Hell Is Not Always Other People: Le regard and Hegelian Reciprocity as Spectacle in Simone de Beauvoir's L'invitée

Although critics have read Beauvoir's L'invitée as the exact corollary of Sartre's theory of le regard or of Hegel's master-slave dialectic, this article explores how Beauvoir's motifs of looking and spectacle reveal a uniquely Beauvoirian theory of intersubjectivity. In particular, Beauvoir's novel demonstrates how Sartre and Hegel do not adequately account for human finitude and thus create skewed pictures of our possibilities for reciprocity.