Enemies and Reciprocities

At a round table on Emily Grosholz' new collection, The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir at the Maison Française in New York,¹ the issue of race stereotypes in her work was raised by audience members. The debate was animated and some speakers sprung to Beauvoir's defense: she wasn't the worst of her contemporaries, it was the times, she was a committed activist, a good amount of her work is indebted to race theory of her day, she promoted writers such as Frantz Fanon and Richard Wright, it would be a mistake to single her out, we shouldn't allow ourselves to be distracted from the best contributions of her work.

The issue presented itself in the guise of, or was taken as, critique. Analyses of contradictory thinking in Beauvoir's work have sometimes been considered criticism of her work.² Recently, Robert Bernasconi's analysis of race hierarchy in the work of Kant and Locke³ has provoked Joseph McCarney's response that, while we shouldn't engage in "facile airbushing of the great figures of the past," at the same time, we need to avoid:

the dangers of an answering facility on the other side. . . . Without [this distinction] disreputable opinions or even incidental remarks, instead of being judged to be incompatible with the logic of a philosopher's position, a sad decline from her best insights, are liable to engulf the whole. Our antiracist critique will then end up proving far too much.⁴

McCarney, as I like to suppose, reminds his readers with that courteous pronoun "she" that this debate will be occurring as much with respect to women philosophers in the history of philosophy—though he makes no mention of them—as to Hegel, Kant and Locke.

Feminists have taken pains to recuperate women's contributions to the history of philosophy, working on unpublished, untranslated, or otherwise neglected texts and disconnecting the distinctiveness of these thinkers from the male philosophers whose adherants they are often considered to be. So one can understand the view that Beauvoir's best insights should not be eclipsed by attention to the most incidental, inconsistent, or disappointing elements of her writing, and similarly understand that psychoanalytic and deconstructive methodologies (though they offer alternatives to "critique") are not often brought to interpretation of problematic content in the work of historical women philosophers. This said, perhaps historical women philosophers are being quarantined from interrogations that can also serve to enrich their texts, and the feminisms that attend to them.

I.

In addition to some largely scathing discussion of those American women preoccupied with making themselves feminine, Beauvoir's discussions of being-for-others in America Day by Day⁵ also includes a preoccupation with her experience of becoming white. She reminds her readers of Richard Wright's description of the constant consciousness of being black: "he can never forget that he is black, and that makes him conscious every minute of the whole white world from which the word 'black' takes its meaning."⁶ But her attention is just as much taken up with the way in which she is conspicuous as privileged,⁷ and her encounters with the "unfriendly" faces of African Americans living in "poverty and hatred" [la misère et la haine]: "we felt the bite [la morsure] of those looks . . . in these hostile streets."⁸

With every step, our discomfort grows. As we go by, voices drop, gestures drop, smiles die: all life is suspended in the depths of those angry eyes [ces yeux qui nous maudissent]. The silence is so stifling, the menace so oppressive that it's almost a relief when something finally explodes. An old woman glares at us in disgust and spits twice... a tiny girl runs off crying, "Enemies! Enemies! [Les enemies! Les enemies!]"⁹

Does Beauvoir think she is othered as privileged and white? Her concerns might seem confused in this work: her depiction of race inequity in America dissolves into self-preoccupation.¹⁰

By the time she realizes The Second Sex,¹¹ what can appear as instability has been transformed into a domain of potential ethical significance...