Sonia Kruks’s Beauvoir’s “Time/Our Time: The Renaissance in Simone de Beauvoir Studies”

1. Sonia Kruks’s Beauvoir’s “Time/Our Time: The Renaissance in Simone de Beauvoir Studies” Prof. Wen-chuan Chu Student: Hsiu-yu Kuo (69412101) March 15, 2007

2. I. Some Criticism on The Second Sex A. As feminist theorizing exploded in the 1980s, The Second Sex was extensively discussed, yet often only to be dismissed as methodologically naïve and self-contradictory. B. In terms of the gynocentrism in U.S., Beauvoir was seen as increasingly old-fashioned. She was accused of taking masculinist values as the norm to which women should aspire, of disparaging the female body.

3. C. Toril Moi noted in 1990 that the feminist literature on Beauvoir was not only predominantly critical but also peculiarly nasty in tone. It contained an “unusual number of condescending, sarcastic, sardonic, or dismissive accounts.”

4. II.New Reflections on Beauvoir’s Significance A. Against the unquestioned assumptions of an earlier generation, that Beauvoir worked faithfully in the framework of Satre’s “existentialism” and that she just “applied” his philosophy to the question of women, recent work in feminist philosophy has now indubitably established Beauvoir’s importance as an original philosopher in her own right.

5. B. In Margaret Simons’s Meeting with Beauvoir in 1972, Beauvoir insisted that the only important philosophical influence on The Second Sex was Satre’s Being and Nothingness. Simons was already convinced by 1972 that Satre’s early philosophy could not be the philosophical origin of The Second Sex. C. Simons shows, contrary to received opinion, there is evidence that influence often ran in the opposite direction, that Satre had significant intellectual debts to Beauvoir.

6. III. The Originality of Beauvoir’s Ideas A. Much of the more recent feminist philosophical literature on Beauvoir has been concerned with this question, tracing the influences on her thought of other figure in the phenomenological and existential tradition, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, as well as examining how she draws from earlier thinkers such G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx.

7. B. It is equally plausible to suggest that she arrived at this concept primarily from reflecting on her own experience.

8. IV. Toril Moi’s argument on gender identity. A. Moi criticizes the concept of “gender identity” as a reifying closure on the fluidity of individual experience. For our lived experience is built on many other things that “per se have nothing to do with sexual difference”: “a woman is a human being as much as she is a woman.”

9. 1. Moi’s vision is of a world in which sexual difference is less oppressive. 2. Sexual difference simply should become less significant in the daily experiences of all human beings, toward new version of androgyny.

10. B. Heinämaa, unlike Moi, points out, for Beauvoir, human bodies are encountered not only as integral to the self but also as an often threatening “alien vitality.” 1. Our bodies are ourselves and alien to us. 2. It is not just that women experience menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, or lactation, but that such experiences give rise to a more heightened awareness of the alien vitality of their bodies.

11. C. Heinämaa is correct that Beauvoir does not ask why women are oppressed, that she does not seek a “first cause,” or a primary point of origin, for this oppression. But Beauvoir does ask—and seeks to answer—questions about how women are oppressed.

12. V. Two Voices in Beauvoir’s Work A. Satrean Voice One is still a Sartrean voice that focuses on “the ethic of the project,” accusing the masculinist claims that “subjectivity equals transcendence,” and that freedom involves autonomy and control.

13. B. Muted Voice • The other muted voice holds great promise for feminist ethics. By attending to this voice Bergoffen carefully begins to tease from Beauvoir’s work an “ethic of generosity” and a celebration of the joys of giving and sustaining human bonds.

14. 2. We come to accept differences and to let the other be, delighting in her or his otherness. “For Beauvoir, recognition means an acknowledgment of otherness. It is in recognizing our otherness, she argues, that we recognize our need of each other.

15. VI. Conclusion Beauvoir has become a major theoretical source. She is a thinker with and through whom we may critically engage our own present.

16. Works Cited Kruks, Sonia. “Beauvoir’s Time/Our Time: The Renaissance in Simone de Beauvoir Studies.” Feminist Studies 31.2 (2005):286-309.