Emancipatory Thinking: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Political Thought by Elaine Stavro (review)

There is much more to the thought of Simone de Beauvoir than her status as a founding mother of feminism might immediately suggest. As Elaine Stavro's Emancipatory Thinking: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Political Thought shows, we have much to gain by attending to the more expansive contributions of this singular and wide-ranging thinker. Those contributions grow out of her many engagements with existentialist philosophy, literary practice and criticism, and the political and ideological clashes of her day. In Stavro's hands, the reach of Beauvoir's thought is extended even further into debates beyond her lifetime in feminist epistemology, discursive power, and new materialism.

The reception of Beauvoir's thought in philosophy and political theory has been slower to develop than in gender studies, though a growing body of scholarship from Nancy Bauer, Penelope Deutscher, Sonia Kruks, Lori Marso, and Toril Moi is changing that. Stavro's book is a welcome addition to this growing interest in Beauvoir as a theorist of freedom and embodiment that includes, but is not limited to, her groundbreaking contributions to feminist thought. Emancipatory Thinking reaches out in many directions, providing a pleasing eclecticism that will spark curiosity as well as enhance our understanding of Beauvoir as a political thinker.

Among the most compelling questions that Stavro pursues is how to understand Beauvoir not just as a thinker but also as a public intellectual whose writings cut across so many divides: disciplinary, aesthetic, and political. Is she a writer or a philosopher? Is her writing literature, criticism, non-fiction, or personal essay? Drawing her political activities into the mix, as Stavro does, can we further consider as well the art of living her life as a political, critical, or philosophical contribution above and beyond the words she committed to paper?

Emancipatory Thinking invites us into these intersections fearlessly and creatively. All the better for us, her readers, to help us think with Beauvoir and the divergent and previously untrod paths she carved out for herself. Stavro reads Beauvoir's political engagements as instructive philosophical moments, drawing insights from the stands she took during the trial of collaborator Robert Brasillach and in drawing attention to the torture and imprisonment of Algerian resistance fighter Djamila Boupacha. Stavro uses these moments of heightened tension in the French republic to illuminate the concrete political stakes of Beauvoir's public judgments about political action and the implications for individual, collective, and state responsibility for violence. These events and Beauvoir's political actions and statements concerning them provide a grounded reality through which to think of her more abstract ethical and philosophical commitments in texts such as The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).

Not content to leave Beauvoir's thought as an artefact of the events of her day, Emancipatory Thinking turns to our own time to consider how Beauvoir's thought can interject in contemporary theoretical debates that she never lived to see. Among the most robust of these imagined engagements is Stavro's presentation of "Beauvoir's radical humanism" as a provocation to new materialism's focus on non-human agency and the decentred subjectivities of post-structuralism. Overall, Stavro sees Beauvoir as contributing and correcting these debates rather than opposing them outright. This leads to unexpected moments such as Stavro's contention that "Beauvoir too has a theory of gender performativity" considerably before the notion was championed by Judith Butler. In this way, Emancipatory Thinking provokes new thinking with a Beauvoirian humanism that attends to ambiguity and the diversity of human experience while never shying away from hard political judgment and action.

Readers more and less familiar with Beauvoir will find much to enjoy and engage with in this wide-ranging study. Occupying the intersections of political and philosophical writings, lived experience and theoretical reflection, and the political moment of Beauvoir's day with the emergent political crisis and contentions of our own, Stavro expands the conversation with Beauvoir to include both scholars and concerned citizens...