Hiding in Plain Sight - The Rhetorical Workings of Simone de Beauv
Hiding in Plain Sight - The Rhetorical Workings of Simone de Beauv
Hiding in Plain Sight - The Rhetorical Workings of Simone de Beauv
Scholar Commons
1-1-2013
Recommended Citation
Crawford, E.(2013). Hiding In Plain Sight: the Rhetorical Workings of Simone De Beauvoir's Feminist
Language. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/2431
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HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: THE RHETORICAL W ORKINGS OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR’S
FEMINIST LANGUAGE
by
Emily Crawford
Bachelor of Arts
Mercer University, 2002
Masters of Arts
University of South Carolina, 2005
_____________________________________
English
2013
Accepted by:
ii
To Emile. Thank you for being my companion.
iii
Acknowledgments
expectations. The dissertation process has been long, and to say I appreciate his
financially, making it possible for me to write, pay tuition, and simply live; and
creatively, reading chapter drafts, asking questions (and learning when not to ask
project: perspective. Whenever I felt I could not possibly keep writing or sustain
interest in the project any longer, Emile encouraged me to keep going and
my learning endeavors. I thank Lydia for her unbridled enthusiasm (one summer
she traveled to the library with me almost every day and embarked on her own
research project: a massive illustrated feminist history timeline she titled “You
Go, Girls!”) and Louis for entertaining me with pirouettes, juggling, and jokes.
I also thank Erik Doxtader for unflappably guiding my nascent ideas from
iv
appreciative to Christy Friend who helped keep my project rhetorically focused
and offered invaluable advice on balancing work and family lives. My classes
interesting directions. I thank Kate Adams for serving as my outside reader and
for supporting me. Lisa Bailey has seen me through the ups and downs of
dissertation writing and coached me along, meeting with me over coffee and tea
my writer’s block. Mark Brantner and Brooke Rollins lead by example with their
own dissertations and helped me by lending supportive calls, texts, and when
they were in town, meals and drinks. Thanks to the University of South
Business Communication, and Tell Them! for allowing me to work and providing
v
Abstract
translated into instant U.S. feminist acceptance, but by 1981 Julia Kristeva’s call
for “Women’s Time” coupled with the rise of poststructuralism in the academy
essentially sounded the death knell for Beauvoir in the world of feminist language
past twenty years a handful of feminists have slowly and intermittently begun to
Instead of accepting what Beauvoir and feminists in her lineage say about her
language, I derive her language assumptions from how her language works.
enacts the same process. Next, I explore Beauvoir’s use of masculine language
in The Second Sex as a reiteration with possibilities for feminists. After that, I
vi
for variety of ambiguously ethical relations—both mutually and agonistically
vantage of longstanding stylistic debate in rhetoric and feminism over the merits
of clear versus opaque language and what those stylistic choices mean in terms
of social change. Finally, I argue that even though Privileges, the work to which
Beauvoir first points readers to her feminist philosophy and politics, seems to
work toward different ends than The Second Sex or The Ethics of Ambiguity, the
and politics, these texts enact the very same critique of her “serious man” whose
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………….iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………...………………….iv
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………...…………………vi
RELATIONAL……………………...………………………………………………..59
SADE………………………………………........................................................114
viii
6.2 AMBIGUITY AS THE TACITLY PERFORMED…………… …………………….196
WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………214
ix
Chapter 1:
writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is
not new” (Second 3). At our current point in feminism, some undoubtedly find
The Second Sex “irritating” and “not new.” Haven’t we done all we can do with
Beauvoir’s landmark feminist text? Aren’t our times firmly post-humanist, in stark
Yet, the more I read both about and by Beauvoir, the more I was
book. For one, Beauvoir positions The Second Sex not as launching a women’s
woman is just being born,” she tells us in her 1949 work (Second 751). As
Penelope Deutscher points out, at the time when Beauvoir wrote The Second
Sex, French women had been enfranchised five years earlier, and access to
education and employment had been widened (Philosophy 1). Particularly in her
opening to The Second Sex, Beauvoir hints that woman, as a subject or issue to
over. “Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism,” she tells us, “it is
1
now almost over: let’s not talk about it anymore” (Second 3). Beauvoir’s
description of woman’s position in her world could easily come from the mouth of
a post-feminist woman of our world: “Many women today, fortunate to have had
all the privileges of the human being restored to them, can afford the luxury of
impartiality: we even feel the necessity of it. We are no longer like our militant
Yet for the next 700 pages Beauvoir explicates how women have not in
economic, historical, and mythological situations woman’s lot has been that of
explains. “[W]hile he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the
essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other” (Second 6).
Closely re-reading The Second Sex arrests us with its contradictory post-feminist
and pre-feminist perspectives. Women have arrived, insists Beauvoir, and at the
to her work than “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (Second 283),
that The Second Sex existed not only as a social constructionist-feminist text, but
also as a text defined by rhetorical ambiguity. Yet, what initially drew American
readers to The Second Sex was in part Beauvoir herself. After all, she seemed
intellectual woman who refused both marriage and motherhood and instead
created a seemingly equal partnership with Jean Paul Sartre. The 1952 English
1
translation and publication of The Second Sex sent shock waves through U.S.
universities. “In the 1950s and early 1960s,” Toril Moi reports, “any young
various civil rights and anti-war movements to create their own liberation
movements. After reading The Second Sex Mary King and Casey Hayden,
famously wrote a position paper calling for gender inequality in SNCC. Radical
feminist Shulie Firestone aspired to become the “American Beauvoir” and New
York Radical Women attempted to hand-deliver their Notes from the First Year to
Beauvoir in appreciation for her influence (Brownmiller 42, 27). Where Betty
systems already in place, Beauvoir was the radical Marxist feminist to these
subject at a time when feminine difference, the maternal erotic and sexual-textual
jouissance were deemed to be the zeitgeist of French feminist thinking” (“E tat”
201). Poststructuralist feminist scholars like Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and
2
Julie Kristeva readily wrote off Beauvoir as a “masculine” feminist, more
creating a feminine world of difference.1 Within the academy, The Second Sex
became shorthand for your mother’s feminism—fine for a certain place in time,
but completely outdated and incapable of doing the kind of theoretical work
how gender and sex work in which she credits Beauvoir as a major precursor,
1
An interesting shift in perception given how Beauvoir was initially seen by U.S.
feminists as the radical feminist interested in feminine difference.
3
rather than strictly adhering to a Cartesian subjectivity.2 The recovery work these
simply a purveyor of Sartean thought and instead read Beauvoir’s work as post-
with the assumption that we must find a different way of reading her work.
Beauvoir is fashionable again, but not for the same reasons she was initially
“État Présent” 205), my restaging of Beauvoir suggests that her work possesses
Beauvoir’s language, I argue, hides in plain sight and scholars have often
let what Beauvoir says about her language rather than what her language
actually does, determine how we view and value her work. While Beauvoir tells
us, "I think that I say what I say and that that is what you hear; there is a real
2See Simons’s Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins
of Existentialism; Butler’s Gender Trouble; and Kruks’s “Gender and Subjectivity:
Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Feminism.”
4
connection created through language," that’s not the full story (Beauvoir qtd. in
Holland and Renée 5n). As I will demonstrate throughout the project, when read
her own language, there must be a balance. As such, the first half of the project
concerns itself with the text most people (but not Beauvoir) consider her primary
feminist text: The Second Sex. In the second half of the project I look at a text
pointed to for those beginning to understand her feminist philosophy and politics.
overlooked as worthy of rhetorical study because she never laid claim to the title
attention from the complexities of her language and rhetoricians and feminists
have mostly accepted what she says about her language over what her language
does. Why should Beauvoir’s refusal to call attention to her language exclude
This tension between the visible, consciously confessed and the hidden,
unconsciously performed, guides the study. How, I ask in each chapter, does
5
Beauvoir’s language hide in plain sight? What rhetorical issues does Beauvoir
engage with that we as rhetoricians and feminists haven’t seen because she’s
operative? Considering both what Beauvoir says about her language and what
her languages does, this project opens Beauvoir’s language up as more sensitive
pedagogy, social change, history, and the like. To clarify, when I call for
this means I explore how Beauvoir manages the logic of a proposition, how
she compromises between a desire for radical social change and a dogged
pragmatism, how she attends to an ethics that accounts for difference, how
she implements a language suited for social change, and the ethical roots
6
rhetorical issue or question, but the range of issues and questions mirror
writing, particularly in The Second Sex and Privileges, offers rhetorical scholars
Beauvoir urges readers to take her at her word, once they encounter her
than agonistic (combative), readers can learn capacities for thought and how to
read Beauvoir’s writing as they read it. While Beauvoir’s contradictions have
historically been read as obstacles to overcome, I argue that she works with
acceptance of uncertainty.
7
However, while the surface level concerns of contradictions may be read
Beauvoir’s language in The Second Sex. These critics doubt the ability of what
language on the structural level and explore the possibilities Beauvoir opens up
relational, language, violence and difference in terms of the ethical and sexual as
I switch from focusing on her language in The Second Sex to “Must We Burn
not burn Sade, Beauvoir tells us, because he raises the disturbing question of
how to manage incomprehensible relations. I argue in this chapter that her non-
8
incomprehensible relation: in “Must We Burn Sade?” we witness an openness to
readers to attention with its stark dogmatism. What do we make of this sudden
the vantage of longstanding stylistic debate in rhetoric and feminism over the
merits of clear versus opaque language. Does a clear, plain style work best in
enacting feminist change by laying bare the obvious inequalities between the
imperatives, her own language tends to hide in plain sight. In this chapter I look
obscure her own creative and ethical intervention in feminist social change.
most critics who ignore this text, I find Privileges precisely the testing grounds for
Six I argue that even though Privileges seems to work toward different ends than
9
The Ethics of Ambiguity, both works enact the very same critique of her “serious
principles in the face of changing situations. The stated lesson of The Ethics of
Ambiguity opens the way for reading the performed lesson of Privileges—that
Sex and Privileges, merits a rhetorical inquiry for its thorough saturation in
ambiguity and the political and ethical implications. Combined, these chapters
give us a way into Beauvoir’s language and provide an opening for thinking about
open to relational creations and compromises, and committed to the idea that
questions can help us live and approach problems differently. As I’ll demonstrate
difficult ambiguity like the one she performs through her language. This
and how it structures the way we think and act. As an existentialist, Beauvoir
believed that language helps shape our realities. She warns us of “words as
murderous as gas chambers” (Force 22) and encourages women toward active
liberation when she declares, “words are crucial weapons for feminism and must
be chosen carefully and used wisely” (qtd in Bair, “Simone” 151). Analyzing
10
Beauvoir’s language as obscure, invisible, and unstated offers an occasion to
11
Chapter 2:
contradiction. She is both object and subject, other and self. Throughout the
body, yet should not let her biology limit her freedom; her situation as outsider to
the world gives her a better vantage point to create through art, yet her situation
restrains her from composing great art; she actively exercises her freedom and at
the same time passively accepts her sex’s predetermined limitations imposed by
societal institutions.
perception that many feminists have today, Nancy Bauer writes, “Beauvoir’s text
13
teeters precipitously on an unstable foundation of contradictions” (“Beauvoir’s
First”). Jean Elshtain quips, “De Beauvoir launches volleys against her subjects
in the name of liberating them” (307). Michele Le Doeuff concurs, adding, “What
a strange mixture The Second Sex is for a feminist reader of today” (55). Those
tempted to approach it selectively” (Le Doeuff 55). Le Doeuff explains that “side
outdated and which makes the book less accessible to more recent readers”
conceptual albatross around Beauvoir’s neck that suggests subjects (male and
female) are always free.3 What Le Doeuff and others find missing from such a
always free, then how do we account for systemic oppression? How can women
at the same time always free to create and take full responsibility for their life
the very workings of her language. In this chapter I argue that contradiction in
3
Throughout Being and Nothingness Sartre argues for the fact of subject’s
freedom: “In fact we are a freedom which chooses, but we do not choose to be
free. We are condemned to freedom…thrown into freedom” (593).
14
The Second Sex enacts a moment of rhetorical power for women. Further, I
thought and how to read Beauvoir’s writing as they read it. Instead of reading
The Second Sex with already established assumptions about the nature of
agreed upon entity, but a constantly composed and often contradictory and
negotiated category. She does this by writing an uneven text, a text with which
readers must actively struggle through the reading process. Through the
made language values such as linear, consistent progression, and presses them
know when subjects (particularly women) act in freedom and when they react in
oppression and call it freedom? If we are to take Beauvoir at her word (which
15
challenging the very assumptions that we must choose between one and the
other?
to the degree that it takes seriously that the contradictory may be a moment of
rhetorical power, that there may be inventive and creative power in producing
linguistic and conceptual uncertainty. In the case of The Second Sex, when
readers wrestle with the contradictory statements Beauvoir makes about women,
woman readers never yield a certain definition of woman, even though the book’s
contradictory language in the beginning of The Second Sex prepares readers for
rhetorical problem, The Second Sex demands a rhetorical inquiry, a close and
and Louise Renée argue in Simone de Beauvoir’s Fiction, “there is still one
lingering assumption, present even amongst Beauvoir scholars: that Beauvoir did
Beauvoir’s writing not only pop up in the content and style of her work, but also in
16
her conversations on language. Holland and Renée concede that Beauvoir at
unified subject, but insist that Beauvoir holds contradictory views that we cannot
that "the betrayals of language prevent any true communication" (Beauvoir qtd in
Holland and Renée 4n). In the same statement Beauvoir argues that "I think that
I say what I say and that that is what you hear; there is a real connection created
meaning common to all and accessible to all" (Beauvoir qtd in Holland and
attention.
The rhetorical approach I deploy follows from Pope’s dictum that “[t]he
sound must seem an Echo to the sense” (74). In other words, I focus on the
interplay between what Beauvoir’s language both does and what it says in The
Second Sex. Beauvoir’s language does not solely transmit ideas, as others have
primarily assumed, but it also sounds an echo. If her language only transmitted
foundational propositions she sets forth could not logically hold. But when we
approach, no longer are ideas and language discrete entities, but language
17
becomes the idea. Language exists not as auxiliary to thought, but enables the
Instead of accepting only what Beauvoir says about her language, in this
creators in The Second Sex and show how Beauvoir’s language echoes and
between men’s capacities for active, original creation and women’s propensities
binary in her discussions of women and creativity with her concept of “thoughtful
productive for women. Beauvoir explains this conceptual contradiction, the idea
18
Beauvoir scholars and rhetorical scholars, I argue, lead to a fresh and compelling
problem with contradictions; however, few of these scholars take up the concept
of contradiction in the same way. There are those who deal with contradiction in
the content of her writing, who point out how Beauvoir makes statements, for
later. There are those who instead focus on the contradiction of how Beauvoir
spoke and wrote about her language philosophy, how she pledges a verbal
admit its fundamental opacity. Beauvoir, scholars point out, both calls to
language use. Her vision of communication subscribes to both free and open
spills over from writings on her language into her life. How, scholars ponder,
could Beauvoir advocate for women’s equal rights with men, yet still subordinate
19
supposedly broad concept of human gets figured as a very specific kind of
human. In the case of The Second Sex, argues Spelman, Beauvoir enacts a
her more general theoretical perspective provide de Beauvoir with the ingredients
of a very rich account of what it has meant to be ‘woman’ and how women have
been treated—in fact, they suggest a much richer account than she actually
Beauvoir’s own situation as a woman, as “part of the intellectual and political air
Second Sex where Beauvoir focuses on the body from the perspective of
biological functions, she negatively saddles women with biological passivity: “In
she feels her body to be ‘an obscure, alien thing’ (1:66)” (Arp 163). Yet in book
two, at the very least, Beauvoir ameliorates these charges by elaborating on the
women are compelled to feel negatively about their bodies. Arp reconciles these
20
two bodily accounts by “discounting [Beauvoir’s] remarks on female biology”
(162). In dealing with contradiction then, Arp suggests we read the social and
psychological accounts of the body from the second book onto the first book, in
effect, ignoring half of the text in order to make sense of the text as a whole.
titled “The Notorious Contradictions of Simone de Beauvoir” and asks, “Is any
feminist philosopher of the twentieth century better known her for contradictory
one mostly blames Sartre for the textual, conceptual imperfections and reads
Beauvoir selectively.4 In effect, Sartre gets credited with the existential elements
of the text (the parts that declare woman always free), and Beauvoir with the
parts that analyze women’s oppression (the parts that argue woman cannot
made Other by her situation and does not have the same degree of freedom as
According to Deutscher there are those like Toril Moi who, in Simone de
that Julie K. Ward in “Beauvoir’s Two Senses of ‘Body’ in The Second Sex”
4
We have seen this impulse already in Le Doeuff’s Hipparchia’s Choice.
21
offers, is a reading which de-emphasizes Beauvoir’s inconsistencies to the point
of arguing that The Second Sex has no inconsistencies at all: “when confronted
with apparent contradictions among an author’s claims, one needs to look deeper
(Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice). The instability of the text, critics tell us, lies in
Amid the choices for how to read contradiction in The Second Sex,
themselves these have no meaning. These facts may take on this or that
meaning” (“Notorious”184). To make her logical point, Beauvoir must rely upon
that something is and is not at the same time. In stark contrast against Spelman,
5
These readings can range from the mean-spirited criticism Moi surveys in
“Politics and the Intellectual Woman: Clichés and Commonplaces in the
Reception of Simone de Beauvoir” to the more well-intentioned interpretations
like Arp’s.
22
and, later, freedom (“Notorious” 176). For Deutscher, making particular
contradictions seem natural in The Second Sex helps debunk the myth of the
Yet more often than not, readers have taken contradictions in The Second
context. Beauvoir is, after all, a woman of her time, not completely immune to
the patriarchal structures she describes. Tina Chanter even goes as far as to
suggest that Beauvoir “deprives herself... of the resources that she needs in
order to complete [her] project” and “suffers from the fact that she wrote in the
suggests, constrains The Second Sex from becoming the fullest version of itself.
context for a more situated and thus more sympathetic reading. Mary Evans, for
example, puts passages from the “Biological Data” chapter where Beauvoir
23
(Beauvoir qtd in Evans 64-65).6 These moments should be excused as parts of
an historical idiom Evans writes, for “the ‘facts’ of human physiology were not
cannot trust an analysis of woman which explains social hierarchy and behavior
biology that reinforces stereotypes which justify woman’s oppression. But if, as
Beauvoir argues, “biological data take[s] on those values the existent confers on
them,” (47) then how can she so confidently declare women more emotional due
6
Even in Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s new translation the passage suggests
gender essentialism: “Instability is a striking characteristic of [women’s] bodies in
general...More instability and less control make [women] more emotional, which
is directly linked to vascular variations: palpitations, redness, and so on; and they
are thus subject to convulsive attacks: tears, nervous laughter, and hysterics”
(43).
7
She depicts motherhood as “enslavement to the species” (Second 46),
breastfeeding as an “exhausting servitude” (Second 42), and likens the fetus
during pregnancy as a “hostile element...locked inside” woman (Second 42).
24
Historical readings like the one Evans provides lock The Second Sex into
a historical time period and detracts from the text’s creative possibilities. When
the text as simply useful to a different generation, but not to our own. Readers
can appreciate what The Second Sex did for a time period and firmly ensconce
the text on the bookshelf of feminist history. Such an approach allows Chanter to
pay due respect to The Second Sex’s place in feminist history and
condescendingly dismiss the work as irrelevant for today: “Suffice it to say that,
while her stance was a radical one in her time, feminism is now able to risk what
veered toward performative readings. Scholars found that reading for what The
Second Sex does rather than what Beauvoir says it does moves readers past
second wave feminists, particularly those struggling for recognition in the field of
philosophy, these refrains were especially irksome. Beauvoir already had the
25
thinker worthy of study. But with a performative reading, one that looks at what
the text does, readers get a different story. Rather than vindicating Sartrean
demonstrate its limitations for women. In other words, she may state her
Kruks puts it wryly, "Although Beauvoir said she worked within Sartre's
from arguments like Judith Butler’s who cites Beauvoir as a precursor to her
will be shown to have been gender all along" (Gender 12) to Kruks who instead
"revitaliz[ing his] … ideas in ways that significantly transform them" ("Gender and
Subjectivity" 101). With this approach readers focus less on authorial intent than
on the effects of the text and are able to still respect Beauvoir's philosophical
integrity. Wittingly or not, this reading approach does double duty, both
However, the problem with the way this approach usually gets applied is
that it does not go far enough in thinking through the effects of how we read
Holland and Renée argue, few critics see Beauvoir as a serious thinker in terms
26
of language. Even those who have envisioned Beauvoir’s language as
thought. For example, Butler, stepping back from previous claims that Beauvoir
maintains an ambivalence toward the Cartesian mind/body split later retracts: "it
appears that Beauvoir maintains the mind/body dualism, even as she proposes a
Sartre but fails. Beauvoir, it seems to these critics, inadvertently exposes the
arguments.
necessary to Beauvoir’s feminist project. The Second Sex has not persisted in
the feminist canon despite its contradictions but because of its contradictions.
tangles of contradiction in The Second Sex with more subtlety. So far in this
8
See Butler’s “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault” for
an example of her earlier claim of Beauvoir’s ambivalence toward the Cartesian
mind/body split.
27
question in the reading of The Second Sex. Contradictions pervade the text as
insists we are always free with a feminism that insists women are not?); as a
through bodily functions like pregnancy yet still have the complete freedom to
attribute problematic passages in The Second Sex to an era and when to read
contradiction other than as a problem or error. In what follows, we will see a brief
Contradiction has moved from Aristotle’s descriptions where it was seen as a tool
creation. The possibilities for contradiction have opened up beyond the purely
logical into the realm of the psychological. Indeed, rhetorical scholarship points
certainty and truth. Aristotle, in Book IV of Metaphysics, reacts against the ideas
of the Sophists that “it is possible for the same thing to be and not to be”
28
(Aristotle, Metaphysics 4.4).9 For Aristotle, entering into rhetorical demonstration
presupposes a belief that the speaker has a definite position on the issue. From
arguments. The speaker can ultimately argue that something is or is not, but by
the rules of logic cannot argue both at the same time. As such, non-
that something is and is not at the same time, then there exists no real argument,
The contradictory speaker essentially captures all ground and blocks his
nihilistic apathy where one choice is just as valid as another. Engaging with a
contradictory argument, “it follows,” Aristotle reasons, “that all would then be right
9
In tracing the rhetorical heritage, I begin with Aristotle because his arguments
have influenced, wittingly or not, the way that most Beauvoir scholars have
viewed her contradictions.
29
and all would be in error, and our opponent himself confesses himself to be in
error. And at the same time our discussion with him is evidently about nothing at
opponent has said one thing and [when] if the right question is asked, an
opponent.
counterarguments and limiting any inventional potential. In listing the topoi, the
this position with an example: “And at Delphi Agesipolis, [Aristipuus], after earlier
consulting oracles at Olympia, asked the god if his opinion was the same as his
10
For more on contradiction in classical rhetoric, see Edward Schiappa’s “The
‘Impossible to Contradict’ Fragment” in Protagoras and Logos. Although Aristotle
sees himself combating Protagoras’s view on contradiction in Metaphysics,
Schiappa reads more similarities than differences between the two. For starker
contrasts look to the fragments of Parmenides or others of the Eleatic school.
30
father’s, implying it would be shameful for him to say contradictory things”
rhetoric where a rhetor battles head-to-head against an opponent with the goal of
This type of rhetoric, argues many feminist rhetoricians, too narrowly defines
rhetoric to the point of excluding women. Karen Foss, Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy
L. Griffin report that they “struggled to find the connection between [Aristotle’s
rhetoric] and women’s rhetorical activities,” (7) for rhetors in this context
Susan Jarratt expressly states her rereading of the first sophists emanates
Aristotelian tradition in rhetoric with its narrow knowledge structure and negative
gender implications for women (xv, 64). While Aristotle and Plato’s shadows
loom large in our rhetorical history books, Jarratt insists we take a more
comprehensive look at classical rhetoric and include the first sophists. One
the truth. Based in part on their experiences with other cultures, the sophists
“believed and taught that notions of ‘truth’ had to be adjusted to fit the ways of a
31
particular audience in a certain time and with a certain set of beliefs and laws”
(xv). For the sophists, language plays a significant role in knowledge formation
perception.
logoi—the notion that there are valid, contradictory positions on all issues—was a
students would argue from multiple perspectives and make what might initially
seem the weaker case, stronger. What we are here describing as contradiction,
an ending point for Aristotle in terms of rhetoric, would be a starting point for
Protagoras, since his epistemological perspective was not finding the one Truth.
contradictory truths and forging a path of action forward (Jarratt 49-53). Where
assumptions. “[A]s it had evolved from the classical period through the
32
male” and “categorically refused entry to women” (27).11 From Connors’s
rhetorics where accommodation is the aim and dialogue and equal participation
are valued over individualistic competitions in which one person wins and
another loses. In this view, contradiction becomes a generative tool to hear and
create different perspectives without one winning out over the other. With irenic
Connors argues, with the rise of irenic rhetoric in American colleges in the early
written, and from abstract arguments to personal expositions (44). Foss, Foss,
and Griffin, for example, see their mix of feminism and rhetoric not simply as an
inclusion of women into men’s ways of knowing and participating in rhetoric, but
individuals create and enact the worlds in which they choose to live” (7).
If, as Connors argues, men were trained to know rhetoric and its
counterpart logic as a “fighting,” “contest” and “struggle,” (Connors 27) then these
ways of knowing, Lorraine Code argues in What Can She Know?, are markedly
11
See Karlyn Kohrs Cambell’s Women Public Speakers in the United States,
1800-1925, Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from
Antiquity to Renaissance, and Andrea Lunsford’s Recovering Rhetorica for
examples of recoveries of women rhetoricians.
33
is marked by sex: “[i]deals central to the project [of epistemology]—ideals of
This is not to say that Code cedes logic and knowledge to the masculine.
subjective and objective,” not entirely one or the other (27). Indeed, dichotomous
While Aristotle’s logic relies upon the power of the objective knower, it
continue to find resources in his logic and abstraction. Marjorie Hass in “Feminist
questions the assumption that Aristotle’s cultural views caused his metaphysical
views and suggests that the “objective” position be more fully articulated by
virtue ethics based upon hierarchy and certainty could bolster the feminist ethics
that Aristotle discusses the law of non-contradiction not only through logic, but
also through psychology. Kenneth Burke takes up this line of thought in “War,
34
Response, and Contradiction” and sees the possibilities and envisions
must take into consideration. So, for instance, if a writer wishes to establish a
feeling of the horror of war, the writer might do well to highlight the heroics of
war. “[T]here are good grounds,” Burke believes “for suspecting that man’s
emotions over logic as the motivation for actions, thus the illogic of a text might
actually amplify its persuasiveness. Indeed, the very practical, logic-based civic
rhetoric follows from the values formed by the more affective epideictic rhetoric:
“the point of view which began as a poet’s irresponsible ‘inkling’ attains its
embodiment in the very architecture of the state” (235). In order to attend to the
more practical work of the state, Burke suggests, we would do well to take into
consideration the epideictic, the level where values are formed in oftentimes
contradictory ways.
author’s intentions, in fact, produce contradictory effects. Burke writes, “let war
35
be put forward as a cultural way of life, as one channel of effort in which people
can be profoundly human, and you induce in the reader the fullest possible
response to war, precisely such a response as might best lead one to appreciate
the preferable ways of peace” (240-241). As opposed to logic, the best deterrent
to war (and Burke concerns himself with the future anticipation of war rather than
the past response) depicts the humanity, heroics, and honor of war. In other
dangers and risks. Humans are qualitatively different from the one-to-one cause
and effects found in industrial factories where raw materials go in and come out
primarily for its ambiguity. If we believe that a certain Truth exists, then there
exists no room for contradiction. Something either is or is not. This logic dictates
that a successful writer would hold the same position consistently throughout the
text in order to build a case for the Truth. Any hint of contradiction, from an
36
important document would work tirelessly to justify or overcome the variety of
contradictions in the text. In order to save the text, this perspective holds, you
components of contradiction still hold a great deal of force and can offer feminists
a particular kind of intellectual capital, there exist different ways of reading and
Irenic rhetoric allows something to both be and not be; it allows questions to
linger open longer without rushing to conclusions; and it allows for an abundance
of positions.
expands our vision of how contradiction can be experienced. Again, where the
something of a trap to set for your opponents to make them appear absurd or
37
perspective, becomes something to accept and work with as part of the rhetorical
landscape.
sense. At heart, they see it as a broken text that needs fixing. In taking the
position of overcoming the obstacles of the text, readers enact a certain violence.
They beat the text into submission. They read the text as they think it should be
readers launch into the text from the well-rehearsed mantra, “One is not born, but
rather becomes, woman” and read preceding and following chapters through this
prism (283).
Sex and as fundamental to the text may revitalize Beauvoir’s feminist theory and
allow it to do new work. Beauvoir has been pigeonholed as the feminist who
forefront. However true these characterizations may be, the effect has been a
stultifying one. Readers approach the text certain of what they will find. For
younger generations of feminists who have grown up taking The Second Sex’s
axioms for granted, Judith Thurman supposes the text seems “as quaint as a pair
myopically reading The Second Sex as “one is not born, but rather becomes,
38
ambiguous contradiction to a well-circulated, popularized, easily consumable
catchphrase. As such we lose the struggle and contingency in reading the text.
contradiction from The Second Sex. Indeed, the rhetorical potential of the text
rests precisely in its contradictions. The ambiguity that comes with contradiction
amplifies the generative possibilities of the text. Irenic rhetoric allows for an
the opportunity to pause with the ambiguity of her text. Beauvoir acts as a
rhetorical device, but subtly echoing it. In this way, Beauvoir acts as an invisible
39
contradiction as ripe with creative possibilities. While Aristotle and Burke
Once again, I argue that the way Beauvoir moves through her
contradictions, her very language, echoes the concepts she seeks to explain. In
blocks her from creativity: her passivity keeps her from working hard on her craft,
yet it also opens up the possibility for originality; the discipline necessary to enter
into the literary tradition and secure an intelligent audience, for instance, can also
produce a tedious and pedantic artist. The content of what Beauvoir says about
woman as creator moves from emphasizing the imperative of active control and
totally rejecting the passive elements of creation (as seen in her passages on
motherhood) to insisting upon the value of both active and passive components
(as seen in her passages on literature). Her oscillation between the poles of
12
In these sections she usually pairs the creative outlets of art and literature
together, but for ease of discussion I’ll only refer to woman’s writing or literature.
40
through creative arts like writing literature holds the most promise for extracting
women from their position as Other, yet Beauvoir seems to trap woman by
“As long as [woman] still has to fight to become a human being,” Beauvoir
concludes in The Second Sex, “she cannot be a creator” (750). The ability to
immanence to man’s ability to transcend the given world through creation. In the
chapters and crystallizes how she has defined woman thus far in her analysis
but this creation is nothing but a repetition of the same Life in different
worthless when it is not serving the species; but in serving the species, the
human male shapes the face of the earth, creates new instruments,
41
an existent, because transcendence also inhabits her and her project is
not repetition but surpassing herself toward another future; she finds the
with men in festivals that celebrate the success and victories of males.
her own eyes Life in itself does not provide her reasons for being, and
these reasons are more important than life itself. (Second 74)
Rather than framing woman’s ability to give birth as a gift of basic creation,
Beauvoir sees it as “her misfortune.” There is the brute reality of biological life
philosopher, Beauvoir concerns herself with existence and how, in this instance,
and engaged relationship with the world. Existence goes beyond maintaining
the world with one’s actions and projects. While on the face of things biological
creation, the form of creation exclusively reserved for the female sex, seems
fundamental to both life and existence, Beauvoir dismisses this form of creation,
or what she deems “re-creation,” for a creation that “shapes the face of the
earth.” Where man actively “invents and forges the future,” woman is passively
“complicit” in repeating the human race. Man’s creation of “reasons for being,”
which include bringing values and human projects into existence, overshadow
42
While Beauvoir could have made the distinction between the re-creation of
life and the principal creation of existence and moved on, she dwells on woman’s
admits that “some women say they felt creative power during childbirth” (549),
this statement as she does for her more disturbingly discontent pictures of
maternity, nor does she elaborate any further on this particular experience of
women. Beauvoir’s limited space and energy directed to the joys of creation
through childbirth strike at the heart of the feminine myths she aims to upset.
has no active hand in shaping the fetus, but acts as a vessel for the natural
forces. Perhaps she facilitates nature’s creation, but carrying a child and giving
birth does not qualify woman as an active creator in the world, for Beauvoir.
Beauvoir deems this contradiction as problematic and proof that women should
view the trappings of pregnancy and motherhood suspiciously, for even woman’s
enrichment comes passively to her. Woman is “proud of it; but she also feels like
43
the plaything of obscure forces, she is tossed about, assaulted” (538). Since
cajoling women into thinking their whole identities lie in becoming wife and
creative quality (532). Existentialist creation reacts against the repetition of pre-
set values. Creation instead, she argues, should come from a place where the
subject freely considers and chooses a project that speaks to her individual gifts
and situation.
actively takes control and does not let biological or social forces exclusively drive
a life. As practiced at the time of her writing The Second Sex, motherhood fails
chapter “The Mother” describing the legal, moral, and logistical constraints of
birth control and abortion. In doing so she suggests the technologies that
prevent perpetual pregnancy of the sexually active woman often bring women
must overcome the law that “dooms young women to death, sterility, and illness”
13
Most of her examples deal specifically with her fellow French women.
44
and religious hypocrisy that “authorizes the killing of adult men in
In short, the crucial role of creator “attempts to found the world anew on a
human freedom” (748). This amounts to an active role of origination where one
must “unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom,” not falling for false indicators
as possible, their destiny rather than allowing social institutions, customs, and
motherhood on the grounds that passive creation is not really creation; however,
she identifies one productive line of creativity for women: “Woman’s situation,”
childbirth woman merely ensures the continuity of humanity, but through writing,
she can disrupt the continuity of life and forge a new future, propose new values.
Indeed, in her own life Beauvoir saw language as her way out of the traps in
which many women found themselves: “[w]ords without doubt, universal, eternal,
presence of all in each, are the only transcendent power I recognize and am
14
However, Beauvoir also allows that abortion is not always a sign of woman’s
choice. Often, “the seducer himself…convinces the woman that she should rid
herself of the child” (529).
45
affected by” (Force 650). Words, for Beauvoir, hold the potential to affect woman
time, predispose woman to seek refuge through words. Because of this, she
“does not grasp [the masculine world] in its universal guise but through a
particular vision” (Second 742). Here, creation not only extends beyond
accepted world because of her exclusion; her creation comes from her “feelings
and emotions” of her experience as Other (742). Precisely because she has little
hope of making it in the real world, woman can lose herself in the imaginary and
great writer.15 At the margins of the masculine world, woman rejects a universal,
given-vision of her situation, but it is because of her inability to have a real hand
in constructing herself and change the given world that she fails at writing
(Second 742). If woman cannot successfully posit herself in a world she has
15
Beauvoir takes the term “great” seriously: “Men we call great are those
who…take the weight of the world on their shoulders” (Second 749). Rather than
redefining the question, “Why are men greater writers than women?” she accepts
the terms (“the great book Middlemarch does not equal War and Peace;
Wuthering Heights, in spite of its stature, does not have the scope of Brothers
Karamazov” (Second 746)) and argues that woman can match man once she
has freedom equal to man’s.
46
helped create, she cannot rightfully be deemed a creator. Yes, her leisure time
affords her the space to think, but since she “decides to paint or write just to fill
the emptiness of her days,” woman hardly ever knows the “austere necessity of a
discipline” that great writers need (Second 742). So while bourgeois women
may have the luxury of space, time, and money to devote to their days to writing,
they often lack the seriousness and rigor of writers who must actively struggle
women often have an environment conducive to writing, if they passively fall into
writing rather than actively choose it, then they are never forced to learn the
motherhood section stand in her writing section up to this point. Passivity holds a
thoughtful effort, they put their confidence in spontaneity; writing or smiling is all
one to them: they try their luck, success will come or will not” (Second 743).
“The curse on the woman vassal is that she is not allowed to do anything…when
she is productive and active, she regains her transcendence” (Second 721). If
47
and not rely on the feminine myths created by men that imbue value to passive
Within the world of The Second Sex, Beauvoir builds many of her points
through an accumulation of binaries: there is the subject and there is the object;
there is the One and there is the Other; there is the active creator of the world
and there is the passive receiver of culture. Indeed, within the section where
number of stark oppositions to amplify her points of how women often miss
creative opportunities that men seize. Woman “believe[s] in the magic virtues of
passivity” and as such “create[s] mirages” that please, but does not create art,
which for Beauvoir in this section, is the meaningful creation (743). Women
artists often “cheat,” they “[play] at working, but [do] not work,” they “[confuse]
conjurations and acts, symbolic gestures and effective behavior,” they may
“disguise” themselves as artists and she may “[imagine] she is a writer,” but
woman’s passive mirages that often get confused with artistic creation with real
artistic creation. Art, Beauvoir insists, “is not a mirage, it is a solid object,” it must
and the “laziness” of “most women” writers (read: amateur writer) (743). What
these binaries ultimately boil down to is the difference between an active creation
48
and a passive acceptance of the given. According to Beauvoir, the problem with
opposed to actively creating, knowing that “value can be acquired”; they “know
thoughtful effort”; rather than cultivate technique and craft, women rely on the gift
of personality; they “try their luck” instead of investing the “effort” (743). Beauvoir
finally arrives at the central problem for women writers: they misplace their
By this point in the text, over 700 pages in, Beauvoir has taught readers
has been arguing from the beginning of The Second Sex, is one of the central
Yet the further Beauvoir explains the creative process in writing, the more
more than the immediate translation of the subjective impression” (743). This
definition falls squarely into the passivity side of Beauvoir’s binaries: there’s no
thought effort, just an instant, gut reaction. And Beauvoir certainly sees the
trouble in relying on spontaneity as a writer: one must “[take] others into account”
49
when creating and one also runs the risk of “reinventing a banal cliché” (743).
But even as she reprimands woman for ignorantly taking her written clichés as
present pleasing mirages, Beauvoir admits that a greatness can come from
unstudied writing: “of course, it is a precious gift to be able to dig down into
without premeditation or pretense spring from a writer, but how can she suddenly
recommend the creative merits of passivity, where the ideas come from within
the writer, without studied, active effort after reprimanding woman for her passive
complicity in her own subjugation? More specifically, how can she recommend
passivity given its role as the societal expectation for women and the condition of
Beauvoir acknowledges the odd place she’s written herself into with this
turn: “these two terms” that is, spontaneity and thoughtful effort, “seem to
contradict each other” (744). By the terms and definitions she’s given readers
thus far, they do. Within the world of The Second Sex that Beauvoir has
constructed for readers, one cannot write “the immediate translation of the
subjective impression” and with thoughtful effort at the same time. Or, more
precisely, male writers have not been able to do this. Colette, according to
50
Beauvoir, has.16
spontaneity,” into a creative possibility for women writers (744). Beauvoir has
thus far made the case for women writers’ culturally-constructed predilection for
Beauvoir’s critiques of passivity in the previous 700 pages of The Second Sex
stand. She instead opens the transformative possibility of passivity when paired
with its opposite and challenges women writers to live the full potential of
contradiction. And it’s in living this contradiction that women can become great
writers.
Unlike passages in The Second Sex where the goal of woman as creator
rests in becoming more active, here woman, Beauvoir suggests, at the same
time needs an element of passivity. One of the few examples where woman
woman must inhabit the contradiction of active control and passive spontaneity.
The greatest generative and creative possibilities for woman come only from
16
Colette’s spontaneity is “not found in any male writer” and (744).
51
contradiction.17 Through Beauvoir’s construction here, creative limitations
originate from certainty where one adheres with conviction to either an active or
passive role, and the freedom to create emanates from the contradiction of
inhabiting activity and inactivity at the same time. Contradiction, in this sense,
student…assiduous and pedantic” (Second 745). Pure will alone cannot create a
produce writing that forges a new world. In this regard, women “make
theoretician” (Second 745), but in their current situation, woman cannot excel as
For Beauvoir, women fail to take their writing far enough. They clearly and
sometimes beautifully describe scenes and situations. They can expose the
However, woman stops short of boldly proposing and creating new worlds, of
opening new vistas of opportunity: “truth itself is ambiguity, depth, mystery: after
17
For a like-minded take on the complicated and sometime contradictory
elements of creativity, see Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From:
The Natural History of Innovation, particularly his chapter on serendipity (97-
128).
52
its presence is acknowledged, it must be thought, re-created” (Second 747).18
Upon observing and describing the unjust truths of the world, one must burst
through the mirages and create anew. In other words, the problem here is that
women ultimately assume the ready-made world they inhabit rather than
To break through into the realm of creation, woman needs not only
activate the conscious, active, intentional drives, but at the same time allow her
latent, unconscious, passive skills to bear on her words. Woman must first “do
writing” before creativity can “do her.” Rarely does Beauvoir attribute any
carefully following the movement of her contradictions and allowing for both
active and passive elements, rather than assuming a logical progression to her
“not found in any male writer,” marking one of the few categories where a woman
spontaneity” is not just the contradiction of inhabiting active and passive activities
rhetorical tropes and also allowing one’s unconscious the freedom to wander and
18
Yet another contradiction here: recreation through childbirth is seen as less
valuable than recreation of the world through words.
53
spontaneously produce rhetorical turns), but it also includes the capacity to
differentiate between good and bad writing and edit accordingly. Given woman’s
spontaneity” as editing constitutes a more difficult task for woman than for man.
object, as active and passive. Again, for Beauvoir, writing, at its fullest
potentiality, creates new worlds, but writing, for woman, too often becomes a tool
of expressing her very self: “editing or crossing out for her means repudiating a
part of self; she does not want to sacrifice anything both because she delights in
what she is and because she hopes not to become other” (Second 744). If
must take responsibility for language, not as an extension of her self, but as a
woman, unlike man, is a divided subject: “She refuses to confine herself to her
role as female because she does not want to mutilate herself; but it would also
themselves into a formalized, disciplined training and at the same time they must
discard tradition and break away for their own unique project. “[W]ithout serious
training, [woman] will never be more than an amateur” (Second 742); however,
54
kills her critical sense and even her intelligence” by following only the required
for men and women. The “world has always belonged to men” and as she
argues throughout The Second Sex, men have been trained their whole lives
terms of the masculine (Second 721). Women creators, Beauvoir suggests, have
Woman” chapter that women are watching men, and their success, and trying to
emulate them: “Sometimes [woman] rejects her femininity, she hesitates between
like a man: she wastes a lot of time and energy in defiance, scenes, and anger”
(Second 737). Creation, however, does not look the same in men and in woman.
By ignoring her difference woman ignores her unique creative genius. Women
need both activity and passivity for genius: “There are women who are mad, and
there are women of talent: none of them have this madness in talent called
genius” (Second 745). In ignoring her difference from man, she wastes her
creative potential. If woman tries too hard in creating an independent life for
herself, she becomes a joke, an imitation of man and not a full version of woman.
Woman must emulate the discipline and the hard work of studying, analyzing,
pondering the tradition, but often, Beauvoir observes, she unnecessarily imitates
man working so hard to succeed that she is never able to forget herself or lose
herself in her project: “Not being able to forget oneself is a failure” (Second 744).
55
Earlier, through the negation of mother as creator, Beauvoir marks
creator, she also plays with the complexities of contradictions in this account. To
reach her creative potential, a potential where she can create her own world,
woman must not simply work hard to change her situation, but she must also
Contradictions are not always problems in The Second Sex, but as with
where sound echoes sense. Given that the goal of Beauvoir’s existentialist
“thoughtful spontaneity” as the way woman must create is not one concept
feminist philosophy by dictating not another ready-made value for how woman
should experience the world, but generating multiple possibilities of how she
Not only does the sound, the style of The Second Sex, engage in
passivity in childbirth to claiming the necessity of passivity in her writing, but the
sense, the content of The Second Sex, also affirms contradiction as a creative
necessity for woman. To create new worlds for herself woman cannot simply
imitate the freedom of man and live her life on the side of active, conscious
56
choices. She instead must inhabit both the thoughtfulness of focused study and
the difficult question of “What is a woman?” and “How can woman obtain
freedom?” not through certainty, but the ambiguity of both the sound and sense
ambiguity that, when read closely and taken as a serious rhetorical choice, opens
of creative possibility for woman. One cannot know ahead of time which element
constitutes ambiguity.
Second Sex. While my analysis in The Second Sex has thus far focused on the
interplay between the content of Beauvoir’s argument and the echo of her
alleged “masculine language” in The Second Sex. How, these scholars ask, can
a text written in masculine language affect any real feminist change? In Chapter
57
ask readers to reconsider the possibilities Beauvoir opens up with her re-
58
Chapter 3:
“Vive le point-virgule!”:
language” structure in The Second Sex poses a formidable tension for feminist
rhetoricians, as she both acknowledges the power of language, and admits she
has no intentions of creating what she calls a new feminist language.19 “I am not
sure that I understand exactly what [new feminist languages] are, or even what
they should be,” Beauvoir admits in an interview (Bair, “Politics” 151). “It is
difficult,” she continues, “to describe new concepts and actions in existing words,
but it is even more difficult to invent new ones…words are crucial weapons for
feminism and must be chosen carefully and used wisely” (Bair, “Politics” 151).
even “trivial things like…ordinary sexism we’ve got so used to” (Schwarzer 70).
“It starts at the level of grammar,” she tells us, “where the masculine always
comes before the feminine” (Schwarzer 70). The importance of language, she
suggests here, is that it allows us to think in different ways and as a result act in
different ways and transform the world. Indeed, the very structure of our
19
The term “masculine language” is indeed a contested term. We will get to a
more precise definition later in the chapter.
59
grammar works on us in unconscious ways predisposing us toward valuing the
admits the fundamental importance of language for change, but she seemingly
refuses to change her language. This becomes an egregious blind spot after the
thinker.
women’s movement, “it is possible to write one’s self into existence,” then The
Second Sex, Beauvoir’s allegedly masculine text, coupled with her refusal to
change her language in later writings, practically wrote her out of existence as a
20
See Carolyn Burke’s reflections on her time in Paris from 1970-1943 in “Report
from Paris: Women’s Writing and the Women’s Movement.”
60
inclusion in opposition to “women’s time” which favors difference and “specificity
upon her language in The Second Sex. Bair explains these language choices
where, “in keeping with her consistent stylistic third person [and] impersonal
modes of narration, [Beauvoir] speaks of women as ‘she’ or ‘they,’ which has led
to charges that she considers herself above, apart, or in some way removed from
the condition of women” (“In Summation” 57-58). In response to what has been
addresses Beauvoir directly and demands answers: “In your despairing view, all
those qualities that make women differ from men only lead to their demise. And
so, while your picture of the world of patriarchy would lead the reader to feel that
women must band together and go off on their own, your dislike of
values found in The Second Sex (221) while Stevie Smith opens her review of
The Second Sex charging Beauvoir as having “written an enormous book about
women and it is soon clear that she does not like them, nor does she like being a
divisive given her subject matter. Instead of expressing solidarity with women,
61
Beauvoir, and to different degrees and definitions, French and Anglo-
feminists, agree that The Second Sex traffics in masculine language. At best,
worst, it is taken as outright misogynistic. While there exists little debate over the
existence and problems of masculine language, yet claiming her own use of it
remains puzzling.
not assume she aims to destroy it and create a new feminine language. Judith
Butler in Bodies that Matter reminds us that “[t]o call a presupposition into
question,” in this case masculine language, “is not the same as doing away with
it; rather,” she tells us, “it is to free it from its metaphysical lodgings in order to
placing, and thereby to permit the term to occupy and to serve very different
political aims” (30). The expressed purpose of The Second Sex was never to
upend masculine language, but in this and other texts Beauvoir shows an
awareness of its limitations, particularly for women. And yet, she does not “[do]
away with it” or even attempt to “[do] away with it.” She uses it, explores its
political stakes for women, and, I argue, in doing so, enters into a different
language, Beauvoir suggests, but rather, the problem is that what we term
masculine language has evolved through time into an exclusive and oppressive
62
language structure. Likewise, this logic implies, masculine language can be
where she frees masculinity from its biologically male moorings, Halberstam
argues that masculine women aim not to imitate men, but to “[afford] us a
examining the masculine separate from the male body, we get a clearer picture
of exactly what constitutes the masculine rather than conflating it with the male
masculine and feminine languages as not simply following from respective male
More important, however, are the political stakes involved in how we read
the feminist potentiality of The Second Sex. Language, for Beauvoir, allows us to
think in different ways and as a result act in different ways to transform the world.
discredits the feminist thought, then there’s nothing much we can salvage from
The Second Sex. Its language rests irreparably on the side of the masculine
63
Encouraging a reading where masculine language is not inherently exclusive and
oppressive but a mutable relation breathes new life into The Second Sex and
Language as an evolving relation between the masculine and the feminine re-
opens the potentiality of The Second Sex and allows for thought and action
In this chapter, I argue that while Beauvoir’s language in The Second Sex
Irigaray’s The Speculum of the Other Woman stands as the most recognizable
voice of male thinkers like Freud and Plotinus in order to interrupt the masculinist
compromise and different types of relations. Beauvoir does this not by outright
64
rejecting feminine language (as has often been the charge against her), but by
rejecting what she deems the psychoanalytic style, a style that she
audience. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir does not simply stick with an easily
The Second Sex. For nearly sixty years the only English translation of
Beauvoir’s landmark text has been significantly curtailed by unmarked cuts, re-
different punctuation? If so, how does punctuation shape our thought and
choices between H.M. Parshley’s 1952 translation and Borde and Malovany-
“feminine” language?
65
The charges against Beauvoir for using masculine language resonate
from both English and French corners of the feminist world. While the English-
English and French feminists, providing a curious and slippery definition. In this
language and then unpack the prevalent French psychoanalytic definition. I will
briefly reflect on the English definition of masculine language; however, for the
provides a richer base from which to then analyze Beauvoir’s adherence and
The Second Sex, “is the work of men; they describe it from a point of view that is
their own and that they confound with the absolute truth” (Second 162).
Language represents but one tool of representation that man has taken for
granted as a natural, normal outgrowth of his dominance and very being. And
while “[t]his world has always belonged to men” (Second 721), Beauvoir
marshals her analysis to prove the masculine bent of the world came about as an
active doing, not as a passive, natural state of affairs. As such, while Beauvoir
never devotes large, continuous space to her critique of masculine language, she
66
obliquely and intermittently addresses the question of masculine language’s
man’s invention,” (Second 212-213) and she devotes roughly fifty pages in her
language in The Second Sex. She leaves the precise qualities of masculine
language unnamed; she instead principally cares about its effects. By calling
interests secured by it. Her concerns with masculine language in The Second
Sex are two-fold: first, man uses language as a tool of oppression and second,
“History” chapters how woman came to be man’s Other and how man used
language to shore up legal and value systems in his favor. He wrote laws that
put the legal system “into harmony with reality,” (Second 88) and “strip[ped]
woman of all her rights to hold and transmit property” (Second 90). Creation of
“Man feminizes the ideal that he posits before him as the essential Other,
because woman is the tangible figure of alterity; this is why almost all the
67
Throughout The Second Sex Beauvoir argues that man needs woman, the
myths to validate and naturalize the current social order where man oppresses
woman.
archetype where man “soars in the sky of heroes” while woman “crouches on the
ground, under his feet” (Second 262) and Breton, contrastingly, envisions
“Myths” section creates and maintains the values that preserve woman as man’s
Other. The more the values formulated in the realm of the epideictic are
repeated, the more they become a naturalized way of thinking and the very
justification for oppressive actions against woman through legal and legislative
foundational values and beliefs that make the concrete material realities of the
world possible: “By way of religions, traditions, language, tales, songs, and film,
68
myths penetrate even into the existence of those most harshly subjected to
interests to the detriment of women. Through writing laws and creating a cultural
mythology, man exercises his dominion over the world and woman through
language.
Yet, by this logic alone, there is no reason why woman could not use
masculine language mechanically toward feminist ends. Why, for example, could
women not also compose laws and create myths that constitutes her as fully
subject as man has? Language, Beauvoir indicates, is not that simple. Because
woman exists in a world created by men, she cannot simply employ her particular
language of difference, of “bizarre genius” for her own devices because it cannot
hand in creating, Beauvoir tells us. She “feel[s] crushed by the universe of
While lamenting the “dull escapist” novels of women, Beauvoir also admits it
“natural for women to try to escape this world where they often feel unrecognized
“masculine world” where woman, if she dares approach, does so with timidity and
conformism (Second 745). Woman finds herself in a double bind: if she “disturbs
and antagonizes” with her difference and originality she only “babbles” and if she
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Unable to adopt the language of men with any force, when woman
attempts a language of her own she can barely be heard: “To say that woman is
mystery is to say not that she is silent but that her language is not heard; she is
there, but hidden beneath veils; she exists beyond these uncertain appearances”
(Second 269). There is a language that takes into account sexual difference,
Here, in The Second Sex, we see the double bind mentioned earlier by Beauvoir:
deafness of the world to a feminine language. Once again woman finds herself
in an impossible position: she is neither subject nor object; she can neither
participate in the reigning language structure nor be heard in her own language
structure.
offer more fully articulated positions. These two perspectives, Toril Moi
summarizes, generally divide along lines of the practical English and the
theoretical French:
experience, they questioned not only the category of experience, but even
21
It should be noted that both Moi in French Feminist Thought and Christine
Delphy in “Invention of French Feminism” have argued that this “French” position
is only a segment of what feminism looks like in France and there are also more
materialist-minded feminists doing work in France as well.
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that of the ‘experiencer’ – the female subject herself. If we were looking
identified point of view.22 For example, Kate Millett’s formative Sexual Politics
comes before the feminine” (Beauvoir qtd in Schwarzer 70), a concern that the
fear that the very structure of masculine language proves inadequate for
22
For Anglo-feminist debates on what it means to write as a woman and
complicate the English-French distinctions see Jonathan D. Culler’s On
Deconstruction, p. 43-64, Shoshana Felman’s “Re-Reading Femininity,” Diana
Fuss’s “Reading Like a Feminist,” Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life,
Mary Jacobus’s Reading Woman, Peggy Kamuf’s “Replacing Feminist Criticism,”
Peggy Kamuf and Nancy K. Miller’s “Parisian Letter: Between Feminism and
Deconstruction” in Conflicts in Feminism, Nancy K. Miller’s Getting Personal,
Deborah L. Rhode’s Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Differences, Elaine
Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own and “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male
Feminists and the Woman of the Year” in Men in Feminism, and Patricia Ann
Meyer Spacks’s The Female Imagination.
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asserting basic grammar and logic as ideologically loaded. Language, for
richer base from which to then analyze Beauvoir’s adherence and subversion of
masculine language.
of masculine language as a discrete entity without first contending with the tangle
of time, history, values and subjectivity.23 “The future,” Cixous proclaims in “The
Laugh of the Medusa,” “must no longer be determined by the past” (1524). While
the past certainly must be taken into consideration, she calls for a radical re-
thinking of time, a break where she “refuse[s] to strengthen [the effects of the
takes up the question of time and history suggesting that before we discuss how
where one speaks. She draws a sharp contrast between cursive time, a time
23
I launch my explanation of masculine language from the
Kristeva/Cixous/Irigaray triumvirate. For their most notable influences begin with
Freud’s 1922 “Medusa’s Head,” Lacan’s On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of
Love and Knowledge, and, although not psychoanalytic, Derrida’s “Linguistics
and Grammatology” in Of Grammatology.
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decidedly Freudian. The first is “readily labeled masculine” (18) and represents
with political inclusion: “the struggles for equal pay for equal work, for taking
power in social institutions on an equal footing with men” (18). The goal here
should have equal pay, full access to family planning tools, comparable
“distrust…the entire political dimension” of cursive time (19). The new generation
that sets up masculine values, the values that have reigned unquestioned, as
universal values that women should easily and naturally accept (20).
totalizing and even totalitarian spirit of this ideology” (21). As such, Kristeva
model (21).
new social contract” (21). It does not go anywhere new, but sublimates
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difference into the dream of unity. By contrast, Freudianism can work within
difference and of the difference among subjects who themselves are not
reducible one to the other” (20). The socialist political agenda has reached its
saturation point, argues Kristeva, because it does not take into consideration
questions of language.
Kristeva explains this implicit criticism of masculine logic through the turn
order to try to discover, first, the specificity of the female, and then, in the
The relationship of sexually differentiated subjects to language, the belief that the
to the importance of rethinking masculine language. Cixous agrees with this line
of thought adding, “writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space
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that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory
Beginning with language, rather than with women’s political inclusion, offers the
The masculine, then, becomes a symbolic marker for the logic of the
same. Particularly in Irigaray’s “This Sex Which is Not One” and Cixous’s “The
bodies as metaphors for writing and language. “Write your self. Your body must
be heard,” implores Cixous (1527). Both Irigaray and Cixous play with the idea
the penis” so does the “political anatomy” (Cixous 1533). Meanwhile, the
inhabiting language:
As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for
passivity. Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can
forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous
contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two—but not divisible into
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Where man needs a tool to touch himself for sexual stimulation, woman, without
intervention touches herself. Where man visibly and actively stimulates, woman
masculine and feminine bodies, demonstrate two attitudes toward language: the
multiple feminine.
castration complex and lack, psychoanalytic feminists refigure the feminine with a
reminiscent of a vagina, that, when looked upon, seizes up man in terror by its
lack of a phallus. Looking upon the feminine, there is nothing to see in the face
valuing the visible, the feminine lacks the authority that comes with the penis.
ominous, but as playful and productively excessive: “[o]ur glances, our smiles,
are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend
ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thought, our
signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking” (Cixous 1526).
representation and the logic of the same. Man recoils from Medusa because he
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cannot see her; instead he sees a terrifying, deadly monster of difference. The
but only as lack. With this obliviousness comes significant limitations for ways of
alternative:
I don’t want a penis to decorate my body with. But I do desire the other for
the other, whole and entire, male or female; because living means wanting
everything that is, everything that lives, and wanting it alive. Castration?
Let others toy with it. What’s a desire originating from a lack? A pretty
meaning, reason, and conscious control. The history of writing, Cixous tells us,
has unnecessarily been “confounded with the history of reason” that “enormous
machine that has been operating and turning out is ‘truth’ for centuries” (1526,
her body in all its excessive multiplicities and anti-logics: “she sets off in all
directions leaving ‘him’ unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers
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are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason” (Irigaray
29).
Yet even with these highlighted differences and with the core belief in a
fundamental difference between the sexes, the feminine is not incompatible with
language, they do not aim to overthrow one god and replace it with another.
“Women’s Time,” “The Laugh of the Medusa,” and “This Sex Which is Not One”
sharply contrast the feminine and masculine, but, as Cixous reminds us, sexual
difference is not the same thing as sexual opposition (1526). While sexual
vanquish the other. None of these authors suggest totally replacing masculine
symbolic systems with a feminine model, but shattering the symbolic system by
however, the problem of women’s inclusion “is not, strictly speaking, [their]
project, not its apogee. As Kristeva explains it, there exists no one correct
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political program for feminism, but each of these strategies addresses specific
Cixous more aggressively claims her use of the masculine and the
feminine: “Besides, isn’t it evident that the penis gets around in my texts, that I
give it a place and appeal? Of course I do. I want all. I want all of me with all of
him. Why should I deprive myself of a part of us? I want all of us” (1535).
Tapping back into the concept of excess, the feminine does not limit itself to itself
or to the same, and in doing so the feminine refuses the hierarchy and singular-
mindedness of the masculine. As such, the feminine does not aspire toward a
pure language position, but steals, mixes, creates, and transforms the symbolic
social system. As Cixous famously quips, “For us the point is not to take
to ‘fly’”24 (1532).
distinguishes woman’s writing and woman’s style (in the biologically constituted
24
The French word here is volver, which translates as both “to fly” and “to steal.”
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(Kristeva 25). Kristeva does not deny the specificity that women’s social situation
produces in her writing, but she does deny an essentialism that attributes
woman’s writing as feminine: “does one not find the pen of many a female writer
being devoted to phantasmic attacks against Language and Sign as the ultimate
writers, “don’t denigrate woman, don’t make of her what men have made of you”
(1528).
perspectives, does not simply equal the language from biologically constituted
male bodies, but is more about a type of violent language that effaces
difference is met with a disciplining violence and where, in effect, men’s political
and social interests are secured over and against women’s. Woman cannot level
the sexual playing field by mechanically writing her inclusion into the world of
represents a way of thinking about the world that values linear time, progress,
singular, representation, and the logic of the same. Kristeva, Irigaray, and
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Appropriating masculine language leaves women open to “a risk of
identification” to which she should not “succumb” (Cixous 1532). Kristeva less
optimistically sees this move as politically unviable for women: “How” she
rhetorically asks, could woman “take hold of [the masculine] contract, to possess
it in order to enjoy it as such or to subvert it?” (24). “The answer remains difficult
frustrating, mutilating, sacrificial” (24). The point remains that rather than
difference.
While Beauvoir, Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray all address the problematic
inclusion. Where Beauvoir raises issues of how masculine language has been
mobilized as a tool of oppression against women, prohibiting them from full and
active inclusion in the world of creation, Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigarary focus on
same. The chief problem with masculine language, from this perspective, is that
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Yet we can still identify common ground between these feminists in their
does not advocate simply for women’s inclusion into masculine language
For example, both Beauvoir in The Second Sex and Irigaray in Speculum of the
women” and that “all of [Lacan’s] stuff still minimizes women” (Jardine and
Beauvoir 228). Irigaray, even after the publication of Speculum of the Other
25
For an excellent comparative reading of Beauvoir and Irigaray’s styles and how
it shapes their philosophy, see Moi’s “’I Am a Woman’: The Personal and the
Philosophical.”
26
While writing The Second Sex, Beauvoir attended a handful of Lacan’s
lectures, but she held a general skepticism toward psychoanalysis in terms of its
ability to account for human behavior. Yet later in life she admitted: “I wish I had
paid more attention to psychology. That I had read more, tried to understand it
better. I wonder why I was so afraid of Freud when I was young[?]” (Beauvoir qtd
in Bair, Simone 633, n23). Even still, Lacan in particular, remained an “enigma”
she “never really cared to understand beyond what [she] used in The Second
Sex” (Beauvoir qtd in Bair, Simone 655, n34).
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Woman and This Sex Which is Not One, according to Beauvoir, “is trying to do
something” but “hasn’t gone quite far enough in my opinion” (Jardine and
have a specific problem with Irigaray’s or Cixous’s content, but rather with not
being able to understand (and asserting the common woman cannot understand)
second book with far greater pleasure, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un. It’s
kind of work she is doing and I found her book very interesting. (Jardine
And of Cixous, she readily admits to being of the older generation that “can’t
read her, understand her” (Jardine and Beauvoir 229). She elaborates:
I think it’s wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to
talk about things which interest a multitude of women. You can’t address
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yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will
And as far as Kristeva’s work, Beauvoir confesses, after faulting Tel Quel, the
journal most closely associated with her, “I don’t know [her] work very well”
psychoanalytic scholars based upon their stylistic language choices. She never
points to any conceptual disagreements (indeed, she reports her “interest” in the
kind of work Irigaray does), but always goes back to the psychoanalytic style as
style, and thus the whole project, fails for Beauvoir as she and a “multitude” of
women are unable to “understand” these stylistics. Not only does the project fail
by her standards, but she even goes as far as making moral claims that their
such, they make different stylistic choices. Irigaray agrees that her feminine
language is “somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason” (29), but she takes
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the risk that her audience, one immersed in the psychoanalytic tradition, has the
Beauvoir, meanwhile, casts for a more general audience in works like The
Second Sex, one that might not be trained in such a particular school of thought.
Irigaray, and Cixous, but when it comes to language, these differences are more
27
Moi, in “’I Am a Woman,’” works through a more thorough comparison between
Irigaray and Beauvoir’s opening passages in order to prove how “philosophical
style becomes a record of subjectivity” (177).
85
only to subvert it in the following paragraph, Beauvoir punctuates the masculine
True, the theory of the eternal feminine still has its followers; they whisper,
‘Even in Russia, women are still very much women’; but other well-
informed people—and also at times those same ones—lament, ‘Woman is
losing herself, woman is lost.’” (Beauvoir, Second 3)
contingent, Beauvoir accentuates the illogic of the position. Neither Irigaray nor
Beauvoir shy away from masculine language. Both integrate it into their
disagrees with their audience choice and writing style does not mean she
that she simply disagrees with what she calls the Lacanian style because of its
audience (women of all classes read The Second Sex when it was originally
Cixous, too, celebrates her language as phallic: “isn’t it evident that the penis
gets around in my text, that I give it a place and appeal? […] I want all…Why
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should I deprive myself of a part of us? (1535). Beauvoir, like the psychoanalytic
style from her content, but in examining the interplay between and inseparability
Beauvoir’s criticisms of Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous she values the rhetorical
dimension of audience above all else: “You can’t address yourself to women by
content are discrete language entities. This distinction allows her to sharply
criticize Irigaray’s “laborious,” “Lacanian style” but still show interest in the work
she undertakes (Jardine and Beauvoir 228); it enables her to morally repudiate
Cixous, not for her ideas, but explicitly for her “esoteric” style that excludes
women (Jardine and Beauvoir 229); and it frees her to confidently dismiss
If, as Beauvoir argues, “a purely feminine writing style” and “a language all
of a piece which would be a women’s language” are “insane,” and at the same
time language “is inherited from a masculine society” with “male prejudice” that
“we must rid language of,” then one sane option for feminists would be to
punctuate masculine language toward feminists ends (Jardine and Beauvoir 229-
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Beauvoir proposes a gesture similar to Cixous’s—volver, “to fly” and “to steal”—
steal the instrument; they don’t have to break it, or try, a priori, to make of it
something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good” (Jardine and
Beauvoir 230). In Cixous’s use of “volver,” she delineates her position from the
manipulate, but rather to dash through and to ‘fly’” (1532). Beauvoir and Cixous
use the term “steal” in a different sense than Audrey Lorde’s famous response,
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Beauvoir and
masculine language in The Second Sex where she argues masculine language
eludes woman because she had no part in its creation. Woman’s duty may be to
steal and appropriate masculine language, but she can only repeat it with a
difference because she had no part in its creation. In this two-pronged critique of
Since the question for Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous is not “How
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alternatives take a variety of shapes. One can punctuate the masculine by
cartoonish parody of its workings, or, as Beauvoir does in The Second Sex, by
structures of thought in The Second Sex, but also how she literally punctuates
mysterious object known as woman. Throughout the course of the text, she sets
out through categories and subcategories to rationally account for the denigrated
situation of woman. Originally published in two volumes, the first half of The
“Destiny,” “History,” and “Myths.” Within these parts she methodically carries
readers through chapters like “Biological Data” where she provides empirical
animals to complex and contingent facts of humans, along with the almost
read. In her “History” chapters, she wields a sweeping existential and Marxist
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(and thus masculine, according to Kristeva) narrative of woman and man’s
support from historians and philosophers to defend her linear argument that man
has worked through legal, economic, and social means to secure his freedom to
the detriment of woman’s. Likewise her “Myths” chapters prove the assault
against women on a cultural front, charting the oeuvre of five Western, canonized
authors’ distinctive methods for Other-ing woman. Volume two considers woman
the social situations (such as wife and mother) available to her. While the
second volume relies on markedly less scholastic, empirical logic, it does hold to
the organizational structure of the first where the category of “Lived Experience”
“Toward Liberation”) that are then narrowed to specific chapters (for example,
“Childhood,” “The Girl,” and the like under the “Formative Years” part).
woman in order to reveal mastery and a more reasoned argument for woman’s
inclusion as a fully human subject. Beauvoir works through a linear and logical
woman as Other. All of Beauvoir’s support points us toward women entering the
“human Mitsein” (Second 17) and men and women working “beyond their natural
Identification, rather than difference, bookends The Second Sex’s stated aims.
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blush, she adheres to a phallocratic economy of signification, occasionally
hopelessly masculine, in this section I will show how the more recent Borde and
specifically the semicolon, and how it connects the feminine with the masculine in
masculine in The Second Sex as fully contained, and thus, not really subversive.
The dominant, masculine order, this line of argument goes, absorbs any break or
criticism of itself. Whatever attacks on the masculine Beauvoir might make are
so intimately implicated in old, socialist (in Kristeva’s sense of the word) thought,
repeat masculine language and one can repeat masculine language with a
[certain types of] mimesis result only in a slave morality, accepting and fortifying
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For English-reading audiences, such subtleties were lost in H.M.
Beauvoir. During the taxing translation process Parshley landed himself in the
hospital for exhaustion, and only three months after the publication of his
translation, he died.29
understood his job as heavily editing Beauvoir to the end of making her more
diarrhea,” Alfred Knopf told him. “I have seldom read a book that seems to run in
four times but in different parts of the text, and I can hardly imagine the average
person reading the whole book carefully” (Knopf qtd in Bair, Simone 433).
28
Blanche Knopf, while visiting the Gallimard family, misunderstood her
translator as describing The Second Sex as a “modern-day sex manual,
something between Kinsey and Havelock Ellis” (Bair, Simone 432).
29
For an historical account of how Parshley was selected to translate The
Second Sex (and how The Second Sex was chosen as a French text to translate
into English) as well as his attempts and difficulties in translating an unfamiliar
philosophical text, see Bair’s Simone de Beauvoir p. 432-439.
92
necessary cuts, assuring her he did not want to change her ideas, but to abridge
her work “in part to effect some reduction in bulk, but primarily to make the work
more attractive to English and American readers” (Parshley qtd in Bair, Simone
434). Without explicitly calling her long sentences held together with numerous
Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex”. In this
article, Simons launches the initial criticisms against Parshley’s translation: ten
per cent of the original French edition is missing from the, at that time, only
English translation (most of these cuts were women’s stories from the “History”
sections); no ellipses mark the edition’s deletions leading Simons to trace line by
line the differences between editions; and, finally, the translator botches
punctuation the changes he made to the text and as a result, Simons argues, he
gives us a different text, one where we get a different sense of how Beauvoir
related to women.
30
Beauvoir gave Parshley “carte blanche” as long as he included a statement at
the beginning of the text relinquishing her of any responsibility for the English
translation (Bair, Simone 435).
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Given Parshley’s translation choices Simons proceeds with an ad
hominem claim that “the pattern of some of his other deletions adds to the
evidence of his sexism” (66). Rather than attend to the problems of the text,
Simons attacks the translator adding Parshley “obviously found women’s history
boring, but he apparently found some sections more irritating than others. He did
takes a turn away from the text, her larger point remains valid: to read Parshley’s
oppression.
percent of the text rather than the 10 percent that Simons estimated. Not only
did he cut large sections from the “History” chapters, but also from Beauvoir’s
identifies mistakes that insinuate Beauvoir’s error rather than Parshley’s: not only
Hegel and the concept of alienation, but also syntactical gaps that resulted from
his deletions. Like Simons, Moi identifies a larger politics behind this particular
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bad translation, and resultant readings. Given the hard fought battle for women
in the philosophical canon, Moi suggests that these errors “have more pernicious
Second Sex cedes ground to sexists who “believe women in general and
and Malovany-Chevallier ultimately aimed to include all of the original text and to
whole idea is developed within the semicolons; there’s a flow,” insists Malovany-
Chevallier (qtd in Glazer, “A Second Sex”). They claim that Beauvoir condemns
other people’s opinions to semicolon-laden sentences; for her own thoughts she
same time. For her own arguments, they claim, she retains simple, “readable,”
this may be the case in some of the passages in The Second Sex, I disagree that
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opponents. The inclusion of the semicolon into the newest English translation
makes for a more difficult text, but that difficultly yields a series of more
inclusion of semicolons enables her to connect elements of the feminine with the
While the simple inclusion of the semicolon into Borde and Malovany-
Chevallier’s 2010 English translation of The Second Sex may seem like a minor
accomplishment. The semicolon, in fact, has become a battle cry for the
While Italian printers in the early 16th century regularly included semicolons, they
were not included in Etienne Dolet of Lyons’s 1540 work enumerating the six
punctuations recognized in the French language (Parke 52). Although the rules
of semicolon usage have evolved over time, it has historically had “the properties
pause than a colon or a period (Parke 49). Ben Jonson likewise distinguishes
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Punctuating the masculine—in the literal sense of written notations to
clarify meaning—is no small matter. At its very inception, punctuation held the
Developed in the early Middle Ages as an aid to writing Latin, punctuation was
refined and codified in the West so that the language of scriptures, liturgy,
literate audiences (Parkes 1). Earlier, in oral cultures, readers and speakers
desired rhythm, and to indicate meaning (Parkes 19). Indeed, the effect of
pausing in different places and thus giving different meanings to the text became
such a hermeneutic concern that scribes and authors began working together to
part 9 he compares the “unsatisfactory,” “free running style” with the “compact”
style. The “free running style” is “united by nothing except the connecting
there is no more to say of that subject.” Compare this with the “compact” style
style pleases an audience more because “the hearer always feels that he is
grasping something and has reached some definite conclusion.” Not only does
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regularly punctuated language help your audience remember your speech
a sense that the composer is in control and bringing the audience along a definite
comes with a less cultivated, punctuated language; yet he also feels the need to
Quintilian admits that the lack of artistic structures in language seems to some
writers “more natural and even more manly”; however, just as we cultivate
animals and plants for a higher yield, he reasons, so must we cultivate our
ultimately more manly and stronger, he argues, in that they “giv[e] more force
and direction” to our thoughts (IX.iv). “How can a style which lacks orderly
structure be stronger than one that is welded together and artistically arranged?”
rhythmic language not feminine and cosmetic, “not merely for charm[ing] you the
ear,” but a virile, profound, tactical rhythm capable of “stirring the soul” (IX.iv).
After all, Quintilian argues, even the military relies on musical rhythms to move
men to action and sooth them into “orderly repose” at the end of the day.
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While Aristotle and Quintilian define punctuation in the rhetorical sense of
artistic structure, modern readers are probably more familiar with punctuation as
a series of choices to help direct readers toward certain responses and more as
a certain and rational test of good writing. Whereas earlier instructors of rhetoric
might focus on how different punctuations and structures would produce different
rhetorical effects for readers, this mode of instruction, one Connors terms
century shifted from “error avoidance rather than any sort of genuine
marks, like the comma, allow brief pauses and signal to the reader that an idea is
still being developed or explained. Others, like the period, signal a more definite
break, an end to one complete thought. The semicolon, for instance, came into
its modern form at the end of the fifteenth century and was created as a
1566 explains, the “semi-circle on its own [i.e. the modern comma] is not
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sufficient, and that the mark, which is transcribed with a double point thus : slows
up the sentential too much” (qtd in Parke 49). Thus the semicolon offers an
hesitations may seem—what, for instance, is the threshold between a short and
renews or upsets it; and incorrect punctuation distorts it” (258). Lacan references
clock” (209). “The ending of a session,” Lacan tells us, “cannot but be
rigid punctuation can “be fatal to the conclusion toward which [the subject’s]
discourse was rushing headlong, and can even set a misunderstanding in stone”
monumental conception of time and that take into account the subject’s
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correctness, then the semicolon calls forth an exaggerated attention to the
comma is a yellow light and a period is a red light, the semicolon is a flashing
red—one of those lights you drive through after a brief pause” (139). Martha
“notice the connection” (53). Scott Rice in Right Words, Right Places describes
Given the affiliative impulse of semicolon usage, then it makes sense that
so much would rest upon the semicolon in the 2010 English translation of The
Second Sex. If before feminists were anxious about the effectively male-
text, complete with full semicolon inclusion can provide a different relationship to
the masculine. I do not go as far as arguing her restored content and semicolons
slow down readers and encourage them to make connections between ideas that
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representation, and inclusion, but she also uses semicolons to create
connections between the feminine and the masculine and stretch what masculine
woman. Initially she sticks close to Engel’s narrative where because of clans’
worsened with the introduction of property, institutions, and laws. Yet her use of
backdrop of masculine narrative, through her use of the semicolon she affects a
more feminine style within the masculine, creating a compromise and relationship
In the following passages, chosen from the “History” chapters which are
feminist critics, we see Beauvoir uses semicolons to play with more feminine
notions of time, create textual situations of excess, and critique linear, cohesive
arguments. Take for instance a lengthy sentence close to the end of her “History”
chapters:
The single woman most often remains a servant in the father’s, brother’s,
impose various roles on her: the Norman peasant woman presides over
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the meal, while the Corsican woman does not sit at the same table as the
men; but in any case, as she plays one of the most important roles in the
and his property; she is respected, and it is often she who really governs:
communities. (153)
Ten lines, one hundred twelve words, four semicolons, and two colons later we
reach the end of her one sentence. If semicolons primarily serve as connectors,
then the five general ideas Beauvoir puts into conversation with one another are:
1) the single woman remains a servant in her home of origin; 2) she becomes
The logic that holds these different parts together is the logic of cyclical
time. Ostensibly, time moves forward in this sentence as the single woman
moves from her family home of origin to her home with her husband. But
instead, the experience of servitude repeats itself. Where woman was once a
“servant” to her father and siblings, she now becomes the servant to her
husband. Time, in this passage, exists as cyclical, never quite moving forward
into a new future, but repeating itself, as Beauvoir writes later in the sentence, as
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Her sentence comes at the end of the “History” chapters where Beauvoir
sums up woman’s current place in the world. French peasant women largely
she claims. Although she exercises power within the “domestic economy,” and
much harsher” (Second 153). She manages both the heavy manual labor of
rural life and the repetitious, monotonous tasks of the household chores,
pregnancy, and child care. While acknowledging the difficulties of agricultural life
of their work and the denial of any leisure time that man often gets to enjoy.
movement from the beginning to the end. The sentence begins with the single
woman in her original family, moves to her similar life as a wife, takes a
tangential path describing the different regional customs for wives, veers back
economy, and winds up in the past, ancient times. Beauvoir enacts a cyclical
conception of time, beginning and ending her sentence with woman, spanning
winding from woman in the universal (the single woman) to woman in the
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the present to the past, between the general and the specific, producing an
meals, whereas the Corsican woman does not sit at table [sic] with the
Parshley’s rendering cuts the passage into nearly half of the original without
and logic. Here we see the effects of Alfred Knopf’s initial impulse to tame her
“concentric circles,” repeating itself “three or four times but in different parts of
the text” are not testimonies to her need of an editor, but instead examples of her
(Knopf qtd in Bair, Simone 433). In Parshley’s revision of her language, the
connections between woman in the universal sense, across time, and women in
the specific sense, across regions. The older translation assumes a masculine
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vision of time and language and in doing so, distorts Beauvoir’s sophisticated
reliance on the semicolon produces a more excessive feel, and thus more of a
push against the masculine, than Parshley’s edition. While certainly not all of her
arguments, they do lend her language an excessive, chaotic air that strikes
against the heart of a phallocratic economy of the same. The rhythm in such
Take for instance her 158-word sentence earlier in her “History” section,
punctuated by eight semicolons and four colons, where Beauvoir charts the
women:
Salon life once again blossoms: The roles played by Mme Geoffrin, Mme
and sciences: like Mme Du Chatelet, for example, they have their own
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they intervene more actively than ever before in political life: one after the
minister without his Egeria, to such a point that Montesquieu thinks that in
state within the state’; and Colle writes on the eve of 1789: ‘They have so
taken over Frenchmen, they have subjugated them so greatly that they
Even as this sentence cohesively and linearly narrates the progress of women in
references into one complex sentence. The nine parts of the sentence linked by
moves single-mindedly forward, it touches upon arts, sciences, and politics and
spreads from the superficial to the grounded. Even as the section depicts a
points to an existence for women that has already happened, gone away, and
been once more restored. It provides a cyclical perspective of time that enables
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history. The sentence with its cyclical and cursive conceptions of time illustrates
structure of a muted, masculine excess. Beauvoir runs through her case citing a
Such evidence out of context may seem appropriate, but this sentence
comes roughly half way through Beauvoir’s nearly 100-page “History” section
where she mixes philosophy and anthropology with socialist, historical narratives
unevenly supported account. So uneven is the text that Christina Hoff Sommers
she could find on the topic of women and jamm[ing] it all into [The Second Sex]”
(“Not Lost”).
deposited in the text, but also the variety of methods used, sentences like this
one are often perceived as gratuitous. The chapter itself fails as a linear march
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cannot simply read the sentence as unambiguously masculine, although there
are certainly masculine elements to it, the semicolon-filled sentence, in its full
content and language. Beauvoir’s language lingers with its multiple semicolons,
colons, and commas, amplifies with its inclusion of quotations and examples of
contrast:
The salon took on new splendor; women protected and inspired the writer
and made up his public; they studied philosophy and science and set up
Roughly one third of the passage has been cut: the temporal element has
vanished, two of twelve names remain, two sentences (each still containing
semicolons) replace the one long sentence, summarization takes the place of
readers a decidedly more masculine text, stripping it of its long excesses and
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the relatively masculine lines of thought (Marxist history and time, the logic of
rationally mastering the concept of woman, and the political goal of women’s
thinking (cyclical time, valuing the excessive, and creating through non-linear,
arguments.
(Jardine and Beauvoir 228-230). Beauvoir punctuates her language with an eye
toward compromise and connection between the masculine values of linear time,
110
progress, universal political inclusion, reason, common sense egalitarianism,
unity, the singular, representation, and the logic of the same with the feminine
For English readers of The Second Sex, this has only recently been a
possibility with the Borde and Malovany-Chevallier 2010 translation. Their new
Beauvoir’s sentences for a U.S. audience; in doing so, however, he erased the
returned semicolons restore nuance to the text that was previously panned as
thoroughly masculine.
or politically pure language position. While Beauvoir has been critiqued for her
relational mix of the feminine and masculine. In moments of excess found in The
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Second Sex, created in part by Beauvoir’s use of the semicolon, her punctuation
have the possibilities to take readers of The Second Sex somewhere different, to
raise questions of how time and logic operate. Rather than viewing Beauvoir’s
languages of French psychoanalytic feminists, but her language mix allows for
broader ways in which the world can be transformed. Given her target audience
more access to her ideas while questioning masculine structures of linear time,
reason, identification, and scarcity. Beauvoir never promises nor does she
difference. She offers feminists a way to gradually work and transform their
language systems from within. Beauvoir is not interested in writing herself into a
unexpected ways.
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Beauvoir’s language in The Second Sex points to the limits of
The feminine, they hope, holds the potential for attending to difference in a non-
violent and creatively generative way. Beauvoir exploits the rhetorical potential
relational, language, violence, and difference play out in interesting ways in her
language should look like, so she refuses to define and confine what an ethical
challenges feminists to expand what ethical relations between men and women
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Chapter 4:
Unreadable Relations:
assuming her world begins with things rather than words. Beauvoir, as seen in
the previous chapter, envisioned words as “crucial weapons” for feminism (Bair,
“Politics” 151); she saw language as an unconscious force upon women, wielded
language, then, creates a reality in which woman is the ultimate alterity, man’s
used against women in securing man’s own interests. Barbara Cassin describes
this perspective of beginning with things rather than words as “a matter of getting
to the things under words as quickly as possible, of producing the unity of being
under the difference of languages, of reducing the multiple to the one…” (362).
previous chapter, Beauvoir does not merely parrot masculine language but
punctuates it in a way that builds relations between the masculine and the
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Nonetheless, feminists still project representational assumptions onto
Beauvoir’s work. In an interview with Deidre Bair, over thirty years after the
controversial essays, her 1952 “Must We Burn Sade?,” an essay that in part
constitutes where Beauvoir sees the origins of her feminist philosophy and
politics. In this interview, Beauvoir describes Sade as a “fascinating man who for
twenty years brutally loved and hated women and then spent the rest of his life in
jail writing about what he couldn’t do any more...Next to him [Henry] Miller is a
child and Genet an angel” (Bair, Simone 432). On hearing this, her interviewer is
both horrified and perplexed. Bair later candidly assesses the text as “a
soon after The Second Sex, that outrages feminist critics and scholars by its
And Bair is not alone in her criticisms. Andrea Dworkin derides the piece as
an apologia for a rapist. Debra Bergoffen, in an attempt to reclaim the text, reads
the erotic margins of Beauvoir’s work and argues for the essay’s importance as
to understand Sade.
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when it comes to assessing the potentialities of Sade’s relations. Rather than
large part this comes from her performative read of Sade’s language. Where
For Beauvoir scholars, this is an unanticipated strategy. Not only does she
issues that directly affect concrete women such as violence and consent—she
in The Second Sex. In doing this, she signals her conceptual reliance on
the elements that have historically shocked feminists in “Must We Burn Sade?”—
namely, Beauvoir’s treatment of women and her move from supporting the
Beauvoir’s interest in Sade. While she does not find him to engender particularly
skillful or “good” writing on a representational level, she does allow that “[i]n its
gaiety, its violence, and its arrogant rawness,” Sade’s style “proves to be that of a
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great writer” (“Must” 36). However, she saves her more spirited writing on barbs
against Sade as an author. Before granting him any literary merit she writes,
tone, and we begin to be bored” (“Must” 36). And later, she assures readers that
“[N]o one would think of ranking Justine with Manon Lescaut or Les Liaisons
clarifies that “Sade was in no way disposed to great literary audacity” (“Must” 35).
like Judith Butler feel the need to acknowledge Sade’s stylistic faults of
Sade” 172).
Sade misses Beauvoir’s exacting standards when she examines him from
31
She, Sartre, and Jorge Semprun shared an allegiance to committed literature
in this debate. Within this context, committed literature holds that authors have a
responsibility to address political issues of their time. Jean Ricardou and Jean-
Pierre Fay opposed the committed position in favor of the “new novel” while Yves
Berger supported the “uncommitted literature” viewpoint. See Moi’s “What Can
Literature Do? Simone de Beauvoir as a Literary Theorist” for further background
on the debate.
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literature as “broadly realist and ‘committed’” (‘État Présent” 205).32 Even in The
as to exclude women writers from the heights of truly “great literature.” She
laments that while some women writers like Emily Brontë, Virginia Woolf and
(sometimes) Mary Webb begin to approach great writing, “[n]o woman ever wrote
taken on the level of performative language, that is, language that demonstrates
Indeed, in “What Can Literature Do?” Beauvoir distinguishes her interest with
writing as concerned with a doing, as “an activity carried out by human beings,
for human beings, with the aim of unveiling the world for them, and this unveiling
32
In this context Tidd puts Beauvoir in contrast to psychoanalytic French
feminists whose theories explore experimental, feminine writing.
33
Performativity is not to be confused with performance, which has a longer
etymological history. Performance is “a fluid, bilingual term that bridges sport
(performance in the sense of a record), technique (performance in the sense of
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associations of gender as a verb rather than a noun. Gender, and by extension
Beauvoir’s “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one” has “radical
consequences” (Butler, Gender 142) that leads to gender as an active doing: “if
gender is something that one becomes—but can never be—then gender is itself
Butler insists that we do not do gender, but that gender does us. It is
needs the “I,” the ability to lay claim to an authentic self so women can have their
own subjectivity, voice, and story. “[H]ow,” Benhabib asks, is “the very project of
119
More recently, the lines between performativity (verb) and the performance
(noun) have been blurred. Jane Monica Drexler references the “power of
action that does something, that “moves the event beyond the bounds of the
between the two (Cassin 351). The difference between Austin’s locutionary (a
performative statement that does something by saying it) turns out to be, by his
Really Do Things with Words,” identifies at least two types of language acts
under the umbrella of performance—speech acts and what she calls “tongue
acts,” acts that “transfor[m] or creat[e] the world” (349). It is precisely here, in the
realm of language acts where we have “world effects” (Cassin 349) that we see
The action worth unveiling in Sade’s writing, for Beauvoir, centers on his
creating relations. Beauvoir writes, “it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert
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that Sade compels our attention; it is by virtue of the relationship which he
created between these two aspects of himself” (“Must” 4). Foregrounding the
relationship between his writing self and sexual self, not the relationships
language would do, Beauvoir poses his language as integral to understanding his
relations between his “psycho-physical destiny” and his ethics, between his
individuality and the universal, and his individuality and his community.
Language, far from clarifying these sets of relations, obscures them by the
very act of explanation. The more Sade tries to explain his relations the more
than a fault to be overcome through clarity and polish becomes operative. His
language does not obfuscate the message; language functions as the very
indecipherable relations.
seeming hatred of people coupled with his obsession to justify his actions
through writing. The easy read of Sade, one that Beauvoir briefly considers and
But if Sade simply hated people, Beauvoir speculates, and only wanted to shock
them, if he merely wanted to convey his criminal and explicit sexual fantasies,
then he would not attempt to persuade a wide audience of his sexual ethic. Only
through writing and developing his erotic ethic in an imaginary realm was Sade
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able to demonstrate that at core, his sexual ethic is not about misanthropy or
communicable facts of his sexual acts or fantasies and peers into the
explaining, and advocating for his principled sexual practices, which are his
stated writing goals, Sade fails to fully reveal these practices. Sade can never do
the thing he explicitly sets out to do. Beauvoir writes, Sade “tri[ed] to
violent relations between himself and women, between his characters, and
between himself and society he makes himself even more “unreadable” (“Must”
4).
assumptions that criticize Beauvoir for not dismissing Sade out of hand as a
rapist and child abuser. Dworkin reads Sade’s biography and life holistically, as
“of a piece, a whole cloth soaked in the blood of women imagined and real”
lets readers forget the “twisted…scurvy knot” of Sade as “rapist and writer”
(Pornography 70) and produces for readers a biography of an entitled man who
exploited his station in life by taking advantage and torturing mostly poor
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treatment as he was allowed cohabitating mistresses, sometimes with an age
different as much as sixty years. Although Dworkin seems more interested in the
ignored by most biographers and literary critics who suggest that most of Sade’s
violent offenses were on the written page and thus of no criminal or “real” offense
(Pornography 81)) she depicts Sade’s writing as both inciting violence against
women and children and fueling the already-present cultural value of men’s right
to brutalize women.
Violence against women and children are the products of Sade’s writing,
Dworkin passionately argues. She marks the exigence of her study with the
(Pornography 71) and more tenuously links Sade’s legacy to the rise in snuff
pornography, videos where women are actually kill for sexual pleasure.
Following her descriptions of these atrocities she moves into reporting the
cultural resurgence of Sade’s writings and biography (Pornography 71). With this
transition she leads readers to make the connection that with increased
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creates an ethic where women and children are dispensable, argues Dworkin.
as a cultural force has been because of, not despite, the virulence of the sexual
violence toward women in both his work and his life” (Pornography 99). The
writers Dworkin calls out (Beauvoir among them) claim that Sade’s writing rings
of freedom; she reads it as the male privilege to treat women however they wish.
Sade’s sexual relations harm women, and his written words lead to women
and children’s abuses and predispose readers to accept his values and actions
misogyny and perhaps a literal burning of his writings. Put another way, if as a
culture we valued women and children’s safeties, Dworkin tells us, Sade’s
If Dworkin reads Sade’s ethic as “the absolute right of men to rape and
brutalize any ‘object of desire’ at will” (Pornography 71), Beauvoir reads his
the representation of women, for example, matters less than how Sade’s
language acts and conceals even in attempts to reveal.34 Adopting this notion of
34
Irigaray, too, shows little interest in categorizing Sade’s practices as “good” or
“bad” for women: “One could ask pornographers many other questions. Without
even confronting the issue of whether one is ‘for’ or ‘against’ their practices.
After all, it is better for the sexuality that underlies out social order to be
exercised openly than for it to prescribe that social order from the hiding-place of
its repressions” (“’Frenchwomen,’ Stop Trying” 202-203).
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subjects. On reading his violent relations Beauvoir does not assume readers will
in turn enact the same violence, but she does see his writing relationally
In this way, The Second Sex and “Must We Burn Sade?” hold significant
Second Sex canvassing the myths and realities of women’s experiences and
value, then acts in certain contexts could constitute reciprocal, ethical relations
Perhaps the most basic and ubiquitous gender relation explicitly addressed
Beauvoir barely mentions any women at all in “Must We Burn Sade?” and one of
the few women she does reference by name is negatively portrayed as tedious
and fully implicated in her husband’s villainous sexual escapades. And in this
Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, Sade’s wife, for acquainting him with “all the
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insipidity and boredom of virtue” (“Must” 11).35 Yet in The Second Sex Beauvoir
While marriage exists as one choice among many for men, during Beauvoir’s and
previous eras, she argues, it acted as women’s aspired destiny (Second 439).
According to Beauvoir’s 1949 analysis, rather than two subjects freely entering
passively given in marriage, essentially becoming man’s vassal: “She takes his
name; she joins his religion, integrates into his class, his world; she belongs to
his family, she becomes his other ‘half’” (Second 442). But in her account of
attributes more active intention to Sade’s wife in “Must We Burn Sade?” than to
While in The Second Sex Beauvoir analyzes marriage from the standpoint
of women, asserting that even in the twentieth century marriage is “imposed far
more imperiously on the young girl than on the young man” (Second 443), in
“Sade” she seems to look almost exclusively and sympathetically from the
us in The Second Sex, “girls were barely consulted” in their marriage suggesting
that women could not reasonably be held responsible for their unhappy
victim, a willing accomplice” in the marquis’s sexual exploits (“Must” 11). Sade,
35
Nevermind for now that Sade himself held marriage in high esteem, priding
himself on only committing adultery with courtesans, prostitutes, and young
domestics—hardly ever a married woman. In a letter he brags, “For a dozen
girls…I’ve tried to seduce you won’t find three married women” (qtd in Gray 243).
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on the other hand, was the one who passively married out of a sense of duty to
his parents (“Must” 7). In The Second Sex marriage arrests women in a state of
immanence disallowing them from anything more than tedious housework and,
her sister and husband, helps plan orgies and harems, and even willingly
text. For those who read The Second Sex as a proto-feminist tome, one that
makes the case for women’s oppression as a political class, Beauvoir seems to
undercut her whole argument with her insistence on Renée-Pélagie’s active and
earlier assertions that if woman has no choice in her marriage she cannot be
held responsible for an unhappy marriage, then how can we also agree with her
their marriage? Was the wife’s freedom not impinged upon as much or even
more so than her husband’s? How can we agree with Beauvoir’s implications of
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in The Second Sex: a benign but persistent sexism where the myths of the
problem her reading faces, some feminists might argue, is that Renée-Pélagie’s
situation seems especially ripe for the kind of reading Beauvoir provides in The
Second Sex: she had no say in her arranged marriage, her husband’s earlier
dalliances were condoned while she was expected to remain faithful to him, and
she was expected to mold her behavior to suit her husband. Renée-Pélagie’s
eventual divorce provides supporting evidence that she was not as game for
representations of women. The pattern from The Second Sex to “Must We Burn
focus on the relational. Indeed, the fact that contradictions and inconsistencies
exist between these two accounts proves the fundamental ambiguity of marriage
as a relation.
The very problem of relations anchors each of these texts. After all,
Beauvoir organizes “Must We Burn Sade?” around the question “Can individuals,
without effacing difference, integrate into a community?” (“Must” 4). Both Sade’s
life and his writings served as the ideal case study for such a meditation.
Although she finds no easy answers, ultimately Beauvoir deems Sade instructive
as a moralist on this issue. For example, Sade resisted taking for granted
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predetermined relationships between himself and others based on abstract
principles of equality and reciprocity and instead creates the terms for
how these relationships often play out un-consensually and violently. Even still,
testimony lies in its ability to disturb us. It forces us to re-examine thoroughly the
basic problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation between
man and man” (“Must” 64). At heart, Beauvoir concludes, Sade’s writing
relations. According to Beauvoir, man, unlike woman, never has to ask himself
“What is a man?” or in defining himself begin with his sex. Man equals a neutral
struggles with the mystery of his sex. While early men and women questioned
and feared the mystery of woman’s fertility, man’s phallus was unquestioningly
worshipped. Man, unlike woman, possesses a sexual liberty that allows him to
Conversely, women are discouraged from following their sexual whims and
asymmetries like the ones listed above. The gauntlet Beauvoir throws down is
not taken up by ensuring universal equality within the current societal structure.
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Elsewhere, Beauvoir critiques such logic, as heralded by feminists like Betty
Friedan, who see women’s liberation achieved by gaining and maintaining equal
gender relations and the condition of possibility for reciprocal relations. On the
one hand, women and men constitute the “original Mitsein” a necessary,
collective (Second 9). While other politically oppressed classes can easily
identify their oppressors and set their sights on resistance efforts, woman,
because of her deep, biological bond with man, their shared history in various
dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social
women” (Second 8). The “original Mitsein” between man and woman stubbornly
On the other hand, Beauvoir orients the goal toward reciprocal relations
through a “human Mitsein” at the end of her Second Sex “Introduction” (17).
36
See Betty Friedan’s “A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir.”
130
While acknowledging the mindless acceptance of woman’s situation that can
come from men and women’s original Mitsein, Beauvoir still holds out hope for a
born into a world of Others and develop individually and historically into subjects,
hope exists for progressing reciprocal relations between the sexes. Indeed, this
hope is written into the very ethics of her existentialist philosophy: “Every subject
justification for present existence than its expansion toward an indefinitely open
future” (Second 16). Every subject, both men and women, have the potential to
posit their own freedom projects and create their own futures. Current gender
against women. “A situation created over time,” writes Beauvoir, “can come
tools thus amplifying their strength and productivity, Beauvoir sees women’s
exclusion from the human Mitsein as emanating from her differences from man’s
both Mitsein and separation making woman’s entrance into the human Mitsein all
Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the framework upon which she bases her
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gendered One/Other schema. Here, Beauvoir describes relations as they
currently exist: an essential One (Man) and the oppositional, inessential Other
naturally consider themselves essential and the other inessential (Second 7).
between the sexes this reciprocity [of being both One and Other] has not been
put forward, that one of the terms has been asserted as the only essential one,
denying any relativity in regard to its correlative, defining the latter as pure
reciprocal relation with man (Second 9). This imbalance can only be overcome
Other.
reciprocal relations can come to be. At times, she envisions these relations as
sexes lay down their weapons and the exchange seems weightless and
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his own while at the same time having its source in the other” (Second 415).
Man and woman as the original Mitsein, as One and Other may be lived out in
conflict or harmony.
instable gamble; one that many Beauvoir scholars are unwilling to take when it
comes to the violently realized relations of someone like Sade. The potential
Sartre, many feminist scholars work to move Beauvoir from the shadows of
voice” (3), Sonia Kruks argues that although Beauvoir tried to elaborate Sartre’s
philosophy, she failed (“Gender and Subjectivity” 96), and Nancy Bauer
distinctive from Sartre’s as the topic for relevant scholars today (Simone de
Beauvoir 131). Given such a project, these and other scholars have worked
perspective in The Second Sex when she writes “in a concrete and sexual form
37
For a range of texts that distinguish Beauvoir as a thinker separate from Sartre
see Claudia Card’s Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir and Emily R.
Grosholz’s The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir.
133
the reciprocal recognition of the self and the other is accomplished in the keenest
consciousness of the other and the self” (Second 415). There is still recognition
affirm their limits are fellow creatures and yet are different” (Second 415).
Whereas earlier in the text, the sexes met on a battlefield to duke out their
reciprocal relations relies just as heavily on the agonistic as the mutual.38 While
this reframing of Beauvoir as a separate thinker from Sartre has helped her
discordant aspects of her work. Indeed, far from contradicting the reciprocal
relations she elaborates in The Second Sex, “Must We Burn Sade?” embodies
relations fall under the category of eighteenth-century French male writers who
relayed a period when “men regarded women as their peers” (Second 273).
38
Certainly some recent scholars, such as Julie K. Ward, acknowledge both
strains in Beauvoir but claim she prefers a model of “mutual recognition” to
replace “dialectical opposition” (“Reciprocity and Friendship” 44).
134
successfully wrote the “dramatic relations between the sexes” without losing the
The drama between the sexes Beauvoir alludes to in Sade’s writing does
not equate sadism. Sade and sadism hold two different definitions and sets of
where the act of sexual gratification comes through inflicting bodily pain on
this name alone causing his reputation to “buckled under the weight of such
In The Second Sex she delineates the differences more explicitly. Sadism
39
Beauvoir’s U.S. radical feminist inheritors like Women Against Pornography
(WAP), Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPAM) and
Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) often overlooked such
differentiations. See Susan Brownmiller’s “The Pornography Wars” chapter in
her In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution.
135
experienced through rough sex has the capacity to “unit[e]” bodies in a
“reciprocal joy” (412); sadistic sex practiced on women further chips away at their
subjectivity and ability to engage in reciprocal relations. Sade too testifies to the
unifying power of his violent sex in Philosophy in the Bedroom: “Sexual pleasure
is…a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite”
(Sade qtd in Beauvoir 38). Beauvoir beautifully and sensually describes non-
sadistic sexual torment as “a sharp light bursting out in the carnal night” that
“removes the lover from the limbo where he is swooning so that he might once
more be thrown into it” (Second 412). This mode of relations relies on a more
mutuality—necessary in relations.
Second Sex as a framework of gendered relations, she does not confuse this
not equate greater or lesser subjectivity, but instead together work to compliment
and unite individuals. Such binaries “limits and denies” subjects and proves
“necessary” for subject formation (Second 159). The dominant relies upon the
submissive just as much as the submissive depends on the dominant in that both
subject “[attain]” themselves “only through the reality that [each one] is not”
40
See Dworkin’s formative book Intercourse, particularly her infamous line,
“Violation is a synonym for intercourse” (154) which usually gets misquoted as
“All sex is rape.”
136
power differentials between the sexes, but aid in building reciprocal relations by
temporarily destroying boundaries that separate the self and other and allow the
(Second 412). This type of sexual relation “expresses a desire to merge and not
inconstant bonds, but he always writes a concrete relation where the libertine
needs a particular kind of Other. Indeed, not every victim is “[worthy] of torture”
(“Must” 60). For this type of relation to work ethically, the submissive must be
able to fully submit to the torture or transform suffering into pleasure. Rather
relationship between the dominant and submissive comes the knowledge that we
are at once separate and connected, One and Other. The fully realized Sadeian
libertine experience concludes in a recognition of both One and Other: “in doing
he finds a truth which reconciles him with his antagonist” (“Must 60). “Torturer
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and victim” Beauvoir claims, “recognize their fellowship in astonishment, esteem,
non-sadistic, violent relations. In fact, for the first section of the essay Beauvoir
confines of her introductory remarks, only indirectly does she expound upon the
violence of his sexual exploits and even then she deems his vices “not startlingly
original” (“Must” 4) and later comments that his “chief interest for us lies not in his
“whipping a few girls,” Beauvoir tells readers, “is rather a petty feat” (“Must” 8),
and other libertines “indulged with impunity in orgies even worse” than Sade
(“Must” 9). Even his “perverse bucolics have the austerity of a nudist colony”
(“Must” 38). Further into the text, Beauvoir discloses her mild titillation, if not
prurient interest, with Sade’s eroticism as she moves from clinical descriptions of
supplying a prostitute with sugar almonds in the hopes that “they would make her
break wind” (Sade qtd in Beauvoir 25). Given her mild characterizations of
Sade’s sexual relations, Beauvoir mostly denies that Sade’s relational violence
138
reading would do, Beauvoir tells us that he should be “hailed as a great moralist”
repressive, and unjust society, nor from an inherently violent, cruel, and
But Beauvoir primarily derives Sade’s lessons from the negative, from what
concretely through the law and more abstractly through virtue, at best enforces
arbitrary rules and at worst amplifies the injustices it ostensibly seeks to correct.
For example, through the virtues of benevolence and charity, Sade argues that
poor remain poor and that those in a position to help continue their charity.
Charity serves the rich’s vanities more than unsettling conditions of poverty.
These virtuous relations ring false and disguise self-interest as genuine concern
and care for others. Far from uniting the classes through acts of kindness, Sade
people, do greater harm, Sade insists, by aiming to impose abstract values onto
all uniformly. Under the guise of universal equality, laws are constructed which
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benefit the class interests of those writing the laws. More than that, the law
possible,” insists Sade (“Must” 48). Law, as a structure for how ethical relations
justification for his crimes, but he also argued for a radical separation from the
If he rejects standards of virtue, law, and nature, what guides the relational
moralism of Sade? Or, more important for our purposes, what, in the affirmative
form, does Beauvoir see as worthwhile in Sade’s relations? Why does she want
ourselves to abuses? No. Such a reading destroys the nuance Beauvoir sees in
Sade’s complex mix of writing and sexuality and reduces his work to a pragmatic
“To sympathize with Sade too readily is to betray him,” Beauvoir reminds
death” and “every time we side with a child whose throat has been slit by a sex
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maniac, we take a stand against him” (“Must” 61). While distancing herself at the
end of her essay from the particular ways Sade sometimes expresses his
fully reveal and explain his relations. To answer Dworkin’s rhetorical question
might well respond: “I don’t know.” And that drives Beauvoir’s interest and
exploration of the strange mix of Sade’s sexuality and language use. His
concrete, definite way to recognize the Other and have the Other recognize the
One. Sade’s relational violence admirably tries to “destroy the concrete barriers
of flesh which isolate human minds” (“Must” 59). The ethical, reciprocal relation
Other.
41
Jane Gallop also, to her surprise, finds her “original attraction to Sade is to a
site of perversions” (“The Student Body” 53).
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Violent sexual relations are not necessarily a problem for Beauvoir. Instead
immanence. Out of “hostility and sadism” mothers often enlist the eldest
‘shape’” her children, mothers act on “capricious sadism” (Second 558); and little
curb their autonomy (Second 308). Beauvoir marshals the term “sadism” not as
everyday violence women direct toward their children. The man with the whips is
less menacing than the mother trapped in a situation of anger. The real danger
to women is not a relation that allows rough sex, but the institutionalized relation
Sex is not necessarily the warm embrace of mutual exchange and not for the
faint of heart. Conflict between the sexes can be overcome, Beauvoir promises,
but not without a cost. In order to achieve the “reciprocal movement” of “free
assume an endless struggle that “demands constant effort” and even then, one’s
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Even in constant deliberation between mutual or agonistic relations, reciprocal
Feminists must not burn Sade because he raises the disturbing question of
ambiguity and decide their relational mode on a contingent basis. Subjects never
options are still necessary, but never guarantee unambiguous ethical decisions.
We never get to fully know the consequences of our actions or what success
looks like in each situation. Beauvoir indicates the same uncertainty holds true in
movement it would seem cannot happen by following replicable steps, nor will
Sade’s.
following chapter contrasts with the arguments I put forth in this chapter: in
143
“Sade” she urges readers to consider and be open to a variety of relations, no
a singular, clear truth? In the next chapter I explore Beauvoir’s morality and style
and argue that she takes the longstanding rhetorical debate to a place where
ambiguity.
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Chapter 5:
of masculine and feminine styles. However, Beauvoir certainly did not see
writing revealed a sense of nuance, and he talked hesitantly; I was for clear-cut
of existence rather than in its hard core; with me it was the opposite” (Force 61).
differences in her memoir produces tender rendering their relationship (“I brought
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communism, their differences take on the weight of clear, honest writing versus
In pitting their two styles against one another on the backdrop of morality,
construction here, on the one stylistic side we have transparency, clarity, and
truth, and on the other, we have opacity, obscurity, and crafty deceit. The more
places,42 needlessly complicates and obscures the truth. Strip away the
reveals the “hard core” of the matter, Beauvoir argues. Language, this
perspective often goes, should aid in uncovering the truth, and not act as layer of
obfuscation. Successful language, Beauvoir indicates, does not get in the way of
the message, but works as a transparent vessel for the facts, leaving little doubt
throughout this project, her own language tends to hide in plain sight. Beauvoir’s
Sex, although she never calls attention to her language by explicitly explaining or
42
See my summary of Beauvoir’s critique of psychoanalytic feminist writing in
Chapter Three.
146
her language’s operations through contradictions that enact her argument of
woman; she interrupts and accentuates her masculine language with semicolons,
and in doing so, engages in a reiteration of language that values connection and
compromise.
For all of her reliance and faith placed in transparency to reveal truth,
conceal her language’s complexities. In other words, since she characterizes her
her and not examine it further for themselves. Just as Beauvoir’s constant refrain
that Sartre, not she, was the philosopher contributed to the public’s perception of
advocacy against psychoanalytic and difficult writing conceal the difficulties of her
own language.
After all, “The real art,” Ovid reminds us, “lies in concealing the art.” His
a rhetoric that conceals the very means of its existence. Italian humanists called
it sprezzatura, the idea that the rhetorically educated should not make their art
visible, but perform their words as effortless and unstudied.43 The logic behind
such a renunciation of explicit rhetoric posits that the more natural and
spontaneous one’s words appear, the more persuasive and effective the rhetor
43
See Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier.
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and message will become.44 Concealment of rhetorical art, then, could
Beauvoir who devoted most of her life to what she considered revealing the
unadorned truth.
complicates our notions of how feminist social change works. First, however, I
both necessary and insufficient in terms of aiding and changing women’s social
situations. I will then pair her reading on clarity and social change with Judith
Butler’s and secondary readings about Butler’s writing. The binaries erected
around Butler’s writing ring false to Beauvoir’s own use of clarity as she suggests
a more supple and situational way to evaluate the possibilities of clear or difficult
uses clarity as a tool to obscure her own creative and ethical intervention in
44
For a more recent reflection on the rhetorical strategy of non-rhetoric see
Carolyn R. Miller’s 2010 Carolina Rhetoric Conference keynote address, “Should
We Name the Tools?: Concealing and Revealing the Art of Rhetoric.”
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Particularly in France, readers were shocked by Beauvoir’s lack of concealment
in The Second Sex. Beauvoir’s literary hero turned adversary Francois Mauriac,
employer’s vagina has no secrets from me” (Bair 410). Those close to her who
did not share her commitment to revealing one’s life publicly felt betrayed by her
disclosures. Nelson Algren, Beauvoir’s American lover she based her Lewis
America Day by Day and Force of Circumstance, felt enraged and humiliated by
the candid depiction of their love affair: “I’ve been in whorehouses all over the
world and the woman there always closes the door, whether it’s in Korea or
India,” the seventy-two-year-old Algren reflects, “But [Beauvoir] flung the door
open and called in the public and the press…I don’t have any malice against her,
but I think it was an appalling thing to do” (Algren qtd in Rowley 305). 45
The transparency these two find vulgar and appalling, however, offered
(643). For her this in part meant a public, transparent rendering of her life and
45
Algren did in fact harbor malice toward Beauvoir for both choosing Sartre over
him (she refused to marry Algren because of her and Sartre’s commitment as
each other’s “essential love”) and sharing the intimate details of their affair with
the world. For evidence of this, see Algren’s review of Force of Circumstance in
Ramparts and Harper’s as well as his poem “Goodbye Lilies, Hello Spring”
dedicated to Beauvoir in Zeitgeist.
149
thoughts, in an effort to uncover the truth. By clarifying and revealing her thought
and life through words, Beauvoir points toward a belief that words can shine a
as a tool of clarity in pieces where she and others reflect on her writing, when we
look at texts like The Second Sex she takes a more situational approach to
clarity’s boundaries. She still poses clarity as the first step, but ambiguity must
follow. “Lucidity,” Beauvoir argues, “is a conquest [women] are justly proud of
but with which they are a little too quickly satisfied” (Second 746). In praising
clarity in women writers like George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and the
Brontë sisters who reveal the reality of women’s situations, she also asserts that
when clarity stops at description and inhibits women from thinking abstractly
about relations, then women limit their horizons for change. Given women’s
largely confined and dependent situation at the time Beauvoir wrote, she
women writers render the greatest service to the cause of women”—but she
immediately criticizes the call to clarity where women “remain too attached to
horizons” (Second 746, 747). In other words, clarity, when taken as a language
for the sake of lucidity works as a necessary step as it “pull[s] away the veils of
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illusion and lies,” but clarity’s “negative daring,” Beauvoir provocatively asserts,
“still leaves us with an enigma; for truth itself is ambiguity, depth, mystery”
difficult or at least some form of re-created language along the lines of syntax.
Beauvoir explains that where women writers usually stay to the surface of
adjectives and sensual images,” instead they miss the possibilities of affecting
proposes first a gesture toward clarity in the fullest commitment possible, but
with language in its “ambiguity, depth, and mystery” (Second 747). As I have
through a performative lens, not separating form and function, style and content,
but reading her operations of language as deeply integrated into her message of
feminism. Clarity, then, inseparable through style and content, while always a
necessity, is never the goal, is never the ultimate channel for change in women’s
recent rhetorical debates, a contentious site for discussions regarding the validity
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of difficult-to-read writing and even the definition of good and bad writing.
Feminist theorist and rhetorician Judith Butler has acted as a lightening rod for
many of these debates that have spilled over from the academy into the public.46
Both Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago Law professor and Denis Dutton,
social change and truth by targeting Butler’s writing. In an essay for The New
pragmatism and making real changes for women even through academic
feminism; however, lately, she laments, there has been a “turning from the
material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only
the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women” (“Professor”).
46
I use Butler here as a way to give boundaries to the arguments surrounding
what gets termed as clear and unclear language. For a broader look at the role
of clarity in rhetoric and composition studies see Christa Albrecht-Crane’s
“Whoa—Theory and Bad Writing,” Anis S. Bawarshi’s Genre and the Invention of
the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition, particularly her
discussion of Locke’s dictum that rhetoric’s terrain is that of imposing “order and
clearness,” William E. Cole Jr’s “Freshman Composition: The Circle of Unbelief,”
Culler and Lamb’s Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena,
particularly their “Introduction,” Teresa L. Ebert’s “Manifesto as Theory and
Theory as Material Force: Toward a Red Polemic,” James L. Kastely’s “The
Earned Increment: Kenneth Burke’s Argument for Inefficiency,” Susan Peck
MacDonald’s Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social
Sciences, Gary Olson’s “The Death of Composition as an Intellectual Discipline,”
David Orr’s “Verbicide,” Dan Smith’s “Ethics and ‘Bad Writing’: Dialectics,
Reading, and Affective Pedagogy,” Victor Vitanza’s “Three Countertheses: or, A
Critical In(ter)vention into Composition Theories and Pedagogies,” and Susan
Wells’s “Just Difficult Enough: Writers’ Desires and Readers’ Economies.”
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and that there “is little room for large-scale social change” like the work that
(“Professor”).
radical politics, as Butler forwards, but, for Nussbaum, a “hip quietism” and a
Nussbaum, does nothing to help real women, but instead pulls young academic
feminists away from a pragmatic tradition into a false sense of believing that by
writing obscure, esoteric academic prose as Butler does, one “[does] something
bold” when in reality “[h]ungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not
sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not
pragmatic tradition where language’s importance rests in its ability to directly and
quantifiably improve the lives of women. In other words, feminist language must
transparently account for how it positively affects the lives of women. For
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finding justice for raped women, or protecting gays and lesbians, then it
sufficiently practices feminist social change. Butler’s language fails by this rubric
academic audience that, according to Nussbaum, does not aim to improve the
lives of women. The specific difficulty that Nussbaum opposes in Butler’s writing
is what she sees as obscurity for obscurity’s sake under the guise of radical
activism.
Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature and creator of the Bad
Writing Contest, also deems bad writing as using unnecessarily difficult language
as a way to obscure dubious thought. While Dutton cares less about the
Butler and her stylistic ilk constitute a dangerous cultural politics where her
Dutton cites Butler as an example of his last insult arguing her writing is a
obscurity that [she] too [is a] great min[d] of the age” (“Language Crimes”).
By Dutton’s account, Butler’s bad writing has nothing to do with its lack of
connection to solving the real problems of women, but with her lack of clarity she
uses as a mask for her flimsy ideas and weak reasoning. Dutton’s attack
resonates with the 1996 Sokal hoax where physics professor Alan Sokal
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submitted a science article to the cultural studies journal Social Context with the
and cultural studies as his targets, Dutton constructs a contest where it just so
happens that all of the “winners” (add to the list not only Butler, but also Fredric
Jameson and Homi Bhabha) work on broadly construed postmodern and cultural
studies projects.
writing in particular is bad. He simply quotes her and leaves a space for readers
to fill in their own conclusions as to why the writing is bad.48 Apparently neither
Dutton nor the nominator is subject to the strictures of rigorous reasoning or solid
evidence he requires of Butler. Dutton simply deems the sentence bad and lets
Butler’s sentence stand on its own. The force of Dutton’s argument comes from
47
See The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy, a collection of
essays that includes the offending and explanatory essays, a response from an
editor of Social Text, and responses from national and international scholars and
laypeople.
48
Butler’s award-winning bad sentence reads: “The move from a structuralist
account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively
homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to
repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality
into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian
theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the
insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed
conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of
the rearticulation of power” (qtd in Dutton).
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analytic philosophers or a general audience, out of context, without any
ivory tower, divorced from the real world, who seems smart, but only hides
lucidity connects Dutton and his audiences without need of further support.
what he finds problematic with Butler’s writing: “When Butler’s writing is at its
(Dutton) or colluding with evil (Nussbaum) and instead qualifies her writing as
simply not capable of the work she says it does. Like Nussbaum, Holcomb has
prose can’t cash” (195). Butler’s writing is not bad by grammatical standards of
Edited American English, but, for Holcomb, the problem comes as it “strains the
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verbs…the passive voice, and strings of prepositional phrases that displace
actions into nouns” litter Butler’s prose (Holcomb 195). Hers is the language of a
Analyzing Prose, also described by Lanham as “The Official Style,” marks the
action (Lanham 28), the stodgily formal and undemocratic over the energy of
with others. Nussbaum laments, “It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s
ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are” (Nussbaum); Dutton
grumbles, “to ask what [Butler’s writing] means is to miss the point…Actual
49
Lanham supplies numerous, contrasting examples of “The Official Style”
versus his suggested style: “a psychologist does not say that more people think
of suicide at Christmas than at other times of the year. He says, ‘There is an
upsurge in suicidal ideation for some.’…And a building owner does not say, ‘The
air conditioning is wearing out and it has the superintendent worried,’ but ‘The
continuing deterioration of the ventilation system is generating a considerable
amount of ongoing concern to the superintendent of the facility’” (Analyzing 160).
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communication has nothing to do with it” (Dutton); and Holcomb concludes that
195). If virtually no one can understand your writing, cries this chorus of critics,
then how can your writing do anything? How can anyone act based upon your
ideas?
Ironically, given the charges against Butler’s language as unfit for enacting
radical social change, she defends her language as engaging with the “most
“Changing” 330). But rather than defining clear communication as the motor for
social change, Butler takes a broader look at what is behind the very call for
clarity. “[O]ur social responsibility is to become attuned to the fact that there is
effaces the problem of multilingualism” (Butler, “Changing” 330). The demand for
clarity resists attention to differences and works to erase the multilingualism that
commonality.
The desire for common sense that drives calls for clarity, Butler argues, is
often deeply conservative. “Why,” Butler provocatively prods, “are some of the
most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding
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language?” (Butler “Bad Writer”). To break with naturalized, normalized, and
easily intelligible styles. Butler explains the radical social change that can come
If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status
Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more
Difficult language, Butler implies, best challenges the common sense of unjust
social hierarchies.
Butler often leans heavily on Adorno for amplifying the necessity of difficult
language for difficult thought. The “familiar,” Adorno argues in Minima Moralia, in
all its “loose and irresponsible formulation,” in all its “shoddiness” is “rewarded
symptom…of confusion” (101). The radical work of critical thinking cannot come
from clear communication, in the sense that others will easily understand your
writing, because precise language and grammar require work and resist easy
communicate” (101). The more precise the writer, the less comprehensible her
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writing will initially appear. According to Adorno, when striving for new, more just
social possibilities, incomprehensibility paves the way for what could be possible
in the future. Nothing radical can come from the familiar language of clarity.
The familiar comes not only from vague content of insidious common sense
that makes injustices seem natural, but also, according to Butler, through familiar
grammar: “It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best
vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes
upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself” (Butler, Gender Trouble xviii-xix).
widely criticized for her passive voice, for the subjects of her sentences not
taking direct action on the objects of her sentences and as a result obscuring the
clarity of her thought. The following passage offers an example of how her
and politics has come under challenge from within feminist discourse. The
There is a great deal of material that not only questions the viability of ‘the
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subject’ as the ultimate candidate for representation or, indeed, liberation, but
there is very little agreement after all on what it is that constitutes, or ought to
are formed, with the result that representation is extended only to what can be
Butler’s style acclimates readers to her ideas. The subject of Butler’s first
sentence hides at the end and lets the object drive and define the sentence.
Notice that feminist discourse does not challenge the relationship between
feminist theory and politics, but through passive voice, the relationship between
feminist theory and politics “comes under challenge.” Use of the passive voice
here slows down readers, makes the sentence wordy, and emphasizes the
object and the action over the actor. Indeed, the very structure of the sentence
calls into question who or what does the acting. Continuing through the
paragraph, however, the passively voiced sentences support the content of her
argument: namely, that the subject is not a naturally occurring actor in the world,
but is acted upon and produced by various political and linguistic systems. The
more acted upon than acting. The passage fails as an exemplar of easily and
demonstrate her concept through her grammar. Her very language instantiates
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This example of Butler’s language does a certain kind of work: if read
closely and taken on its own terms, it can encourage readers to think differently
about the common sense of subject formation. But could the same argument not
passive voice? Of course social change and interrogation of common sense can
come from difficult language, but can it not also come from transparent
language?
Although Butler briefly hints at the range of her writing styles (in “Changing
the Subject” she begins her stylistic defense recognizing that one must “shift
in various ways” (328)), the tenor of discussions surrounding clarity and social
change tend to polarize, flatten, and minimize rhetorical standards like purpose
radical social change requires radical language. In both “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites
Back” and “Changing the Subject,” Butler explains her language through a
transparent style. If, as she approvingly cites Herbert Marcuse, “what [a radical
have done so in the first place” (Marcuse qtd in Butler, “Bad Writer”), then how
can she use ordinary50 language to explain her difficult language? If one can
50
Here, the context in which Butler uses “ordinary” does not refer to ordinary
language philosophy, but to the more mundane usage indicating commonplace
or everyday.
162
only express radical ideas in radical language, then explanations of her radical
indicates in her stylistic defenses that difficult language best challenges common
sense and unjust social hierarchies, she never explains why it operates better
than easy-to-read language, and while non-specialists benefit from Butler’s more
popular explanations in forums like The New York Times, it also questions the
necessity of difficult language in the first place. If, indeed, difficult language is
necessary to the idea itself, then it should stand on its own, free of explanations
change. On the one hand, advocates for clarity champion its democratic nature.
Everyone, they insist, can understand and engage with clear language: it is
represents a desire for honesty, accountability, and certainty. On the other hand,
those skeptical of clarity question its fitness to do the kind of social work that
undergirding our social order. Between the intersection of rhetoric and feminism
this has generally been the stalemate throughout the modern feminist movement;
however, Beauvoir’s take on clarity as a first step that ultimately must be followed
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by ambiguity, offers us a constructive compromise between these two
While, to a certain extend, Beauvoir values and encourages what she calls
women’s lots in life—she also insists that clarity alone inhibits women from
becoming great, abstract thinkers who can create new futures for themselves.
Only through embracing the ambiguity of existence (as I will discuss further in
and characterizing his language as a series of rhetorical ruses, but in effect she
obscures her own style and content. Although most scholars have read
contend Beauvoir creates, through the contradiction of clarity and obscurity, her
arguments).
164
the collection of essays that Beauvoir points feminists interested in her feminist
philosophy and politics toward, this essay and the fact that it traffics in debates of
style also implicitly engages in the question of communication as the goal for
suggests a different model, one where creation (and the contradiction inherent in
creations) drives social change. I will briefly explore Lanham and Aristotle’s
definitions of clarity which will allow me to make the case that Beauvoir’s
and sometimes ambiguous steps to make that change. Beauvoir does this
when I see it.” Holcomb offers up concrete examples of why Butler’s writing
itself. In Analyzing Prose, however, Lanham gives the difficult task of defining
clarity his best shot. Writing with clarity is not a matter of enacting an abstract,
simplistic formula (replacing “is” verbs with active verbs, revising passive voice
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for an active voice, decreasing the number of prepositional phrases), but
transparency” (189). Lanham rejects the notion of certain style metric promising
even primarily, from the author’s conscious handling of language but from the
audience. “’Clarity,’” Lanham adds, “can only indicate a reader’s decision, for
content and ignore style” (189). Drawing from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Lanham
describes clarity not as a concrete and discernable textual pattern, but as “the
slippery style, dependent in large part upon the composer’s readership and their
expectations. A transparent style, Lanham tells us, must paradoxically deny itself
preference for this self-immolation originates with Aristotle. In Book III of Rhetoric
51
I use Lanham’s definitions of clarity for his modern take on style analysis.
However it should be noted that overall he reads Aristotle critically and does not
subscribe to a clarity-above-all stylistic philosophy.
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he pronounces his preference for clarity as an ethical virtue: “let the virtue of
style…be defined as ‘to be clear’ (speech is a kind of sign, so if it does not make
clear it will not perform its function)” (1404b). Aristotle does not value language
communicating ideas. As such, the more transparent language can make itself,
the higher function it serves. Aristotle believed that language should seem
compose without being noticed,” Aristotle contends, “and should seem to speak
not artificially but naturally. (The latter is persuasive, the former the opposite; for
them, just as they are at those adulterating wines.)” (III.1404b). While Aristotle
admits the un-naturalness of a natural style, he also holds that the more readers
are aware of language, the more likely they are to feel duped. If the truth is really
the truth, then it should need no extraneous, persuasive, stylistic ornament. The
ethics with its binary categorizations of vice or virtue too often seep into our
stylistic analyses. In Aristotle’s framework, if language does its job honestly, then
it gets out of the way of the content. But why, Lanham asks, should the
52
The At/Through choice being that of a reader looking at words (opaque style)
versus through words (transparent style).
167
measure the invisible in order to measure clarity (Lanham 190). The line
awareness of words and/or the extent to which an author calls attention to her
style. To obtain a clear style, Lanham explains, one “fiddle[s] with the medium
Butler. If readers fail to notice the language, then, Butler reasons, how many
becomes naturalize, in part, through language. “What travels under the sign of
‘clarity,’” Butler questions, “and what would be the price of failing to deploy a
to look at his language and through her language. Although scholars have
transforms his ideas on subjectivity to such an extent that she creates her own.
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example of her fiercely defending Sartre and clarifying his philosophical legacy.
She takes her colleague Merleau-Ponty to task for what she considers his
irresponsible Sartrean interpretations, and turns his own instructions “to learn
how to read” against him (“Merleau-Ponty” 448). She organizes the essay by
Korean War initiated his break from Soviet communism, and, according to Sartre,
his position that Les Tempes modernes, the journal they, along with Beauvoir
and others, created and edited together, should not comment on the war. Shortly
after, in 1952, Sartre went in a different direction, throwing his weight behind the
Communist Party and publically pronouncing his conversion in the journal. Not
writers for Les Tempes. While Merleau-Ponty remained silent, his student
Claude Lefort decided to engage Sartre in a series of, often vicious, public
position of mediator, convincing both parties to remove their more savage insults
about their interlocutor, leaving all three men feeling bitter toward each other.
53
All of the context from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s dispute comes from Jon
Stewart’s edited collection, The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. For
further details, including correspondences and Merleau-Ponty’s “Sartre and
Ultrabolshevism,” see p. 327-447 in this work.
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Later, in 1953, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty went head-to-head over an article
thought an apologetic note should be attached, while Sartre believed the piece
should speak for itself, and each edited as he saw fit without consulting the other.
offend Sartre and suggested a public space in Les Tempes where he could
transparently distinguish his political position from Sartre’s. Sartre refused him
the forum. Merleau-Ponty, in turn, resigned from Les Tempes and wrote
mis-readings are the price of doing business for writers, however, as Beauvoir
argues, readers expect a higher level of textual fidelity from someone who has
both the intellectual standing and personal history that Merleau-Ponty does with
Sartre. This leads her to conclude his mistakes “not…inconsequential” (451) and
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that Merleau-Ponty should and does know better.
Much like The Second Sex, Beauvoir structures her essay as the revealing
certitude and condescension. She holds the “authentic Sartrean ontology” while
join her in her condescension and “[feel] sorry to have to remind Merleau-Ponty
of…elementary truths” (487). So certain is she in her case, in believing that the
facts clearly support her reading she writes that “[e]ven a layperson will easily
Ponty’s interpretive trespasses. “It would suffice,” she tells us, “to skim through
While Beauvoir positions herself as the clear and honest broker of Sartrean
thought providing plenty of textual evidence from Sartre’s writings and utilizing a
cunning rhetor. Her criticisms of Merleau-Ponty stem from what she deems
obscures the truth, she projects a mantle of transparency for her own writing and
ideas. She supplies a vast amount of quotations and shorter paragraphs, while
chapter. Beauvoir claims to strip down the debate to the essential truths. He,
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conversely, must employ a series of ruses to convince readers. She attributes
does not think what he says he thinks; “the ruse of oversignification” (452) which
takes a passage out of context and assigns it a greater meaning than originally
Marx and Lenin and Sartre as singularly Sartrean; and “the ruse of dichotomy”
hers, Beauvoir demystifies the language trickery of her self-imposed rival and
pulls her audience onto her side, diminishing Merleau-Ponty’s rhetorical moves
antics. With the assistance of her revealing, “we” too “are tickled” at denials
(471) and “feel compelled to smile” at his naïveté when it comes to his read on
Sartrean thought.
clarity, but also on dogmatism. That is, she constructs a logic where she (and by
readers believe she exposes his artifice and his lies. Critics who have read the
pertinent texts among Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir virtually all agree that
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“Manichaeist in its tone and claims” (“Ambiguity” 215). Simons sees it only as a
outrage” and “does not approach the subject dispassionately…thus making any
Beauvoir seems, then, to be playing into the binaries just as the critics cited
earlier do. She plays by the Aristotelian game, calling attention to Merleau-
Ponty’s language as language. She sides with transparent certainty and chides
Ponty’s style as misguided. Paired with dogmatism, her clarity comes across as
Beauvoir here seems to proffer clarity as a panacea for all uncertainties. In her
own words she envisioned this essay as an exercise in clarity, as “laying bare the
However, once again, her written language betrays her stated position.
Beauvoir may commit herself to laying bare the truth of Sartrean thought through
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Judith Butler points out, Beauvoir has the atypical Sartrean reading, seeing his
voices that radical thought requires radical language, Beauvoir conceals her
radical-leaning thought under the stylistic rubric of clarity. Beauvoir, through her
palpable and interesting to feminists than they might be otherwise: namely, she
As was hinted at in Chapter Two, Sartre has been the target of feminists
“theorize the ‘subject’ [?] How are we to think about consciousness and the body,
about the gendering of the subject, about agency and its limits…?” (“Freedoms”
28). A key feminist criticism against Sartrean existentialism is that it does not
account for oppression, that it attributes too much power to sheer individual will in
correctly point out that Existentialism does not explain how one can be free and
not free at the same time. Hartsock deems Sartre’s conception of the subject as
the “walled city” view (241). Each subject constructs itself separately and, as
54
See my explanation of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic in existentialist terms in
Chapter Four.
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towards others. In short, Sartre’s subjectivity gets attributed as subscribing to an
Sartre’s early and one of his most-cited works.55 In terms of being, Sartre urges
Cartesian lineage in that consciousness, apart from the body or social, historical,
consciousness and the body. The beloved, in order to transform into the lover,
Sartre tells readers, must “project being loved…if what he wishes to overcome is
not a body but the Other’s subjectivity as such” (351). As we see here, the body
55
For a study on how Sartre’s work evolved regarding his thoughts on
subjectivity, see Thomas W. Busch’s “Beyond the Cogito.”
56
He often gets accused of associating particularly negative attributes to
women’s bodies. Take for example Sartre’s infamous “holes and slime”
passage: “[the slimy] invites me; for a body of slime at rest is not noticeably
distinct from a body of very dense liquid. But it is a trap…[the slimy] leave its
traces on me…Slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sickly-sweet, feminine
revenge which will be symbolized on another level by the quality ‘sugary.’…A
sugary sliminess is the ideal of the slimy; it symbolizes the sugary death of the
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separate “instrument” and “a thing outside my subjectivity” (Being 329).
“Sartre’s entire theory of the party and of class is derived” in part “from his
Merleau-Ponty’s read of Sartre’s subjectivity is that the individual will forms the
subject more than circumstances: “the revolutionary will of the militant is more
himself than his life…The will believes only in itself, it is its own source” (364).57
but “the subject is…the sun from which the world radiates” (436).
between the I and the other is reduced to the look; each subject lives alone at the
heart of the subject’s own universe, a universe of which that subject is the sole
has never been about the subject and Merleau-Ponty wrongly conflates and
attributes “consciousness, the Ego [Moi], and humanity” under the umbrella of
For-itself (like that of the wasp which sinks into the jam and drowns in it) (Being
634). See Margery L. Collins and Christine Pierce’s infamous “Holes and Slime:
Sexism in Sartre’s Psychoanalysis” for what became a typical feminist take on
Sartre and feminine embodiment.
57
Merleau-Ponty uses different terminology here of “the will” and “the militant”
only because he responds directly to Sartre’s The Communists and Peace and
the language Sartre uses there.
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the subject (449). Yet when Sartre does discuss the Ego in relation to the world,
Beauvoir claims that he insists upon a “reciprocal conditioning” between the two.
Leaning heavily on Being and Nothingness Beauvoir supports her claim that
Sartre purports a self that needs the world for formation: “Without the world, there
“Merleau-Ponty” 450).
appearance, being-for-itself is all Sartre has ever accepted, with its inevitable
myself and the other” (“Sartre” 388). As Beauvoir points out, this would mean no
citing numerous passages from Being and Nothingness: “We ought to quote all
the pages where Sartre describes this sort of ‘internal hemorrhage’ through
which my world flows toward the other” (454). She begins her quest for an
exhaustive list of Sartrean support, but mercifully supplies us only with three
quotations.
consciousness and the body, she argues for Sartre’s “passion of the embodied
consciousness can only go beyond the world by engaging itself in it…this is why
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inseparability between the body and mind, Beauvoir has a more difficult time
These points represent only a small taste of the textual support Beauvoir
supplies from Sartre’s writing, and constitutes far more direct quotations than
Merleau-Ponty provides. While she maintains her arguments finds support “from
Nausea to Saint Genet,” she primarily pulls from Being and Nothingness for
such expressly looks at Sartre’s read of the proletariat in The Communists and
Peace.
attributes to Sartre. Just as Butler’s use of the passive voice pointed to her
generally the more accepted read, it is worth noting the greater amount of
Beauvoir’s read constitutes the less obvious one, yet she structures her essay in
such a way that makes her argument seem indisputable in its empirical
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transparency. She, after all, provides direct quotations from Sartre as
one read is right and the other wrong, but to point to the conceptual impasse
between these two scholars intimately acquainted with Sartre’s thought and
writing and to show how the more radical read comes through the more
transparent language. While one can make a case for Sartre’s subjectivity as
challenge Butler’s “radical thought needs a radical language” rationale, but it also
expected with the announcement of clarity. Clarity can conceal. It can conceal
not only nefarious ideologies, but also radically feminist components into an
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constitute the starting place for her feminist philosophy and politics, “Merleau-
Though her style seems from the outset to fall into the category of transparency,
it conceals an opaque and radical argument of subjectivity that has now become
axiomatic for feminists. Once again Beauvoir’s language contradicts its surface-
I have pushed on the seams of Beauvoir’s language, how she describes her
language, the widespread assumptions of her language philosophy, and how her
language acts in her most popular and feminist-identified text (The Second Sex)
reflect on how language works across the consciously confessed and the
Ambiguity into conversation with Privileges, and in doing so, I direct rhetoricians’
attentions to Beauvoir’s ultimate relevance for our field: her explicit articulation
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Chapter 6:
Conclusion:
Beauvoir’s stated and lived relation to feminism has long left many Second Sex
Infamously, only in her 60s, twenty years after the publication of The Second
Beauvoir considered not her writings or political activism, but her more than 50-
greatest achievement. And when Betty Friedan traveled to Paris for advice on
how to lead U.S. feminists “out of rhetoric that did not open up new possibilities in
life” (Friedan 391), she was not prepared for the particular “new possibilities”
politics of not “tak[ing] part in politics” (406); she flatly tells a shocked
58
As stated by Beauvoir, “I began to call myself truly a Feminist and to lend
myself to the goals and needs of the movement” around 1969 (qtd in Bair,
Simone 652, fn9). And in a famous 1972 interview with Alice Schwarzer she
publicly declared, “I am a feminist” (After 32). Elsewhere, she admits that she
would have been “surprised and even irritated if, when I was thirty, someone had
told me that I would be concerning myself with feminine problems and that my
most serious public would be made up of women” (qtd in Bair, Simone 382).
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Friedan, “politics as it exists does not interest me…I do not vote” (406); she
“no woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children” (401); and
she suggests that if women really want to change society, “it’s not by accepting
feminist politics and philosophy, she asks us to begin with her 1955 work
As we have seen in the previous two chapters, which focus on two essays
from Privileges, Beauvoir’s advice to start with Privileges strikes those familiar
with her work as strange. Beauvoir biographer, Deirdre Bair bluntly writes that
“[t]hroughout her lifetime, [Beauvoir’s] regard for these essays remained much
higher than that of scholars or critics of her writing” (663 fn 9). Part of the oddity
As seen in the previous chapters, the first article in Privileges, “Must We Burn
torturer of women, as a moralist we can all learn from; the second, “Right-Wing
59
According to Bair’s biography, Beauvoir had a “lifelong insistence that the
essays in Privileges remained the starting point for any explication of her political
position and philosophical thought” (453). Even more specifically, in a 1982
interview when asked “where someone interested in learning about the
development of her feminist philosophy (both as part of her Existentialist position
and separate from it) should begin, [Beauvoir] insisted that these three [essays]
offered the most appropriate place to start and were examples of her most
significant philosophical and sociopolitical commentary” (Bair, Simone 663 fn 9).
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Thought, Today,” attacks all non-Marxist thought, both on the right and left, as
ontology. For a writer who composed books and articles that explicitly analyze
women’s situations, asking readers to begin with a text that ignores women qua
such, we never get to know ahead of time if our choices and actions are useful or
good. Rather than possessing a static value, concepts like “useful” and “good”
situations. Living a politically responsible and ethical life, Beauvoir tells us,
mindedness in “Right-Wing Thought, Today” where she writes, “There is only one
truth, but error is infinite” (qtd in Kruks, “Ambiguity” 215). Sonia Kruks concurs
writings which otherwise value the ambiguity that political action presents.
Instead, readers are presented with a “stridently opinionated and judgmental” text
through Privileges (“Ambiguity” 214). The essays “do not attend to nuance or
complexities,” Kruks declares, “and they stand in stark contrast to her embrace of
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ambiguity elsewhere” (“Ambiguity” 214). When critics do mention the collection
uncharacteristic text for Beauvoir. Given her history of advocacy for ambiguity
and (albeit late in life) women, why would Beauvoir have us start with Privileges
begin with a work that virtually ignores women and encourages political
like, and refuse a consistent stylistic. After all of this, where does Beauvoir leave
and political change. I argue that feminist scholars have failed to read Beauvoir’s
of-Beauvoir moments that we see her opening up new possibilities for feminism.
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dogmatic style—that both demonstrates her responsiveness to changing
seems to work toward different ends than The Ethics of Ambiguity (the former
ostensibly encouraging dogmatism, the later ambiguity), in fact, they both enact
the very same critique of her “serious man” whose principle ethical problem is the
demand for abstract ethical principles even in the face of ambiguous, changing
situations. The stated lesson of The Ethics of Ambiguity opens the way for
reading the performed lesson of Privileges—that living an ethical life means living
In this final chapter, I contend that rather than shy away from Privileges,
concept of ambiguity unites her work. While generally Beauvoir sides with the
specific instances, such as in Privileges, she puts these tactics aside and
responds to the situation’s particularities, which may ignore women (as we have
seen in Chapter Four and Chapter Five) and be expressed clearly through a
dogmatic style (as we saw with Chapter Five). Only through the ambiguous
unleashed (as in Chapter Two), and through the ambiguous semicolon Beauvoir
links the masculine and feminine worldviews producing a relation (rather than a
185
When we take Privileges as Beauvoir’s primary feminist text, we get a
different picture than the ones presented at the beginning of this project:
(Tidd, “E’tat” 201). When we begin with Privileges in the fuller context of The
keeping the possibilities for the content of feminism open rather than
not, Beauvoir insists, approach ethical and political situations (as we will see
later, she considers the ethical and political one in the same) in the same way.
ways of seeing situations from outside, in Privileges Beauvoir works from within
that discourages subjects from taking certain ethical positions. From here we will
better understand how to read “Must We Burn Sade” and “Merleau-Ponty and
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Pseudo-Sartreanism” as embodiments of her feminist politics and philosophy—
not aberrations. Next, I will examine her “serious man” as a central concept
Privileges. Through her explanation of the “serious man” we get a starker case
for what she sees as the problems with an ethics which responds consistently to
force” in Beauvoir’s work begins as a muted voice in her earlier work (4).60 From
Pyrrhus and Cinéas (1944) to The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) to The Second Sex
her organizing illustration Cinéas essentially asks, “What’s the point?” to his king,
Pyrrhus, as the king elaborates his plans for world conquests. If, after
conquering the world, you plan to come back home, if the job of conquering is
never finished, then why, Cinéas questions, leave home at all? Why even begin
question by locating the driving “élan of [human] spontaneity” (Pyrrhus 91) as the
60
For another argument on Beauvoir as the philosopher of ambiguity also see
Monika Langer’s “Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Ambiguity.”
187
motivating imperative to make sense of how we might live our lives. We act
because we must. The fact of ambiguity does little to mitigate our responsibility
toward action, Beauvoir argues in this early piece. On the contrary, it makes
decisive action all the more necessary: “my relationship with things are not
fixed...I create them minute by minute” (Pyrrhus 94). Subjects must define their
own way, Beauvoir holds in Pyrrhus and Cinéas, and accept from the beginning
Ambiguity describes how contemporary humans may feel like passive subjects
acted upon more than active agents in the world, but how existentialism teaches
us not to flee from this uncertainty, but to assume it. There is no clear purpose to
life or set of moral imperatives that all should adhere to, but instead the
responsibility lies with individuals to create meaning for their lives. Beauvoir
asserts in The Ethics of Ambiguity that our task is not to get rid of ambiguity, to
seek a politically pure place from which to act, but to assume our fundamental
uncertainty. As such, one who genuinely accepts his61 responsibility in the world
does not rely on ready-made values to justify his existence. Instead, he decides
the conditions under which he wants to live and moves toward those conditions.
ambiguity, indeed, this was Beauvoir’s own later, self-criticism of the text, The
beginning with the question “What is a woman?” Beauvoir teases apart the
61
Here, I keep Beauvoir’s use of masculine pronouns.
188
constitutive and often contradictory elements of woman. If woman’s ontological
But Privileges (1955), a text Beauvoir wrote after The Second Sex,
seemingly upsets this trajectory with her peremptory tone with little regard for
Sartre. I argue that this is not a blip in Beauvoir’s otherwise smooth line of
argument for ambiguity, as some scholars have claimed. Just as Beauvoir made
her case for ambiguity concrete in The Second Sex, and, as we have seen in
Chapters One and Two, manifested her concept of ambiguity through language,
she demonstrates her case for ambiguity in a different way by performing her
how she performs in Privileges, we must first explore her explicit articulation of
there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt [a] tragic ambiguity of
We should “assume our fundamental ambiguity” and “draw our strength to live
and our reason for acting” from ambiguity (Ethics 9), we “must not attempt to
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dispel the ambiguity of [our] being but…accept the task of realizing it” (Ethics 13).
(Philosophy 41). In Beauvoir’s estimation, every human “is not granted…to exist
without tending toward this being [a certain, all-controlling god] which he will
never be” (Ethics 13). In other words, we might aim for certainty in our existence
and ethics, but must also accept that certain existence and ethics are a striving, a
anxiety; it need not throw us into a nihilistic angst. Beauvoir insists we seize
ambiguity. She confesses, “I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible
insists that there is an ethics at stake in the ambiguous that does not “suppress
my instinct, desires, plans, and passions” but enables subjects to create their
objective ethics are mandated by institutions or any outside judge. At stake for
Beauvoir is the creation of an ethics that would refuse to tell subjects how to act
and demands they perpetually create and generate their own ethics.
ontological ambiguity (something that happens to you, that envelopes your entire
being), and then ultimately inhabit an attitude of working with our ambiguity (a
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position of active engagement). Beauvoir’s two moves—envisioning ambiguity as
perform (as in a force both constituting and constituted) her ethics. As she
constituted values and principles,” but “the constituting movement through which
values and principles are constituted” (188). Her ethics, then, is an active
Working with our ambiguity (as opposed to through our ambiguity to reach a
bad, useful or useless. “Useful,” Beauvoir tells us, “has no more meaning if
taken by itself than the words high, low, right, and left” (Ethics 49). As I have
argued in the previous chapters, Beauvoir cares more about the situational
establishing any objective, idealized relation. She goes on to explain that words
for this or that” (Ethics 49). Working with our ambiguity is in part, then, an action
between our project and the way we live in the world. In this way, ambiguity
create their own project, and there are no objective standards to which we can in
good faith appeal, Beauvoir provides us with an open ethical platform where
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For Beauvoir, the notion of an ethics that must be created by the subject,
“To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a
meaning,” Beauvoir clarifies (Ethics 129). Absurdity not only accepts that
existence holds no fixed meaning, but it is also content with its meaninglessness.
The ambiguity of her ethics, on the other hand, “assert[s] that [existence’s]
meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won” (Ethics 129). Generative
discourages what she calls “dream[s] of purity” where one could ever live a
perfectly ethical life, inflicting no harm (“Moral” 189). Since the ethics she
proposes does “not agree to recognize any foreign absolute,” “abandon[s] the
right in the eyes of a God, but of being right in [one’s] own eyes” then, indeed the
perfectly pure ethical life does not exist because we are operating, according to
Beauvoir, under subjective conditions where the only judge is one’s self—
This is not to say Beauvoir lacks empathy for desiring the ethical “dream of
purity.” Of course one feels the desire to unequivocally do the right thing, one
feels the tension between the two poles of ambiguous deliberation and certain
action,” how in spite of the fact that “no action can be generated for man without
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its being immediately generated against men,” we must still act in order to live an
ethical live (Ethics 99). Deutscher reads Beauvoir’s ambiguity as taking part in a
difficult paradox: “We might say that what could be realized [in Beauvoir’s ethics],
and only with great difficulty, is the kind of affirmation of ambiguity that was really
power.
But once again this failure to reconcile contradictions should not be read as
a failure of Beauvoir’s ethics. For human action always involves failure to some
degree, she tells us. As humans, we have no choice but to “[accept] defilement,
failure, horror; it means admitting that it is impossible to save everything and that
what is lost is irreparably lost” (“Moral” 190). Pretenses otherwise are a flight
from responsibility. The goal of ethical living is not to escape ambiguity but to
assume it and learn how, despite our lack of perfect knowledge, to assume the
risks and responsibilities that come with existence: “if man is waiting for universal
peace in order to establish his existence validly, he will wait indefinitely” (Ethics
119). Beauvoir insists the ethical exists in the ambiguous and difficult position of
being aware of the (potential) harmful impact of your actions, but nevertheless
acting: “the man of action [i.e. the ethical man], in order to make a decision, will
not wait for a perfect knowledge to prove to him the necessity of a certain choice”
Beauvoir tells us (Ethics 123). “[H]e must first choose and thus help fashion
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history,” she continues, “A choice of this kind is no more arbitrary than a
hypothesis; it excludes neither reflection nor even method; but it is also free, and
it implies risks that must be assumed as such” (Ethics 123). Working with
ambiguity does not mean turning a blind eye to the wider impact of your actions,
gamble. One faces the ontological fact of ambiguity and takes a risk: “political
cannot provide a recipe for ethics. “Which action is good? Which is bad? To
ask such a question is also to fall into a naïve abstraction,” Beauvoir tells readers
(Ethics 134). An ethics of ambiguity will not prescribe an ethical course of action:
“We don’t ask the physicist, ‘Which hypotheses are true?’ Nor the artist, ‘By what
Beauvoir reasons, “does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art”
(Ethics 134). Instead, we engage in methods, methods that “can not define a
priori the moment of invention, still less foresee it” (Ethics 134). Beauvoir’s
heuristic ethical method insists “there must be a trial and decision in each case”
(Ethics 134). She asks us to “consider what genuine human interest fills the
abstract form which one proposes as the action’s end” (Ethics 145) and later that
our method “confron[t] the values realized with the values aimed at” (Ethics 152).
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immediate or certain results: “just as the physicist finds it profitable to reflect on
the conditions of scientific invention and the artist on those of artistic creation
useful for the man of action [i.e. the ethical man] to find out under what conditions
his undertakings are valid” (Ethics 134). Beauvoir castigates the prescriptive
ethical life as too narrow and rigid given the very undefined nature of subjectivity.
With this ambiguous ethical performance, this wager, we must lose any kind
of deliberation (“Uncertainty should not keep [us] from pursuing [our] goals”
(Ethics 148)), but it should also not lure us into a sense of unreflective relativism
where every decision is equally ethical. The fact of an ontological ambiguity does
not give one license to retreat into solipsism. In response to Dostoyevsky’s “If
God does not exist, everything is permitted,” Beauvoir insists on the contrary
(Ethics 15). Precisely because God does not exist, says Beauvoir, because no
ultimate judge or cosmic orchestrator of our lives has a plan, then it’s up to us to
protect and create the world in which we want to live. “A God can pardon, efface,
and compensate,” she explains, “But if God does not exist, man’s faults are
We never get to know if our actions are ethical, but we nonetheless constantly
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question our actions and live and act within the tension of ambiguity, which “can
our inability to know with certainty the effects of our actions. On one level,
Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, provides a multiplicity of ways of being
in the world rather than the masculine One that has not been able to see
when expressed along these lines. However, as Deutscher rightly points out,
Beauvoir may thematize ambiguity in works like The Blood of Others, but “as a
for most of her writing. “It is the exigencies of Beauvoir’s own work that open up
the question [of ambiguity], and yet the question is not articulated within her
work” (Philosophy 51). Beauvoir often defines and defends ambiguity, so says
Deutscher, but she rarely embodies and performs the concept herself.
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immediately or recognizably related to feminism. No women are substantively
discussed or analyzed, the two figures she defends, Sade and Sartre, have
one way of ethically engaging with the world; she instead emphasizes ambiguity
feminists to Privileges as the starting place for those interested in her feminist
politics and philosophy. In Privileges she performs in a different feminist key and
Beauvoir’s content and style diverge from her previous writings can feminists
Rather than writing about women, she writes about Sade. Rather than writing
with a tentative style, she figuratively shouts down Merleau-Ponty. Yes, she
words, but in ostensibly dissonant moments where Beauvoir’s content and style
literary works that explicitly prize ambiguity, one rarely finishes her pieces and
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politics, a text that alternates between rehabilitating male thinkers with
apparatus with which to enact or judge feminist ethics. By varying the content
and stylistics of her writing, she does not allow us to hold a consistent position of
For example, moving from the impossible moral dilemma in her political
novel The Blood of Others where her protagonist wrestles with his role in a
Resistance group, acknowledging the dangers of both action and inaction, to her
those with an eye toward feminist ethics. Where The Blood of Others establishes
inconsistency of the attitudes she sympathetically writes about and inhabits seem
to suggest that there remains no one correct way to enact feminist politics.
something from even the most despicable, anti-woman character. Going back to
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ambiguously or not, remains a gamble. We simply do not get to know which
version of politics will work. Our only consolation lies in assuming and acting in
For Beauvoir, the ethical red flag comes through consistently approaching
ethical problems in the same way. The center of The Ethics of Ambiguity
concerns itself with working through different ethical attitudes that stand in the
way of an authentically ethical life. There is the sub-man who exists dully in the
world only in fact, having no project, no passions, and never questioning the
world around him (Ethics 42-45); there is the nihilist who decides to make nothing
of himself (Ethics 52-57); there is the adventurer who only sees the world as
conquest (Ethics 58-63); there is the passionate man who projects objects as
absolutes (Ethics 63-68); and the independent man who, although possesses a
free-thinking, assumes she can escape reproach (Ethics 68-70). However, the
“most widespread” of the inauthentic, ethical attitudes is that of the serious man
(Ethics 46).
The serious man never questions the absolute values he learned as a child
and consistently suppresses his freedom for the sake of the Cause62 (Ethics 45-
46). In doing this he “loses himself in the object in order to annihilate his
certainty (Ethics 45). The Cause the serious man devotes his life to could
62
Also designated as the Object or Thing by Beauvoir in Ethics.
199
not save the individual insofar as he is a concrete and separate existence,” it
embodies a “deceitful stupidity,” and such an attitude “gets rid of [the individual’s]
(Ethics 46). The serious man attempts to “escap[e] from the stress of existence”
46). A serious attitude, then, gets an individual out of the constant questioning,
For the serious man, the world appears as a given, not something that she
has a hand in shaping and creating, and as such, the serious man knows ahead
of time which choices to make and can be expected to make those choices fairly
reliably. The serious invests and values consistency. Rather than wagering and
deciding with each situation the appropriately ethical action, the serious man
relies on the predetermined values of his Cause. The serious operates with a
her situation, and as result does not acknowledge or recognize the unforeseen
political possibilities. “The thing,” Beauvoir tells us, “that matters to the serious
man is not so much the nature of the object which he prefers to himself, but
rather the fact of being able to lose himself in it” (Ethics 47).
The ethical danger in adopting such an attitude is not only that nothing is
questioned, but that the serious man projects her own values onto others and
judges others as if these values were objective. Beauvoir uses the example of
value and use and he has no qualms sacrificing himself or the subjective
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freedom of others to serve his Cause: “The colonial administrator who has raised
the highway to the stature of an idol will have no scruple about assuring its
construction at the price of a great number of lives of the natives; for, what value
has the life of a native who is incompetent, lazy, and clumsy when it comes to
building highways?” (Ethics 49). In short, the serious man can myopically, self-
Within feminism, one way a serious attitude might express itself is through a
representations is the goal. Take for instance the 2008 Democratic presidential
because she was the woman candidate—not because of her policies or her
experience or her electability against the Republican nominee. And when Clinton
lost the primary, the same serious attitude would lead to support of Sarah Palin.
The serious attitude would assume by virtue of her sex she represents women’s
interests or even that we can isolate women’s issues from the larger fabric of
the uncontested value regardless of the situation. From the serious attitude, the
embraced the ambiguity of the situation and did not automatically support the
interests.
Even as she defines it, Beauvoir herself could be accused of taking serious
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feminist positions later in her public life. Elsewhere in her writings and political
concerns itself first and foremost with the concrete lives of women.63 Her interest
abortion, protecting women from violence, and encouraging futures other than
the customary roles of motherhood and housekeeping for women. She edited a
column in Les Temps Modernes on “daily sexism,” was president of the “League
for the Rights of Women,” co-directed “Choisir,” and was central in forming
“S.O.S. Batter Wives” (Cordero 48). Additionally, the feminist work she describes
as “particularly important” in her 1977 interview with Alice Jardine (that of dealing
with issues of battered wives and rape) all center on political projects that engage
with women as an accepted and agreed upon category. Even though she
(Psych et po)64 “very capitalist” and thus “exploitative,” she finds their mission to
publish and extend visibility to women’s writing laudable and clearly within the
63
Mary Warnock broadly characterizes existentialism as “the deliberate and
intentional use of the concrete as a way of approaching the abstract, the
particular as a way of approaching the general” (133). An existentialist feminism,
then, by definition values the concrete lives of women.
64
For overviews of 1970’s era women’s movements in France see Carolyn
Burke’s “Report from Paris: Women’s Writing and the Women’s Movement,”
Elaine Marks’ “Women and Literature in France” and Toril Moi’s French Feminist
Thought. Also see Deidre Bair’s Simone de Beauvoir (552-3) for background on
Psych et po.
202
and of women’s possibilities. She also, however, pragmatically believes in
working in the world and with women as they currently exist. With this logic
address itself to women’s problems” (Beauvoir in Jardine 228). Add to this her
work with Choisier La Cause des Femmes,65 League for Women’s Rights,
readers can clearly see her focus on extending legitimacy to issues explicitly
articulated as women’s.
politics later in her life,67 she also felt the accusatory sting of not appropriately
representing women or the feminine. Despite the role The Second Sex played in
igniting women’s liberation movements in France and the US, some feminists
deemed its goals and language as masculinist.68 In the same vein, 1970’s
French feminist groups threw stones at Beauvoir for being “Sartre-fixated” and
65
An abortion rights organization.
66
This feminist journal, co-founded by Beauvoir, sees itself as an antidote to the
glut of psychoanalytic and philosophical interpretations of women’s oppression at
the time. Instead, the journal focused on Marxist analysis of women’s situations.
67
Just as Beauvoir only committed to feminism later in life, so too did she take to
sustained political activity. Lawrence D. Kritzman marks the Algerian War and
Beauvoir’s defense of Djamila Boupacha, a member of the Algerian resistance
who was raped with a broken wine bottle by members of the French army, as her
initiation into viewing the personal as political.
68
See Chapter Three for a full articulation of these charges.
203
writing for Les Temps Modernes, what they considered a male publication
a woman, fails at being a political woman in the right way, illustrate how
narrowly defined women. More recently and explicitly, Lisa Jervis, third wave
that “[t]he biggest problem with American feminism today is its obsession with
lead to, or can be equated with, feminist social change…and that isolating
The problem with this logic is that it accepts the current political, social, and
which society’s current structures create and maintain rigid and oppressive
categories of sex. Critiques of this kind, one that the constellation of Privileges
and Beauvoir’s earlier mentioned critics imply, holds that feminism’s project rests
less in representing and promoting women within the current system, and more
204
The ethical feminist dilemma for Beauvoir might ask how to protect women
from violence and rape and support their reproductive rights and creative
situation. In protesting the old phallic idols, Beauvoir might ask, how do we not
make narrowly defined “women’s interests” into a new idol? While abundantly
this only makes her exclusion of women in Privileges all the more pointed. She
toward and how it relates to feminism. Of course readers can find discrete
targets and modes of engagement in the individual essays, but read as a whole
questions.
Since a unified Cause does not drive this political, ethical, and philosophical
politics. While she may not have consciously created this political bricolage, it
205
Cause letting the multiplicity of political opportunities present themselves.
Instead of imposing the same Cause on every problem she encounters (as the
serious man would), she allows the situation to dictate the appropriate reading
decided upon Cause, Beauvoir widens her available response range and
already assuming a static set of feminist precepts, Beauvoir can discuss content
since she cannot know ahead of time the appropriate decisions to make, she
creates the varied political discourse she wishes to see—one in which she
assumes an ambiguity to the world and where she does not assume a certain
future and impose a politics or a Cause on her life. She lets the situation rather
philosophy should not adhere to a rigid code, but assume a more supple
demonstrates the range of attitudes and subjects feminism could open itself up
to. Beauvoir contends that there are no definite Causes feminism is married to,
By having those interested in her feminist politics and philosophy begin with
206
Privileges, Beauvoir protects herself from potentially serious attitudes and
gamble by performing her critique of the serious man and not writing in a manner
consistent with her other, recognizably feminist texts. True, Beauvoir generally
for feminism and discourages a self-certain attitude of what a feminist should do.
Second Sex, with hesitation. Although I always felt ambiguity key to seeing The
Second Sex and Beauvoir’s writings with fresh eyes, I wasn’t quite sure what that
exactly meant. And perhaps that’s what attracted me to this project in the first
intellectual work.
207
third and then resolve her ambiguity through exploring how it influences practical
feminist social change. The more I sat with her writing, the more it resisted such
a tidy read. And the longer I sat with her ambiguity, the longer I sat. As current
research on the brain and productivity has shown, the more uncertain one
becomes about her situation, the less likely she is able to perform (Rock). And
problem. I could have fit Beauvoir’s writing into my predetermined form, but then
I would lose the bits that made her interesting to me. I would lose the emotional
My frustration, a frustration many before me and I’m sure many after me will
consistent Beauvoir. This emotional response comes from the expectation that
Beauvoir reigns as one of the mothers of feminism yet she responds in often
bizarre, inconsistent, and what many would consider un-feminist ways. She
writes with contradictions. She justifies her use of masculinist language. She
defends Sade as a moralist. She vindicates Sartre to the bitter end. And yet she
also writes with non-contradictory certainty, admits women’s need for a new
rhetorical feats with little fan fare when compared to other influential feminists.
The language of feminists like Irigaray and even Butler announce their difference
and their complexity with visible markers. Can one begin more ostentatiously
208
than Irigaray’s Freud-crossed-with-circus-ringleader “Ladies and
even inspires “awards.” With their visible difference, both of these feminists have
philosophy and politics that undergird and inspire their style, there’s definitely
something there that’s happening on a rhetorical level that calls readers to sit up,
take notice, and respond. Once readers respond, both writers have had
opportunities to explicitly affirm, justify, explain, and teach their rhetoric. Not so
with Beauvoir.
rhetorical acknowledgement, but her invisibility allows her to enter places more
opportunity to consider the power of the invisible. Take for example Beauvoir’s
arguments unnoticed.
Indeed, the whole premise for this project rests on the notion that there’s
power to hiding in plain sight. I build this case by exploring five rhetorically
inflected “problems” scholars have attributed to Beauvoir and how they should be
Beauvoir’s contradictions, one of the most cited disputes scholars have with
209
writers and artists. The “problem” of Beauvoir’s singular, blind-to-difference
relations. What once seemed like a problem of blind, dogged devotion to Sartre
can instead give occasion to look at the transformational reading that takes into
ambiguity.
The Second Sex and it gives us a perspective for reading the essays of
Beauvoir and The Second Sex in feminism can be best understood by this deep
seated ambiguity: neither writer nor book clearly or unambiguously stand for a
Cause or transparently represent one Thing but must be translated for each
generation.
an ambiguous world.
210
Beauvoir’s language feels more satisfying; it allows us to “get” Beauvoir. The
sense of progress. It blocks the clear path forward. It muddies the waters of
producing many options and choices, it also arrests productivity, in the sense of
would probably tell us, “It doesn’t necessarily get better.” Ambiguity means
accepting there’s not a steady, logical march to progress, but a halting, zigging
and zagging which, if we’re lucky, can be coordinated and marshaled toward
progress.
experience the gamble, the realization that the potentiality that comes with
However, Beauvoir might argue, if we aim to change our social and political
211
Embracing Beauvoir’s larger body of work—not only The Second Sex and
Privileges, which I focused on throughout the project, but also her interviews,
memoirs, and fiction, which I touch upon—paints a nuanced picture of how she
our language as more or less representational, then we will no doubt live our
lives in a much different way than Beauvoir asks us with her ambiguous
assumptions like this: “If the speaker says what he or she sincerely believes,
spontaneously, without premeditation or artifice, then words will reveal the truth
incomprehensibility, and clear and opaque stylistics encourages readers not only
to question the simple logic of “common sense,” but it also asks us to learn how
212
struggle with her work and her choices (political, personal, ethical, and
ambiguity as fully difficult. The big question Beauvoir’s work, particularly in The
Second Sex and Privileges, opens us toward, but refuses to answer, is how
213
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