Abstract
In Emancipatory Thinking, Elaine Stavro reads Simone de Beauvoir as a critical humanist intellectual, which means that she calls the meaning of humanism into question even while affirming its importance. Beauvoir, she argues, was also a thoroughgoing socialist feminist whose experiments remain current, given today’s popular frustration with capitalism and the degree to which this frustration is manifesting itself in right-wing thought as well as a new openness to socialist ideas.
This is one of several recent books (including others by Sonia Kruks, Ann Murphy, Karen Vintges, Lori Marso, and most recently Nathalie Nya) on Beauvoir and political philosophy. 1 But Stavro’s unique goal is to show the reading public, particularly students in politics and the social sciences, how “active engagement in historical events informs shifts in theory” (17). Specifically, she wants to identify “antinomies” or seemingly intractable theoretical oppositions that the reader may encounter in studying political theory (in which Simone de Beauvoir is often invoked as an example for one side or the other) and to show how these oppositions soften when approached through Beauvoir’s philosophy of ambiguity.
The most important dichotomy Beauvoir addressed in Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) pits liberalism (with its subject-centered voluntarism) against dialectical materialism (with its economic determinism). Beauvoir’s later essays foregrounded the conflict between rights-based deontology and utilitarian or instrumental political reasoning. But Stavro also asks creatively how Beauvoir might tackle theoretical oppositions that arose only during her later life or after her death, such as the debate between humanism and Althusserian or poststructuralist antihumanism. How would she have judged opposing feminist movements with psychoanalytic roots; the school of deliberative democratic theory associated with Habermas; or so-called postmodernists, running the gamut from Foucault to Chantal Mouffe? How would she have responded to the opposition between biological materialism and discursive idealism (associated with Judith Butler) that was partly fought in her name during the 1990s, and what about even more recent developments such as new materialism, affect theory, or contemporary liberal humanism of the sort espoused by Martha Nussbaum?
Beauvoir’s political thinking has often been limited to her published texts, and she is all too often assumed to have agreed with Jean-Paul Sartre or to have shown no innovation except on the topic of feminism. Indeed, in a sort of mirror of Louis Althusser’s distinction between Marx’s texts before and after the “epistemological break,” Beauvoir’s published work has often been broken into the early “existentialist” or “ethical” writings and The Second Sex, on which The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse) is said to be modeled. Beauvoir’s criticisms of her own earlier works as overly “idealist” unfortunately contributed to this tendency. Approaching Beauvoir from the standpoint of political theory and social history rather than philosophy or feminist studies allows Stavro to demonstrate Beauvoir’s originality as a political theorist but also to challenge the ways that twentieth-century Western political theory has been historicized from the standpoint of a new century.
The first three chapters of Emancipatory Thinking explore Beauvoir’s relationship to various debates and theoretical “camps” in feminist activism and philosophy. The first, appropriately, is standpoint theory, an epistemological strategy that has roots in both Marxism and phenomenology but eventually became associated with feminist politics of identity. This philosophy of knowledge was very influential in the social sciences, and so this chapter is particularly significant for readers in political science. It also makes the case for Beauvoir’s prescient grasp of the rationale for what were eventually known as the “new social movements” focusing on the defense of disparaged identities as well as the natural environment and quality of life.
The second chapter tackles the philosophical distinction between sex and gender. According to Beauvoir, the human body can neither be grasped in its entirety by science nor by personal consciousness. The meaning of this dichotomy in the 1940s when Beauvoir was confronting biological determinism differs from its meaning today when the biological doctrines to which new materialists (such as the followers of William Connolly and Jane Bennett) appeal are radically indeterminist. This chapter contains a detailed and helpful account of the development of French feminism during the 1960s and ’70s. Most important is Stavro’s claim that, although Beauvoir is often thought to be a feminist to the exclusion of any other political stance, gender was neither the only axis of oppression nor necessarily the most important axis of political analysis (depending on the racial, historical, or age situation of a given social actor). Such a view brings Beauvoir, despite her rather schematic comments on the subject of race, very close to what is now called “intersectional” analysis.
Stavro’s third chapter explores Beauvoir’s comments with respect to psychoanalysis in The Second Sex and with respect to its legacy in women’s political mobilization during the 1970s and later theoretical movements. She explains different strains of psychoanalytic theory, such as the Freudian, Lacanian, and Adlerian, which Beauvoir sometimes homogenized. Beauvoir rejected those strains involving “sexual reductionism” or denying women’s capacity to become more active and capable despite depressive upbringings and social messages. Stavro also explains the object relations tradition (represented by Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, among others) to which Beauvoir’s own ideas about childhood development, gender identification, and the ideal of emotional reciprocity are similar.
Chapters 4 and 5 of Emancipatory Thinking address respectively the theory and practice of Beauvoir’s politics. These sections of the book provide a good rough overview of French left-wing politics and polemics and show the continuities that link the positions of the immediate post-war period to those arising in the 1960s and mid-’70s. Stavro explains the significance of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts in facilitating resistance to Soviet-inspired dialectical materialism (the Stalinist version of Marxism promulgated by the PCF, or French Communist Party); Beauvoir’s advocacy of “cultural” politics such as struggles around gender and race against its “base-superstructure” model of society; and Althusser’s antihumanist Marxism, in which cultural issues are significant but capitalist culture appears to ruthlessly dictate subjectivity.
As Stavro explains, during the Cold War the major contributors to Les Temps Modernes were trying to preserve space for a non-Soviet, nonauthoritarian socialist option in Western Europe, which required keeping American imperialism and anticommunism at bay. Sartre supported the PCF from outside its ranks and, until the invasion of Hungary, tended to downplay criticism of the USSR. But Beauvoir never joined the party and never retracted the criticisms of dialectical materialism on account of its authoritarianism, its refusal to attribute importance to culture and cultural politics, and its economic determinism she made in The Ethics of Ambiguity.
Indeed, Stavro presents Beauvoir as trying to improve socialism’s prospects by showing that authoritarianism was neither necessary nor capable of leading to liberation. Beauvoir’s discussions of class identification in Blood of Others and the Sade essay, as well as her consideration of economic issues in The Coming of Age, contribute to our grasp of what was innovative in her approach to the theory of socialism. Insofar as Beauvoir analyzed French right-wing thought and aesthetics, the motivations behind sexist myths of woman, and the American affirmation of the “self-made man”—phenomena that would have seemed merely “superstructural” to the PCF—she also contributed to the tradition of ideology critique. Finally, Beauvoir was attentive to and cautious about the psychological role of political action in providing individuals with a seemingly secure and inevitable life purpose. Revolution may overturn some forms of oppression, but it will not overcome all pain and anxiety.
In chapter 5, perhaps the most original chapter, Stavro effectively draws out of Beauvoir’s own media statements and discussions of domestic and international political action during the 1950s and ’60s the skeleton of a Beauvoirian theory of political practice. Beauvoir’s memoirs, whatever their biographical flaws, do give readers a portrait of her self-understanding as an activist and describe her international travel and advocacy, including but not limited to her work for women’s movements. Reading Beauvoir’s journalistic practice, particularly her statement on the trial of Nazi collaborator Robert Brasillach, her advocacy for Algerian militant Djamila Boupacha, and her support for women workers injured in a factory explosion during the mid-1970s, Stavro goes on to identify a nascent theory of the public sphere and media.
In the sixth chapter, therefore, Beauvoir sheds light on the opposition between Habermas and Foucault, not with respect to power and agency but with respect to their respective views on the function of public intellectuals. As is well known, Habermas regards the public sphere as source of democratic agency and power by comparison to the instrumentalist realms of state and economy, but he is profoundly suspicious regarding emotional content in the public sphere. Beauvoir, by contrast, believes mourning, excitement, and outrage are inevitable and legitimate aspects of political interaction. Foucault proclaimed the era of “specific intellectuals” speaking on the basis of an empirical knowledge base rather than, like Sartre, on the basis of diffuse charismatic authority. According to Stavro, however, Beauvoir was not a “universal intellectual” because she was relatively circumspect about the topics on which she writes (she points out that Foucault himself overreached in championing the Iranian Revolution) and because she only intervened on behalf of Djamila Boupacha when requested by others.
Thus Stavro touches on a contentious topic in feminism, often associated with writings by Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak and Linda Alcoff—namely, when is it appropriate to speak on behalf of another group or individual whose situation is imperfectly understood? Stavro’s fear is that identity politics, though justified, may lead to a situation in which women (and men) with educational and communicative resources refuse to speak on behalf of others and inadvertently perpetuate the status quo from a desire for respect or political purity. Given the existing structure of the public sphere, certain injustices may never come to light unless relatively powerful individuals such as “intellectuals” are willing to use their skills and cultural capital to arouse public emotion. Either way, existentialism warns that the success of political and ethical decisions cannot be guaranteed. What matters for Stavro is that Beauvoir made no effort to claim a leadership position with respect to the war for Algerian independence, in which she strongly felt implicated on the wrong side of history by her status as a French citizen.
This consideration of journalistic advocacy and identification leads to a final chapter on the meaning of humanism, which has been identified primarily with liberalism and phenomenologically inclined Marxism throughout the twentieth century. Like Martha Nussbaum, Beauvoir believed that literature gives people unique opportunities for experimenting with agency and identification, provoking empathy and the development of personal capability. But, although she did contribute practical effort and publicity to several liberal feminist organizations in later years, unlike Nussbaum, Beauvoir would not have been content with the development of empathy to unsettle prejudice within a given legal framework and would have wanted a more liberatory structure altogether. While I find Stavro’s positioning of Beauvoir as a critical humanist intellectual persuasive, I wish her comparison to Edward Said had been fleshed out more concretely, particularly given the two thinkers’ proximity to the Arab anticolonial project.
Emancipatory Thinking is a very dense, complex book. Situating different political theories in the practical contexts from which they emerged is a highly effective pedagogical strategy. But it is easy to get lost in the details, many of which are repeated in different contexts with slight variations. To summarize its originality, I would focus on five unifying themes. First, Stavro uses Beauvoir to clear room for emotion and unpredictability in political analysis, which often presents actors as overly rational, without rejecting the corrective framework of reason altogether. Beauvoir believes emotion is important for mobilizing people, and this distinguishes her from both (Kantian) liberals and from liberal or Marxist utilitarians.
Second, Beauvoir does not conceive of the political actor as a “fragmented” self in accordance with some varieties of postmodernism, but neither is it as “transparent” as John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, or Jean-Paul Sartre (for that matter) might contend, and this is why poststructuralists and psychoanalytic theorists (such as Emily Zakin) can read her approvingly. But the reason Beauvoir’s agent is not unified is that it makes decisions in a collective context or situation. Beauvoir strongly believes in the separation and singularity of each individual life. Even if it fails to represent this singularity fully or dispassionately, communication is possible. In fact, agency is activated by working with others. The freedom of this subject is not the negative liberty of liberalism, but neither would Beauvoir be comfortable with the tradition-bound communitarianism that is often posed as an alternative to liberalism.
Many moral theories hold that we have responsibilities to collectives of which we are members. Existentialism is often considered a particularly individualist philosophy because it contends that the commitment to have a collectively based identity, while not chosen, must constantly be renewed. One of Stavro’s more unusual and interesting claims is that Beauvoir’s existentialism also holds us responsible for our collective belonging. This is shown in Beauvoir’s sense of responsibility for the way she lives her whiteness or her French nationality in the face of American racism or the Algerian Revolution. Beauvoir’s reaction was neither irrational nor inauthentic. Certainly, considered as a natural given, identification can be rigid or “serious.” But it can also be a complex and dynamic experience.
From the philosophical standpoint, the way that this book groups together certain political actors, movements, and theorists may seem overly general or even stretched, but it will definitely be familiar to those who learned theory as a matter of “positions” rather than as an ensemble of individual authors and texts. More important, Stavro illuminates something about each of the positions using Beauvoir’s irreducibility to any of them as a kind of “symptom” or blind spot shared by each of them. The book is pervaded by the language of “neither/nor” and “both/and.” But despite the language of antinomies employed by Kant and (in The Ethics of Ambiguity) by Beauvoir, Stavro’s standpoint does not seem to be particularly transcendental or dialectical. Although she frequently evokes Frederick Jameson’s critique of postmodernism, if anything, she seems to sympathize with the later Sartre’s theory of historical agency, with its layers of mediation.
One of the chief lessons of the structuralist historians of the 1950s and ’60s is that the timeframe over which events are assessed helps to determine what the events in question are, while events tend to secrete their own optimal timeframe. According to Stavro, this focus led Foucault and other poststructuralists alternately to refuse history and to obscure history’s relationship to theoretical positions. This is the one claim that I find least defensible in an otherwise provocative and vastly informative book. In fact, by focusing on the ways Beauvoir links gender, economic opportunity, and age throughout her life, this book helpfully rejects the received periodization of Beauvoir’s own work as well as the balkanization of both French and North American social history into events (and works) focusing on the 1930s and ’40s and those dealing with the upheavals of the 1960s. In Stavro’s hands, Beauvoir’s originality and relevance for inherited intellectual oppositions reorganize our sense for where continuities and true divisions lie.