The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays (review)

At the risk of overstating the case, this collection of essays provides further evidence that Beauvoir scholarship is in its richest and most vital period yet. As Margaret Simons, its editor, points out and its authors demonstrate, Beauvoir is less and less considered a writer who applies Sartrean existentialism to concrete situations and increasingly engaged as the philosopher she is. This volume, then, takes up Beauvoir's texts and ideas with care and scrutiny, neither shying away from important critiques leveled against Beauvoir nor underestimating her insight.

The crucial term for this text is 'engagement'; in fact, the first and keynote essay was initially delivered by Michèle Le Doeuff at a 2001 Simone de Beauvoir society conference entitled, "Engaging with Simone de Beauvoir." This volume is a critical engagement with Beauvoir and it accomplishes this in two different but complementary ways, by including articles which forward recent scholarship on the philosophy of Beauvoir, and others which draw on Beauvoir's thought in order to examine concepts not fully explicated in her texts.

Though it does somewhat of a disservice to the diversity of the essays to categorize them in two general forms, it permits a distillation of what sets this text apart from others such as The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (2003), which contains equally good scholarship by quite a few of the same authors. Though this volume contains no shortage of essays offering a compelling treatment of Beauvoir's work itself, both in terms of its inheritance and its legacy, it is the inclusion of other kinds of essays, ones which use Beauvoir's ideas to produce new insights into those concrete situations and applications Beauvoir so famously addresses, which provides the full scope of critical engagement.

It might be helpful to highlight briefly a handful of the essays that advance Beauvoir scholarship. Edward Fullbrook returns to a theme addressed in his and Kate Fullbrook's 1993 book, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend. Specifically, he argues that the ideas found in Beauvoir's She Came to Stay preceded Sartre's Being and Nothingness. As such, he thoroughly completes the project of upending the conventional reading that Beauvoir takes Sartre's concepts and fictionalizes them. Sara Heinämaa offers a persuasive case for Beauvoir's phenomenological allegiance to Merleau-Ponty over Sartre. Drawing on this context, Heinämaa makes sense of Beauvoir's understanding of sexual difference, an understanding situated within a phenomenology of the body. With regard to the range of scholarship to be found in this volume, consider the following: Nancy Bauer invites us to reconsider Beauvoir's relationship to Heideggerian ontology, Shannon Mussett takes up Hegel's master-slave dialectic in order to think differently with Beauvoir about recognition, and Ann Murphy addresses Beauvoir's revolutionary politics and her stance on violence.

The other kinds of essays to be found in this volume might first be exemplified by Debra Bergoffen's piece. She employs Beauvoir's notion of two-fold intentionality in order to produce a positive conception of marriage: rather than viewing marriage as within the social contract tradition of autonomy, Begoffen conceives of it as a relationship founded on reciprocity. Gail Weiss likewise takes Beauvoir's work as instructive, though she employs Beauvoir in accomplishing an understanding of the moral labor involved in building and sustaining relationships which involve freedom from oppressive conditions. By looking at two cases of women who have killed their children, Weiss considers what it would mean to think about ethics not as a failure of choice but as a failure of relationship. Suzanne Laba Cataldi focuses on frigidity as a form of protest, Julie Ward addresses the twin notions of reciprocity and friendship as a possible way out of the conflict of subjects, and Laura Hengehold borrows from Foucault's emphasis on parrh¯esia to explore with Beauvoir the possibility of a couple who are also in a relationship...