Preface

This special issue of Hypatia on the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir brings together papers from around the world, many of which were presented at the 1998 World Congress of Philosophy and the Symposium of the International Association of Women Philosophers. Our special issue also celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication in France of The Second Sex. The celebrations began at the Cinquantenaire du Deuxième Sexe conference in Paris in January 1999 and will continue at the Legacies of Simone de Beauvoir conference at Penn State University, in November 19-20, 1999. Beauvoir scholars would be happier if a complete, scholarly translation of The Second Sex were also forthcoming (and it's not—unless Knopf changes its mind and authorizes one).

But there is good news: Joan Catapano, the visionary assistant director of Indiana University Press, has successfully negotiated for the English language rights to all of Beauvoir's philosophical texts currently available for translation. Indiana will publish a six-volume series of these texts, co-edited by myself and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, that will bring to English readers the wartime diary and student diaries dating from Beauvoir's years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, that have overturned the view of Beauvoir as Sartre's philosophical follower. Other texts in the series include a previously untranslated philosophical novella from the thirties; a play and essays on philosophy, literature and politics from the forties; essays on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, politics, and Sade from the fifties; and writings on post-colonialist politics and feminism, including her three Japan lectures on women and writing, from the sixties.

The articles assembled in this issue reflect dramatic changes and enduring continuities in research on Beauvoir's philosophy since the first special Hypatia issue on Beauvoir that I edited in 1985, later reprinted in Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy (1990). An obvious difference is the international character of this issue. In 1985, the special issue, while published in Great Britain as a special issue of Women's Studies International Forum, included only researchers from universities in the United States of America. This issue brings together scholars from Australia, Great Britain, Finland, The Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as the United States, a reflection of the success of the 1998 Boston conferences in bringing together scholars from around the world.

The 1999 issue also reveals a shifting paradigm in the understanding of Beauvoir's philosophical originality. Most of the 1985 articles assumed a Sartrean philosophical foundation for The Second Sex. By 1999, that assumption has been radically challenged by discoveries based on posthumous texts. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir contributed to the current renaissance in Beauvoir scholarship with her publication of Beauvoir's letters to Sartre and war-time diary, and her donation of Beauvoir's student diaries to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France after her adopted mother's death in 1986. Edward Fullbrook reports on one discovery based on the posthumous texts in his article, presenting evidence of the overall philosophical indebtedness of Sartre's 1943 essay, Being and Nothingness, to Beauvoir's 1943 philosophical novel, She Came to Stay. Beauvoir's student diary from 1927, which is being transcribed by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and myself, provided the basis for my own discovery of Beauvoir's early formulation of the problem of "the opposition of self and other" discussed in Julie Ward's article.

Another change in research on Beauvoir's philosophy since 1985 is in the expanded context of interpretation. Discussions of The Second Sex within the context of Hegel, Marx, and feminist politics, which dominated the 1985 issue, have been expanded to include detailed analyses of Beauvoir's novels, autobiographies, essays in existentialist ethics, and report on China, within the context of Kant, Rousseau, Husserlean phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and African philosophy. Interest continues in 1999 on issues raised in the 1985 issue, including Beauvoir's concepts of the body, erotic embodiment, marriage and lesbian relationships.

Research on Beauvoir's philosophy is flourishing as is evident...