Cambridge Companion to Simone de ...

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CLAUDIA CARD
Introduction: Beauvoir and
the ambiguity of “ambiguity”
in ethics
BACKGROUNDS AND BASICS
During the 1950s, an era when feminism was at a particularly low
ebb, American college students encountered translations of Simone
de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
and
The Ethics of Ambiguity
in courses
on French existentialism.
1
The popularity of these courses was due
in no small part to the French existentialists’ addition of sexuality
to the philosophical agenda. Jean-Paul Sartre’s
Being and Nothing-
ness
was the centerpiece, and Beauvoir’s
The Ethics of Ambiguity
was introduced to show how, contrary to Sartre’s early view, exis-
tentialism might indeed provide a ground for ethics.
The Second
Sex
, however, was presented as though it simply applied Sartre’s
philosophy to women’s situations, a view later to be challenged by
feminist scholarship, as many chapters in this Companion show in
detail. Yet readers were astonished even then by perspectives
The
Second Sex
offered on female sexuality. Raising ethical and politi-
cal issues, Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
nicely complemented Alfred
Kinsey’s “scandalous” but coldly scientific report on sexual behav-
ior in the human female, which appeared in the same year as the
paperback edition of the English translation of Beauvoir’s treatise on
women.
2
Beauvoir’s most widely read philosophical works are still
The
Second Sex
and
The Ethics of Ambiguity
. But her later work as well is
philosophically deep and often original. It offers mature perspectives
on such topics as torture and old age in addition to new perspectives
on her earlier work. Beauvoir’s total output (still being translated into
English) is prodigious. The chronology and bibliography in this Com-
panion show how highly varied in form her published writings are,
1
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
2
CLAUDIA CARD
ranging from letters, diaries, memoirs, and novels to prefaces, book
reviews, philosophical essays and treatises. The scope of her philo-
sophical interests is impressive. Many of her topics are standard in
the philosophical repertoire: ethics, politics, evil, relationships be-
tween selves (articulated as relationships between self and Other).
Others were not conventional among philosophers when she took
them up, some unconventional for women writers in most fields:
psychoanalysis, biology, sexuality, gender, women, lesbians, prosti-
tution, marriage, love.
Equally popular with philosophers and nonphilosophers are Beau-
voir’s stories and novels, especially
She Came to Stay
(explored by
Margaret Simons in chapter 5 and Mary Sirridge in chapter 6) and
The Mandarins
, which won the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 1954.
Her short memoir,
A Very Easy Death
, reflecting on the death of her
mother, and the longer treatise,
Old Age
(interpreted by Penelope
Deutscher in chapter 14 and known as
The Coming of Age
in the
American edition), belong in anyone’s list of classics on aging and
dying. The four volumes chronicling her life and intellectual devel-
opment,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
,
The Prime of Life
,
The Force
of Circumstance
, and
All Said and Done
, revisit many of her earlier
ideas and together construct what Miranda Fricker in chapter 10 calls
a “life-story.” Less well known are Beauvoir’s travel diaries from her
visits to the United States for four months in 1947 (
America Day by
Day
) and to China in 1955 (
The Long March
). The
America
diary in-
cludes wonderful descriptions of life in Beauvoir’s favorite city, New
York, as well as detailed and painful observations of racial segregation
in the South (noted by Robin Schott in chapter 11). Also notewor-
thy are Beauvoir’s prefaces (cited by Schott as well) to such works
as Gis ele Halimi’s
Djamila Boupacha: The Story of the Torture of a
Young Algerian Girl Which Shocked Liberal French Opinion
, Claude
Lanzmann’s filmscript
Shoah
, and Jean-Fran¸ ois Steiner’s
Treblinka
.
And there is more, much more, including letters, book reviews, and
such essays as “Must We Burn Sade?” (analyzed by Judith Butler in
chapter 8) and “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome.” This Com-
panion covers the full span of Beauvoir’s work, not just
The Second
Sex
and
The Ethics of Ambiguity
.
Nevertheless, ethics forms a persistent core of Beauvoir’s philo-
sophical concerns. Hence it is appropriate to make it the eventual
focus of this introduction. It was Beauvoir’s view, in fact, that
only
existentialism could provide the basis for ethics. Yet her conception
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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