!The Other Within Ethics, Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex
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The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir.
Fredrika
Scarth. Feminist Constructions Series, ed. Hilde Lindemann Nelson and Sara
Ruddick. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 2004. 195 pp. $70.00 h.c. 0-
7425-3475-8; $24.95 pbk. 0-7425-3476-6.
Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second
Sex has been quoted, critiqued, dissected,
interpreted, and reinterpreted for almost sixty years. It is a multilayered text with
countless possibilities that continues to inspire activists and scholars alike. One
such scholar, Fredrika Scarth, suggests that by paying attention to the different
voices Beauvoir uses within the text, and by reading it in light of
Pyrrus et Cineas
and
The Ethics of Ambiguity,
we might discern in Beauvoir a new account of the
development of subjectivity that grounds a positive assessment of the maternal
body as also subject.
Scarth situates her reading of
The Second Sex
in response to a number of
critics of Beauvoir. Three aspects of these criticisms are especially relevant to
understanding Scarth’s project. The fi rst is the accusation that Beauvoir equates
transcendence with masculinity and immanence with femininity. Scarth offers
evidence instead that demonstrates Beauvoir’s more subtle position that every
existent is both immanence and transcendence. Oppression occurs when tran-
scendence is “condemned to fall uselessly back upon itself because it is cut off
from its goals” (Beauvoir 1948, 81).
The second relevant criticism of Beauvoir’s work assumes that immanence
is body and transcendence is consciousness. As Scarth shows, however, Beauvoir
does not make such an easy equation between body as immanence and transcen-
dence as consciousness. Our bodies are, after all, that with which we “live out
this transcendence” (111).
Finally, Scarth examines the criticisms of Beauvoir’s descriptions of mater-
nity. While there is no contesting Beauvoir’s negative portrayal of pregnancy and
motherhood, Scarth argues, following Linda Zerilli, that attention to Beauvoir’s
multiple voices reveals that this portrayal is an analysis of patriarchal represen-
tations of maternity. Maternity that is freely undertaken (little more than hinted
at by Beauvoir) has tremendous potential, according to Scarth, for revealing the
other within.
En route to the maternal subject, Scarth identifi es two types of ambiguity
at work in Beauvoir’s ethics. Ambiguity means the meaning of existence must
constantly be won and that each existent is both freedom and fl esh (112–13,
125). At times this latter form of ambiguity is described as the tension between
freedom and the body (e.g., 60, 110), freedom and facticity (110), “our essential
solitude and our essential bond with others” (112), and as “assuming ourselves
as both transcendent and immanent at once” (71, see also 40, 112). A diffi culty
Journal of Speculative Philosophy,
Vol. 20, No. 3, 2006.
Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
248
BOOK REVIEWS
249
arises with the terminology as it is easy to slip from saying the body is the site
where the ambiguity is lived to saying it is a pole within that ambiguity. Scarth
tries to clarify the difference by saying that oppression, like childhood, is marked
by a reduction of the body to its immanent mode and a denial of its aspect in
subjectivity; authentic subjectivity is embodied.
Scarth focuses on maternity in her interpretation of
The Second Sex.
She
argues that, like an erotic encounter, pregnancy demonstrates a new form of risk
that replaces Hegel’s patriarchal risk in the formation of subjectivity. Risk in both
eroticism and pregnancy is an assumption of otherness within. Scarth argues that
we must recognize the other within ourselves if we want to truly have a reciprocal
relationship. Such a recognition is an acknowledgement of our own difference.
In Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, subjectivity is won through a hostile encounter
with the other. Beauvoir, according to Scarth, sees the erotic encounter as provid-
ing a new type of risk-taking, a generous giving of the self. Hegel’s is a risk of
death; Beauvoir’s is a risk of the self as both body and freedom (the second form
of ambiguity). In subjectivity as generosity, “we can assume our situation, and
come to recognize the reciprocity of otherness: that each subject is, for the other,
also an other, and that we all harbor otherness within. . . . For Beauvoir, what is
central to the erotic encounter is that it is a space that allows differences to be”
(124). Scarth concludes her analysis of
The Second Sex
saying, “Beauvoir isn’t
valorizing a masculine model of subjectivity. Rather, in the process of shifting
subjectivity from a masculine preserve to a human capacity she in fact alters the
meaning of subjectivity and the project and the relationship of risking subjectiv-
ity” (155). The risk becomes recognizing the other within the self.
Scarth claims that “for free recognition of my own project to come into
being, there must be other freedoms with the capacity to make my attainments the
point of departure for their own projects. Indeed, I need a multiplicity of freedoms
to take up my project and give it a future and thus a meaning, a multiplicity of
people before me who can respond to my appeal” (68). Beauvoir does argue that
the freedom of others keeps each of us from resting in facticity and that one’s own
freedom is bound up with that of others such that “to will oneself free is to will
others free” (Beauvoir 1948, 73). But does that necessitate that others make my
project “the point of departure for their own projects”? Scarth seems to need this
in order to make pregnancy an example of generous risk taking for subjectivity
or a paradigm case of the other within.
But there is another problem with calling the pregnant woman the model of
“other within.” The other within the pregnant woman truly is other; as Beauvoir
described and Scarth recounts, pregnancy is in some ways the most alienating of
creative experiences because the creation within one’s own body will always be
separate. The individual recognition of the other within oneself slips away. It is
not the otherness within oneself but the other within the body. Only one existent
generously risks the self in pregnancy. That doesn’t seem to be enough for reci-
procity and thus subjectivity.
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A. CLARK
This distinction is crucial to interpreting whether pregnancy and mother-
hood can be authentic projects for Beauvoir. Because it can be done in a way that
reciprocally recognizes the freedom of the other subject, there is good evidence
that Beauvoir thinks motherhood can be an authentic project. Given the ambigu-
ous relationship between the fetus and the pregnant woman, the verdict seems to
still be out regarding gestation as a transcendent project.
Sally J. Scholz
Department of Philosophy
Villanova University
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1948.
Ethics of Ambiguity.
Trans. Bernard Frechtman. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel
Press.
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