Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity by Sonia Kruks (review)

In this first and excellent study of Simone de Beauvoir’s political thought, Sonia Kruks consolidates her reputation as one of the foremost analysts of Beauvoir’s work. Rightly centring on the phenomenological concept of ambiguity at the heart of Beauvoir’s thinking on politics, Kruks’s study is divided into five main chapters focusing respectively on the significance of a Beauvoirian critical humanism in a posthumanist, post 9/11 world; the enduring relevance of her thinking on oppression; how privilege might be strategically deployed in forming political judgements; how risk and ambiguity lie necessarily at the heart of political judgement; and, lastly, what Beauvoir’s thinking on justice and revenge can offer to retributive responses to atrocity. With admirable clarity and a talent for teasing out dispassionately the ambiguities of political choice-making (including Beauvoir’s own), Kruks argues that a productive reconstruction of humanism is needed. She shows how Beauvoir offers valuable tools to such an enterprise, namely, a phenomenological perspective on politics that acknowledges more fully the limits of sovereign rationalism and the embodied and affective situation from which political judgements are actually made. In Chapter 2 Kruks provides new and more nuanced readings of Le Deuxième Sexe, L’Amérique au jour le jour, and La Vieillesse as studies of gender, race, and ageing construed as different forms of oppression, rooted respectively in asymmetrical recognition, indifference, and aversion. As she argues adeptly, if privilege cannot be definitively worked out or worked through, Beauvoir’s own political choices from the late 1950s onwards reveal that it may nonetheless be deployed strategically to support the other’s freedom. Kruks’s study is enriched by both historical and contemporary examples, such as the trial of the Vichy intellectual collaborator Robert Brasillach (the analysis of which forms the core of Beauvoir’s 1946 essay ‘Œil pour œil’), Beauvoir’s defence of FLN militant Djamila Boupacha, who was sexually tortured during the Algerian War, the Cold War political dilemmas that confront Henri in Les Mandarins, and, more recently, the recourse to ‘truth and reconciliation’ committees across the globe as an alternative to retributive justice. Throughout, Beauvoir’s political philosophy is productively staged in dialogue with historical and contemporary political thinkers in the Hegelian and Marxist traditions such as Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, highlighting Beauvoir’s enduring value as a political thinker. Her thinking is revealed to be grounded in a critical and pragmatic humanism, attentive to the risks of abstract universalism and attuned to the unavoidable risks of action in the everyday. This volume is thoroughly recommended to scholars both within and beyond Beauvoir studies, because it shows in insightful and original ways that Beauvoir’s political philosophy, with its sophisticated analysis of oppression and justice, is highly relevant to contemporary debates on war and atrocity and their ethical and political legacies.