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In this study I advance the thesis that Simone de Beauvoir's account of the development of subjectivity is based in a consideration of the Hegelian description of the development of subjectivity in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Like Hegel, Beauvoir argues that an aspect of the development of subjectivity is the ability to discover oneself as related to the collective world. Additionally, she shows through her various works that individual identity and freedom are conditioned by the possibility for intersubjective recognition, and development of a project within an ambiguous relationship between the self, others, and the shared social world. Nevertheless, throughout history this foundation for the possibility of freedom has often been lacking and more so for some groups than others, which points us to an important difference in focus in Hegel and Beauvoir's work. For one, the subject in the idealized Hegelian account comes to recognize its power and freedom as it progresses in its connections and influence within the world. But, for those who have historically lacked options (women, those who happen to be black, the poor, etc.) transcendence in terms of the actualization of one's identity and recognized participation in the collective is at best often co-opted or concealed and at worst impossible. Thus, one of the central differences between Hegel's narrative in the Phenomenology and Beauvoir's in The Second Sex is that for women the cycle is a building up of deception, not a progression to clarity and understanding. This progression as Beauvoir shows is neither natural nor perfect, rather it depends upon the possibilities historically granted to specific social groups and denied to others. The central focus of this study is Beauvoir's analysis of the process of becoming (a) woman, but it is not limited to this. Rather, I argue that through engaging with Beauvoir's philosophy, including her appeal to Hegel, we (1) come to understand the ambiguity of the human condition, desire, intention, and identity, (2) the bad faith that often manifests in our relations with others, and (3) the existence of the spectrums of oppression and privilege. There are, of course, several ways to approach the study of historical figures in philosophy. We can treat them as though they are our contemporaries, analyzing their arguments and clarifying their ideas with the intention of showing their relevance to our contemporary concerns. Or, we can study them in their historical contexts with an eye toward tracing the development of their doctrines, attempting as we go to restructure them within their historical situations and as individuals. Both of these approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. In the former, we succeed in making Beauvoir and Hegel relevant as participants in our contemporary dialogues; but we may be making them relevant through reading our own contemporary views and concerns into their texts. In taking the latter approach, we do not use these historical figures as mere mouths, but through reifying them in their historical context we may find them to be less relevant. In what follows I seek to strike a balance between these approaches, especially in that I am engaging a philosophical predecessor (Beauvoir) who is engaging a philosophical predecessor (Hegel). In order to do this I look at the context in which Beauvoir is using Hegel, the influence of her closest philosophical companions on her use of Hegel, and how feminists have since used Beauvoir's philosophy to address contemporary problems. And while I understand the purpose of philosophy to be in fact engagement, rather than a process of historical excavation, I believe that through examining these various relations we can use historical figures to analyze and resolve the urgent social, political, and theoretical issues of our time, while simultaneously understanding that the times in which they originally philosophized may be vastly different from our own. / Philosophy

While many Simone de Beauvoir scholars have discussed the importance of the category of the erotic in Beauvoir's philosophical works, none explored the importance of Beauvoir's early autobiographical works to our understanding of the development of Beauvoir's ethical philosophy nor have they suggested how Beauvoir's ethical engagement with the erotic might be pertinent to black feminist philosophy. As such, this dissertation is a two-fold project. First, it presents an account of the lived experience of Beauvoir as illustrated through her early autobiographical works. This account focuses primarily on Beauvoir's romantic relationships and traces the development of her conversions leading to her most important philosophical contribution, that of existential ethics, through her accounts of these romantic relationships. Using Beauvoir's Diary of a Philosophy Student, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Wartime Diary, The Prime of Life, and Letters to Sartre, I maintain that it is only through our close engagement with these early autobiographical writings about her philosophical understanding of her romantic relationships that we are able to understand how Beauvoir comes into the ethical views that will inform the rest of her writing career. Beauvoir's focus on embodiment, facticity, conversion, and lived experience illustrate the extent to which these matters are inextricable from her existential ethics. Beauvoir claims in her philosophical ethical writings that the erotic moment serves a privileged moment when we encounter the other. Both Beauvoir's autobiographical writings and her ethical writings provide us with what is termed a "disposition toward the erotic," which is an attitude that stems from reflection upon and lived experience with the other in love or an erotic encounter, where we choose to encounter non-beloved others in a manner similar to that which we encounter the beloved other. In this way, a disposition toward the erotic is the foundation of Beauvoir's ethical assertions, with regard to what obligations we have toward the freedoms of others and how and why it is our ethical duty to fight against oppressive circumstances. The second part of this project draws a bridge between Beauvoir's ethical writings concerning the topic of the erotic and black feminism. As such, I begin my discussion of black feminism by talking about Black women's lived experience as recounted through black feminism itself. After this, I focus on Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," bell hooks' series of books on love and Patricia Hill-Collins' Black Sexual Politics, since these serve as sources of direct black feminist engagement with the question of the erotic. I maintain that, in very important ways, black women's lived experience with the erotic has also informed the aims of the project of black feminism. As such, I illustrate how black women's lived experience has been colored by oppressive views of black women's embodiment and sexuality. I argue, as opposed to oppressive understandings of black women and their relationships toward their bodies, that this disposition toward the erotic is a stance that black feminism fundamentally shares with Beauvoir's existential ethics. / Philosophy

In this essay I examine how conceptions of gender can expand the emancipatory ability of feminism. To achieve this the essay analyzes and discusses two conceptions of gender. The first can be found in Virginia Held’s “The Ethics of Care”, while the second can be found in Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Feminism without Borders”. By comparing these the essay examines the limits of a stricter conception of gender, in comparison to a more complex conception of gender. These are in turn compared to Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” and Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”.  Through the analysis and discussion, it is shown that stricter conceptions of gender give a more simplified view of the real lives of women in different parts of the world. These conceptions may include ideas about contextuality and social factors such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, but these are added to an already established idea of “the woman”. Through complex conceptions of gender these social factors are instead viewed as intersected with gender. Gender is thus seen as a social construct, contextually differentiated by different conceptions of both sexuality and gender expression, as well as other social factors. These social factors are seen as both constructed and used by systems and power structures to oppress women. Complex conceptions of gender can thus expand the emancipatory ability of feminism by bringing both an intersectional and materialistic perspective into view. This perspective shows how gender can both be constructed in problematic ways through discursive representations and feminist theories, but also shows how gender is constructed through social practices and are used to affect women in a material way.

Ce mémoire retrace l’évolution parallèle des concepts de genre et de sujet depuis Le deuxième sexe de Simone de Beauvoir jusqu’à la théorie du genre performatif et citationnel de Judith Butler. Dans un premier temps, nous considérons comment le concept de genre s’introduit dans la théorie féministe et y est envisagé tantôt comme un point de vue subjectif sur le monde, tantôt comme une structure sociale oppressive. En effet, dans le sillage de la dénaturalisation du sujet femme amorcée par Beauvoir, certaines autrices se concentrent sur l’aspect subjectif du genre, en prônant une valorisation de la différence féminine, tandis que d’autres, envisageant avant tout le genre comme une structure oppressive, visent l’égalité à travers son abolition. Nous montrons dans un deuxième temps comment la théorie butlérienne du genre, fondée sur une conception poststructuraliste du sujet constitué, permet de résoudre le conflit entre subjectivité et normativité en replaçant la norme au coeur de la constitution du sujet, et rend ainsi compte du genre à la fois comme structure essentielle du sujet et comme norme oppressive. Cette compréhension du genre nous permet aussi d’envisager la tâche du féminisme comme une transformation de la norme du genre et un effort constant pour déstabiliser et ouvrir les catégories qui composent l’identité du sujet. / This thesis retraces the parallel evolution of the concepts of gender and of the subject starting from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex up to Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative and citational. In the first chapter, I examine how “gender” is introduced into feminist philosophy and considered, alternatively, as a subjective view point and as an oppressive social structure. In the wake of Beauvoir’s attempt at denaturalizing “woman,”some feminists chose to focus on the subjective aspect of gender by valuing feminity as difference, while others, considering gender first and foremost as an oppressive structure, sought to achieve equality through its abolition. In the second chapter, I show how Butler’s account of gender, based in a poststructuralist understanding of the subject as constituted,resolves the conflict between normativity and subjectivity by conceiving of the norm as central to the subject. Gender is thus accounted for as both an essential component of subjectivity and an oppressive norm. This understanding of gender also entails that the task of feminism is defined as the transformation of the norm of gender, and as a constant effort to destabilize and open the categories that make up the identity of the subject.

Nous voulons poser à nouveau le problème de la caducité. Notre mémoire prend comme point de départ le discours de Simone de Beauvoir et, en le comparant avec le vécu des personnes âgées d'aujourd'hui, permet de voir l'évolution positive, et négative, qu'a connue notre société. Certes, nos aînés vivent de plus en plus leur vieillesse, mais il y a toujours un groupe d'entre eux qui ne peuvent que la subir. Cette mise à jour de notre attitude face à ce groupe de personnes, nous permettra d'envisager quelques solutions, sans pour autant demander à cette communauté de faire à elle seule tout le travail de réforme. Il va de soi que nos aînés ont à trouver leur place dans notre société et cela n'en sera que plus facile pour eux, si nous leur enlevons la barrière des préjugés.

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Cette étude esquisse un réseau dynamique des expériences mélancoliques chez Simone de Beauvoir, du point de vue de l’autobiographie et de la philosophie de l’existence. En transformant en désir d’exister la passion inutile de l’homme vers l'être chez Jean-Paul Sartre, la pensée beauvoirienne se repose sur la problématique de la morale, l’existence de l’individu concret et séparé du monde, ainsi que la relation intersubjective. Cependant elle aspire sans cesse à l’Absolu abstrait qui la conduit inévitablement à la frustration ontologique, qui est une structure inhérente à la mélancolie. Ainsi s’établit un dialogue permanent dans son oeuvre-vie, que nous ont révélé ses autobiographies, entre désir d’exister et non-désir qui est exprimé par l’apathie, la fatigue et le dégoût. Cela nous aide à déterminer l’existence de la mélancolie chez elle. La tâche est cependant rendue difficile par son ambition de décrire la totalité de la vie et du monde. De plus, les instants et les sentiments mélancoliques sont dispersés à travers toute une vie, racontée par l’autobiographe qui joue le jeu de l’ombre-claire. Bien que l'on risque de perdre ce qui en fait la spécificité et la complexité, la mélancolie nous paraît inaccessible sans la lier à ses métamorphoses. C’est pourquoi nous effectuons une étude soigneuse de ces autobiographies pour en suivre les instants et les sentiments : la solitude de l’ennui adolescent, la mélancolie d’amour, l’impuissance du sujet politique, le deuil des êtres chers, jusqu’à l’angoisse du temps et du vieillissement. Le premier chapitre tente de dégager une infrastructure philosophique de la mélancolie, qui est la tension entre désir d’exister et non-désir. La recension de la représentation littéraire et de l’ontologie phénoménologique de la mélancolie chez Sartre, et les nouveaux apports de Simone de Beauvoir dans l’après-guerre, nous incitent à discerner une théorie de la mélancolie féminine dans Le Deuxième Sexe. Étant donné la similitude des expériences vécues entre son projet féministe et son projet autobiographique, nous cherchons à construire un réseau intertextuel entre son écriture de soi et sa théorie anthropologique existentielle des femmes, en étudiant nécessairement les romans corrélés. En tenant compte du petit nombre de pages, notre choix se porte plutôt sur ses autobiographies, ainsi que sa théorie et ses romans sur les femmes qui servent de références essentielles. Dans les chapitres suivants, nous tachons d'explorer les expériences vécues par/avec Beauvoir, dans la mesure où elles concernent la mélancolie. Le deuxième chapitre porte exclusivement sur le récit d’enfance, en vue de son autonomie relative aux récits ultérieurs, et se concentre sur la solitude et l’ennui adolescent. Le troisième chapitre essaie d’établir une relation entre la passion amoureuse et la mélancolie. Le quatrième constate l'impuissance du sujet dans l’expérience de la guerre. Le cinquième tache de découvrir la relation entre mère et fille dans l’essai du deuil maternel, et à partir de cela, d’examiner son dernier roman pour connaître la diversité de la mélancolie féminine. Le dernier chapitre veut rassembler les moments indépassables de l’être humain autour de la mort et de l’angoisse du temps, pour éclaircir leur rapport à la mélancolie chez notre auteur. / This study outlines a dynamic network of melancholic experiences in Simone de Beauvoir, from the perspective of autobiography and philosophy of existence. Transforming into "desire to exist", the useless passion human towards the Being in Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir's thought rests on the problem of morality, of the existence of the concrete and separate individual in the world, as well as the intersubjective relationship. However, Beauvoir aspires continually to the Absolute abstract which inevitably leads to the ontological frustration, which is an inherent structure to melancholy. This establishes an ongoing dialogue in her work and life, we have revealed her autobiographies, between desire for existence and non-desire which is expressed by apathy, fatigue and disgust. This helps us to determine the existence of melancholy at Beauvoir. However, the task is made difficult by its ambition to describe the totality of life and of the world. In addition, times and melancholy feelings are scattered throughout a lifetime, narrated by autobiographer who plays the game of shadow-clear. Although we risk losing what makes the specificity and complexity, melancholy seems unattainable without linking it to its metamorphoses. That's why we make a careful study of these autobiographies to follow the moments and feelings: solitude adolescent boredom, melancholy of love, the impotence of the political subject, mourning of loved ones, until the anxiety of time and aging. The first chapter discusses the philosophical infrastructure of melancholy, which is the tension between the desire to exist, and non-desire. The review of literary representation and the phenomenological ontology of Sartre melancholy, and new contributions of Simone de Beauvoir in the postwar, encourage us to discern a theory of feminine melancholy in The Second Sex. Given the similarity of experiences between her feminist project and autobiographical project, we seek to build an intertextual network between his self-writing and its existential anthropological theory of women, studying necessarily correlated novels. Considering the small number of pages, our choice is rather on his autobiographies, and his theory and novels about women which serve as key references. In the following chapters, we try to explore the experiences of / with Beauvoir, to the extent that they relate to melancholy. The second chapter focuses exclusively on the childhood story, to its autonomy on the later accounts, and focuses on loneliness and adolescent boredom. The third chapter tries to establish a relationship between the passion of love and melancholy. The fourth finds impotence of the subject in the experience of war. The fifth discover the relationship between mother and daughter in the essay of maternal grief, and from this, to look for his latest novel about the diversity of women's melancholy. The last chapter wants to gather the insurmountable moments of the human being around death and anguish of time, to clarify their relation about melancholy in our author.

Comment concilier le récit d’une expérience personnelle qui met le “moi” écrivain au coeur de l’entreprise auctoriale avec le désir d’intervenir dans la chose publique et politique ? Et comment réunir ces deux dimensions dans l’espace poétique de la fiction afin que ni la biographie ni l’idée ne prennent le pas sur le romanesque ? C’est ce que nous nous sommes proposé d’étudier à travers les exemples de cinq oeuvres : La Maison du peuple de Louis Guilloux, L’Espoir d'André Malraux, La Conspiration de Paul Nizan, Les Mandarins de Simone de Beauvoir et Le Premier Homme d’Albert Camus. Il est apparu que nos auteurs n’ont pas seulement leur amitié ou leurs conflits en commun, mais également une vision convergente sur la manière de conjuguer leur vécu et les causes de leur temps, avec çà et là, les particularités propres à chacun, que nous avons tenté de mettre en lumière. La période que couvre le corpus allant de la fin des années 1920 jusqu’à la fin des années 1950, sa confrontation avec des théories littéraires qui ont fleuri à partir des années 1970 manifeste la pertinence des questions que continue à soulever une littérature engagée dont on a sonné le glas, et pas seulement sur le plan formel. Prenant ce corpus pour matériau d’analyse sans nous y restreindre, nous détaillons les questions de poétique et de genres littéraires que soulève la désignation “roman autobiographique”, les techniques de représentation et de transposition ainsi que la part de subjectivité qui préside à une écriture en situation, afin de déterminer comment une expérience personnelle se transforme en exercice esthétique pour aboutir à une éthique de l’action. / How do authors reconcile the desire to share their personal experience — where the “I” is the heart of the work — with the desire to participate in public and political life ? And how can they bring together these two dimensions in the poetic space of fiction, so that neither their biography nor their main thesis end up of overshadowing the work’s novelistic qualities? These are the questions we proposed to examine through five novels: La Maison du Peuple by Louis Guilloux, L’Espoir (“Man’s Hope") by André Malraux, La Conspiration (“The Conspiracy”) by Paul Nizan, Les Mandarins (“The Mandarins”) by Simone de Beauvoir, and Le Premier Homme (“The First Man”) by Albert Camus. We found that, beyond their friendship and their shared battles, these authors also shared similar views on how to reconcile their personal experiences and the causes of their time — with, here and there, their own particularities, which we examined. The confrontation of these works, which range from the 1920s to the late 1950s, with the literary theories that emerged starting in the 1970s attests to the pertinence of questions raised by this socially-conscious literature (and not only on the formal level). Using this corpus for analysis, but without restricting ourselves to it, we examined the questions of poetics and genre raised by the term “autobiographical novel”, techniques of representation and transposition, and the subjectivity inherent to engaged writing. This will lead us to understand how a personal experience can be transformed into an aesthetic exercise and result in an ethics of praxis.

In ihrem großen Werk Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) fragt Simone de Beauvoir, was eine Frau sei. Über diese Frage sind anscheinend nicht endende Debatten geführt worden, und eine Antwort, die auf einer rein biologischen Begründung beruht, ist längst nicht mehr ausreichend. Im Anschluss an diese Frage kann weiter gefragt werden, was das Weibliche sei. Über diesen Terminus sind in der Geschichte mindestens genauso viele Versuche unternommen worden. Der französische Philosoph Emmanuel Lévinas, Zeitgenosse Simone de Beauvoirs, ist mit seiner Ethik des Anderen in Frankreich und über die Grenzen hinaus bekannt geworden. In seiner Philosophie taucht der Begriff ‚des Weiblichen‘, später auch ‚die Frau‘ oder ‚Mutter‘ immer wieder auf. In nahezu all seinen größeren Werken sind diese Begriffe präsent. Die chronologische Aufarbeitung, die Analyse der Weiterentwicklung sowie die Deutung und Funktion beziehungsweise die Aufgabe des Weiblichen in den einzelnen Wer-ken und dem Gesamtwerk ist in der Forschungslandschaft bisher nicht erfolgt. Eine solch allumfassende Analyse kann ein Aufsatz nicht leisten. Daher ist es das Ziel, die Funktion und Interpretationsmöglichkeit des Weiblichen vorerst nur in einem Werk, Le Temps et l’autre, herauszuarbeiten.