Studies of Simone de Beauvoir have mostly concentrated on her literature, her life, and her famous 1949 work, The Second Sex, and the continued emphasis has been on Beauvoir's views on gender. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir places her theory of women's 'otherness' in the context of a number of contemporary theories on a similar subject. While gender takes its place among these, Professor Deutscher counterbalances its grip on our memory of Beauvoir's ideas by situating it in the context of our relationship to ageing, to generational difference, and to race and cultural difference. By differentiating the many aspects of 'otherness', Beauvoir revisited some of the concepts of reciprocity, ambiguity, and ethics for which she is best remembered.

Geschlecht sexual difference, ontological difference

The philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir : ambiguity, conversion, resistance

By denying to vegetal life the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality, traditional philosophy not only marginalizes plants but, inadvertently, confers on them a crucial role in the current transvaluation of metaphysical value systems. From the position of absolute exteriority and heteronomy, vegetation accomplishes a living reversal of metaphysical values and points toward the collapse of hierarchical dualisms.

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Vegetal anti-metaphysics: Learning from plants

The article asks how phenomenology, understood as a philosophical method of investigation, can account for gender. Despite the fact that it has provided useful tools for feminist inquiry, the question remains how gender can be studied within the paradigm of a philosophy of a subject. The article explicates four different understandings of phenomenology and assesses their respective potential in terms of theorizing gender: a classical reading, a corporeal reading, an intersubjective reading and a post-phenomenological reading. It concludes by arguing that phenomenology can extend its analysis to the question of gender only if its method is radically revised.

A phenomenology of gender

This paper examines a convergence between Heidegger's reconceptualization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and some recent work in feminist philosophy on relational autonomy. Both view the concept of autonomy to be misguided, given that our capacity to be self-directed is dependent upon our ability to enter into and sustain meaningful relationships. Both attempt to overturn the notion of a subject as an isolated, atomistic individual and to show that selfhood requires, and is based upon, one's relation to and dependence upon others. The paper argues that Heidegger's notion of authentic Mitsein (being-with) rejects traditional notions of autonomy and subjectivity in favor of a relational model of selfhood. Ultimately, it provides a new point of entry into contemporary debates within feminist philosophy on Heidegger's thinking and defends Heidegger from certain feminist critiques.

Reconsidering Relational Autonomy: A Feminist Approach to Selfhood and the Other in the Thinking of Martin Heidegger

and Derrida in their philosophies of “difference.” Nevertheless, there is one key Heideggerian theme on which Deleuze and Derrida part company: Heidegger’s theory of temporality. In Being and Time, Heidegger develops a theory of temporality based on an analysis of existence as being-towards-death: death is the never-reached horizon of experience, in light of which authentic decisions must be taken. In his writings, from Speech and Phenomena through to The Gift of Death, Derrida has taken up and developed this theme, sometimes extending it (to writing and language), sometimes uncovering its underlying Kierkegaardian problematic of undecidability/decision, and always disputing Heidegger’s apparent anthropocentrism (such as Heidegger’s claims that animals perish without authentically dying, and his related claim that animals are “world-poor” in comparison to Dasein). However much Derrida contests elements of Heidegger’s theory, however, he does not dispute the basic schema of “temporality” as a being-towards-death in which the future illuminates, determines and so is “prior” to the past and present. Deleuze, on the other hand, takes an entirely different approach, drawing not on Heidegger for his views on death, but on Spinoza. Like Derrida, Deleuze disputes any “essential” difference between human and animal death. Unlike him, Deleuze does not regard death as an “end” in light of which the “meaning” of present experience is determined, and dismisses the entire Heideggerian scenario of anxiety before human finitude. Death is an accident, however inevitable for “finite modes,” but it is not one which constitutes the identity or meaning of an individual’s existence. On the contrary, the goal of life should be to live “so intensely ... that death, always external, is of little significance” (SPP 41). Instead of being-towards-death, Deleuze uses Spinoza to focus on good and bad encounters among finite modes, good encounters being those which increase the power of a mode and allow it to “persist in its essence.” This orientation to encounters (in time) and essences (which are sub specie aeterni) forms the basis for a different theory of temporality than that of Heidegger’s temporal ec-stases.

Geschlecht sexual difference, ontological difference

Citations

The philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir : ambiguity, conversion, resistance

Vegetal anti-metaphysics: Learning from plants

A phenomenology of gender

Reconsidering Relational Autonomy: A Feminist Approach to Selfhood and the Other in the Thinking of Martin Heidegger

Death and temporality in deleuze and derrida

Related Papers (5)

Being and Time

Writing and Difference

Speculum of the other woman

Toward a Phenomenology of Difference

Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question