Beauvoir experiences the profound alienation and division that speaking produces in women. For to be reminded that one is a woman is tantamount to being reduced to particularism and insignificance as a potential creator of shared meanings. When told that she thinks the way that she does because she is a woman, Beauvoir says that her “only defense” is to reply:

I think thus and thus because it is true,” thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: “And you think the contrary because you are a man,” for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity

Such passages seem to confirm readings of The Second Sex that criticize its genderless (read: masculine) ideal of subjectivity. What appeared at first to be the author’s affirmation of her feminine voice is abandoned a mere page later in the quest for objectivity. But what appears at first to be a denial or flight from reality enables Beauvoir to reveal the limits to Sartrean notions of freedom and autonomy in constituting one’s field of action or situation—here in the context of a conversation. In contrast to the masculine subject, for whom social relations of language provide access to universal meanings, the feminine subject who speaks is effectively shut up in her femininity. If the “peculiarity” of being a woman renders speaking as a woman both necessary (“I am a woman”) and self-annihilating (“You think thus and so because you are a woman”), such a paradox cannot be accounted for by focusing on individual existence and by stressing free choice. Instead, Beauvoir reveals the category of woman to be a social category that places limits on the freedom of the individual “for-itself.”

Freedom and Compulsion

Let me turn now to what I see as the challenge that Beauvoir’s text poses to the Sartrean existentialist understanding of freedom on which it is normally taken to be parasitic. I say parasitic, because it is commonly assumed that Beauvoir more or less applied Sartrean existentialist categories to the topic of women. Her work is an interesting case study but philosophically derivative. As Penny Deutscher observes: “Sartre’s substantial public profile and the 1943 publication of Being and Nothingness meant that any theoretical discordances with Beauvoir’s subsequent publications would often be evaluated, where attention was paid to them, through the lens of Sartre’s work. For these reasons, her method and theory were long overshadowed . . . by that relationship” (2008, 6). That Beauvoir herself claimed to be merely adhering to an existentialist ethics in the early pages of The Second Sex and elsewhere only contributes to the tendency to see her as a disciple of Sartre.

That may be what Beauvoir says about her intellectual debts: what she actually does with those debts is another story. In fact, Beauvoir would come to question the Sartrean understanding of freedom as a basic ontological condition of being human, and what brought her to question it, as Deutscher argues, was the specific ontic situation of subjugated peoples, in particular women and African Americans.

In “The Humanism of Existentialism,” Sartre argues that existence precedes essence: what we are, and what gives our lives significance, is not pre-established for us, but is something for which we are responsible. We are thrown into a world not of our own choosing, abandoned in the midst of beings, with no pregiven nature or identity that gives purpose to their lives. Once we exist, however, it is our responsibility to create an essence for ourselves through our projects, life-defining plans that we freely choose. There is nothing that one is by virtue of having certain physical traits or being born into a particular social class. Whatever the conditions of my being thrown into the world, I can always rise above them and transform them through my actions: “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (1995, 36). Human existence is thus characterized by freedom. This is an ontological claim. Human beings are free irrespective of what they will. But they do not always accept their freedom and in fact demonstrate a pervasive tendency towards what Sartre calls “bad faith.” As Penny Deutscher explains, bad faith occurs when “one prefers to act as if one is a pure freedom divorced from one’s actions, embodiment, objecthood, or context (one denies one’s ‘facticity’)” or when one chooses “to reduce oneself to one’s actions, embodiment, objecthood, or context (denying that one is in relation to them, a freedom, and so responsible for them” (2008, 29). Bad faith is a denial of freedom that involves either a denial of one’s facticity or the possibility of transcendence.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre discusses how human beings give meaning to the bare facts of their existence through an account of consciousness. Facticity is continually transcended as human beings choose projects for themselves and strive to realize them. To be human, then, is not only to be in-itself (en-soi) but also for-itself (pour soi). Whereas the in-itself is passive and inert, the for-itself is active and dynamic. The fundamental lack at the heart of human existence tends to lead to an appropriation and possession, of objects or of people reduced to objects, in a constant effort to fill up the gap. I see others as being in-itself and they too see me that way. Seeing myself through the other’s eyes, I begin to regard myself as an object who is seen as such by a being for-itself who interprets or gives meaning to what he sees. This leads to an inevitable conflict between human beings, with each striving to take up the position of the for-itself in relation to the other as the in-itself. In attempting to assert his transcendence the other will objectify me; to assert my own transcendence I will turn the tables and objectify him. And so on in an endless cycle.

Now Beauvoir certainly accepts key elements of Sartre’s philosophy. She accepts the idea that human beings combine the mutually exclusive characteristics of the in-itself and the for-itself. And she accepts that every attempt to transcend one’s facticity, the given, involves a continual attempt to objectify the other. In Beauvoir’s telling, however, this dynamic is deeply gendered and in many ways constitutive of what gender is:

Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. . . She is defines and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other

Beauvoir agrees with Sartre that the problem is not that one transcends one’s facticity by way of setting up the Other as part of the inert and passive facticity of existence, for this Other then goes on to “set up a reciprocal claim.” The problem is when one identity or group gets stuck in some kind of permanent otherness, never once asserting the for-itself, its own right to transcendence, and remaining instead in the inert position of the in-itself.

Now what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she—a free and autonomous being like all human creatures—nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed by another ego which is essential and sovereign

How are we to understand the sense of being compelled here? Following Sartre, one would have to say that for a woman to blame men for her status as the Other is to exhibit bad faith in the face of her own failure to choose transcendence over immanence and thus affirm freedom. And Beauvoir herself seems at times to admit as much. For example, she tells us that one powerful answer to the question “Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty?,” is that “she [woman] is often very well pleased with her role as the Other” (SS, xx, xxv). Call it fear of freedom or whatever you like, many times woman is simply guilty of bad faith, according to Beauvoir.

But that is not the whole of it. It isn’t simply the moral fault of women that they are reduced to Woman, compelled to live their mortal lives according to the masculinist strictures of the eternal feminine. Beauvoir refuses to give a simple answer to the question of what compels women in this way, choosing instead to open up the question of why it is that they feel compelled: whence comes this sense of compulsion? The point is not to dispute the sense of compulsion but rather to interrogate it as belonging to a deterministic way of thinking more broadly.

The genuine argumentative force of The Second Sex is to repudiate determinisms, of a number of kinds: those of biological differences, historical traditions, economic circumstances, social forces, prejudice. This means, as Deutscher argues, that Beauvoir is, in a way, perfectly willing to acknowledge biological differences of the sexes, which for her will mean acknowledging (so to speak) that women might have some biological disadvantages, all the while that she argues they don’t determine women’s condition. This gives a particular inflection to the status of biology in the work. For Beauvoir “[biological] facts cannot be denied—but in themselves they have no significance” (SS, 38). So even when in the biology chapter Beauvoir seems to be conceding too much to the biological determinists, at the end of the day she insists that biological differences have meaning only in the context of which human existents are free. There’s nothing material—despite all the concessions to materiality she takes pains to acknowledge—which can be understood as an absolute limit on freedom. She is pressing her readers to relinquish the ubiquitous appeal of determinisms of all kinds. And in many respects this repudiation of deterministic thinking when it comes to the question of gender difference could be seen as a straightforward application of Sartre’s claim that nothing in the facts of my existence—my having been born, having a certain body, being a member of a certain race or social class, etc.—can let me off the hook for my own responsibility in assigning all those facts a particular social meaning. I am not responsible for the fact of being born, but I am responsible for how I take up that fact. I am not responsible for being born male or female, but I am responsible for the meanings I give to that fact.

But of course The Second Sex would be a much shorter book if Beauvoir had decided merely to apply the fundamentals of Sartrean existentialism and especially the notion of bad faith to the problematic of gender. Can the idea of bad faith, a kind of shirking of one’s responsibility for becoming who one is, explain what Beauvoir means when she writes: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (301). We already know that this becoming a woman is experienced as a form of compulsion, but how? And is it bad faith to even speak of compulsion here? Here we might note that this sentence is typically understood as a declaration of the founding paradigm of second-wave feminism: the sex/gender distinction. And in some important respects that characterization of The Second Sex and its importance is right. But apart from the fact that Beauvoir did not use the term gender and distinguish it from sex—there being no such term in French—she was not simply focused on combating deterministic conceptions of sex. The issue she is staving off is more generically determinism, and the important point here is that those staved off determinisms can take a number of forms—biological or sex determinism, to be sure, but gender determinism just as much—the determinism of society, history, language, habit and expectation. The maddening proliferation of reasons that Beauvoir gives in The Second Sex for why women remain intractably Other—everything from the sex specific character of their biology, education, lack of employment opportunities, of access to property, their social roles as mothers and wives, their unequal legal status, etc.—do not in the end amount to an answer, but they do point towards a productive confusion that raises significant questions for the Sartrean account of freedom, to which I now turn.

Freedom and Situation

We can get a sense of what might be at stake for Beauvoir if we turn to her autobiography, in which she recounts a dreary evening in the spring of 1940, on which she and Sartre wandered the streets of Paris discussing philosophy. Sartre briefly sketched for her the main lines of argument for what would become Being and Nothingness. Their discussions over the next few days centered on the problem of “the relation of situation to freedom.” On this point they disagreed. Writing in 1960, Beauvoir tells us:

I maintained that, from the point of view of freedom, as Sartre defined it—not as a stoical resignation but as an active transcendence of the given—not every situation is equal: what transcendence is possible for a woman locked up in a harem? Even such a cloistered existence could be lived in several ways, Sartre said. I clung to my opinion for a long time and then made only a token submission. Basically I was right. But to have been able to defend my position, I would have had to abandon the terrain of individualist, thus idealist, morality, where we stood.

In the view of Beauvoir scholar Sonia Kruks, this passage gives us good reason to be suspicious of Beauvoir’s concessions to the Sartrean ontological conception of freedom as absolute. In fact, The Second Sex, far from applying this conception, is to a significant extent incompatible with Being and Nothingness.” What is more, says Kruks, “it in many ways anticipates Sartre’s own trajectory towards the account of materially mediated freedom which he elaborated in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1987, 111). That may well be, but my point here is not to dispute who is derivative of whom. It is rather to think about whether Beauvoir, focused as she was on subjugated groups such as women and African Americans, came to see that there might be situations of oppression in which freedom, as Sartre had defined it in Being and Nothingness, ceases to be possible. Why did Beauvoir contest Sartre’s claim that even the cloistered existence in a harem could be lived in ways that are consistent with freedom?

To answer this, we can turn with Kruks to another example, found in Being and Nothingness, in which Sartre describes the torture victim turning the tables on his torturer by looking at him. In this look, the tortured can assume his situation in such a way that he remains free. According to Kruks, Sartre is here asserting that two equal freedoms confront each other, irrespective of the fact that the torturer has the power of physical domination over his victim. Similarly, the existence of material or political inequality between a master and a slave is irrelevant to their relation as two freedoms. It is this assumption, that relations of otherness are conflictual relations between two equal freedoms, which Beauvoir quietly subverts. Her subversion implies a tacit challenge to Sartre’s entire ontology. For if freedoms are not equal irrespective of the facticities of their social situations, then freedom can no longer be conceived of as the indestructible upsurge of being-for-itself. We can no longer conceive of ontological freedom which exists independently of social and political freedom (113).

Kruks is accusing Sartre of holding on to an absolute freedom, that is, a freedom utterly untouched by material circumstances. Beauvoir, by contrast, understands that freedom is situated, not absolute, and that there are situations in which it makes no sense to say that someone is free. That reading is not exactly wrong in my view, but not exactly right either. It is not exactly wrong because Sartre does tell us: “No limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself, or, if you prefer, we are not free to cease being free.” (567) But it is not exactly right because, as Matthew Eschelman points out, Sartre does talk about limitations of one’s freedom, and he does so about 300 pages into Being and Nothingness, where he elaborates a revised notion of the self as partially constituted by and hence dependent upon others. Sartre writes:

Keeping ourselves within the compass of existence for-itself, that only my freedom can limit my freedom, we see now, when we include the Other into our considerations, that my freedom on this new level finds its limits also in the existence of the Other’s freedom

(1956, 525; quoted in Eschelman, 69).

“Rarely noted by commentators,” writes Eshelman, “Sartre abandons his initially exaggerated view of absolute freedom: freedom is not limited only by itself; it is also limited by Others” (2009, 69). Although that seems right, it is also the case that Sartre does not have an account of the fundamentally interdependent character of human existence. He holds to the idea of a fundamental ontological individualism, whereas Beauvoir argues for an intrinsic ontological interdependence: “I concern others and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth. The me-others relationship is an indissoluble as the subject-object relationship.” She saw this in large part because she was attuned to the ways in which feminine subjectivity is constructed through an array of relationships, some of which placed women in debilitating relations of dependence on others, but many of which involved recognition of a networks of relations in which I is dependent on some people for some things and they are dependent on me for others.

The bottom line here, really, is that if we think, as Sartre does, of the self as constituted through its dependence on others, where dependence is an unfortunate fact of human existence that limits one’s freedom which ideally would be absolute, then we will think about freedom in terms of sovereignty. Even if Sartre recognizes the limits to an absolute freedom, those limits are seen as just that: a limiting condition. Ideally, it is the fully sovereign subject that is absolutely free. That no one can be fully sovereign, hence absolutely free, is an unfortunate fact of being human. Sartre’s view reflects his entanglement in a Western tradition that puts forward an impossible conception of freedom as a phenomenon of the will, a property of the subject, and a means to an end whose name is sovereignty. On this account, dominant in liberal democracies like our own, freedom is defined in highly individualistic terms, housed in constitutionally guaranteed rights, and experienced as something that begins precisely where politics ends. This view of freedom as finding its limits in the existence of other people is fatal for democratic politic. As Hannah Arendt explains:

Politically, this identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will. For it leads either to a denial of human freedom—namely, if it is realized that whatever men may be, they are never sovereign—or to the insight that the freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic can be purchased only at the price of the freedom, i.e., the sovereignty, of all others (1993, 165). By contrast with this idea of freedom as a property of the will and the condition of sovereignty, Arendt holds that freedom is possible only in political community: “If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce” (ibid). It is only in community and in action in concert that one can translate an otherwise empty albeit potentially dangerous I-will into an I-can. After all, it is not simply a matter of what one may will but a matter of whether one can do what one wills, and this is a political question.

Although Beauvoir did not in my view fully think through the freedom in the way that Arendt understands it, she came a lot closer than did Sartre to moving the conception of freedom from a philosophical register, where it is solely an individual question of the I-will, to a political register, where it is a collective matter of the I-can. That move is what she gestures at in the introduction to The Second Sex, when she writes:

In truth . . . the nature of things is no more immutably given, once for all, than is historical reality. If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say “We”; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into “others.” But women do not say “We,” except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say “women,” and women use the similar word in referring to themselves. They do no authentically assume a subjective attitude

(xxii).

What Beauvoir sees here is that only collective action can bring about real social change, but such action has to amount to more than a meeting of select feminists. Of course the meeting of feminists may well spark the kind of collective identification necessary, but the main point is to think about the difference between women as a demographic group and women as the subject of feminism, that is, as a political subject. I suggest that Beauvoir’s real contribution to modern feminism lies in just that.

Linda Zerilli

Linda Zerilli is Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Cornell University Press, 1994) and Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago University Press, 2005). Her research interests are in democratic theory, feminist theory, Continental philosophy, and the politics of language. Linda may be contacted at lmgzerilli@gmail.com

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———. 1991. “‘I am a Woman’: Female Voice and Ambiguity in The Second Sex.” Women & Politics 11 (1): 93–108.

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