How free is Beauvoir’s freedom? Unchaining Beauvoir through the erotic body

Available accessResearch articleFirst published online December, 2016

How free is Beauvoir’s freedom? Unchaining Beauvoir through the erotic body

Volume 17, Issue 3https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700116666254

Abstract

One of the most important concepts in Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist and phenomenological ethics is the concept of freedom. In this article, I would like to argue that Beauvoir’s concept of freedom is problematic in being strongly constrained by its essentially active character. This constraint contradicts some of Beauvoir’s major ideas, such as the one that considers the body as a situation, as a source of activity and of freedom in itself, as well as the idea of eroticism as one of the most important expressions of authenticity. I will show that Beauvoir’s concept of freedom can appear to be less constrained by the necessity to be inherently active if we look at it through the ‘crack’ provided by her conception of the erotic body as already embodying freedom. Using this ‘crack’, I will attempt to shed new light on the aspects of Beauvoir’s idea of the erotic that are productive for her conceptions of ethics and of freedom.

Keywords

Beauvoir body erotic existentialism feminist philosophy freedom phenomenology transgression

One of the most important concepts in Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist and phenomenological ethics is the concept of freedom. We could say that the main project of Beauvoir’s theory is conceiving of an ethics through which we can set ourselves free by recognising the other and its own freedom: only the other’s recognition of my freedom can keep me from being objectified; only the other’s freedom can make me a subject and save me from reification. In this article, I argue, however, that Beauvoir’s concept of freedom is problematic in that it is strongly constrained by its essentially active character. I show that Beauvoir’s freedom can barely be attained within a contemplative, aesthetic or even playful or erotically embedded existence, even when this kind of existence would seem to be authentic according to certain existentialist and mainly phenomenological principles, most of which are at least partly supported by Beauvoir. This is because, in Beauvoir’s view, an aesthetic attitude or a contemplative existence is immature behaviour, which can never be really recognised as free or authentic. I argue, though, that this premise strongly conflicts with some of Beauvoir’s major ideas, such as her consideration of the body as a situation, a source of activity and freedom in itself, as well as the idea of eroticism as one of the most important expressions of authenticity. I also show that this constrained freedom, which appears to be a critical element in Beauvoir’s theory, is the result of a problematic principle in Beauvoir’s thought, namely the principle that inescapably connects the authentic mode of freedom (transcendence) with action and immanence with passivity. Andrea Veltman compellingly discusses this idea of Beauvoir’s concept of transcendence as clearly related to activity and movement, showing how it is another division between Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir, in that Sartre allows for transcendence to be achieved through pure ‘intentional movements of the for-itself [which] occur even in relaxation and withdrawal from the world’ (2009: 227), while Beauvoir’s transcendence is necessarily connected to constructive action and never achieved in a state of relaxation.

It is important to stress that this ‘constructive action’, this active transcendence, will never be ‘unbounded’ for Beauvoir. There will always be constraints on our possibilities for action: immanence – and oppression – always delimit freedom, always reduce the margin of our choices. Even from within privileged situations, such as Beauvoir’s own – white, middle-class and intellectual – there are no possibilities of ‘pure action’ or ‘absolute transcendence’. This is one of the most important meanings of Beauvoir’s ambiguity.¹ This problem is the result of a clash between the major influences on which Beauvoir draws. Her Marxist and Hegelian background leads her to endow freedom with a highly (and mostly politically) active character.² Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, for instance, argues that it is Marx’s concept of ‘productive activity’ (Tätigkeit) which marked Beauvoir’s concept of transcendence in The Second Sex:

Even the broader concept of ‘productive activity’ […] refers to conscious activity which results in some kind of object in which the individual is objectified, be it a tool, a building, a book, or a piece of music. Thus the bearing or rearing of children is not regarded as an activity that affects or alters human consciousness, social structures, or historical development, being seen rather as an animal or biological activity […] Beauvoir adopted the Marxist concept of productive activity without questioning it from a feminist perspective. (1996: 98; emphasis mine)

The Marxist influence on Beauvoir needs further investigation, but Lundgren-Gothlin’s work has played an important part in shedding light on this controversial issue. Some of the earliest feminist critiques of Beauvoir’s work argued that Beauvoir did not see how her own analysis of the lives of women in The Second Sex was classist, reducing ‘women’s experience’ to that of a few white, middle-class women, or that her work was clearly not Marxist since she refused to accept the reductionist Marxism (as expressed in Engels) that seeks to explain the feminine condition exclusively in terms of the rise of private property. Sonia Kruks has carefully addressed these critiques, responding insightfully to them in her recent work (2012, particularly in the introduction and Chapter 1). Kruks shows, for instance, that while Beauvoir was indeed influenced by Marx, still she firmly insisted that ‘establishing women’s economic independence would not, in itself, end their oppression’ (2012: 17). Kruks also reminds us that the ‘lived experience’ available to Beauvoir for her phenomenologically informed research was indeed predominantly white and middle-class, but argues that it was paradoxically Beauvoir’s ‘partial perspective’ (2012: 52) which in most cases endowed her work with authenticity and depth.

In Beauvoir’s eyes, the concept of freedom is key to explaining ethics and describing the goal of political action. At the same time, though, her phenomenological background impels her towards softer, less expressly active meanings of freedom: the body in itself is a situation, capable of embodying freedom when it recognises itself as transformative, erotic and full of living possibilities. I argue, therefore, that Beauvoir’s concept of freedom would appear to be less constrained by the necessity of being inherently active if we could look at it through the crack afforded to us by her conception of the erotic body as already embodying freedom. This idea of the ‘crack’ can be traced to Debra Bergoffen’s forceful analysis, in which she presents the erotic, the gift and generosity as central to Beauvoir’s philosophy, despite their sometimes apparent marginality in her texts. For Bergoffen, this idea constitutes an alternative to Beauvoir’s conceptions of freedom and the project. The generous erotic is the crack through which the subject might gain authenticity and meaning in a different way, a way that exceeds or escapes the project: ‘As a model of action, generosity returns to and unsettles the ethic of the project. It unsettles it insofar as its paradigm of abundance and excess challenges the teleology of the project. It returns to it insofar as its refusal to impose itself on the freedom of the other provides a model for the appeal’ (Bergoffen, 1997: 64).

I begin by explaining the relationship between freedom, morality and authenticity in Beauvoir’s theory, in order to discuss the active nature of her concept of freedom and how, by connecting any attempt to engage in a project of being (to mean a more contemplative or playful existence) to irresponsible or immature tendencies, she requires freedom to be almost always a part of a project of doing. After that, I deal with Beauvoir’s concept of the erotic and the importance of its meanings to her theory in order to show how a less rigid concept of freedom, that is to say a freedom that considers our subjectivity as primarily constituted by a lived and erotic body, could prove to be much more in tune with one of the most essential elements of that theory. This in turn sheds light on the ways in which Beauvoir’s idea of the erotic is productive for her conceptions of ethics and freedom.

On becoming moral, becoming free and cancelling ambiguity

De Beauvoir’s Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) and her later Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (1947; The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1948) and Le deuxième sexe (1949; The Second Sex, 1989)³ constitute central works in the development of her ethics. Through these, a theory of ambiguity and its cardinal place in the conformation of moral subjects is clearly drawn, although it is mainly throughout The Second Sex that the embodied character of this subjectivity is more fully developed and emphasised. De Beauvoir agrees with Sartre on the fact that all subjects possess a kind of freedom – that is, ontological freedom⁴ – which is the kind of freedom responsible for turning the world into a human world. Thus, in a way that is similar to Sartre’s argument in Being and Nothingness ([1943] 1956) according to which we are condemned to be free,⁵ Beauvoir argues that ‘Every man is originally free’ ([1947] 1948: 25). Through ontological freedom, we disclose the world and give it meaning (Beauvoir, [1947] 1948: 12, 74). However, this ontological freedom can be denied by the subject through an act of bad faith.⁶ Both Sartre and Beauvoir recognise, then, that we can be blind to our freedom, attempting to escape from the responsibility it implies. Recognising this, recognising one’s own freedom, is described by Beauvoir as a different kind of freedom – moral freedom, which is not pure, irreducible (and in fact ethically meaningless), ontological freedom but freedom made conscious, the freedom that is expressed by the desire to disclose being: ‘To wish for the disclosure of the world and to assert oneself as freedom are one and the same movement’ ([1947] 1948: 24). This is the freedom that is born when we take full responsibility for our ontological, inescapable freedom (Beauvoir, [1947] 1948: 25, 26); this is the freedom that turns us into moral persons.

Here Beauvoir separates herself from Sartrean thought. This separation becomes sharper, though, when Beauvoir argues for moral freedom as deriving precisely from the relationship with the other, from the connection with another subject. This implies not only that the other is not, as Sartrean thought had it, my enemy, but that she/he is absolutely necessary in order for me to gain my moral freedom; in Beauvoir’s words: ‘the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom’ ([1947] 1948: 91). This means that I can be meaningfully free only so long as another free subject recognises my freedom: only when the other, as a free subject, encounters me in my own freedom and reveals it can I see myself as possessing moral freedom. Thus, in order for me to gain my moral freedom I need to struggle for others to achieve their freedom, since only the other as a free subject can set me free. De Beauvoir argues for the recognition of the other-as-subject as no less than the basic condition of my own becoming a free subject that projects herself towards the future (1944: 299). In order for me to be free – not ontologically free, but certainly meaningfully free – my freedom must be recognised by another (free) subjectivity: ‘we need the other in order for our existence to become grounded and necessary’ (Beauvoir, 1944: 290). Only the other can provide meaning to my acts, to my project; we are dependent on the other’s freedom: ‘only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom’ ([1947] 1948: 82). This is why avoiding oppression and struggling to free the other is the only way to achieve my own free subjectivity.⁷

Confining ourselves to an illusion that we are pure subjectivities, pure freedoms with no roots in the world of materiality and objects, irremediably brings us to project our own abject immanent parts – from which we cannot really escape – onto the other, making the other a total other, with no possibility of developing freedom, while at the same time falsely appearing to make ourselves into pure transcendent subjects. This, for Beauvoir, is the main cause of oppression and, consequently, the main obstacle to our development as moral subjects:

The tyrant asserts himself as a transcendence; he considers others as pure immanences: he thus arrogates to himself the right to treat them like cattle. We see the sophism on which his conduct is based: of the ambiguous condition which is that of all men, he retains for himself the only aspect of a transcendence which is capable of justifying itself; for the others, the contingent and unjustified aspect of immanence. ([1947] 1948: 102)

The oppression of women across history has functioned precisely this way, in Beauvoir’s view; this is one of her main arguments throughout The Second Sex: Man has projected immanence onto woman, falsely believing that he is absolute transcendence while women are absolute Others, pure immanence, pure flesh. Men have projected their abject parts onto women and consequently deprived themselves of freedom, wrongly believing that they themselves are absolute freedom. By forbidding women to enter the dialectical subject-to-subject process, men have, paradoxically, denied themselves their own freedom. Men have negated, for women, the possibility of developing themselves as moral subjects with moral freedom by reducing women to their bodies, to pure immanence, pure facticity while considering themselves as being constituted by pure transcendence, a distilled freedom that is not mingled with embodiment nor intertwined with flesh. Men have projected onto women their own otherness, their own fleshed existence, which is in fact their own strangeness and is wrongly taken to threaten their freedom, their transcendence. Men have failed to understand that in misrecognising their own ambiguity and transporting into the woman-other the immanence which is part of their own subjectivity, they themselves, far from becoming pure transcendence, pure freedom, in fact lose the possibility of being truly free subjects, recognised by a free other who is not reduced to flesh.⁸ Oppression, then, in Beauvoir’s view, is self-defeating and leaves us with no possibility of expressing our own moral freedom. Freeing the other by recognising the ambiguity of both myself and the other, our complex existence as constituted both by flesh and by freedom, is the only way to become meaningfully free and to achieve morality (Beauvoir, [1947] 1948: 86–87, 91, 95–96). The struggle to free the other, therefore, consists mainly in fighting oppression, as oppression reveals itself precisely through depriving the other of her inherent ambiguity by objectifying her, turning her into pure immanence.

Morality, freedom, authenticity and ambiguity

In Beauvoir’s view, moral freedom is a necessary element for achieving authentic subjectivity. Authenticity is clearly linked with freedom as made conscious, as chosen responsibly. The pursuit of moral freedom is, for Beauvoir, the only way to avoid bad faith and gain an authentic existence. For Kristana Arp, ‘In The Ethics of Ambiguity Beauvoir does describe an authentic mode of transcendence: it is what she calls moral freedom, which serves as an ethical ideal that all should seek’ (2001: 143). Being moral, then, means recognising ourselves and others as ambiguous, as free subjects; this is the only meaning of being authentic. Oppressing the other by thinking of ourselves as pure transcendence, denying our own and others’ ambiguity, means deceiving ourselves, stripping ourselves of all possibility of authenticity. Ontological freedom (the theoretical possibility of gaining moral freedom) always remains, but it is meaningless when it is not fleshed out as moral freedom. This kind of self-deception, of inauthentic behaviour, is typical of the oppression that men exercise towards women. Drawing on Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave, Beauvoir insists that, unlike the eventual reciprocity that Hegel’s dialectic is supposed to bring, men’s positioning of women as their absolute Other cancels dialectics and with it the possibility of both men and women living an authentic existence and developing moral freedom ([1949] 1989: 141). Arp describes the firm relation between authenticity, the recognition of ambiguity and moral freedom expressed in Beauvoir’s commentaries on patriarchy and women’s oppression:

This behavior on the part of men is wrong because it is inauthentic. They are fleeing the challenge of establishing a free reciprocal relation with another human being by engaging in a relation with a being who is not, like them, a transcendence, but rather a being who is consigned to immanence. The implication is that one can only achieve authenticity by struggling to maintain free reciprocal relations with others. (2001: 144; emphasis mine)

This is how morality, freedom and authenticity appear as clearly interdependent in Beauvoir’s thinking: by emphasising moral freedom – freedom as needing to be recognised responsibly, consciously, authentically; as necessarily resulting from a moral act, in other words struggling so that the other can also be morally free by avoiding oppression – Beauvoir’s philosophy causes freedom, authenticity and moral behaviour to emerge as inextricably intertwined.

Freedom, authenticity and morality are also strongly linked to ambiguity, seen mainly in the ambiguity of the conception of the subject’s existence as both embodied and transcendent and as both independent and intimately intertwined with others. Recognising the other as a free subject, for Beauvoir, means recognising the other in her/his ambiguity as constituted by a lived and fleshed body, rooted on the one hand in species, in the perishable world of objects, but at the same time not reduced to its condition of object, of flesh: a body that is not reduced to pure facticity. ‘A man is at the same time freedom and facticity; he is free, but not in the sense of the abstract freedom proposed by the Stoics, he is free within a situation’ (Beauvoir, 1944: 279). The lived body is ambiguous because it is simultaneously immanent and transcendent; it is part of the fleshed world, the world of materiality, death and decomposition, while also constituting a site of freedom, from which subjectivity as a project towards the future is developed:⁹ the body is the subject’s situation: ‘In the perspective I am adopting – that of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – if the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp upon the world and the outline of our projects […] It is not the body-object described by the biologist that actually exists, but the living body of the subject’ (Beauvoir, [1949] 1989: 30, 33; emphasis in original). This is a phenomenological position, which refuses to see the body as either a pure social construct or provided by essential ontological features. The body is neither neutral nor provided a priori by essential features, but it constitutes the subject’s situation. This position in Beauvoir is noted and analysed by those who emphasise the phenomenological nature of Beauvoir’s position, according to which the already sexed body of the subject is her situation and she cannot, therefore, be seen as totally constructed regardless of the features of her particular body.

This interpretation is exemplified, within the scholarship on Beauvoir, by researchers such as Nancy Bauer (2001), Moira Gatens (2003), Sara Heinämaa (1997, 2003a, 2003b) and Toril Moi (1999). These authors maintain that according to Beauvoir, the subject’s body is an essential element, even if by no means sufficient, for explaining her situation in the world. The body then has to be interpreted, given meaning and form, by a social reality, without which it renders itself incomprehensible. Nevertheless, they argue, this body should not be understood as neutral, as allowing just any interpretation: it is concrete, sexed and full of essential characteristics (it is provided with particular functions, limited strength and certain kinds of organs) and is thus a body that presents constraints and specific limitations. The question of what the concrete meaning of these particular features and limitations will be, though, is a question that can only be answered, from Beauvoir’s standpoint, in terms of the specific ways in which these features and limitations are coded, interpreted and evaluated by a certain society (and by the individual subject herself) at a particular historical moment (Beauvoir, [1949] 1989: 30–33).

Recognising the other, then, means above all recognising this other not as a complete other, as somebody who is reducible to the condition of object – pure meat enclosed in its solitary immanence – but as a mixture of immanence and transcendence, of flesh and freedom (Beauvoir, [1947] 1948: 100–102, 115). In The Second Sex, Beauvoir writes that ‘every existent is at once immanence and transcendence’ ([1949] 1989: 239). In order to recognise this ambiguity, she argues, it is however first of all necessary to recognise ourselves as ambiguous; we must see ourselves not only as free, transcendent subjectivities projected into the future, but also as embedded in otherness. The task is to identify ourselves as freedom at the same time as we recognise the otherness within us, flesh out our own immanence, our own fleshed corporeality (Beauvoir, [1947] 1948: 102–103). Recognising ourselves as ambiguous embodied subjects, both rooted in materiality and immersed in transcendence, is the first step in identifying the other as ambiguity, as both freedom and immanence. Thus, denying power to the other,¹⁰ denying the other the possibility of developing moral freedom – through physical, economic and political oppression – means failing to recognise the subject’s ambiguity and reducing her to pure immanence, to a condition where the subject turns into pure flesh, a body lacking all transcendent meaning, with no project, no future. This immanent subject cannot recognise its own ambiguity or its freedom: it is in fact a subject deprived of subjectivity, so to speak, who in turn cannot recognise my own freedom. When confronting him, I am myself turned into an object.¹¹ This is where oppression resides.

Freedom and the coercion to act

I have shown how Beauvoir’s freedom is a freedom compelled to action and how, accordingly, authentic existence seems in Beauvoir’s theory to be reduced to an existence of doing, or of acting politically; to describe it even more accurately, we could characterise it as an existence that cannot recognise itself as free when experienced as contemplative or as playful. This raises two important problems. First, this conception of authentic existence seems to conflict with one of Beauvoir’s basic premises, namely that our erotic existence is that which most firmly approximates us to an authentic existence. I argue that this appears problematic since eroticism, even in Beauvoir’s eyes, seems to escape the limits of the project by exceeding it. In this way, the erotic becomes a different mode of transcendence, not related to political action but appealing to the immeasurable phenomenological condition of our living flesh. Second, even if, for the sake of argument, we could agree with Beauvoir that authenticity is inescapably connected to an active existence, this premise appears redundant when we consider that for Beauvoir authentic subjectivity is always already active, since it is constituted by an experiencing, lived body which is in itself a situation and cannot be reduced to dead meat, as it is transcendent by virtue of its very way of existing.¹² It is clear, then, that even a playful or contemplative existence is in fact active when it is developed through taking full consciousness of and responsibility for the living body, which is in itself a dynamic, active body in the first place. This argument might seem problematic when it is compared to Beauvoir’s argument against Sartre regarding freedom. But Beauvoir does not believe that ontological freedom is the only type of freedom subjects have, which is why she believes that there is a moral requirement to struggle for others’ freedom in the first place: freedom must be disclosed; it must be taken in a responsible and conscious way in order for it to be moral, meaningful freedom. To say that man has to fight in order to provide himself and others with freedom is not redundant, since ontological freedom is just not enough. The same might be argued regarding the redundancy of the active body in Beauvoir: that maintaining that the body is in itself already living and active does not contradict the fact that in order to give moral, significant meaning to this living body and its existence, we need to act, to fully enroll in an active struggle for freedom.

Nevertheless, I do see a redundancy here in Beauvoir, since she does not convincingly explain why contemplative behaviour, or more playful behaviour (such as erotic behaviour), when consciously and responsibly experienced, is in itself less an expression of freedom and action than, for instance, engagement in a political struggle. This is how Beauvoir expresses herself on this subject in Pyrrhus et Cinéas: ‘to enjoy a good thing is to use it, to throw oneself with it toward the future. To enjoy the sun or the shade is to feel its presence as a slow enrichment […]. All enjoyment is project. It surpasses the past toward the future […]. To drink cinnamon-flavored chocolate, says Gide in Incidences, is to drink Spain’ (Beauvoir, 1944: 217; emphasis mine). This is a clear description of how the living subject, in itself, constitutes a project. And yet it is clear that one of the main reasons why Beauvoir made such a strong connection – mainly in The Second Sex – between freedom and action was the great importance of activism, for Beauvoir, as the most important means for fighting oppression. But even if we recognise the importance that political action might have had for the development of her own existentialist ethics, I want to argue that, if we want to coherently explain other important (mainly phenomenological) elements in her theory, we have to widen the possibilities she allows for formulating and theorising freedom, although this does not entail diminishing or denying her theory’s firm engagement with political activism.

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir explains why an aesthetic attitude towards existence is immoral and inauthentic. The aesthetic attitude fails because it forbids transcendence: it takes the world as a given that cannot be changed and that has an essential reason to be the way it is. The aesthetic attitude is nothing but a form of bad faith, of inauthentic relation to the world: in fact it detaches us from it, leaving us only as observers and, moreover, as immoral ones, since detached contemplation and its acceptance of the world as it is prevents us from participating, acting and struggling to set others free (Beauvoir, [1947] 1948: 74–78). The aesthetic attitude can be explained as an attitude that refuses to surpass what Beauvoir considers the child’s position, the position that fails to recognise that the subject is a potentially free and responsible being and that the world might be transformed. This is precisely how Beauvoir explains the passage from childhood to adolescence: to leave childhood, for Beauvoir, means to leave behind the observer’s attitude, to surpass the belief that the world must be as it is and that there is no other way for it to be. Adolescence is reached by starting to ask questions, by beginning to doubt the necessity of learned principles. This in itself impels the subject to action, through which real subjectivity and freedom are achieved (Beauvoir, [1947] 1948: 35, 38–39).

Thus, it seems that refusing to act, to choose and decide, to engage in an active struggle in order to free ourselves and others, means to refuse ethics and authenticity, to refuse transcendence. Action, and mainly political action, seems to be at the core of Beauvoir’s concepts of freedom, ethics and authenticity. Veltman argues that Beauvoir’s:

ethical freedom is realized in engagement with the public world and in constructive activities, rather than in passivity, laziness, or idle enjoyment [Beauvoir, [1974] 1948: 78–81]. Human beings do not truly exist apart from doing something, and it is therefore human action, in which we create and change the world […] that first define[s] the freedom of existential ethics. (2009: 233; emphasis mine)

Other kinds of activities, meaningful activities, activities that change the world and history, such as science, art and, of course, philosophy, might also be recognised as activities through which the human achieves and discloses freedom, but only when they are performed in the knowledge that it is not in their power to provide us with an absolute truth or with absolute meaning but only with partial, fractional steps towards a more complete existence (Beauvoir, [1947] 1948: 79–81). But important questions arise about other kinds of experience. What does Beauvoir’s theory have to say regarding more modest experiences such as embodied pleasures and embodied modes of recognising ourselves as free or productive? What about erotically embedded activities? What about playing, contemplating, dancing? And, even more crucial in this regard, what about being pregnant, giving birth, breastfeeding and raising a child? Can these activities count for Beauvoir as existential projects, projects through which we disclose freedom?

It has often been argued that Beauvoir seems to relegate all of these other kinds of experience to the realm of immaturity, bad faith and childishness; she considers them as a way to keep embracing only immanence and to escape from reaching transcendence.¹³ And yet, interviews with Beauvoir late in her life suggest that these assertions of hers might in fact have been addressing the understanding of women’s biology and maternity under patriarchy, the construction of motherhood as an oppressive institution in patriarchal societies, rather than being assertions about women’s biology and maternity per se.¹⁴ And yet, even these few and late attempts of Beauvoir’s to show that she did try to argue for motherhood as not necessarily oppressive and as potentially enriching, when it happens in an environment of choice and freedom for women, show how difficult it is to truly understand Beauvoir’s concept of maternity as a project and as a means to achieve transcendence and freedom – unless it is, once again, turned into a sort of political act, an ethical active project with political consequences. In attempting to understand maternity as something more than merely a means of oppression on the part of patriarchy, then, Beauvoir is mainly adapting her Marxist and Hegelian background to the question of motherhood, bringing it once again into the realm of action, of project, in the sense of an active political undertaking, but without ever taking into account the potential phenomenological, erotic and experiential meanings of motherhood. But it is not enough to show that Beauvoir did not really argue against maternity. That does not settle the question of whether Beauvoir could understand this kind of activity as a project, as an existential-phenomenological project. Tolerating maternity, bearing women’s biology, arguing that maternity and female biology are not loathsome or oppressive in themselves, is not the same as saying that they can be empowering or transformed into real transcendental projects, expressing freedom.

What I am arguing is that according to Beauvoir’s premises themselves, this should and must be a possibility. This possibility should, however, derive directly from the recognition of motherhood as a project that is at least potentially joyful, erotic and creative. The erotic and creative character of motherhood has indeed been recognised and investigated by feminist theorists. Iris Marion Young, for example, provides a compelling account of the experience of breastfeeding and its erotic character (2005). In Young’s phenomenological analyses, it is made clear that the maternal body and its relationship with the baby, starting in pregnancy, are highly imbued with eroticism, which has, however, been repressed and silenced by patriarchy and its oppressing models, calling for a concept of motherhood emphasising mainly duties and self-sacrifice. Another well-known account of the creative and erotic aspects of motherhood is by Adrienne Rich (1986), arguing for a recognition of the experience of motherhood (highly embodied and erotic) in opposition to the patriarchal institution of motherhood (alienating and oppressive). The erotic, creative character of motherhood has been and continues to be discussed. For my argument here, it is only important to agree that motherhood can be looked at as a potentially erotic and creative activity. Analyses like Young’s are meaningful in the context of my questioning of Beauvoirian concepts, since they show that the roots of the erotic character of mothering are above all phenomenological. This strongly supports my argument that, even starting from Beauvoir’s own theory and premises, mothering can clearly be regarded as an erotic situation.

De Beauvoir and the erotic

I argue that the necessarily active mode of defining transcendence and freedom appears to be highly problematic when considering what Beauvoir had to say regarding the experience of eroticism and, more generally, an attitude that recognises the body as a living situation that involves within itself freedom, authenticity and the possibility of recognising otherness within ourselves. In other words, I posit that the playful, joyful and contemplative character that Beauvoir herself ascribed to eroticism and to the living body as a situation (when experienced as such) are just as firmly linked to transcendence, freedom and authenticity as are action and political engagement. For Beauvoir, erotic relations are one of the principal frameworks within which the distinctions between subjects are blurred in an act of generosity and openness. By means of the erotic, we recognise both the otherness within us, namely our own flesh, and the irreducible freedom of the other (alongside her presence as facticity). Thus, the erotic fleshes out two kinds of ambiguity: the vague distinctions between subjects and the world; and the ambiguity expressed through the intertwining of immanence and transcendence that characterises all subjects (Beauvoir, [1949] 1989: 378). In this respect, the erotic is perhaps the ideal form for recognising ambiguity, making it present and fleshing it out.

Insofar as Beauvoir was concerned, the erotic is also one of the most vital expressions of the moral life.¹⁵ In ‘Must we burn Sade?’ (Beauvoir, [1955] 1962), she eloquently describes the failure of the protagonist, the Marquis de Sade, to formulate a true conception of the erotic on account of his inability to recognise the other and transcend his own skin. Sade’s failure can be said to be an ethical one, for recognising others and embracing them by opening one’s body to them is the paragon of ethics in Beauvoir’s existentialist eyes. From her standpoint, the inability to reach a true level of eroticism inevitably stems from the subject’s ethical shortcomings. The Marquis, who can be viewed as the epitome of a sexual being, does not manage to truly understand and experience the erotic, for he is completely incapable of being the other, of making himself strange, of putting himself in the other’s shoes.

The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one’s self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other. The curse which weighed upon Sade – and which only his childhood could explain – was this ‘autism’ which prevented him from ever forgetting himself or being genuinely aware of the reality of the other person. (Beauvoir, [1955] 1962: 32–33)

Sade thus fails to recognise the other’s subjectivity; he is an inveterate solipsist who adamantly strives to remind us of the tragic fate of the lonely subject. At a certain point in the narrative, the protagonist is dismayed upon realising that humans are incapable of truly becoming intimate with each other. He comes to the conclusion that erotic-cum-sexual enjoyment is only possible if one fully accepts the fact that we are lonely subjects in a world of others-as-objects. In other words, the Marquis believes that, in order to fully live his life and attain pleasure, he must assume the role of the master, while rendering the other an oppressed slave. According to Beauvoir, Sade cruelly ‘asserts the radical separation of the other object from the sovereign subject. It aims at the jealous destruction of what cannot be greedily assimilated’ ([1955] 1962: 41; emphasis mine). Since all subjects are lonely and impenetrable, human beings are incapable of truly communicating or forming an intimate relationship with each other. From the hero’s standpoint, there are no other subjects – only opaque objects precluding true intersubjectivity. Sade’s ethical position and conception of the erotic, then, can be ascribed to his grasp of subjectivity.

In Beauvoir’s estimation, the Marquis failed to recognise the openness of each subject’s living body. She claims that it is precisely our affective carnality, always open to and intertwined with the world and others, that enables us to be ethical subjects and that, moreover, prevents sexual reification. In fact, Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir contend that eroticism is what makes us subjects and differentiates us from objects.¹⁶ By its very nature, a subject is ambiguously immersed in the world through an erotic-cum-emotional bond. Therefore, the only way to be truly moral and autonomous subjects is by generously and erotically opening our ambiguous embodied selves to the world and to other subjects by touching and being touched by others in their role as subjects, not objects. What is more, the erotic experience is the most efficacious means for recognising our own freedom and ambiguity and that of the other: ‘The erotic experience’, Beauvoir asserts, ‘is one that most poignantly discloses to human beings the ambiguity of their condition; in it they experience themselves as flesh and spirit, as the other and as subject’ ([1949] 1989: 378). De Beauvoir needed to create and defend an active and political concept of freedom and transcendence in order to successfully explain oppression and formulate a solid theory of ethics. The problem is that this created inconsistencies with some elements of her own phenomenological approach. She recognised the inherent transcendence in an authentic erotic, embodied relationship. However, this recognition appears to be somewhat in conflict with her conception of freedom and transcendence as essentially calling for surpassing immanent conditions and for action.

Conclusion

In fact, Beauvoir might have broadened her concept of freedom and transcendence – by linking freedom more firmly to the erotic – without losing much. It may be that her particular historical context made it impossible for her to do so personally, but her philosophy would definitely have allowed it. De Beauvoir’s concept of freedom seems mainly to call for an active existence, for an ethics of doing instead of an ethics of being. Passive existence, meanwhile – contemplative or meditative existence – is seen as inauthentic, deceitful or irresponsible.¹⁷ I have tried to show that this attitude stems from conflicts between some of the traditions influencing Beauvoir, namely phenomenology on the one hand and existentialism, Marxism and Hegelianism on the other. De Beauvoir conflates being ‘inactive’ or ‘contemplative’ with losing subjectivity or being objectified. While transcendence seems to imply action, passivity is identified with immanence and objectification. Then, instead of understanding the possibility of contemplation as an act of authentic subjectivity (not merely a product of laziness or of inauthentic behaviour), Beauvoir denies the possibility of being in the world without explicitly acting and yet gaining freedom. This clearly conflicts with Beauvoir’s concept of eroticism as an authentic and ethical form of existence. Some aspects of Beauvoir’s theory of freedom would have benefited from the recognition of an ethics of being, as an alternative to an ethics of doing. Certainly, a more playful, erotic, relaxed concept of freedom – the possibility of gaining freedom by ‘authentically and erotically being’ – would in fact have accorded more fully with Beauvoir’s theory as a whole.

De Beauvoir’s conception of the erotic subject as capable of disrupting hegemony through an authentic recognition of its own and the other’s pervasive ambiguity makes it evident that to achieve ‘transcendence’ from a Beauvoirian perspective also, or even mainly, means to interact erotically, to create by way of our embodied fleshed existence, to be subjects and objects at one and the same time: to engage in an ethics of the erotic. This concept of ‘erotic freedom’ can open up a whole new range of possibilities for the application of Beauvoir’s thought to current issues in feminist theory. For example, it can lead us to reflect more deeply on the ambiguity of motherhood, by pointing out the importance of rejecting stereotypical, reactionary or essentialist versions of ‘the maternal’ while also recognising the potential for creativity, freedom and authenticity in maternity and, more specifically, in embodied practices of motherhood such as being pregnant, labouring and nursing. More broadly, developing this vein of thinking within Beauvoir’s scholarship can provide a valuable tool for recognising the existential meaning in otherwise apparently ‘nonproductive’ erotically embodied practices.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their constructive advice and comments.

Notes

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