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3 The Question of Reciprocal Self-Abandon to the Other: Beauvoir’s Influence on Sartre Guillermine de Lacoste The question of reciprocal self-abandon to the other might appear inconsequential when one deals with the question of the influence of Sartre on Beauvoir or vice versa. Yet, as will become evident below, it is at the very core of each’s vécu (lived experience), and each’s pensée—that is, the evolution of their individual oeuvres. In a long section of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1974 Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre discusses candidly with her his original negative reaction to selfabandon to the Other. But to our great surprise, he also ascertains that the ideal basis for reciprocity in a love relationship is the equal self-abandon of each partner to each other, and Beauvoir totally agrees. This assertion is certainly in complete opposition to Sartre’s well-known stance, which stresses the activity of the project, and transcendence away from the contingency of the body, that is, passive and feminine self-abandon. As we begin to scrutinize Sartre’s assertion to Beauvoir about mutual self-abandon to the other and try to determine when and how Beauvoir influenced Sartre on the subject, it is interesting to remember that, yes, it is she who introduced the question of self-abandon to the other in her “Woman in Love” chapter of The Second Sex—but that she was most negative about it there. It is quite apparent that “Woman in Love” is a tacit acquiescence of the virulent androcentrism found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Gay Science (which Beauvoir quotes at length in that chapter): “I will never admit the claim that man and woman have equal rights in love. These do not exist,” Nietzsche writes adamantly .1 And a little further: “Woman wants to be taken, wants someone who takes, who does not give himself away.”2 And he goes on to explain that woman wants to abandon herself totally, in love, but that a man who would want to do Job Name: -- /302299t 50 Guillermine de Lacoste likewise would simply not be a man. Beauvoir’s reaction is well known. She agrees with Nietzsche that woman has the propensity to give herself completely, to abandon herself totally to the man she loves. Woman thus hopes to find herself , Beauvoir explains. But instead, because her lover objectifies her, she suffers a deep alienation (une aliénation profonde in the French text—translated as “selfabandonment ” by Parshley), and loses herself. In that chapter, Beauvoir exhorts women to become like men, to fulfill themselves, not through self-abandon to the other, but through action in the world (SS, 642–78; DS, 477–507).3 We learn from Beauvoir’s La Force de l’âge that in her own life, when she had first fallen in love with Sartre, twenty years before The Second Sex, she had abandoned herself completely to him. She had let herself be subjugated by him in the same way, she explains, that she had once been subjugated by her friend Zaza: “In both cases, I preserved my peace of mind. So fascinated was I by the other person that I forgot myself, so much indeed that no part of me remained to register the statement: I am nothing” (FA, 64). What of course played an essential role in both cases was the lack of reciprocal self-abandon of the other person. Zaza was so taken up by her large extended family and her many activities that she had not, in the earlier years of her friendship with Simone, abandoned herself emotionally to her in return. Sartre’s case was quite different. As Beauvoir explains in La Force de l’âge, when she fell in love with him, she experienced a great “trouble” in his presence. Note that the French word le trouble is a “false friend” since it does not mean the English “trouble,” as Hazel Barnes renders it in her translation of L’Être et le néant. Rather, it is a very deeply felt, irresistible impulse to abandon oneself completely to the person one loves—with the complete expectation of the reciprocal abandon of the other. When not reciprocated—which Beauvoir soon realized was the case in her relationship to Sartre—it can create havoc in the one who feels le trouble. In Beauvoir’s case, it was especially shattering because Sartre had convinced her that they were “pure translucid consciousnesses,” with nothing opaque...

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