There’s a kind of loneliness that settles in just after you have achieved something and moved on. Arriving at a place that you’ve always wanted to get to has a way of making visible those parts of your life that have not been remedied in the transition. Like a photographic negative, realizing your goals can emphasize absence—those interpersonal connections you have not been able to make or sustain, that person you’d like to find who really sees you in your most authentic self-expression, those captivating interlocutors whom you’ve never met who go straight to the marrow of an idea or a life.
I found myself in such a place fifteen years ago, after I had just moved across the country to start my first job as an assistant professor of philosophy. Being the only untenured member of a fifteen-person department, and being a woman in a discipline where the professors were overwhelmingly men, accentuated my isolation during this period of development and transition. Gone were the other women in my cohort from the only philosophy Ph.D. program in the United States to require two courses in feminist philosophy.1 Gone were our Friday afternoon conversations over pitchers of Oregon beer that went long into the night, and that covered all things philosophical, existential, personal, and political.
As a palliative to my physical and intellectual solitude, I read books that I really enjoyed—books that I wanted to read outside of what was necessary for my teaching and research. Having read Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical essays and novels in graduate school with great enthusiasm, I decided I would work my way through her memoirs. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter stayed my loneliness in ways that I could not have anticipated. Beauvoir’s words noticed me. They asked something of me. Her direct descriptions of her own experiences called me to offer up mine in a kind of conversation, and to compare them with those of the women characters in the story. In return, aspects of my own life trajectory and their connections to my familial, social, and religious milieu were revealed to me in gentle, yet irrefutable ways. Reading Beauvoir’s book was a dialogue that I cherished; it offered me a moment of relationship at the end of each solitary day.
Years later, as Editor in Chief of Simone de Beauvoir Studies, I am frequently approached by women from all walks of life, inside and outside of the academy, who tell me how reading one of Beauvoir’s books changed their lives. The experience of finding a true companion in Beauvoir’s words is not a function of the reader, although it is always personalized; it is instead a hallmark of the writer’s style and skill. Beauvoir’s unique ability to draw the reader into a tête-à-tête and to evoke social life in all its dynamism no matter the genre of writing may be the most distinctive and laudable feature of her oeuvre. She is explicit about her intention to evoke experience rather than represent it in “Literature and Metaphysics,” where she argues that literature succeeds according to the measure by which the reader “reacts as if he were faced with lived events […]. The reader ponders, doubts, and takes sides; and this hesitant development of thought enriches him in a way that no teaching of doctrine could.”2
Off the page, in her own life, Beauvoir was an expert conversationalist and “une grande épistolaire” (a master correspondent) whose profound investment in regular dialogues with others shapes the feel and quality of her written work.3 Traditional distinctions between speech and writing, the saying and the said, first person and second person, self and other, writer and reader, voice and silence, and life and literature are therefore complicated within Beauvoir’s own expression and in the act of reading her books. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir’s remark in the avant-propos to Correspondance Croisée (Correspondence at a crossroads) regarding the letters exchanged between Beauvoir and Jacques-Laurent Bost could potentially be extended to all of Beauvoir’s writing: “Circulant en aller et retour, l’ écriture restitue la dimension vivante d’ une conversation” (Circling there and back, the writing restores the living dimension of a conversation).4
This special issue, “Dialogues avec Beauvoir / Beauvoir in Conversation,” features six articles and three book reviews that explore and enact various dialogues with Beauvoir. In some cases, the conversations examined are those that actually took place: letters exchanged between Beauvoir and her readers during the 1950s and 1960s; Beauvoir’s brief encounters with Françoise Sagan; the spoken and unspoken dialogues woven through the quartet Sartre-Beauvoir-Zaza-Merleau-Ponty. In other cases, conversations are imagined between Beauvoir and groups of people, such as contemporary women’s activists in Latin America, the Middle East, and France.5 Still other articles stage interactions between Beauvoir and certain schools of thought like twentieth-century Anglophone women’s literature or the branch of political theory called “new materialisms.” The ways that Beauvoir’s writings have been received and talked about by her readers, and the role played by various translations of her books in structuring the reception of her ideas are also considered in several of the contributions.
The lead article of the issue, “Simone de Beauvoir et ses lectrices: hypothèse d’ une influence réciproque (1949–1971)” by Marine Rouch, represents some of the first fruits of published research on the enormous collection of letters (more than 20,000) sent to Beauvoir from her fans and readers over her lifetime. An historian by training, Rouch argues that the Liberation of Paris was accompanied by a shift in the relationship between literature and mass culture: in this context, “écrire à l’ écrivain.e, tout comme écrire à des figures publiques tels que les stars de la chanson ou du cinéma, devient tout à fait courant, presque banal” (writing to an author, much like writing to famous public figures such as singers and actors becomes completely common, almost banal). The “fan letters” from this period reflect Beauvoir’s extraordinary capacity to speak to her women readers in particular. Rouch’s central contribution is to show how Beauvoir’s women readers in turn influenced the future course of the author’s own writing, notably The Woman Destroyed, through their letters, letters which often describe their own lived experiences—their disappointed loves, broken marriages, unwanted pregnancies, and so on. Their letters are thus mediums for “[la] transmission d’ une éthique feministe” (the transmission of a feminist ethic) and a call to Beauvoir to speak for women, to be their “porte-parole.”
It is interesting to compare Rouch’s study with an article that appeared in the last issue of Simone de Beauvoir Studies (vol. 30, no. 1) that has nearly the same title: “Simone de Beauvoir et ses lecteurs: de personne à personne” by Anne Strasser. Strasser employs the term “lecteurs” (designating both men and women) rather than “lectrices” (designating women readers specifically) because this is the term Beauvoir herself uses in her memoirs. Rouch’s choice of “lectrices” reflects her engagement with unpublished letters as opposed to Beauvoir’s published texts and signals that she is emphasizing different kinds of conversations than Strasser—intimate, personal, epistolary dialogues that sometimes continued for many years rather than momentary responses to “critics” or imagined discussions with the collective entity that is Beauvoir’s “public.”
If Beauvoir’s philosophy is to remain relevant in the twenty-first century, scholars must continue to explore its relationship to recent developments in feminist theory. Sonia Kruks’s article, “For a Modest Human Exceptionalism: Simone de Beauvoir and the ‘New Materialisms,’ ” juxtaposes Beauvoir’s “modest” humanism with an increasingly popular political discourse devoted to articulating “new materialisms.”6 As the moniker suggests, new materialisms reject the reductive, Cartesian conception of matter as passive, inert, and unthinking, and instead insist upon the ways that matter has life, agency, and a kind of mind, often appealing to eighteenth-century notions of vitalism, empirical findings in quantum mechanics, and phenomenological descriptions of nature in order to present their case. Kruks applauds new materialisms for their capacity to disrupt the enlightenment conceptions of sovereignty, rationality, and humanity that have been so crucial to Western and patriarchal political theory. However, she argues that some new materialisms (notably, Jane Bennett’s variety) may work against feminist ethics and politics insofar as they cannot account for the ways that freedom and responsibility are specifically human. As Kruks explains, “New materialist anti-exceptionalism tends to deflect attention not only from the distinctive intra-human qualities of human freedom but also from its vulnerability to human oppressions and from our responsibility to resist them.” Moreover, by prioritizing change over permanence in their ontologies, new materialisms have difficulty explaining the enduring character of sexism, racism, and other intersecting oppressions.
Kruks’s analysis is one of the first to offer a constructive call for the proponents of new materialisms to develop finer-grained ontological accounts of their core political concepts of agency, subjectivity, responsibility, oppression, freedom, and humanity.7 Such a conversation is not only pertinent to the evolution of new materialisms, but also promises to shed light on the similarities and differences between Beauvoir’s philosophy and that of Judith Butler, who, drawing upon Michel Foucault’s work, locates mechanisms of power and agency outside of the individual, human subject.8
The title of Flavien Falantin’s article revisits a motif from Beauvoir’s 1951–1952 essay, “Faut-il brûler Sade?” as well as Merleau-Ponty’s “Faut-il brûler Kafka?” which was published in 1946 and written for a special issue of Action oriented around that question.9 Both essays examine the relationship between literature and politics, and reveal the interplay between individual psychology and collective life. For example, Merleau-Ponty resists the move to separate an author’s oeuvre from his social and political location. He writes, “[T]he work and the political action are part of a sole human life that expresses itself from its historical milieu.”10 Falantin’s “Faut-il brûler Sagan?” deepens this discussion by substituting a woman author for “Sade” and “Kafka,” two writers whose bodies of work, however different from one another, are nonetheless invested in tropes of masculinity: in both cases, the solitary male protagonist who refuses to conform to society even when faced with death, incarceration, transformation, or dehumanization becomes the symbol of an uneasy and hard-won liberty. Falantin’s creative substitution raises questions about the ways women’s writing is so often under fire, including those dealing with the status of women authors, the depiction of women characters, and the political project of feminism.
Similar to Rouch’s article on epistolary exchanges between Beauvoir and her women readers, Falantin’s essay focuses on a real conversation that Beauvoir had during her lifetime. We can read Beauvoir’s accounts of Sagan in her memoirs and Sagan’s descriptions of Beauvoir in Chroniques 1954–2003.11 Different from Beauvoir’s conversations with her women readers, however, Beauvoir’s conversation with Sagan marks a kind of limit—a conversation that could never have really happened, an impossibility of connection and dialogue. As Beauvoir explains in Force of Circumstance, “[E]very time I left her [Sagan], I said to myself that the next time we must have a real talk together; and then the next time we didn’t—I’m not sure why.”12 The lack of conversation between Beauvoir and Sagan raises the question of what barriers may exist to opening conversations between women about feminist issues, especially when the interlocutors are speaking across different generations and perspectives.
Despite the failure of their real-life dialogue, Falantin’s analysis uncovers an intriguing rapprochement in their novels, namely, the critical presentation of bourgeois society from a woman’s point of view. In Les Belles Images and Bonjour tristesse, for example, masculine domination and masculine solitude are not depicted as expressions of freedom, as they may be for Sade or Kafka, but as oppressive and conformist modes of relating to women. The two authors also converged at times in their political activism, but they nonetheless interpreted their participation differently; for example, whereas Beauvoir’s support for the Manifesto of 343, a list of women who declared that they have had an abortion that was published in Le nouvel observateur and Le Monde in 1971, remained unequivocal, Sagan later expressed ambivalence about her signature.
Sarah M. Misemer’s “Beauvoir/Iribarren/Dodera: Simone, mujer partida—A Shared Monologue,” also addresses the theme of the possibility of conversations among women. Yet unlike Falantin’s subject, the women interlocutors are not from the same culture, nationality, class, and vocation. Misemer analyzes the dialogic techniques used in Simone, mujer partida, the latest theatrical production by María Dodera, one of Uruguay’s most prominent playwrights, and the performance of actor Gabriela Iribarren in the role of Simone de Beauvoir. As Misemer’s paradoxical title suggests, the play is a monologue that is not at all solitary, but is instead created out of the layered subjectivities of Beauvoir, actor, director, and audience. Simone, mujer partida reflects Iribarren’s interpretation of Dodera’s interpretation of Beauvoir’s writings about herself and other women, which are in turn juxtaposed with references to instances of contemporary feminist activism in Latin America, such as the #NiUnaMenos movement to protest violence against women. According to Misemer, the play’s title refers not to a “defeated” woman, but to the deconstruction of a monolithic notion of “woman,” one that would prevent the diversity and multiplicity of women’s experiences from speaking to and with one another in collective resistance to oppression.
Misemer’s discussion of Simone, mujer partida, which emphasizes the bodily and sensorial aspects of the production, takes root at the underexplored intersections of performance studies and Beauvoir studies, and, as such, constitutes a long overdue invitation to go further into this fecund encounter.13 This missed conversation is surprising given that Beauvoir wrote a play herself and that she uses the theater as a central setting and metaphor in several of her novels including She Came to Stay and All Men are Mortal.14 In addition, clarifying the relationship between Butler’s performative theory of gender and Beauvoir’s conception of women in The Second Sex has been a crucial part of scholarship concerning Beauvoir’s magnum opus.15
The consideration of Beauvoir’s work in relation to performance studies also raises questions of genre and expression: if a primary aim of existential and phenomenological philosophy is to evoke the temporal truths of existence, then would a live performance not be even more suited to this task than a novel?16 Beauvoir’s own view is that each medium affords a different kind of creative freedom. Whereas a novelist has no restrictions on the content of her story and can expose the interior psychology of the protagonist, the playwright must express everything through the actors’ bodies and voices, whose consciousnesses are “closed”: “every thought, every feeling, every event only exists across verbal expressions, the text [of the play] not only represents the characters’ conversations, but the totality of their being and their situation.”17 By making Beauvoir the lead in her play, Dodera imbues the performance with this famous legacy and with the consciousness that shows through in Beauvoir’s own writings.
On July 25, 1919, Beauvoir’s mother, Françoise Bertrand de Beauvoir, gave her eleven-year-old daughter a special gift to facilitate her study of English: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.18 As Beauvoir recounts in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she immediately recognized aspects of herself in the character of Jo March and was inspired both by Alcott’s story and Alcott herself.19 Ambre-Aurèlie Cordet’s article, “Simone de Beauvoir et les romancières anglo-saxonnes: la double dette,” focuses on such formative literary engagements in Beauvoir’s youth. Cordet is specifically interested in the indirect dialogues between Beauvoir and Anglophone women novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Alcott, Katherine Mansfield, Mary Webb, and George Eliot. Inversely to the way that Rouch traces the influence that Beauvoir’s readers had on her writings via their letters, Cordet investigates the imprints left on Beauvoir by the novels that she herself read. She concludes that Beauvoir owes a “double dette” (double debt) to American and English women authors: they not only encouraged her development as a writer, but they also helped to motivate her sense of what it means to be a woman and a feminist. By modeling the vocation of an author in life and on the page, women like Alcott and Beauvoir write new possibilities for their women readers, liberatory possibilities that emerge suddenly and forcefully like an unexpected plot line in the middle of a story.
Mapping a novel’s routes of demographic travel—tracking its most frequent destinations and the most prominent social patterns among its readership across historical periods and cultural geographies—is one indication of which conversations are vital for certain groups and which are avoided. Like those books by Anglophone women writers that Beauvoir read in her youth or Sagan’s novels or Dodera’s plays, Beauvoir’s own works do not receive proportional attention from women and men, white women and women of color, or people from the bourgeoisie and the working class.20 Understanding these demographic trends in the reception of Beauvoir’s oeuvre, and in her engagement with works by other authors, is part of understanding what she has to say and what she means.
The final article in this special issue is the second installment of the Simone de Beauvoir Studies Featured Translation / Traduction annuelle of 2019, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert’s “The Blood of Others: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir.” Part I, “I Exist, Therefore I Encroach,” which was published in SdBS 30.1, provides a philosophical and historical analysis of the emergence of the notion of “empiétement” (‘encroachment’) in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy by analyzing unpublished manuscripts that make reference to passages from The Blood of Others and “Pyrrhus and Cineas.” Part II likewise investigates the underexplored dialogue between Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty through a consideration of their real-life historical relationship as it was mediated by two other interlocutors, Élisabeth Lacoin (nicknamed “Zaza”) and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Already in de Saint Aubert’s positioning of this quartet we are asked to see the historical origins of existentialism in a new light: rather than frame the conversation according to the most intimate couples in the group (Beauvoir-Sartre and Zaza-Merleau-Ponty), de Saint Aubert examines the pairs that are most distanced from one another across the lives of the others: Beauvoir-Merleau-Ponty and Zaza-Sartre. The title of Part II, “Between Birth and Death: Freedom Struggling with Existentialist Divinities,” signals this personal turn in the conversation back toward the mythical conception of a shared experience, as well as the consequences of these nested first loves for the philosophies that would follow from them.
Encroachment is about the inevitability of transgressed boundaries between self and other, interior and exterior; it is exemplified in the catalyzing role Jean plays in Hélène’s death in The Blood of Others, most especially when he was trying his best to leave her alone, to not influence her freedom in any way. Deep in the archives of Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished manuscripts, de Saint Aubert finds Zaza at the origins of this sophisticated phenomenological notion. He explains, “[f]or the two writers [Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty], her death was perhaps their first—if not their most intense—experience of the encroachment of freedoms.” Both philosophers’ writings are thus so many repeated attempts to exorcise and preserve Zaza’s death.21 As the surviving best friend and fiancé, Zaza’s place in their respective histories renders any encounter between Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty at once the most intimate and the most distant, for Zaza is “the third term in their impossible dialogue.” Whereas Rouch’s, Falantin’s, Misemer’s, and Corbet’s articles address the ways that the page influences life, de Saint Aubert approaches Beauvoir’s conversations from the other direction, attending to transpositions of personal life into literature and philosophy. Beauvoir’s and Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvres thus bring a kind of immortality to these early experiences of youth because, in de Saint Aubert’s words, “Zaza has not finished dying,” a protest against contingency that is echoed in the title of Sartre’s eulogy for Merleau-Ponty: “Merleau-Ponty vivant.”22 After Sartre’s death in 1980, more than fifty years beyond the star-crossed meetings of late 1920s, the last surviving member of the quartet may finally be ready to admit the end of the conversation, to say “Adieu”: “[D]e vos cendres à mes restes il n’ y aura aucun passage […]. Personne ne l’ entend; je ne parle à personne.” (There will be no passage from your ashes to mine […]. No one hears this; I do not speak to anyone.)23
The original articles and book reviews that make up this special issue each emphasize different kinds of dialogues with Beauvoir. However, they also speak to one another through shared themes and parallel engagements of the same texts (The Woman Destroyed, Les Belles Images, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Second Sex), thus inviting readers to participate in exchanges of a second- and third-order—conversations about conversations about conversations. Curiously, despite the diversity of the subjects and dialogues pursued in this issue, the topic of abortion is addressed in all six articles, albeit to different degrees and from different perspectives. Given how shockingly little scholars have written about Beauvoir and abortion, this convergence is unexpected, but by no means is it unfounded.24 It implies that this aspect of women’s lives is a central talking-point across Beauvoir’s oeuvre, as well as in the contemporary global landscape of women’s experiences.
Like its repeated appearance in this special issue, the theme of abortion recurs throughout Beauvoir’s oeuvre, from her early novels to her interviews of the 1960s and 1970s. Recall that, in When Things of the Sprit Come First, Chantal Plattard’s sixteen-year-old student, Andrée, asks for her assistance in procuring an abortion for her friend: “But isn’t there a way of not having babies? Don’t you know any? Or people who could tell us?”25 In The Blood of Others, Hélène’s illegal abortion serves as a principal image in the plot, one that exposes the ontological meaning of violence and connection. As de Saint Aubert explains, “This obsession with the Other is at its most extreme in the recurrent exorcism of original encroachment, in the exorcism of the Occupant par excellence which is the child in pregnancy—fruit of encroachment and encroachment itself.” Kruks likewise refers to abortion to make an ontological point about the ambiguity between physis and anti-physis in human life.
The legalization and decriminalization of abortion was not only a mainstay of Beauvoir’s literary works from the beginning, but also her politics. According to Sylvie Chaperon and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, abortion was the key issue that motivated Beauvoir to become involved with the Mouvement de liberation des femmes (MLF) in the 1970s and that ultimately radicalized her feminism.26 During this time, Beauvoir played a central role in the association that Gisèle Halimi founded to fight for legalizing abortion called Choisir (To Choose), and she participated in a number of activist initiatives, including signing the Manifesto of 343 and giving testimony at the Bobigny trial.27 In her court deposition on November 11, 1972, Beauvoir presents the stakes of the issue clearly: “In my opinion, women have bodily freedom. They can choose to have or to not have a child and no one can intervene. For me there is no doubt about it.”28 She continues, “outlawing abortion is an essential piece in the system that society has put into place in order to oppress women.”29 Her writings on abortion are particularly attentive to disparate access to abortion and disparate punishments for abortion allotted across women of different economic classes.30 Beyond her discussions of the issue’s legal, political, and theoretical aspects, Beauvoir was an activist at street-level; for years she gave women money, information, and sometimes her home to help them procure abortions in good conditions, rewriting through her own actions Chantal’s failure to help other women in When Things of the Spirit Come First.31
Beauvoir herself was well-aware of the cultural proscription against talking and writing about abortion—of the injunction to silence and minimize, to never make abortion the subject of conversation.32 In the course of translating de Saint Aubert’s article for this issue, I discovered that the English translation of The Blood of Others by Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse fails to include a sentence that describes the aborted fetus. Compare, for example, the following French and English passages:
Hélène était couchée de tout son long, les yeux fermés. Sa chemise enfantine découvrait ses genoux; sous ses jambes, il y avait une toile cirée jonchée de cottons sanglants. La cuvette était pleine de sang et dans cette crème rouge flottaient de gros morceaux de mou de veau. Je vidai la cuvette et je tirai la chasse d’ eau.33
Hélène was lying flat on her back, with her eyes closed. Her childish nightdress revealed her knees; under her legs was an oilcloth covered with bloody rags. I took the basin, I went across the landing and opened the lavatory door. I emptied the basin and pulled the plug.34
As has already been demonstrated in the cases of The Second Sex and She Came to Stay, abridging, mistranslating, and censoring Beauvoir’s descriptions of women’s experiences has philosophical consequences.35 On the next page after this passage, where the philosophical and ethical import of the novel is first revealed, Hélène and Jean each repeat the phrase “C’ est à moi de choisir” (It is for me to choose), a phrase whose gendered political meaning is lost in the absence the text's abortion imagery.36 Many of the key concepts of existentialism—freedom, choice, encroachment, flesh, intentionality—were first articulated with words that refer to women’s bodily experiences (“pregnancy,” “abortion,” “invaginations,” “fold,” “chiasm,” “promiscuity”).37 Yet these origins are often obscured by the universalist aspirations of philosophical scholarship. Writing women’s experiences in all their particularity is therefore a mode of resistance against oppression, silencing, and censorship, and an invitation to voice and expression.
Many months into my first year as a philosophy professor, I was in bed late one night reading Force of Circumstance and nearing its ending. Suddenly, a wave of grief came over me, and tears fell from my cheeks slowly and softly. I was thinking that once I finished All Said and Done, I would no longer have anything new of Beauvoir’s to read.38 I would lose this precious late-night dialogue with someone who seemed to understand me better than even those in my intimate circle of friends and family. Our dynamic conversation would end and I feared that reading her books again would never be like the first time, where the surprise of what comes next added to the real-life character of the exchange. I decided then and there (with a dramatic flair suited to youth) that I would never read All Said and Done. There would be too much to lose if I finished Beauvoir’s oeuvre once and for all. I needed always to keep open the promise and possibility of the next conversation.
This special issue excavates, explores, and imagines new and exciting dialogues with Beauvoir across multiple disciplinary perspectives. It also gestures toward other conversations that are waiting to happen—encounters between Beauvoir’s oeuvre and academic fields such as transgender studies and feminist geography, imagined exchanges between Beauvoir and interlocutors like Toni Morrison or Gloria Anzaldúa, creative juxtapositions of Beauvoir’s ideas with contemporary women’s lives. Like water drops on a window pane that merge and separate from one another, Beauvoir’s words and life trace “résonances intimes” (intimate resonances) with our own, according to Rouch’s apt phrase. To invoke Beauvoir in speech, to bring Beauvoir into dialogue, is also to raise the question of women’s freedom, then and now, and to drive toward its reality, toward a future of continuing conversations.
The group of women interlocutors pursuing their doctorates at the University of Oregon during this time includes Celia Bardwell-Jones, Dana Berthold, Kim Garchar, Rochelle Green, Jena Jolissaint, Chaone Mallory, Amy Story, and Lisa Yount. All of these women went on to achieve successful careers in philosophy or related fields, and all have continued feminist advocacy work.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” trans. Veronique Zayteff and Frederick M. Morrison, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmerman and Mary Beth Mader, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2004, 269–277, p. 270. Essay originally published in 1945.
The phrase “une grande épistolaire” comes from Marine Rouch’s article in this issue. For examples of Beauvoir’s real-life conversations, see Simone de Beauvoir and Madeleine Chapsal, “Entretien de Simone de Beauvoir,” in Les Écrivains en personne, Paris, Julliard, 1960, pp. 15–38; Simone de Beauvoir and Madeleine Gobeil, “Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview,” trans. Bernard Frechtman, The Paris Review, no. 34, 1965, pp. 23–40; Simone de Beauvoir and Alice Schwartzer, “The Rebellious Woman—An Interview by Alice Schwartzer,” in Feminist Writings, trans. Marybeth Timmermann, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 192–208 [Interview originally published in 1971]; Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret A. Simons, “Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir,” trans. Jane Marie Todd, Hypatia, vol. 3, no. 3, 1989, pp. 11–27; Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre, trans. Quintin Hoare, New York, Arcade, 1991 [1990]; Simone de Beauvoir, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, trans. Ellen Gordon Reeves, New York, The New Press, 1999.
Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, “Avant-propos,” in Correspondance croisée, 1937–1940, by Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques-Laurent Bost, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Blanche,” 2004, p. 7.
See in particular two of the books reviewed in this issue: Karen Vintges, A New Dawn for the Second Sex: Women’s Freedom Practices in World Perspective, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2017; Manon Garcia, On ne naît pas soumise, on le devient, Paris, Flammarion, coll. “Climats,” 2018.
See, for example, Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, New York, Polity, 2002; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2007; Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010; Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010.
See also Patrice Haynes, “Creative Becoming and the Patiency of Matter: Feminism, New Materialism and Theology,” Angelaki, vol. 19, no. 1, 2014, pp. 131–150; Helen Mussel, “The Truth of the Matter,” Hypatia, vol. 31, no. 3, 2016, pp. 537–553; Paul Rekret, “A Critique of New Materialism: Ethics and Ontology,” Subjectivity, vol. 9, 2016, pp. 225–245.
See, for example, Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault,” Praxis International, vol. 5, no. 4, 1986, pp. 506–516; “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Letitia Sabsay, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 12–27.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Must We Burn Sade?” in Political Writings, trans. Kim Allen Gleed, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, and Virginia Preston, ed. Margaret A Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2012, pp. 44–101. [Essay originally published in 1952.]; Maurice Merleau-Ponty “Faut-il brûler Kafka?” Action, no. 97, July 1946, pp. 14–15.
Merleau-Ponty, “Faut-il brûler Kafka?” p. 69.
Françoise Sagan, Chroniques 1954–2003, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 2016, p. 459.
Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard, New York, Penguin Books, 1987 [1963], p. 476.
For scholarship on Beauvoir and theater, see Dennis Gilbert, “Sartre and Beauvoir on Theater: Force of Circumstance?” Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 8, 1991, pp. 137–152; “Simone de Beauvoir on Existentialist Theater,” Sartre Studies International, vol. 18, no. 2, 2017, pp. 107–126; Pierre Masson, “L’ Invitée, un huis-clos positif?” Revue d’ Étude du roman du XXe siècle, vol. 13, June 1992, pp. 41–52; Alexander H. Welcome, “Our Bodies for Ourselves: Lithe Phenomenal Bodies in the Stand-Up Comedy of Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley,” Black Women, Gender & Families, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, 87–107.
Simone de Beauvoir, “The Useless Mouths (A Play),” trans. Liz Stanley and Catherine Naji, in “The Useless Mouths” and Other Literary Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 33–87. [Play originally published in 1945.]; She Came to Stay, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse, New York, W. W. Norton, 1999 [1943]; All Men Are Mortal, trans. Leonard M. Friedman, New York, W. W. Norton, 1992 [1946].
Judith Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,” in “Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century,” ed. Hélène V. Wenzel, special issue, Yale French Studies, vol. 72, 1986, pp. 25–39; “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519–531; Sara Heinämaa, “What Is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of Sexual Difference,” Hypatia, vol. 12, no. 1, 1997, pp. 20–39; Stella Sandford, “Contingent Ontologies: Sex, Gender, and ‘Woman’ in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler,” Radical Philosophy, vol. 97, 1999, pp. 18–29; Silvia Stoller, “Genealogy of Gender Theory? Genealogy of Gender Practise?” Phainomena, vol. 22, no. 84–85, 2013, pp. 135–151.
Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” p. 274.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Roman et théâtre,” in Les Écrits de Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Blanche,” 1979, 327–331, pp. 328, 331, my translation. Essay originally published in 1945.
Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, “Chronologie,” in Mémoires, t. I, ed. Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Éliane Lecarme-Tabone, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” LV–CIII, p. LIX.
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup, New York, Harper Colophon, 1974 [1958], pp. 89–90.
On this point, see Rouch’s article in this issue. See also readings of Beauvoir that consider how her work speaks and does not speak to women of color, such as Kathryn T. Gines (Kathryn Sophia Belle), “Sartre, Beauvoir, and the Race/Gender Analogy: A Case for Black Feminist Philosophy,” in Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, ed. Maria Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines (Kathryn Sophia Belle), and Donna Dale Marcano, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2010, pp. 35–51; Stephanie Rivera Berruz, “At the Crossroads: Latina Identity and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,” Hypatia, vol. 31, no. 2, 2016, pp. 319–333; Alia Al-Saji, “Material Life: Bergsonian Tendencies in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy,” in Differences: Rereading Beauvoir and Irigaray, ed. Emily Anne Parker and Anne van Leeuwen, New York, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 21–53.
For more on Zaza’s relationship with Merleau-Ponty see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Lettre de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” in Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Éliane Lecarme-Tabone and Jean-Louis Jeannelle, Paris, Éditions de l’ Herne, coll. “Cahiers de L’ Herne,” 2012, pp. 221–223; Moses M. Nagy, “Zaza and Merleau-Ponty: Their Love and Her Death,” in “The Spiritual Sphere of Zaza,” special issue, Claudel Studies, vol. 22, no. 1–2, 1995, pp. 99–108.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty vivant,” Les Temps modernes, no. 184–185, October 1961, pp. 304–376; translated by Benita Eisler as “Merleau-Ponty Vivant,” in The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, ed. Jon Stewart, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1998, pp. 565–625.
Simone de Beauvoir, La cérémonie des adieux, suivi de “Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, août-septembre 1974,” Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Blanche,” 1981, p. 14.
Notable exceptions include Sylvie Chaperon, Les années Beauvoir, 1945–1970, Paris, Fayard, 2000, pp. 365–369; Ruth Kitchen, “From Shame toward an Ethics of Ambiguity,” Sartre Studies International, vol. 19, no. 1, 2013, pp. 55–70.
Simone de Beauvoir, When Things of the Spirit Come First, trans. Patrick O’Brian, New York, Pantheon Books, 1982 [1979], p. 88.
Sylvie Chaperon, “Introduction,” trans. Marybeth Timmermann, in Feminist Writings by Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015, 181–191, pp. 182–183; Le Bon de Beauvoir, “Chronologie,” p. XXXVIII.
Chaperon, “Introduction.”
Ibid., p. 221.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Beauvoir’s Deposition at the Bobigny Trial,” trans. Marybeth Timmermann, in Feminist Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015, 219–222, p. 222. Deposition originally published in 1973.
Beauvoir and Schwartzer, “The Rebellious Woman”; “Abortion and the Poor,” trans. Marybeth Timmerman, in Feminist Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmerman, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 216–218, essay originally published in 1972.
Beauvoir, “Beauvoir’s Deposition at the Bobigny Trial,” p. 221.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, New York, Vintage Books, 2010 [1949], p. 524.
Simone de Beauvoir, Le Sang des autres, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 95. Subsequent references to this work are indicated by the abbreviation SA.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse, New York, Penguin, 1948, repr. 1975 [1945], p. 101. Subsequent references to this work are indicated by the abbreviation BO.
Margaret A. Simons, “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex,” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 6, no. 5, 1983, pp. 559–564; Barbara Klaw, “L’ Invitée Castrated: Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, and Getting Published, or, Why Must a Woman Hide Her Sexuality?” Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 12, 1995, pp. 126–138; Toril Moi, “While We Wait: Notes on the English Translation of The Second Sex,” Signs, vol. 27, no. 4, 2002, pp. 1005–1035; Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari, eds., 2017, “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient …”: The Life of a Sentence, New York, Oxford University Press, 2017.
SA, p. 96; BO, p. 102.
On female imagery in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, see Jennifer McWeeny, “Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty,” in The Blackwell Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer, Oxford, John Wiley & Sons, 2017, pp. 211–223.
At this early point in my career, I was naive about how much Beauvoir had published in her lifetime. I now realize how slim a chance there is that I could ever complete the project of reading her oeuvre in its entirety.
