Meryl Altman - Beauvoir, Hegel, War - Hypatia 22:3

Hypatia, Inc. and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hypatia.

http://www.jstor.org

Hypatia, Inc.

Beauvoir, Hegel, War Author(s): Meryl Altman Source: Hypatia, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer, 2007), pp. 66-91Published by: on behalf of Wiley Hypatia, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4640082Accessed: 07-02-2016 12:25 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 66.11.2.230 on Sun, 07 Feb 2016 12:25:10 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/publisher/black

http://www.jstor.org/publisher/hypatiainc

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4640082

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp



Beauvoir, Hegel, War

MERYL ALTMAN

The importance of Hegel to the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, both to her early philosophical texts and to The Second Sex, is usually discussed in terms of the master-slave dialectic and a Kojeve-influenced reading, which some see her as sharing with Sartre, others persuasively describe as divergent from and corrective to Sartre's. Altman shows that Hegel's influence on Beauvoir's work is also wider, both in terms of what she takes on board and what she works through and rejects, and that her reading of Hegel is crucially inflected by two additional circumstances that Sartre did not entirely share: the experience of her first serious study of Hegel as a noncombatant in Paris during the German occupation and her earlier direct exposure to an eccentric, idealist reading of Hegel as developed by the group Philosophies in connection with surrealism and the artistic avant-garde. Altman also explores the afterlife of Hegel's influence on Beauvoir on second-wave feminism in the United States and Europe, and suggests continuing relevance to feminist theory today.

Montrer les influences et liens philosophiques n'est important a mes yeux que si cela ajoute

a la comprehension d'une pensee.

-Eva G6thlin

There is no absolute beginning in thought.

-Michdle Le Doeuff

People make their own Hegel. But they do not make him just as they like. The importance of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, both to her early philosophical texts and to The Second Sex, has been quite well recognized. However, her interpretation of Hegel's thought has

Hypatia vol. 22, no. 3 (Summer 2007) ? by Meryl Altman



Meryl Altman 67

mainly been discussed in terms of the master-slave dialectic and described as influenced by Alexandre Kojeve's famous 1930s lectures at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. For a long time, her reading was seen (and dismissed) as indistinguishable from Jean-Paul Sartre's; more recently, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin (1996) and Nancy Bauer (2001) have persuasively shown how she diverges from or even corrects Sartre's views. My own work with Beauvoir's texts, including her early diaries and fragments, has shown me that Hegel's influence on her work is also wider, both in terms of what she takes on board and what she works through and rejects. Beauvoir's reading of Hegel is crucially inflected by two circumstances Sartre did not fully share: her experience of serious, independent study of Hegel's texts in Paris under the German occupation, and earlier encounters during her student days with eccentric, idealist, and literary readings of Hegel, exemplified by the Philosophies group and by surrealists such as Louis Aragon.

This article sets out some of this wider context, not to be obsessed with the minutiae of Beauvoir's intellectual autobiography, but with the ultimate goal of understanding what is puzzling about Hegel's appearances in The Second Sex and then in later feminist texts that are influenced by Beauvoir. Despite recent work by Kimberly Hutchings (1998), Patricia Jagentowicz Mills (2003), and others, it must be admitted that the appropriateness of Hegel to a feminist undertaking, in Beauvoir's day or in ours, is not the first thing about his writing that one notices. So, the first question is, "Why Hegel?" and then the second question is, "Which Hegel?"

Beauvoir studies is currently experiencing something of a renaissance, and I must acknowledge Margaret Simons (1999), Toril Moi (1994,2000), Karen Vintges (1996), Sonia Kruks (2005), and Michele Le Doeuff (1991), as well as Bauer (2001) and Lundgren-G6thlin (1996), among those who have made my work possible.' Part of the collective project over the last few decades has been simply to establish how much Beauvoir had accomplished before she met Sartre, and how fully she had her own independent and truly philosophical projects apart from his. (Perhaps this point may not really be necessary to make anymore within a feminist context, although I note that mainstream philosophical narratives, for example, standard surveys of the influence of Hegel on French philosophy, still haven't taken much account of her existence.) Wanting to ensure that Beauvoir would be taken seriously, we have sometimes argued vehemently that she was a "real philosopher," almost as though we were making her tenure case in a U.S. university-and this has been made harder because she herself sometimes said that she wasn't one.

Dare I say, however, that not to be a philosopher is perhaps not the worst state of affairs conceivable? Also, there are many different styles of "doing philosophy." I thought of taking as my epigraph, "The present writer is by no means a philosopher," which is actually a quotation from Spren Kierkegaard (Sara Heinamaa says this is Kierkegaard's satiric response to Hegel's "systematic



68 Hypatia

thought" [2003, 9]).2 What emerges from the study of Beauvoir's early influences is how heterogeneous her philosophical background was with respect to genre and style. The separation between the philosophical and the unphilosophical, between the philosophical and the literary perhaps, isn't quite there. This has implications for her mature work: in my view, perhaps the greatest contribution of The Second Sex to what came to be called women's studies was an interdisci- plinary method that accepts and weighs all sorts of evidence and levels out all modes of authority, including the philosophical voice alongside literature, social science, history, and (not least) the personal testimony of lived experience.

But I quote Kierkegaard also defensively here; my own training was in literary studies, and my interest in Hegel is secondary to my commitment to Beauvoir. As a result, I approach Hegel from the outside, taking what might be called a genealogical approach, and remaining agnostic about which reading of Hegel might be a "correct" one. Also, I am not concerned with whether Hegel himself was right, but with whether, and how, he has been useful: not with what he means but with what he does, if you will (how to do things with Hegel). Finally, I don't at all mean to offer a deterministic account, as though the thought of one person causes the thought of another, or as though the influence of sources had to be mutually exclusive. Part of my argument here is simply that a broad-based, contextualized approach to the history of political ideas is worth the effort.

How TO HAVE THEORY UNDER AN OCCUPATION

In July 1940, Beauvoir returned to Paris-she'd fled the city as the Germans were arriving, part of a mass exodus, but then decided to come back in case Sartre might return or send some word. At this point, as she tells us in her memoirs, she does not know whether he is alive or dead.

July 6. I went to the Bibliothique Nationale. I took a card and I began to read some Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit. At the moment I understand almost nothing [quasi rien]. I've decided to work through Hegel every day from 2 to 5 o'clock. It's the most soothing [apaisant] thing one can find. (1960, 523)3 July 7. Rode my bicycle across Paris with Lise. I passed a parade of armored cars, full of Germans dressed in black, their large berets waving in the wind; it was somewhat beautiful, and sinister. At the Nationale I read Hegel, which I still have a lot of trouble understanding. I found and copied out a passage which will do marvelously as the epigraph to my novel. (1960, 524)4

The passage in question-"Every consciousness pursues the death of the other"5-does indeed stand at the opening of L'Invitde (1943) and we can take



Meryl Altman 69

it as her version of the idea Sartre (to whom she passed it on) would phrase more famously as "hell is other people" (1945). There is something piquant in thinking that Hegel had written the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807/1977) under conditions of practical and psychological duress while his city was besieged by the French, and she was reading it under the equivalent and yet opposite condition. Beyond anecdote, context can help us understand that "death" was more than just a metaphor, for both of them.

On July 11, she receives a penciled note from Sartre: he's in a prison camp, but at least he's alive.

The gray and green uniforms, the Nazi flag flying over the Senate, had become familiar. I taught my classes at Duruy, and I read Hegel at the Nationale which now opened in the morning as well. Hegel calmed me down a little. Just as when I was twenty years old, my heart bleeding over my cousin Jacques, I read Homer "in order to put all of humanity in between me and my particular suffering," I tried to melt the moment I was going through into the "course of the world." Around me, embalmed in thousands of volumes, the past was sleeping, and the present seemed to me like a past yet to come. I myself did not exist [Moi, je m'abolisais]. However, these reveries in no way encouraged me to consent to fascism. If one were an optimist, one might consider it the necessary antithesis of bourgeois liberalism, thus a stage toward the synthesis we were hoping for: socialism. But in order to hope to one day sublate fascism, one had to begin by refusing it. No philosophy could have persuaded me to accept it, it contradicted all the values upon which I'd built my life and every day brought me new reasons to detest it. How nauseated I felt reading in Le Matin and La Victoire these virtuous apologias for Germany, these scolding sermons our conquerors heaped upon us. Since the end of July, placards had appeared in certain shop windows: Jews Not Allowed. (1960, 526)6

Life goes on; the school year begins, and she is asked at work to sign a statement attesting that she is not a Jew (and does sign it-what else could she do?). She listens with rage to the discourses of Henri-Philippe P&tain and others who claim to be patriots saving France, and who blame the defeat on the excesses of the Popular Front, on Andre Gide, and so on, preaching a return to agriculture and to what we would now call "family values." There was no reason to think Germany would be defeated; London was being bombed to pieces, the United States had not yet entered the war. But, she says, she makes a kind of wager: if the world continued to fall apart, there'd be very little point in writing, but in case the world should ever come to its senses, she decides to keep writing



70 Hypatia

anyhow. Every morning she goes to the Caf6 D6me and works on her novel; every afternoon she returns to the library.

I continued to read Hegel, whom I was beginning to understand. In the details, the richness of his thought overwhelmed me: but the system overall made me dizzy. [L'ensemble du systnme me donnait le vertige.] Yes, it was tempting to cancel oneself out in favor of the Universal, to consider one's own life from the perspective of the End of History, with the detachment which the point of view of death also implies: then how ridiculous would seem this tiny moment in the course of the world, this one individual, me! Why should I concern myself with what happened to me, what surrounded me, right here right now? But the smallest movement of my heart disproved these speculations. Hope, anger, waiting, anguish affirmed themselves against all sublations; the escape into the universal, in fact, was only an episode in my personal adventure. I went back to Kierkegaard and started to read him passionately; the truth he was affirming defied doubt as victori- ously as the Cartesian proof; the System, history, couldn't do any more than the Evil Demon.7 The more I went along, the more I separated from Hegel,

without ceasing to admire him. Now I knew that I was linked to my contemporaries, to the marrow of my bones; I discovered the other side of the coin of this dependence, my responsibility.. . In occupied France, one consents to oppression merely by breathing. . . . But this situation that was imposed on me, my remorse had taught me that I had contributed to creating it (1960, 537).8

Interestingly, quite a few people were reading or rereading Hegel about this time. Theodor Adorno was. And Walter Benjamin had been perhaps rereading, certainly rewriting him, in the theses "On the Concept of History" (1940), just about the last piece of writing Benjamin completed. It's strange to realize that if Beauvoir had tried to read Hegel in the Bibliothique Nationale even a few months earlier, she might not have been able to get the book because Benjamin might have had it checked out: though he'd been urged to flee by his ex-wife and his friends, and had even been interned in a camp for two months the previous year, it was not until June 1940 that he finally began the months of wandering and the quest for papers that would culminate in his suicide on September 27. Barbara Johnson says that faced by the prospect of German invasion, Benjamin renewed his library card (Johnson 2003, 155; see also Brodersen 1996); and in some ways that is the same gesture as Beauvoir's decision to study Hegel, which is not (as I have discovered) a stroll in the park,



Meryl Altman 71

or a short-term project. "Je crois en un apres" (I believe in after) (1960, 518). So as long as we're talking about "history," and various things that can mean, I would want us to be working toward an intellectual history that would take into account the "actualitd" of two people who might have been studying in that room at the same time, but not together, and the situatedness (in a broader sense) that meant only one of them survived.

Thus far I've been citing Beauvoir's memoir, La force de l'Age (1960), which was actually written during the Algerian crisis, at a time when Beauvoir and Sartre were calling into question what it meant to them to be French, to be in fact traveling the world as prominent cultural "exports" of the French govern- ment, which was meanwhile pursuing repressive and repugnant policies in their name. So, a colleague suggested to me, perhaps Beauvoir was retrospectively reading those issues into her memories of the Occupation.9 But if we look at the two major philosophical essays Beauvoir produced in the early 1940s, Pyrrhus et Cineas (1944) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), we find them very much marked by this problem about history and using Hegel to work through it.

For example, in The Ethics of Ambiguity she condemns what she calls the "aesthetic attitude," which she illustrates as follows: "'Let us try to take the point of view of History,' people told themselves, when they learned that the Germans had taken Paris" (1944,109-10).10 The conclusion to that essay invokes, and then departs from, Hegel very directly." The Ethics of Ambiguity both reports and enacts the same move I found in the memoirs. An optimistic view of His- tory with a capital H is corrected by a concrete experience of life at a particular historical moment, with a particular position-what we'd now call a social location, what she would call a "situation,"--that one has not entirely chosen but for which one is responsible. It's worth dwelling on this shift because it is the major shift, or development, within their thinking that both she and Sartre ever made, an extremely enabling one on which her whole ability to be a feminist thinker joining concrete personal experience with political will depends.12

ANOTHER YOUNG HEGELIAN IN FRANCE

In fact, however, Beauvoir's initial engagement with Hegel was closer to the intellectual generation formed by the First World War, and had remarkably little to do with questions of solidarity, responsibility, or political life. Most com- mentators suggest that Hegel had not really been on Beauvoir's screen before the 1940s. This is the impression Nancy Bauer gives in her book, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (2001). And Lundgren-Githlin (1996) reads Beauvoir's Hegel entirely through Koj ve's, even though Beauvoir apparently did not attend his famous lectures of the 1930s. We do know, however, that she read Jean Wahl's book, Le Malheur de la Conscience dans la Philosophie de Hegel, when it appeared in 1929.'3 In fact, the first memoir passage I quoted above



72 Hypatia

(dated July 6) originally read in her journal, "I worked through Hegel for two hours with the Wahl [book] on Le Malheur de la Conscience dans la Philosophie de Hegel. At the moment I understand almost nothing." (1990, 339).14

It's easy to see how Wahl's book might not have helped much: he does not exactly provide a commentary. Rather, he reads selectively, and his reading stresses Christian redemption and reconciliation with the Absolute through suffering, as "tragic, romantic, religious experience"-a narrative one might more readily associate with Kierkegaard. I find this especially hard to understand since Wahl himself was a Jew: by the time Beauvoir was attempting to use him as an approach to Hegel, he had already been excluded from the Sorbonne, would be interned at Drancy. But as I said at the beginning, people make their own Hegel.15

Beauvoir seems to have begun making hers even before Wahl's book appeared, however. True, Hegel didn't loom large on the curriculum for the agre'- gation (the highly competitive examination French students take to qualify for teaching careers). She notes in her memoirs, "At the Sorbonne, my professors systematically ignored Hegel and Marx; in his large tome about 'the progress of consciousness in the West,' Brunschvicg gave barely three pages to Marx, who he put in parallel with a highly obscure reactionary thinker" (Beauvoir 1958, 318).16 Beauvoir's general opinion of Lion Brunschvicg, the doyen of Sorbonne philosophy at the time, who directed her thesis on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, was from the very beginning quite low. "M. Brunschvicg may be a man of merit but for me = 0" (2006, 213).17 Brunschvicg's contempt for Hegel is confirmed by Alexandre Koyre, who quotes his description of Hegel's philosophy as an "escape hatch [6chappatoire], a means for contemporary philosophy to evade or postpone contact with true knowledge of the real ... anachronistic even before it was born" (1931, 150).18 A story Henri Lefebvre told to Bud Burkhard around 1932 provides further confirmation. "The typical frustration came when Leon Brunschvicg turned down yet another thesis topic, this time on Hegel: 'You know (Lefebvre recalled Brunschvicg saying) Hegel had the mental age of a seven-year-old. He thinks of a concept like a cow thinks of green: because she browses indiscriminately among grasses, leaves, hay, she has a concept of green'" (quoted in Burkhard 2000, 138).19 Disdain for Hegel was not new in French academic life. In the letters of Alain-Fournier and Jacques Riviere, which Beau- voir read and reread during the late 1920s, Riviere complains (before the First World War) that he would have liked to write a thesis on Hegel's aesthetics but knew his professors would never accept it.

And yet, as a rebellious idea, the project was available, then and later. While Hegel was not on the syllabus, Beauvoir would have encountered him in a surprising number of other places, and especially in an intellectual culture that circulated around, and in opposition to, the Sorbonne.20 One could speak of the official and the unofficial curriculum of the 1920s, and while Hegel certainly



Meryl Altman 73

wasn't part of the former-Lefebvre goes so far as to say Hegel was "proscrit" (banned)-he was very much a part of the latter, and it was the latter that Beauvoir found especially compelling. As she wrote in her diary in November 1926: "Philosophy would be thrilling, if only there were no tests to study for, and I could really dive into it!" (2006, 179).21

Those diaries also show an important, though short-lived, intellectual friendship with a student named "Barbier," who appears to be the same friend called "Nodier" in the Mimoires d'une jeune fille rang&e (1958). Barbier was part of a group called "Philosophies," Marxists, but with a mystical slant, who published a journal called L'Esprit; Beauvoir seems to have been drawn toward their approach in 1927 (long before her acquaintance with Sartre), in part because she found Barbier attractive, and she took it seriously enough to have wondered about her own intellectual future, "NRF or l'Esprit?" (2006, 263).22 Elsewhere she notes, "A real pleasure, to chat for fifteen minutes with the director of I'Esprit. All at once I imagine everything knowing him might bring" (2006, 308) and "December 2. Read l'Esprit. There are two strangely beautiful articles by someone called Morhange" (2006, 198).23

But who were the Philosophies, and what was L'Esprit? Apart from the now-forgotten poet Pierre Morhange, this group of young

men included Norbert Guterman, Paul Nizan, Georges Politzer and, most interesting to me, Henri Lefebvre. Their first review was called Philosophies; the second, L'Esprit, came out in 1926 and 1927. The same group (joined by Georges Friedmann) later founded the La Revue Marxiste. Described as the first group to present a coherent Marxist-Leninism in France, their mature work took a similar approach to the Frankfurt school. La Revue Marxiste was the first to translate Marx's economic and philosophical manuscripts, before falling apart in a fairly dramatic way-in the words of Michel Trebitsch, it was "immediately crushed in grotesque circumstances by the brutal intervention of the Party" (1991, xxii).24

What they were doing in the 1920s, however, was attempting to find, or to found, a new mythology, a new absolute, a new mysticism, as a response to the problems of postwar inquietude. In this context, the first issue of L'Esprit published Hegel's section on the unhappy consciousness, translated and pref- aced by Jean Wahl: it seems possible that this was the first writing by Hegel Beauvoir actually read.25

Morhange's writing is vague poetic yearning mush, and Lefebvre's own meandering contributions about le moi are not much better.26 In retrospect, this is more than a little embarrassing for Lefebvre, who would go on to be known for work as a demystifier in such works as The Critique of Everyday Life (1947/1991), which is currently enjoying something of a renaissance. The "Brief Notes" at the beginning of the Critique of Everyday Life are about as complete a repudiation of the mystical Hegel of the Philosophies as might be conceived



74 Hypatia

of-Lefebvre saves a special virulence for surrealists and other practitioners of "magic realism." And Burkhard notes that by the first sketches for La Conscience Mystifi&e, in the 1930s, Lefebvre and Guterman were working out a critique of Lefebvre's earlier position. "La mystification: Notes pour une critique de la vie quotidienne" (1933)27 notes that bourgeois culture appeals to an abstract "esprit," which offered unreachable Absolutes and a diversity of entertaining evasions in place of reality, and thereby maintained order. "The true roots of the unhappy consciousness . . . lay in the projection of human desires and consciousness into an impossible search for comfort in an unrealizable Absolute" (Burkhard 2000, 143-44).28

Now, this is more or less the same trajectory that will be taken by Simone de Beauvoir, away from what she calls le goit de l'absolu (a taste for the absolute), through and away from the inquietude of the postwar period.29 In the course of her early essays and novels, she moves toward what might also in her case be called a "critique of everyday life," which I see in The Second Sex's analysis of the Myth of Woman as it enters normative cultural practice through literature, religion, the education of girls, and other ideological-material formations. (The Second Sex is directly critical of surrealists.) I'm tempted also to compare this to the other French classic of demystification, Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957).30 But Beauvoir will never have anything positive to say about Lefebvre and Guterman for the quite sensible reason that they were vicious political enemies to Sartre after the war; and Barthes does not have much good to say about Beauvoir or Sartre, perhaps for similar reasons. At some moments, however, the similarities may be more striking than the differences, and perhaps we are at such a moment now.31

If we go back to the 1920s, we find that Beauvoir's notebook contains some other interesting, though puzzling, references to Hegel. For example, in a time of depression she copies into her notebook some lachrymose verses by Jules LaForgue, of which it is hard to make much, except that they correspond to the ups and downs of her "relationship" with her cousin Jacques and her struggles to put together a sort of self. "Nothing more! Marble Venus! Pointless corrosives / Mad brain of Hegel! sweet consoling refrains! / Churchtowers set in order" (2006, 128).32 "Hegel" here seems to be standing in for a myth of human collective progress, for a delusion of absolute sense and order, a brief stay against the feeling that one is merely a speck in the random, pointless universe of adolescent yearnings.

Beauvoir also copied a more interesting citation from Louis Aragon: "All metaphysics is in the first person singular. So is all poetry. The second person is still the first" (2006, 227).33 I've traced this quotation to the conclusion of Aragon's early poetic effort, Le Paysan de Paris (1926/1990), a sort-of-novel that is not really enormously readable today, but was a major inspiration for Benjamin's work on the Paris Arcades.



Meryl Altman 75

The explicit project of Le Paysan de Paris is to create a modem mythology, including new myths of modernity, based on valuing quotidian, as well as nonrational and contralogical, aspects of human life. Aragon's opening is very much on the side of philosophy, but not at all the classroom sort. It begins (at least) as an opposition to Hegel, and the conclusion is a pretty thorough critique of Hegel's "logic," but I think it also parallels the search for a new mystical totality undertaken under the sign of Hegel by the Philosophies group.34 Like the work of the Philosophies group, Aragon's is an attempted solution to the postwar problem of loss of faith. It is not religious as such-Aragon is very clear that people who believe in God are simply being lazy. Rather, it attempts to substitute a different absolute, an absolute that he perversely locates in the concrete, the particular, the ephemeral, the everyday. He also locates it in women, or rather in Woman.

So, in the middle of the section called "Passage de l'Op ra," we find:

The living individual, says Hegel, poses himself in his first evolution as subject and as notion, and in this second evolution he assimilates to himself the object, and thereby gives himself a real determination. And he is in himself Kind, substantial uni- versality. The relationship of one subject with another subject of the same kind constitutes the particularization of kind, and judgment expresses the relationship of kind to the individuals thus determined. That is sexual difference. (70)35

The reaction of the narrator to this Hegelian proposition is to test it by going for a walk, during which he finds that "many diverse women out for a walk submit themselves to the Hegelian judgment."36 In other words he encounters women who offer him a variety of sexual experiences, more and less fleeting, including prostitution, which Le Paysan de Paris energetically defends.37

AFTERLIFE

The same point from Hegel comes up in The Second Sex, in the chapter on "les donnees de la biologie.""38 Beauvoir's reaction there is rather different, as you might expect. Most philosophers, she says, have not had too much to say about sexual difference: the myth in Plato's Symposium explains love, not sexual difference (which it presupposes); Thomas Aquinas says women are "occasional beings," which is just a masculine perspective on the "accidental character of sexuality."

Hegel, however, would have been unfaithful to his rationalist delirium [son d lire rationaliste] if had had not tried to found it [sexual difference] logically. According to him, sexuality



76 Hypatia

represents the mediation by means of which the subject attains itself concretely as kind. "Kind [genre] produces itself in him as an effect against this disproportion in his individual reality, as a desire to find again in another individual of his species the feeling of himself in uniting himself to it, of completing himself and thus enveloping kind in his nature and bringing it to existence. This is sexual intercourse [l'accouplement]." And a little further on: "the process consists in this, to know what they are in themselves, that is to say one single kind, one single and same subjective life, they posit it as such." And Hegel then declares that for the process of coming together to occur, there must first be differentiation of two sexes. But his demonstration is not convincing: one feels too much in it the parti pris of locat- ing the three moments of the syllogism in every operation. The sublation [dipassement] of the individual towards the species, by which individual and species accomplish themselves in their truth, could come about without a third term in the simple relation of the parent to the child: reproduction could be asexual. Or else the relation of the one to the other could be the relation of two likenesses [semblables], with differentiation residing in the singularity of a single type, as happens in hermaphroditic species. Hegel's description pulls out a very important meaning of sexuality; but his error is always to turn a meaning into a reason [son erreur est toujours de faire de signification raison]. It is in exercising sexual activity that men define the sexes and their relations, just as they create the meaning and the value of all the functions that they fulfill; but it is not necessarily implied in the nature of the human being. (1949, 39)39

Then she moves on to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Later, she suggests that sexual difference is not all that crucial: one can't imagine people who don't die and are still people, but people could reproduce partheno- genetically and still be human.

Beauvoir's (perhaps coincidental) rewriting of Aragon parallels a key move in her introduction to The Second Sex:

One must understand the implications of the verb "to be": bad faith consists in giving it a substantive value when it should have the dynamic Hegelian meaning: to be is to have become, to have been made the way one manifests oneself. (Beauvoir 1949, 25)40



Meryl Altman 77

One of Beauvoir's characteristic moves was to turn a prescriptive or "necessary" account into a descriptive, historically contingent one (Hutchings 2003, 72). Sometimes, as in my first example, she makes an antifoundationalist appropriation of Hegel (against his own grain, perhaps); sometimes, as in my second example, she put that appropriated Hegel to use in an antideterminist reading of something else. She needs Hegel to account for oppression and also to hold out the possibility that things really can change, that is does not imply ought. We need to bear in mind the basic methodological point that slipping from a meaning to a reason, like slipping from a fact to a right, is in her view a mistake. Not noticing this has led otherwise intelligent people to some fairly spectacular misreadings of The Second Sex.

Aragon's conclusion returns to Hegel, and also uses Hegel against himself, in attempting to synthesize philosophy and eroticism.4 Synthesizing philosophy and eroticism is something Beauvoir will also try to do: as I've argued elsewhere, the radical core of The Second Sex is an argument about the centrality and authenticity of women's sexual pleasure and desire, although this is accomplished mainly by a sort of via negativa (or perhaps a way of despair), through the minute investigation of female unpleasure, discomfort, pain, and frigidity (Altman 2002). Perhaps the main thing she got from Aragon was the tendency to apply Hegel to sex in a very concrete way; the sense that such juxtapositions were not incongruous; or perhaps the sense that such incongruous juxtapositions might be intellectually productive. At least, I hope I've shown that Hegel was part of the ordinary language of the avant-garde, so that it was in a sense normal for Beauvoir to turn to Hegel, even in thinking through problems where what Hegel actually had to say was quite problematic.

But there are also some things about Aragon that will not be assimilable to a feminist appropriation. For him, "the concrete" is the sexual, or at least sexualized, experience of Woman (by a man). Beauvoir works through this in her sections about "Mythes," where she is liquidating her own intellectual past through literary criticism and critique of many of her own earliest literary influences (surrealists, but also Paul Claudel). Much of the literary criticism in The Second Sex (and there is a great deal of it) is of this "demystifying" or "anti-myth" type.42

A huge amount remains to be said about Hegel's presence in, and influence on, The Second Sex. Here are a few general remarks that might guide further.

* First, Beauvoir's knowledge of Hegel was comprehensive, including Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Right, as well as Phenomenology of the Spirit, and (unlike many of her contemporaries) she did not confine herself to following out a single thread or theme in his work but tried instead to come to terms with his texts in their entire, strange complexity, without ever becoming a prisoner of his system;



78 Hypatia

* Second, her reading of Hegel was her own (and reading her only through Koj"ve, or only alongside Sartre, is insufficient);

* Third, her reading is itself dialectic, in very local ways, which means that any summary will be falsifiable and problematic;

* Fourth, she needs to be located in a broader context, including cre- ative writing, and the split between philosophers and poets must be set aside;43

* Fifth, her use of Hegel is not accidental or decorative. Hegel mattered to her, and through her, to the next generation of feminists and scholars.

To take up this last point: Beauvoir's demystifying appropriation of Hegel had an enormously significant, but not unproblematic, legacy for 1970s feminisms.44 It is central, for instance, to Sherry Ortner's groundbreaking article, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" (1972), one of the most influential pieces of the new feminist anthropology.45 It was also an important influence on the "feminist critique of science," for example on Sandra Harding, who brings up the master-slave struggle in a founding moment for "feminist epistemology"-the slave has to know more about the master than the master knows about the slave (1986, 26).46 The most Hegelian text of 1970s radical feminism is Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1971), which even includes several diagrams purporting to capture the essence of World History.47

And then we might think about the way of despair, or doubt: in Jean Hyppo- lite's formulation, "what consciousness takes to be truth is revealed to be illusory, consciousness must abandon its first belief and move on to another" (1979, 12). Could we see the crucial second-wave feminist practice of "consciousness- raising" implied in that idea of the unhappy consciousness, reflecting upon itself in ways that lead to collective recognition and then to collective action? Of course, the practice had other points of origin, for example the Maoist practice of "speaking bitterness," but the term itself is suggestive.

There are also suggestive parallels with a very interesting Italian radical feminist text of the 1970s, Carla Lonzi's Sputiamo su Hegel."48 The title means "let's spit on Hegel" or "we spit on Hegel," and the message is hardly ambigu- ous. For instance, "The master-slave dialectic is a settling of scores between groups of men: it does not point a way toward the liberation of woman, the great Oppressed of patriarchal culture" (1974, 17).49

And yet, why spit on him rather than simply turning away? I see Lonzi as performing an "appropriation" similar to Beauvoir's in attacking both the male Left in Italy and its deeper philosophical roots, through a point-by-point refu- tation of the boldest sort. Lonzi doesn't mention Beauvoir, but I hear echoes of Beauvoir's point when Lonzi says, for example, "Woman's condition, which is the result of her oppression, is viewed by Hegel as its cause" (1974, 25).50 And Lonzi, like Beauvoir, talks a great deal about women's sexual pleasure and unpleasure as the root of their oppression.



Meryl Altman 79

Against all odds, feminism's engagement with Hegel's views of sexuality appears to persist, perhaps most recognizably in the work of Judith Butler (1999, 2000). Couldn't we do without him by now? Probably. But knowledges are situated, and political knowledges perhaps doubly so; continued engagement with Hegel may point to also continued, though not always acknowledged, engagement with Beauvoir, which in my view is all to the good. The best reason to continue to engage with Hegel may be that feminism needs some dynamic account of the shape of change, both internal and external, and how these connect; the best reason to continue to spit, that feminism has to be, first and foremost, a ruthless work of demystification.

Finally, to gesture (at least) back toward my title: the need for and the difficulty of demystification will be precisely and particularly evident in the special case of military propaganda. It would be stretching a point to see Beauvoir's engagement with Hegel as caused, or even exhaustively explained, by the double European experience of the lies of war in the first half of the twentieth century. One may say, though, that the need for a form of cultural demystification that can if necessary stand outside the academy and apart from the state has never been more obvious than it is right now.

NOTES

A preliminary version of this paper was delivered at the Australasian Society for Conti- nental Philosophy annual conference 2005, "The Politics of Being," School of Philoso- phy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, June 15-17, 2005. Many thanks to all who commented there, particularly Robert Bernasconi, Simon Lundgren, and Marguerite La Caze; to my colleagues Andrea Sununu and Neal Abraham for help with languages and text; and to Keith Nightenhelser for indispensable assistance at all stages of this project.

1. For Anglo-Americans, another important step is the ambitious translation project of which the first volume has now appeared (Simons 2004).

2. The quotation is from Kierkegaard 1983. Heinimaa sees Kierkegaard as leading Beauvoir to reject "systematic philosophy" in favor of the phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty. See HeinAmaa 2003, 6-11.

3. 1940 6 juillet. J'ai 6td a la Nationale. J'ai pris une carte et j'ai commenc " lire du Hegel, la Ph6nomenologie de l'Esprit. Pour I'instant, je comprends quasi rien. J'ai d cid6 de travailler Hegel tous les jours de 2 heures a 5 heures. C'est ce qu'on peut trouver de plus apaisant. The passage published in her Journal de guerre (1990, 339) is virtually identical, adding only that she is using Jean Wahl's book alongside Hegel's.

4. 7 Juillet. Promenade a bicyclette, dans Paris, avec Lise. J'ai croise un d filk d'autos blind es, chargies d'Allemands vetus de noir dont les grands berets flottaient au vent; c'Itait assez beau et sinistre. A la Nationale, j'ai lu Hegel que j'ai encore bien du mal a comprendre. J'ai trouv6 un passage que j'ai copi6 et qui servirait merveilleusement d'epigraphe a mon roman.



80 Hypatia

5. Chaque conscience poursuit la mort de l'autre. 6. De nouveau mon journal s'arrete. Je n'avais plus rien a noter. Les uniformes verts

et gris, la croix gammte flottant sur le Senat m'dtaient devenus familiers. Je faisais mes cours a Duruy et je lisais Hegel A la Nationale qui, a present, ouvrait dis le matin. Hegel me calmait un peu. De meme qu'a vingt ans, le coeur saignant A cause de mon cousin Jacques, j'avais lu Hombre 'pour mettre toute l'humanite entre moi et ma douleur par- ticuliere,' j'essayais de fondre dans 'le cours du monde' le moment que j'etais en train de traverser. Autour de moi, embaume dans des milliers de volumes, le pass6 sommeillait et le present m'apparaissait comme un passe " venir. Moi, je m'abolisais. D'aucune maniere, cependent, ces reveries ne m'inciterent a consentir au fascisme; on pouvait, si on etait optimiste, le considerer comme la necessaire antithese du liberalisme bourgeois, donc une etape vers la synthese a laquelle nous aspirions: le socialisme; mais pour esperer un jour le depasser, il fallait commencer par le r fuser. Aucune philosophie n'aurait pu me convaincre de l'accepter, il contredisait toutes les valeurs sur lesquelles s'&tait batie ma vie. Et chaque jour m'apportait de fraiches raisons pour le d6tester. Quelle nausde, le matin, lorsque je lisais dans le Matin, dans la Victoire ces vertueuses apologies de l'Alle- magne, ces sermons grondeurs dont nos vainqueurs nous accablaient! Des la fin de juillet, des pancartes apparurent a la vitrine de certains magasins: "Interdit aux juifs."

Another passage in the Journal de guerre (362) that is not picked up in the memoir reads: 21 janvier [1941] Hegel ou Heidegger? Pourquoi si la conscience peut se transcender mon destin individuel aurait-il tant de prix? Je n'arrive pas a decider. Tantat il me semble que le point de vue universel Hegel-Marx 6te tout sens a la vie. Tant6t que peut-etre l'individualit6 comme tel n'a pas de sens, que c'est un leurre de vouloir en donner un. Idee de salut personnel-mais pourquoi cette id&e (Kierkegaard, Jacques, Kafka, etc.) aurait-elle un sens? Ou est le vrai? Ou est le leurre? Avons-nous seulement un besoin de penser que cela a un sens? Mais comment I'universel en aurait-il si l'individu n'en a pas? (January 21. Hegel or Heidegger? If consciousness can transcend itself, why should my individual fate have such value? I can't manage to decide. Sometimes it seems to me that the Hegel-Marx universal point of view takes all the meaning out of life; sometimes I think maybe individuality as such has no meaning, that it's a trick to try and give it one. Idea of personal salvation-but why should this idea [Kierkegaard, Jacques, Kafka, etc.] have meaning? Which is the truth? Which is the trick? Is it just that we need to think it has meaning? But how could the universal have any meaning if the individual doesn't?)

7. See Hein~maa (2003, 6-11) for a discussion of Kierkegaard's mockery of Hegel's system in the "Concluding Unscientific Postscript" (1846/1960).

8. Je continuai ' lire Hegel que je commengais a mieux comprendre; dans le detail, sa richesse m'dblouissait; l'ensemble du systeme me donnait la vertige. Oui, il tait tentant de s'abolir au profit de l'universel, de consid rer sa propre vie dans la perspective de la fin de l'Histoire, avec le detachement qu'implique aussi le point de vue de la mort: alors, comme cela paraissait derisoire cet infime moment du cours du monde, un individu, moi! Pourquoi me soucier de ce qui m'arrivait, de ce qui m'entourait, juste ici, maintenant? Mais le moindre mouvement de mon coeur dementait ces speculations: l'espoir, la colere, I'attente, I'angoisse s'affirmaient contre tous les d6passements; la fuite dans l'universel n'6tait en fait qu'un episode de mon aventure personnelle. Je revenais



Meryl Altman 81

a Kierkegaard que je m'etais mis a lire avec passion; la verite qu'il revendicait defiait la doute aussi victorieusement que l'6vidence cartesienne; le Systeme, I'Histoire ne pouvaient pas plus que le Malin Genie faire &chec A la certitude v&cue: "Je suis, j'existe, en ce moment, a cet endroit, moi."

Plus j'allai, plus-sans cesser de l'admirer-je me separai de Hegel. Je savais i" present que, jusque dans la moelle de mes os, j'&tais lide a mes contemporains; je decou- vris l'envers de cette d6pendance: ma responsabilit. .. . Dans cette France occupee, il suffit de respirer pour consentir "

l'oppression.... Mais cette situation qui m'6tait imposee, mes remords m'avait d couvert que j'avais contribu6 e la crier.

9. Kruks (2005) observes that until the Algerian crisis Beauvoir spoke about "the privileged" as though she herself were not among them, but that subsequently she was able to acknowledge and then use this privilege in politically progressive and effective ways. It may also be relevant to note that before seriously taking up the study of Hegel, Beauvoir had already read Marx-she had worked her way through Das Kapital (1857) and says retrospectively that there was a great deal she didn't really grasp in this first encounter (though she had had the impression of deciphering it easily); but she recalls being blown away by the labor theory of surplus value, as much as by her first encounter with Descartes' cogito.

10. Essayons de prendre le point de vue de l'histoire, se disait-on en apprenant l'entr e des Allemands i Paris.

11. Des qu'on considere abstraitement et th oriquement un systime, on se situe en effet sur le plan de l'universel, donc de l'infini. C'est pourquoi la lecture du systeme heg&- lien est si consolante: je me souviens d'avoir eprouve un grand apaisement A lire Hegel dans le cadre impersonnel de la Bibliothetque Nationale, en aofit 1940. Mais des que je me retrouvai dans la rue, dans ma vie, hors du systeme, sous un vrai ciel, le systeme ne me servait plus de rien: c'6tait, sous couleur de l'infini, les consolations de la mort qu'il m'avait offertes; et je souhaitais encore vivre au milieu des hommes vivants (As soon as one considers a system arbitrarily and theoretically, one situates oneself on the plane of the universal, thus the plane of the infinite. That's why reading the Hegelian system is so consoling: I remember having felt very much soothed reading Hegel in the impersonal setting of the Bibliotheque Nationale, in August 1940. But once I found myself outside in the street, in my life, outside the system, under a real sky, the system was no more use to me. The consolations he had offered me, painted with the colors of the infinite, were the consolations of death, and I wanted to go on living, among living men).

The passage continues: L'existentialisme ne propose aucune evasion.... Et en fait tout homme qui a eu de vraies amours, de vraies revoltes, de vrais d6sirs, de vraies volontes, sait bien qu'il n'a besoin d'aucune garantie 6trangere pour etre sur de ses buts; leur certitude vient de son propre dlan (Existentialism [in implied contrast] proposes no escape.... And in fact, every man who has had real loves, real rebellions, real desires, real acts of will, knows very well that he needs no external guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certainty comes from his own rush forward).

12. I've given a fuller account of Hegel's presence in Beauvoir's early philosophical essays, and also in The Second Sex, in "Feminists Reading Beauvoir Reading Hegel," paper delivered at the conference on Hegelian Politics of Gender: Spirit, Nature, Law, December 12-13, 2003, University of Jyviskyli, Finland.



82 Hypatia

13. Parmi les ouvrages non romanesques qui compterent pour nous pendant ces deux ans, je ne vois que Ma vie de Trotsky, une nouvelle traduction d'Empedocle d'Holderlin, et Le Malheur de la conscience de Jean Wahl qui nous donna quelques apergus d'Hegel (1960, 59). (Aside from novels, the only works I remember which counted for us during those two years [1929-1930] were Trotsky's My Life, a new translation of Holderlin's Empedocles, and Jean Wahl's The Unhappy Consciousness, which gave us some glimpses of Hegel.)

14. J'ai travailli 2 h. Hegel avec le Wahl sur la conscience malheureuse et la phenomenologie de l'esprit, pour l'instant je ne comprends quasi rien.

15. Baugh (2003) foregrounds the formative importance of Wahl's Hegel, rather than Kojeve's, to such thinkers as Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and Sartre, and very helpfully explains Wahl's reading as a reaction against earlier attempts to co-opt Hegel for an empiricist philosophy of science. I am indebted to Simon Lumsden for steering me toward this lucid and indispensable book. But Baugh minimizes, to the point of obscur- ing, the religiously specific dimension of Wahl's own focus on redemption. Sometimes it does seem possible to view this metaphorically, or at least ecumenically, as when Wahl explains Hegel's method in his Priface (1929, 9): A l'origine de cette doctrine qui se presente comme un enchainement de concepts, il y a une sorte d'intuition mystique et de chaleur affective. (At the origin of this doctrine, which presents itself as a development of concepts, there lies a sort of mystical intuition and warmth of feeling.)

But see such passages as

On voit alors comme il est injuste de dire que Hegel a manqud le sense du p ch6. On pourrait le croire en lisant certaines affirmations dog- matiques sur la rationalite de l'univers; mais si on suit les chemins par lesquels passe Hegel pour arriver a ces affirmations, on se rend compte qu'au centre de sa philosophie est l'idee de conscience malheureuse, I'idde du p.che..... Le p6che est rachet6 par la mort d'un Dieu (Wahl 1929, 99). (Thus we see how unfair it is to claim that Hegel lacked a sense of sin. One might believe this from reading certain dogmatic affirmations about the rationality of the universe; but if we follow the roads by which Hegel travels to arrive at these affirmations, we realize that at the center of his philosophy is the idea of the unhappy consciousness, the idea of sin. .. . Sin is redeemed by the death of a God.)

This feels closer to Claudel, or to the Thomism of Beauvoir's teachers at the Cours D6sir (the very Catholic girl's school she attended while her competitors were preparing for the ENS at elite lycees), than to the genealogy Baugh (2003) traces as far as Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.

Attempts to reconcile Hegelianism with orthodox Christianity persisted; for instance, Heckman (1974) notes that the official Hegel congresses of the 1940s were controlled by the Jesuits. There is more to chew on here than I can possibly bite off.

16. A la Sorbonne, mes professeurs ignoraient systematiquement Hegel et Marx; dans son gros livre sur 'le progres de la conscience en Occident,' c'est a peine si Bruns- chvicg avait consacr6 trois pages

" Marx, qu'il mettait en parallkle avec un penseur r6actionnaire des plus obscures. See Simons (1999, 198). Simons, who is working on



Meryl Altman 83

Beauvoir's very early influences (especially Bergson) has located the textbook Beauvoir used at the Cours Desir. Simons found Hegel in that text, obviously in a very reduced and simplified form.

There is also the possible indirect influence of Alain (Emile Chartier, [1868- 195 1]), whose presentation of Hegel in a section of Idees (1939) Michael Kelly described as "sniping" (1981, 45).

17. M. Brunschvicg est peut-Otre un homme de valeur mais pour moi = 0. I was fortunate to consult Beauvoir's early diaries in a manuscript transcription, thanks to the generous help of Peg Simons. An English translation is now available (Beauvoir 2006), so I have cited that edition.

18. Un moyen pour la philosophie contemporaine d'eluder ou d'ajoumer le contact avec l'intelligence veritable du reel . .. anachronique avant meme de naitre. Koyre attributed the relative poverty of French work on Hegel to a variety of causes, including the dominance of "la pens&e mathematique," World War I prejudice against all things German, and the unavailability of accurate French translations.

19. See also Lefebvre (1973, 372): Brunschvicg ne parlait de rien d'actuel, de rien de vivant ... rien ne rdpondait aux questions que se posait un jeune homme, apres la guerre, dans l'effondrement des valeurs et des idees re;ues (Brunschvicg never spoke of anything current, anything living ... he had no answers to the questions a young man was asking himself, after the war, as values and received ideas were crumbling around him). Baugh (2003) provides a fuller and more sympathetic explanation of Brunschvicg's distaste for Hegel.

20. Again, Lefebvre (1973, 373): "Les salles de cours de la Sorbonne, oi enseignait Brunschvicg, offraient aux jeunes philosophes des oasis de calme drudit, intellectua- lit6 sereine, que je ne pouvais m'empecher de trouver-spontandment-douillette et stagnante. Autour de la Sorbonne, dans les directions les plus diff6rentes, c'6tait une immense fermentation, une immense renaissance; du moins on le croyait. Tout s'ecrou- lait, tout allait recommencer (The classrooms of the Sorbonne, where Brunschvicg taught, offered young philosophers an oasis of erudite calm, serene intellectuality, which I couldn't help finding suddenly stagnant and namby-pamby. All around the Sorbonne, on all different sides, there was a tremendous ferment, a tremendous rebirth; or at least we thought so. Everything was falling apart, everything was about to start over). And: De cette periode date un fait assez important: la philosophie (vivante, pour autant qu'elle vive) commengait a se chercher et a se faire en grande partie hors de l'Universite. Cette scission ne devait entrainer ses consequences que dix A vingt ans plus tard (A pretty important fact dates from that time: living philosophy [insofar as philosophy can live] began to be pursued to a great extent outside the University. The consequences of this split would not be felt for ten or twenty years) (376).

21. La philo serait passionante s'il n'y avait pas d'examens " preparer et qu'on pOt

s'y livrer A fond! 22. NRF is the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, the prestigious and urbane literary and

critical journal founded by Andre Gide and friends in 1909. What Beauvoir means particularly here may be seen in the diary's critical comment about her errant cousin Jacques, penned after she had dedicated herself seriously to her philosophy: Oh! cette frivolit6, ce manque de serieux; comme il est NRF avec ses histoires de bar, de bridge,



84 Hypatia

d'argent! (Oh the frivolousness, the lack of serious commitment; he's so NRF with his stories about going to the bar, playing bridge, spending money!)

23. Un vrai plaisir pour un quart d'heure de bavardage avec le directeur de l'Esprit. Tout de suite j'imagine tout ce qu'il pourrait m'apporter.... 2 decembre. Lu l'Esprit. 11 y a d'un certain Morhange deux articles etrangement beaux. See also Beauvoir 1958, 326.

24. See Trebitsch (1987a, 1987b) and also especially Burkhard (2000), whose indispensable book is devoted to tracing the history of the group.

25. Wahl's brief translator's note to the selection published in L'Esprit (1926, 195) reads: Ces pages contiennent une description du d doublement de la conscience et de son effort vers l'unite tels qu'on le voit dans la religion. Ainsi, le christianisme, dont I'apparition a ete preparde par le scepticisme d'une part, en tant que conscience de la dualit6 humaine, par le judaisme de l'autre, en tant que conscience contradictoire de la dualite absolue de l'homme et de Dieu et de leur unit6 immediate, est le sentiment auquel l'Fme parvient dans son malheur, de l'immuable en tant que particulier et du particulier en tant que l'immuable. A l'opposition de la generale et du particulier (judaisme) succede grace A lui la religion du Dieu incarnme (These pages contain a description of the doubling of consciousness and its effort towards unity, such as is seen in religion. Thus Christianity, whose appearance was prepared for, on the one hand by the Skeptics, in the form of consciousness of human duality, on the other hand by the Jews, in the form of contradictory consciousness of the absolute duality of man and God and of their immediate unity, is the feeling which the soul attains in its unhappiness, of the immutable in the form of the particular and the particular in the form of the immutable. From the opposition of general to particular (udaism], and by means of it, follows the religion of God incarnate).

To my ears, very little distinguishes this from simple Christian triumphalism, of the sort Beauvoir had heard quite enough of at the Cours D sir. The continued political power of the Catholic faction within French academic and literary life, the seriousness with which questions of faith were taken, the central significance of "loss of faith" in intellectual autobiography, and the continued psychological pressure to reconvert, con- fess, take communion, and so on to which Beauvoir and her fellow students and fellow writers continued to be subjected throughout their lives, deserves greater attention than it usually receives from secular-minded scholars.

But to balance this religious solemnity, the editors of l'Esprit added to Wahl's note the following even briefer preface:

Nous ne publions pas cet important fragment de Hegel pour manifester une coordination avec ce philosophe, mais pour le reconnaitre, puis cer- tainement, le repousser [signed N.D.L.R.] (We publish this important fragment of Hegel, not to display our solidarity with this philosopher, but to recognize him, then, certainly, to push him away). (1926, 195)

This both is, and isn't, a joke, I think. 26. The book series associated with Philosophies published Wahl's (1926) work on

Plato's Parmenides, as well as the works of William Blake (1926), another builder of mystical systems.



Meryl Altman 85

27. "Mystification: notes for a critique of everyday life." 28. Baugh (2003, 59) points out that the title, La conscience mystifiee, is a direct

riposte to La conscience malheureuse: unhappiness now seen as a result of alienation. Lefebvre has also been recognized for his direct influence on Guy DeBord, the

Situationists, and the protests of 1968. Whether that legacy was truly a demystification of French culture or simply created new mythologies through a romanticization of youth (or both) is an open question.

29. In the specific case of her interest in the Philosophies group, Enlightenment common sense kicked in very quickly. In a fragment of Beauvoir's writing given to me by Peg Simons, who holds the manuscript privately, Beauvoir wrote a highly ambitious to-do list on July 19, 1927, for the following school year. This list includes the phrase, "Essentiellement: relire l'Esprit et &tudier le mysticisme" (Essentially: reread I'Esprit and study mysticism) (76) at the head of a long list of philosophers she intends to get to the bottom of; but a mere ten days later, she has seen a difficulty, at least of method. Je ne vois rien, rien; non seulement pas une rdponse mais aucune maniere sortable de poser la question. Le scepticisme, I'indifference sont impossibles, une religion est impossible pour l'instant-le mysticisme est tentant; mais comment connaitrai-je la valeur d'une pens e qui ne laisse pas place a la pensee? sur quoi m'appuyer pour le rejeter ou l'accepter? (I see nothing, nothing; not only no answer, but no presentable way to ask the question. Skep- ticism, indifference are impossible; a religion is impossible for the moment-mysticism is tempting; but how would I be able to evaluate a way of thinking that leaves no place for thinking? what could I lean on to reject it or accept it?) (85). The general taste, or perhaps one should say nostalgia, for an Absolute lasted much longer.

30. Derrida, too, has been at pains in a 1986 interview to distance himself from U.S. interpretations of his thought as a "mysticism." "Unfortunately or fortunately, as you like it, I am not mystical and there is nothing mystical in my work. In fact my work is a deconstruction of values which found mysticism, i.e. of presence, view, of the absence of a marque, of the unspeakable." I originally viewed the translation at http://www.lake. de/sonst/homepages/s2442/reb.html#eng, but the page has since been taken down. For another translation of this interview, see "The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View with Victor Vitanza, beginning September 1997. The Guest Moderator is/was Steven Mailloux, UC-Irvine. File 6 (http://www.pre-text.com/ptlist/vitanza6.html, accessed April 15, 2007). On this blog site, the reader is referred to the original transcription, which was published in R6tzer 1986, 67-87, quotation on 74.

31. See Baugh, especially "Derrida and Sartre: Filiation/ Parricide" (2003), 140-44); see Fox 2003 and recent work by Foucault biographer Eribon (1999).

32. Oh! la vie est trop triste, incurablement triste! O Bien-Aimd! Il n'est plus temps, mon coeur se creve Et trop pour t'en vouloir, mais j'ai tant sanglote, Vois-tu, que seul m'est doux le spleen des nuits d'6td, Des nuits longues oit tout est frais comme un grand reve.

Astres! je ne veux pas mourir! J'ai du genie!

Et plus rien! 6 Venus de marbre! eaux fortes vaines!



86 Hypatia

Cerveau fou de Hegel! doux refrains consolants! Clochers brod es ' jour et consumees d'dlans, Livres oi l'homme mit d'inutiles victoires! Tout ce qu'a la fureur de tes fils enfante, Tout ce qui fait ta fange et ta splendeur si brave, O Terre, est maintenant comme un rave, un grand reve. Va dors, c'est bien fini, dors pour I'temite.

33. See Rubio 2003. The question of mystification or mythification comes up also with reference to the Arcades project: briefly, Benjamin saw his work as demystifying Aragon's, Adorno worried (not without reason) that Benjamin's account wasn't sufficiently free of its own "phantasmagoria." To complicate matters further, Le Paysan de Paris itself wavers (or, if you like, unfolds a dialectic) between building myths and tearing them down. See Limat-Letellier 2003.

34. Toute metaphysique est ' la premiere personne du singulier. Toute podsie aussi. La seconde personne, c'est encore la premiere.

35. L'individu vivant, dit Hegel, se pose dans sa premiere evolution comme sujet et comme notion, et dans ce second il s'assimile l'objet, et par 1] il se donne une d termi- nation reelle. Et il est en soi le genre, l'universalit6 substantielle. Le rapport d'un sujet avec un autre sujet du meme genre constitute la particularisation du genre, et la jugement exprime le rapport du genre aux individus ainsi determin s. C'est 1k la difference des sexes. According to Rubio (2003), this comes from Hegel's Logic, which Aragon read in Vera's 1859 French translation.

36. Tants de promeneuses diverses se soumettent au jugement H6gelien. 37. Dans le passage tant de promeneuses diverses se soumettent au jugement hig&-

lien, d'age et de beaute variables, tant de promeneuses dans ces galeries, leurs complices, se contentent uniquement d'etre femmes, que l'homme encore ind6cis et solitaire avec son idle de l'amour, l'homme qui ne croit pas encore a la pluralite des femmes, l'enfant qui cherche une image de l'absolu pour ses nuits, n'a rien a faire dans ces parages (In the passage so many women, of varying age and beauty, out for a walk, submit to Hegelian judgement, so many women out for a walk in these corridors which are their accomplices, happy just because they are women-so many that the man, still indecisive and lonely with his idea of love, the man who does not yet believe that women are many [and not One], the child who seeks an image of the absolute to comfort his nights, has nothing to do in this neighborhood).

38. Parshley translates this as "the data of biology," but "the biological 'givens'" is another possible meaning.

39. Hegel cependant eat 6te infidele son ddlire rationaliste s'il n'eft tente de la fonder logiquement. La sexualite represente selon lui la m6diation i travers laquelle le sujet s'atteint concretement comme genre. "Le genre se produit en lui comme un effet contre cette disproportion de sa realite individuelle, comme un d sir de retrouver dans un autre individu de son espece le sentiment de lui-meme en s'unissant a lui, de se compl6ter et s'envelopper par 1l le genre dans sa nature et de l'amener A l'existence. C'est l'accouplement" [Philosophie de la Nature, 3e partie, ?369]. Et un peu plus loin: "Le processus consiste en ceci, savoir: ce qu'ils sont en soi, c'est ' dire un seul genre, une seule et meme vie subjective, ils le posent comme tel." Et Hegel declare ensuite que, pour



Meryl Altman 87

que le processus de rapprochement s'effectue, il faut d'abord qu'il y ait diff6rentiation des deux sexes. Mais sa demonstration n'est pas convaincante: on y sent trop le parti pris de retrouver en toute operation les trois moments du syllogisme. Le d passement de l'individu vers l'esp ce, par lequel individu et esp ce s'accomplissent dans leur veritd, pourrait s'effectuer sans troisieme terme dans le simple rapport du g nerateur a l'enfant: la reproduction pourrait etre asexude. Ou encore le rapport de l'un i l'autre pourrait etre le rapport de deux semblables, la diff6rentiation r sidant dans la singularite d'un meme type, comme il arrive dans les espices hermaphrodites. La description de Hegel degage un tres important signification de la sexualit6; mais son erreur est toujours de faire de signification raison. C'est en exergant I'activit6 sexuelle que les hommes d finissent les sexes et leur relations comme ils crdent le sens et la valeur de toutes les fonctions qu'ils accomplissent: mais elle n'est pas necessairement impliqu&e dans la nature de l'etre human (Beauvoir 1949, 1: 38-39).

40. C'est sur la port6e du mot &tre qu'il faudrait s'entendre; la mauvaise foi consiste a lui donner une valeur substantielle alors qu'elle a le sens dynamique hgdelien; etre c'est etre devenue, c'est avoir ete fait tel qu'on se manifeste.

41. As Rubio (2003) puts it, "Le parcours amoureux mime parfaitement le d velop- pement dialectique de la connaissance propre a la philosophie h gdlienne" (the course of love perfectly imitates the dialectical way knowledge develops in Hegel's philosophy).

42. The legacy for second-wave academic U.S. feminist literary criticism, filtered at first through Kate Millett (1970) and Betty Friedan (1963), deserves to be better acknowledged and further discussed.

43. Thinking outside disciplinary boundaries would also be helpful in coming to terms with Bataille, Benjamin, and others.

44. Heckman's (1974) failure to include Beauvoir in his mapping of the intellectual terrain of French versions of Hegel is regrettable, and also leaves out a major interna- tional influence that Hegel actually (through her) had. Unfortunately, the same must be said of Baugh (2003), who does not even include Beauvoir's reading of Hegel in his chapter on Sartre, where it would be quite relevant.

45. The debate between Sherry Ortner's view and Gayle Rubin's "The Traffic in Women" (1975), so foundational to feminist anthropology in the 1970s and since, can be seen as a debate between two versions of Beauvoir, where each anthropologist draws on different sections of her chapter on "Mythes."

46. The view is sufficiently problematic that I am of two minds about claiming it as a legacy of Beauvoir's. See Bauer (2001, 267): "[Karen] Vintges and I agree that the standard reading of Beauvoir's relation to Hegel, on which she just maps relations between men and women onto the master/slave dialectic is untenable.... Vintges further observes, quite astutely, that the feminist standpoint theory that developed in the wake of The Second Sex has been driven in many of its incarnations by exactly the sort of cliched Hegelian picture that she and I fail to find in Beauvoir's work."

A slightly different way to approach this: standpoint theory is either a terrible idea, or a very good one, depending on whether the standpoint is understood in a static way (as identity), or a dynamic way (as situation). A limiting case of the former might be the nineteenth-century understanding of women as more "moral" than men, which has unfortunate avatars even today in the "women's ways of knowing" school of feminist



88 Hypatia

epistemology and in some approaches to the question of "women and war." For a related critique, see Le Doeuff 1998. See also Ehrenreich 2004.

Beauvoir herself, I'd argue, is closer to the more dynamic view, which understands the ways in which situations are complex, relative, and can change as a function of historical realities and also through acts of conscious choice and will. So, for example, a woman may be epistemologically advantaged with respect to her husband but epistemologically disadvantaged with respect to the woman who cleans her house; or a woman scientist may be epistemologically one step ahead of those who run her university or biotech corporation, but one step behind the "human subjects" who are the objects of her scientific work. She will still, and always, have choices to make about how to live this situation, in complicity with power relations as she finds them, or in resistance to them. It is always possible to open one's eyes, or to close them, to what is going on in one's life and work.

We're not so far, now, from Donna Haraway's concept of "situated knowledges," which might help us appreciate the inputs of existentialism to that strand of feminist work. Epistemological and ethical advantages are not pre-given, nor are they entirely "made." They must be actively worked for, worked toward, and reworked as conditions change (this last point a particularly salient one for second-wave feminists in the twenty- first century).

Another trap can arise from thinking too rigidly about masters and slaves: considering oneself to be the slave, when one is actually the master (or neither, or in between) is a form of bad faith in itself, especially when coupled with the idea that the victim is epistemologically privileged. See Brown 1995. And finally-as I think Beau- voir saw-epistemological privilege need not imply ethical privilege, and may not lead to ethical behavior: all sorts of accommodation, complicity, and bad faith remain equally possible.

47. See especially chap. 9. Like many of her generation, Firestone owes more to Beauvoir than she signals directly.

48. Two translations of Lonzi's text into English are available. For an abridged "cross- cultural translation" by Giovanna Bellesia and Elaine Maclachlan see Mills 1998; for a differently abridged translation by Victoria Newman see Bono and Kemp 1991. I have consulted both, and tinkered. Lonzi's manifesto, comparable in wit and tone to Robin Morgan's (1970), deserves to be much better known outside Italy, and would be well served by a full translation that acknowledged its original activist context.

49. La dialletica servo-padrone e una regolazione di conti tra colletivi di uomini: essa non prevede la liberazione della donna, il grande oppresso della civilth patriarcale.

50. Quelle condizione femminile che e il frutto dell'oppressione e indicata da Hegel come il movente dell'oppressione stessa.



Meryl Altman 89

REFERENCES

Altman, Meryl. 2002. La femme frigide dans Le deuxieme sexe. In Le cinquantenaire du Deuxieme sexe, ed. Sylvie Chaperon. Paris: Syllepse.

Aragon, Louis. 1926/1990. Le Paysan de Paris. Paris: Gallimard. Alain [Emile Chartier]. 1939. Idjes. Paris: Paul Hartmann. Barthes, Roland. 1957/1970. Mythologies. Paris: Points. Bauer, Nancy. 2001. Simone de Beauvoir, philosophy and feminism. New York: Columbia

University Press. Baugh, Bruce. 2003. French Hegel: From surrealism to post-modernism. New York: Rout-

ledge. De Beauvoir, Simone. 1943. L'Invitde Paris: Gallimard. - . 1944. Pyrrhus et Cineas. Paris: Gallimard. -- . 1947. Pour une Moral de l'Ambiguit6 (The Ethics of Ambiguity). Paris: Gallimard.

- . 1949. Le deuxieme sexe. Paris: Gallimard. - . 1958. Memoires d'une jeune fille rang&e. Paris: Gallimard.

-- . 1960. La force de l'ige. Paris: Gallimard.

. 11990. Journal de guerre. Paris: Gallimard. - *. 2004. Philosophical writings. Ed. Margaret Simons. Urbana: University of Illinois

Press. . 2006. Diary of a philosophy student, Vol. 1, 1926-1927. Trans. and ed. Bar-

bara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret A. Simons, with Marybeth Timmerman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1940/ 2003. On the concept of history. In Selected writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940. Trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Blake, William. 1926. Premiers et seconds livres prophetiques. Trans. Pierre Berger. Paris, Editions Rieder.

Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. 1991. Italian feminist thought: A reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Brodersen, Momme. 1996. Walter Benjamin. London: Verso. Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of injury. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Burkhard, Bud. 2000. French Marxism between the wars: Henri Lefebvre and the "Philoso-

phies." Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books. Butler, Judith. 1999. Subjects of desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

. 2000. Antigone's claim. New York: Columbia University Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2004. What Abu Ghraib taught me. AlterNet, May. http://www.

altemet.org/story/18740/. Eribon, Didier. 1999. Rflections sur la question gay. Paris: Fayard. L'Esprit. 1926. Trans. Jean Wahl. Paris: E Rieder. Firestone, Shulamith. 1971. The dialectic of sex: The case for feminist revolution. New

York: Bantam. Fox, Nik Farrell. 2003. The new Sartre. London: Continuum. Friedan, Betty. 1963/2001. The feminine mystique. New York: W. W. Norton. G6thlin, Eva. 2002. Lire Simone de Beauvoir A la lumiere de Heidegger. In Les Temps

Modernes, no. 619 (June-July).



90 Hypatia

Harding, Sandra. 1986. The science question in feminism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Heckman, John. 1974. Introduction, Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit. Trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

Hegel, G. W. E 1807/1977. Phenomenology of spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press.

Heinamaa, Sara. 2003. Toward a phenomenology of sexual difference: Husserl, Merleau- Ponty, Beauvoir. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Hutchings, Kimberley. 2003. Hegel and feminist philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hyppolite, Jean. 1979. Genesis and structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit. Evanston,

Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Johnson, Barbara. 2003. Mother tongues: Sexuality, trials, motherhood, translation. Cam-

bridge: Harvard University Press. Kelly, Michael. 1981. Hegel in France to 1940: A bibliographic essay. Journal of European

Studies 11 (41): 29-52. Kierkegaard, Soren. 1843/1950. Fear and trembling-Repetition, Kierkegaard's writings, VI.

Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

- . 1846/1960. Concluding unscientific postscript. Trans. David E Swenson and Walter

Lowrie. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Koyre, Alexandre. 1931. Rapport sur l'Vtat des 6tudes higdliennes en France. In Revue

d'histoire de la philosophie 5 (2): 147-71. Kruks, Sonia. 2005. Simone de Beauvoir and the politics of privilege. Hypatia 20 (1):

1-26. Le Doeuff, Michdle. 1991. Hipparchia's choice: An essay concerning women, philosophy,

etc. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. . 1998. Le Sexe du savoir. Paris: Aubier.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1947/1991. The critique of everyday life. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso.

. 1973. La Somme et le reste. Paris: Belibaste. , and Norbert Guterman. 1933. La mystification: notes pour une critique de la

vie quotidienne. Avant-Poste, no. 1 (June). Limat-Letellier, Nathalie. 2003. Hypothises sur 'le gofit insens6 de la mystification et

du desespoir.' In Une tornade d'enigmes: Le Paysan de Paris de Louis Aragon, ed. Anne-Elisabeth Halperin and Alain Trouve. Paris: Editions Improviste.

Lonzi, Carla. 1974. Sputiamo su Hegel, la donna clitoridea, e la donna vaginale, e altri scritti. Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile.

Lundgren-Gothlin, Eva. 1996. Sex and existence: Simone de Beauvoir's The second sex. Trans. Linda Shenck. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

Millett, Kate. 1970/2000. Sexual Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mills, Patricia Jagentowicz, ed. 1998. Feminist reinterpretations of Hegel. State College:

Penn State Press. Moi, Toril. 1994. Simone de Beauvoir: The making of an intellectual woman. Oxford:

Blackwell.



Meryl Altman 91

.. 2000. What is a woman? And other essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Morgan, Robin. 1970. Sisterhood is powerful. New York: Random House. Ortner, Sherry B. 1972. Is female to male as nature is to culture? Feminist Studies 1 (2):

5-31. R6tzer. Florian. 1986. Franzdsische Philosophen im Gesprach. Munich: Klaus Boer Verlag. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. The traffic in women: Notes on the "political economy" of sex. In

Toward an anthropology of women, ed. Rayna Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Rubio, Emmanuel. 2003. "Hegel, I'Amour et le Paysan de Paris," les Actes du Colloque de Lyon, December 2001, "le dix-neuvieme siecle d'Aragon," Presses Universitaires de Provence. http://perso.wanadoo.fr/luc.vigier/ERITA/EDITO/erubio.htm.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1945. Huis clos. Paris: Gallimard. Simons, Margaret A. 1999. Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, race, and the origins

of existentialism. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Trebitsch, Michel. 1987a. Les m saventures du groupe Philosophies. In Revue des revues

(Spring): 6-9. -. 1987b. Le Group "Philosophies," de Max Jacob aux surrealistes, 1924-25.

Cahiers de l'institut de l'histoire du temps present, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (November): 29-38.

-. 1991. Introduction. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of everyday life. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso.

Vintges, Karen. 1996. Philosophy as passion: The thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. Trans. Anne Lavelle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wahl, Jean. 1926. Etude sur le Parminide de Platon (Collection de philosophie et de mystique dirigee par Pierre Morhange). Paris: E Rieder.

.. 1929. Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel. Paris: Les editions Rieder.



Meryl Altman - Beauvoir, Hegel, War - Hypatia 22:3

Documents

Transcript of Meryl Altman - Beauvoir, Hegel, War - Hypatia 22:3