Comment avoir une relation interraciale réussie (French Edition)

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In the novel, Tous les Hommes sont mortels, Beauvoir chooses Fosca, who drank a magic elixir to obtain immortality, to tell the story of the many facets of his life throughout the ages. During one of his reincarnations, Pythagoras, the Cock Philosopher was Aspasia, the Milesian courtesan. Pythagoras the Cock Philosopher informs Micyllus that he too will be a woman in one of his future lives Lucian, Like Beauvoir, the Cock Philosopher points out the value of the body and its influence on daily decisions and judgements.

I was a philosopher in those days: Now, on the contrary, I propose to eat beans; they are an unexceptionable diet for birds Lucian, Beauvoir seemingly transforms this instance in her diary into a long paragraph, which blurs or omits direct reference to some of these subjects while appearing to allude to them. She introduces the notion of Plato who is often confused with Pythagoras in a paragraph discussing her forays into bars and notes how costly it is to buy books concerning him: In the same paragraph, she introduces her discussion with Riquet as follows: Of potential importance in these lines from her first autobiographical tome is the fact that there exists a lot of confusion concerning Plato and Pythagoras.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, shows that as early as the first centuries BCE, it was fashionable to present Pythagoras as a quasi-deity who originated many of the ideas in the Greek philosophical tradition, including those of Plato and Aristotle Huffman. Beauvoir read and spoke English well by the time that she wrote her memoirs, as her approximately letters written in English to Nelson Algren, her American lover, attest.

Use of the historical present is commonplace in diaries but a mixture of past tense and historical present often surprises a reader and signals that closer attention might be needed to certain areas of the text. For example, the entry of January 27, shows a series of paragraphs recounting the recent past in historical present tense for these, I will provide the French and the English so that you can have a better idea of what is being translated.

It is perhaps philosophically meaningful that these passages also stress the importance of presence. The first begins as follows: I apologise for some books that I had loaned her and that had caused trouble]. The second paragraph continues: Another example, her entry of September 27, , also contains these tense switches.

Cahiers I have translated this part as follows. Barbara Klaw 77 I walked down the boulevards of Montmartre, smiling at the Morris columns. Then the passage shifts without warning to a present tense. Cahiers, —66 On boulevard Malesherbes, I am carried away by a radiant and lilting enthusiasm--Parisian couples cross my path; without envy, but with tenderness, I watch them, [ A small dwarf at the corner of the rue Royale is selling violets.

Cahiers, And in the morning at the Institut Catholique as I studied Leibniz and Locke, I had the illusion that it would be easy to finally surrender the year's end to the discipline of the competitive exam. Pleasure to see him again and to be on this terrace again so simply. Reasons to intersperse the past and the historical present tenses My point is that Beauvoir seems to revert to the present tense for moments that have particularly moved her or had a lasting impact on her.

Her diary shows that she feels the most united with her thought and self when neither the future or the past exist, when there is only the present. I coincide with my thought. I coincide with myself. In each of these passages, conflating everything into past tense would also destroy the temporal flavour of the text in English and remove allusions to all English-language authors and philosophers who mix these tenses for stylistic or philosophical effect.

Brinton provides an excellent overview of both the linguistic reasons and literary precedent for mixing past and historical present tenses in English-language literature from medieval literature onward. As she shows, the use of historical present in medieval literature is quite common.

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It was thought that mixing the present tense with the past made certain events more vivid. Nineteenth-century writer Charles Dickens is often considered to be the first to use the historical present in a sustained and purposeful way for description and narration. Mixing the historical present with the past tense serves several useful functions.

It makes things present to the readers by bringing them before the event or by bringing the event before their eyes Lee , The reader as eyewitness thus experiences an increase in the vividness, the excitement, the anticipation, the suspense, and the surprise of the unfolding of the events displayed. Events therefore become unrelated incidents without historical or logical reason Casparis , Although many argue that the use of the historical present may not in itself be a significant indication of the vividness of any particular event, the switch between past and present or between present and past is always meaningful Wolfson , and introduces important structural boundaries in a text.

If compared to a movie, the switch to historical present indicates a close-up shot, a main action that is sudden, unexpected, important or odd Frey , 43; Visser , Reasons Beauvoir read and wrote Beauvoir, as we know, read voraciously and wrote frequently for several reasons. Reading and writing were ways for her to think through her opinions of what she was reading or thinking or feeling Dayan and Ribowska , These activities also allowed her to realise her desire to hang onto every second by recording her life Dayan and Ribowska , She hoped her writing would help people Dayan and Ribowska , From early childhood onward, she wanted to be a writer.

She was fascinated by style and genre, and comments increasingly on its use in her early diary, autobiographical tomes and interviews Dayan and Ribowska , 30—31, Many of these authors wrote during the first half of the twentieth century. Katherine Mansfield, whose collection of short stories, Bliss, she was reading for the second time on May 19, ; Isabella Duncan, whose autobiography, My Life, she read and reacted against on May 13, ; and from later comments, we know that she read Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf, two other authors who played frequently with tense-switching.

In front of me there is a hedge of ivy. On December 27, Mansfield wrote the following passage: I went out into the garden just now. It is starry and mild. The leaves of the palm are like down-drooping feathers; the grass looks soft, unreal, like moss. The sea sounded, and a little bell was ringing, and one fancied — was it real, was it imaginary?

Some one brings in food from the dark, lamp-stained yard. Mansfield , July 14 shows another odd combination of past and present: They are not important at all!? I suddenly found myself outside the library in Woerishofen: Mansfield , In her November 21, entry, Mansfield even comments on the importance of varying past and present. To-day I began to write, seriously, The Weak Heart, — a story which fascinates me deeply. Mansfield , In conclusion, this study points to the importance and difficulty of establishing an accurate transcription of a handwritten manuscript, and the subsequent complexity involved in producing faithful translations of such transcriptions.

Bibliography Beauvoir de , Simone. Tous les Hommes sont mortels. Diary of a Philosophy Student. Translated by Barbara Klaw. Edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.

The Present Tense in Narration. Journal of English and Germanic Philology The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. U of Wisconsin Press. Works of Lucian, Vol. Journal of Katherine Mansfield. The American Journal of Philology 97 4: Ness, Lynn and Caroline Duncan-Rose. Peter Maher, et al. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory Vinay, Jean-Paul and J.

An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Syntactical Units with One Verb. Beauvoir a, Madame Mabille envoie ses filles aux Halles de Paris Beauvoir a, Se nourrir devenait une entreprise de longue haleine, et harassante Beauvoir a, On se gorgea de nourriture Beauvoir a, Le chauffeur finit par me proposer de dormir au garage, dans sa voiture [ La question reste ouverte. Ainsi, en zone Sud, en Il y a glissement du politique vers le non-politique. Simone de Beauvoir aurait-elle un but plus noble?

Cf aussi aussi Albou- Tabart, al. La Force des choses I. La Force des choses II. Le Ventre de Paris. Le Livre de poche. At the same time, she claimed that, despite this fact, her own experience of Asia, in this specific case of China, maintained its value because of her absolute good faith in describing what she had witnessed ibidem. Indeed, on board a plane flying over the Gobi desert in , like the Marco Polo described by the Italian writer Maria Bellonci , she asked herself what she would have seen and discovered in Maoist China, where she and Sartre had been invited as official guests of the Chinese Communist Party.

Actually, she was not interested at all in the study of classic China: Its enduring influence lasted, just disguised under the rhetoric of the Communist Party, under the rule of Mao and beyond. See also Ebrey But there is no need to make a myth of China in order to feel great sympathy for the country. Again, she left Europe without any particular knowledge of the civilisation of the country she was going to visit, even though this time she spiritually prepared for this new Oriental trip by reading some of the masterpieces of Japanese classic and contemporary literature.

Dating back to the 11th century, and attributed to the court noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, the book describes in detail life in the imperial court during the Heian era, with particular emphasis on the life of aristocratic women. Beauvoir describes in a greatly detailed account her travel impressions of Japan in the fifth chapter of Tout compte fait. Beauvoir adhered to the cause of the tribunal with great passion and personal involvement.

In the seventh chapter of Tout compte fait, she describes in detail the process that led to the setting up of the tribunal and its works , — Even if the judgement of the tribunal did not have an impact on the American occupation of Vietnam, it had great value from a cultural and political point of view in the development of a global pacifist front, to which it gave the arguments and authoritative opinions of Nobel laureates and some of the most world-famous members of the intellectual environment. There are a great many university-students and almost all of them manage to take a degree: Beauvoir explicitly condemned the use of torture by French soldiers against suspected partisans of the resistance movement, with particular regard to the case of Djamila Boupacha: Boupacha, who had been condemned to death on 28 June, , was given amnesty under the Evian Accords and was freed on 21 April, , also thanks to the involvement of Beauvoir and Halimi see Surkis and Murphy At the end of this short overview of the relationship between Beauvoir and the Orient, which conclusions could be outlined, besides the clear fact that she was not an Orientalist at all but that she occasionally visited the Orient, broadly conceived, and wrote about it here including the case of Algeria?

Lazar , Then, I remembered the words of Edward Said, who, in his masterpiece Orientalism, wrote that The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.

As an attempt at interpretation, we may say that Simone de Beauvoir was not an Orientalist in the sense of a scholar of Oriental Studies but was actually an Orientalist in the Saidian sense, namely she created her own image of the Orient and used it for her own purposes. Using the Orient as a new field for her struggles and, at the same time, as an ideal locus in which to project her theories and utopias. La longue marche is the most representative example in this sense as she projected on Maoist China her expectations about the successes and achievements of a communist revolution, something that could have not been possible or at least that never occurred in post-war France.

I hope not , In her own Orient, Beauvoir saw worthy causes and people able to struggle against the diminishing of the human being imposed by the dictatorship of a repressive society, of capitalist economy or by the rule of a dictatorial political power especially an imperialist one. But what would you suggest? Should the world be changed? Or ought there to be none?

There must be happy endings, must, must, must! The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 31 2: Barat, Frank and Daniel Machover. In Is There a Court for Gaza?: Berlin — Heidelberg — New York: Essai sur la Chine. The Coming of Age. American edition of La vieillesse. American edition of Tout compte fait. Translated by Toril Moi. America Day by Day. Translated by Carol Cosman. Berkeley — Los Angeles — London: University of California Press.

Italian edition of La longue marche.

Translated by Laura Guarino. In Simone de Beauvoir. Political writings, edited by Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, — Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, Berkeley and Los Angeles: The Good Person of Szechwan. Three Daughters of China. Andrea Duranti Deoanca, Adrian. Interview with Lieven de Cauter, February Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism.

Women and the Family in Chinese History. London and New York: French Cultural Studies A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. The Decline of a Family. Translated by John E. The French Review 62 3: In Connaissances du Maghreb: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

The Pennsylvania State University Press. From Emperor to Citizen: State University of New York Press. The Tale of Genji unabridged. Translated by Dennis Washburn. In Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, edited by Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Translated by Gaston Renondeau. Behind the Forbidden Door: Travels in Unknown China.

The Good Women of China: Simone de Beauvoir a pour projet de visiter Tombouctou, mais la chaleur et le manque de transports font avorter ce voyage.

Witchcrafts of Color | Meridians | Duke University Press

Le fait de rencontrer des membres du R. Un amour transatlantique The Grass is Singing. When Simone de Beauvoir says: The moment one chooses to be free one also chooses to be moral. It is important at this point to clarify one aspect: Usually ethics is considered to be the choice made by the individual to be ethical, while morality is the whole of values and norms dominant in a given culture. I believe she ignores such a distinction because she makes a fundamental assumption: This assumption distinguishes between the person who claims to be moral because he follows the values and obeys the norms of the culture he is born into and the ethical person who, instead, is born the moment the will to be free is chosen.

The birth of the ethical person is the result of a process of transcendence, which she defines as a project de Beauvoir, op cit. At the origin of the formation of subjectivity, there is an act of will, which finds expression in the action of engaging oneself in the world in order to transform it and oneself. The formation of the subject depends on the will of the individual to live his freedom, seen by her as taking the engagement in the world seriously, from which his ends derive.

The individual ability to be free will make society more equalitarian. She speaks of the formation of the subject as a necessary condition for the making of democracy. The question that arises spontaneously at this point is: In itself, freedom is an ontological quality, which, however, needs the world in order to become an existential and social experience. Simone de Beauvoir clarifies this when she says: The subject, then, is that person who casts himself into the world as an act of freedom rather than finding himself in the world thinking he has no other choice but to accept what has been reserved for him by fate.

The act of freedom is an act of rebellion against facticity, that is, the social historical situation the individual is born into. However, the act of rebellion should not be seen as a negative act, as an act of destruction, but rather as a creative act necessary for the subject to be born.

For this reason it is an act of transcendence: After Descartes how can we ignore the fact that subjectivity radically signifies separation? And if it is admitted, at the cost of a contradiction, that the subject will be the men of the future reconciled, it must be clearly recognised that the men of today who turn out to have been the substance of the real, and not subjects, remain excluded forever from this reconciliation. To exist means to question and to answer The process of transcendence implies that at the core of subjectivity there is a movement toward the future because the act of negation creates an emptiness that makes the future a presence.

In this interaction between present and future, meaning is formed, as well as the end of an action, as Simone de Beauvoir clarifies: The reason for such a battle is the ambiguity of existence that forces the individual to choose between the right and the wrong that are not absolutes but depend on the situation the person is in. In this struggle, the person not only finds meaning but also ethics because the act of transcending originates in the antinomies of existence that provoke anxiety, which induces the individual to urgent interrogation.

The meaning of life is given, it lies in life itself, while the meaning of existence must be discovered, conquered; it is the result of the existential struggle that sees man himself as an urgent interrogation. And, as soon as he exists, he answers Going back to Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir believes that ethics reside in the choice to be free and in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning, rather than in a set of norms and values collectively established Man is constantly faced by the possibility of not making the choice to be free because at his roots he is divided.

Therefore, he is constantly struggling with conflicting emotions that push him in two directions, either to transcend himself or to flee himself. There is within him a perpetual playing with the negative, and he thereby escapes himself, he escapes his freedom. Therefore, not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place.

Joy is thus the main quality of freedom, and it does not come as a result of a frivolous and disengaged life but, on the contrary, of deep engagement. To will man free is to will there to be being, it is to will the disclosure of being in the joy of existence; in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness. In addition, they constitute indivisible totalities whose ideas, moods, and acts are secondary, dependent structures and whose essential characteristic lies in being situated, and they differ from each other even as their situations differ in relation to each other.

The unity of those signifying wholes is the meaning which they manifest. A man is the whole earth. Sartre , 1 Simone de Beauvoir shares the same synthetic anthropological view. She also believes that the individual is a whole in whom metaphysical and social conditions are strictly interrelated and the project of liberation implies a process of change that involves the individual and the society. Sartre clarifies the dialectical relationship between the metaphysical and the social conditions in the description of the process of liberation: Even nature can be changed, but not the metaphysical conditions that are the limits the individual can never overcome without self destruction.

To make himself other means, in fact, to transcend but also to accept the limits, and only then can man reach the profound meaning of existence and formulate the ends of his actions. Individual and universal experiences Simone de Beauvoir used literature to further explore her philosophical ideas. This choice was justified by the fact that her philosophy had existence at its centre and literature was an indispensable tool for exploring the deep struggle of existence with the many possibilities it offers.

With Sartre, she believed that the meaning of the world is revealed in language. Jean Paul Sartre, in the introduction to the first issue of Les Temps modernes, 1 October , spoke for the first time of a committed literature, making it clear that the act of writing is an act of disclosure whose final end is to change the social condition of man and the concept he has of himself. It is a revolutionary act. The idea of committed literature, which de Beauvoir remained faithful to all her life, was already present in the books she wrote toward the end of WWII. Mariolina Graziosi philosophical essay: In the two novels and her play, Simone de Beauvoir approaches the question of universal man, explaining that it is an abstraction since only the particular man exists.

However, the will to be free and questioning puts the individual in contact with eternity, an experience that is possible only if he participates in the singularity of his era, in the singularity of his existence. The protagonist, Blomart, represents the free, and for this reason, ethical individual who lives committed to questioning everything and to finding new answers. The new woman is born because she chooses to transcend herself by sharing with her man the same project: As the result of her process of transformation, a true relationship between the two is formed, not as a private affair but as the presence of two consciences that are in touch with eternity and the world at the same time.

In All Men Are Mortal, Simone de Beauvoir sets out the necessity to be mortal in order to live a full, passionate life. She tells the story of Fosca, a man who has chosen immortality. Fosca lives forever but he has not achieved happiness. On the contrary, as centuries pass by, he understands that life is a struggle that goes on and on without an end. The understanding of this truth causes Fosca to sink into despair because he has lost his passion for life. The only way out is to be mortal, and to engage in the struggle that a particular existence within itself and that an individual conscience can make its own.

She portrays fourteenth-century Flanders, where an entire town has to deal with its own conscience. The town is besieged and the governing council is faced with a dilemma: The town council decides that only the soldiers are to be fed; but a hero, Jean Pierre, convinces the council to give true freedom to the town by allowing each member to choose his own destiny.

The people resolve to set their town afire and storm the enemy: In this play, Simone de Beauvoir shows how social institutions do not pursue freedom since they always sacrifice the individual to the collective well being. But in so doing they create victims and deep pain. The presence of free individuals makes the formation of a true community based on deep social ties possible because all the members are able to transcend their particular interests and recognise a common destiny: The answer is yes.

I find it extremely important and very helpful because more and more in contemporary society the burden of choice is charged on the individual. One reason is that there is no longer a dominant system of values but rather a plurality of systems. Moreover, in contemporary society, identity is no longer based on a fixed system of roles but is the result of a narration created by the individual himself. In her work Simone de Beauvoir demonstrates how an individual can face the necessity to choose in order to achieve freedom and joy with it.

She makes it clear that the formation of a new type of identity, based on individual narration rather than on a social model collectively imposed, is connected to the need to choose , Mariolina Graziosi Recently, sociological debate on the formation of identity has recognised this new type of identity and the roles that both ontology and narration play in its formation. For instance, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens maintains that the formation of identity is the result of reflexive activity that can emerge only in the presence of ontological trust, which is indispensable for the formation of a reflexive ego Giddens Even though Giddens recognises the link between the social and the ontological level, his idea of ontology differs from that of Simone de Beauvoir.

For him, ontological trust is the result of social interaction rather than the other face of the will to be free. Drawing from the discoveries of recent psychoanalytic contributions such as those made by Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg , he recognises the crucial role played by a stable and unified self that is the result of the care given in the first years of life Giddens She recognises the difficulty of modern man to choose to be free and in fact she says: He who does not struggle to become a subject is sub-human.

He is afraid of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged and thereby of being in a state of danger before the future, in the midst of its possibilities. He is thereby led to take refuge in the ready- made values of the serious world. He will proclaim certain opinions; he will take shelter behind a label; and to hide his indifference he will readily abandon himself to verbal outburst or even physical violence [ Unfortunately, in modern society rebellion as she defines it is ever rarer, and narcissism has replaced the ability to engage oneself in the world in order to change it Lasch Giddens recognises that contemporary man has lost the meaning of his existence because of his inability to find answers to fundamental moral questions.

He thinks it is necessary to help the individual to form trust and then reconnect to his moral roots. Other sociologists denounce the inner division of contemporary man and speak of a fragmented self. For example, Richard Sennet argues that contemporary man has developed a personality with an adapted ego separated from the self. The ego in fact is more and more flexible with respect to social requests, while the inner experience is fear of failure Sennet The contemporary individual has thus chosen flight from himself and has preferred facticity to ethics.

The question is why, since the social contradictions he has to face are not lacking and therefore he has reasons for rebelling. Simone de Beauvoir contemplates such a possibility, and she believes it emerges if nothingness predominates as a result of infantilism. An existence would be unable to find itself if moment by moment it crumbled into nothingness. That is why no moral question presents itself to the child as long as he is still incapable of recognizing himself in the past or seeing himself in the future.

It is only when the moments of his life begin to be organized into behaviour that he can decide and choose [ If I leave behind an act which I have accomplished, it becomes a thing by falling into the past. It is no longer anything but a stupid and opaque fact. In order to prevent this metamorphosis, I must ceaselessly return to it and justify it in the unity of the project in which I am engaged. For this reason, the person has a problem in connecting the past, the present and the future because he lacks the strength, that is, a mature ego, to face pain, anxiety and uncertainty.

The protagonist of The Blood of Others says of himself: You have given me the courage to accept risk and despair for ever, to endure my crimes and the remorse that will torture me until my end. Mariolina Graziosi We can conclude then by recognising that Simone de Beauvoir has made a good contribution to the understanding of the social existential condition of modern man. She demonstrates the importance of the ontological level for the formation of subjectivity and the making of a true democracy.

However, she underestimates the deep psychological need for trust. Even though she is a pioneer in recognising the importance of the self, and in this respect she anticipated the development of psychoanalysis which, after Freud, has given more and more emphasis to the analysis of the self, she understands the self not as the product of social interaction but as the product of an act of transcendence. Her limit lies in the assumption that anxiety and social constraints lead the individual, no matter what happens, to profound questioning, ignoring the strong power of collective culture which has made consumerism and pleasure, rather than pursuing joy and happiness, the main aspirations Adorno Simone de Beauvoir was deeply influenced by Hegel and by Marx.

However, she went beyond them with her faith that the individual can overcome alienation only by his own will. To recognise this aspect would have implied that she recognises the role of the psyche in deep existential experience and in the act of transcendence, as the alchemists centuries before had already understood and which, much later, Jung would re-propose. Moreover, only by achieving subjectivity is the individual 2 Jung has a different idea of the metaphysical condition. For him the deep experience of the individual is due to the presence of the archetypes that form the phylogenetic inheritance of men.

Jung defines the archetype as structure that allows the individual to give form to his experience through images that should be seen as symbols, metaphors of the deep existential experience: For this reason, the realisation of subjectivity must be the main project of the individual. Finally, Simone de Beauvoir clarifies that freedom does not mean absence of limits but rather authenticity that can be achieved by pursuing the project of the will for freedom in deep engagement with the world we live in.

Ambiguities mean in fact possibilities. The ethics of ambiguity instead evolve directly from existence, from the deep ontological needs to pose questions and find answers due to the struggle the individual faces in his own existence between failure and the assertion of freedom.

Some have accused the ethics of ambiguity of being individualistic. Simone de Beauvoir answers this accusation with the following words: She also refuses the accusation of solipsism because, she says the individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to the other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of him.

However, an individual needs help at different levels in order to form a mature personality capable of self consciousness centred on the will to be free rather than on bad faith. Unfortunately, Simone de Beauvoir believes that each person is able to save himself alone because the ambiguity of existence leads man to transcend himself.

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She says I think that [ And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goal; the certitude comes from his own drive. This can occur if the individual becomes the main value so that each life counts and is not seen instrumentally with respect to the collective.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity. Sage Publications Beauvoir de , Simone. Le sang des autres. Il sangue degli altri. The ethics of ambiguity. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Memorie di una ragazza perbene. Introduzione a Il sangue degli altri. Francis, Claude, and Fernande Gontier.

Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis. The Search for the Self. The Culture of Narcissism. Les Temps Modernes, October 1. The Corrosion of Character. The revision of the philosophical and literary legacy of Beauvoir in recent decades has given rise to varied approaches to and new investigations of her work that require a firm methodological basis, able to highlight her writing and her interpretations of the history of culture.

To read such rich and complex writing as hers, however, requires adequate methods. In her memory texts, various hermeneutic possibilities may be encountered, which, under the aspect of the aesthetic of reception, lead us to some singular questions. This paper is based on a triadic conception of her memory works and on the effects her texts have had on the traditional system of philosophical reflection.

My intention is to consider, in a certain aesthetic perspective, the question of the longevity of her memoirs. This longevity must be delimited methodologically and investigated through certain levels of reading. The conceptual level The first level is a conceptual reading; it has two axes that interact with one another.

The first axis is about the meaning of the memoirs and of their reception in the 20th century. The role of the autobiographical texts is to provide a revision of human identity, taking into account the communication between the text and the reader. According to Wolfgang Iser , — , this communication shows itself through enunciations that demonstrate the openings or gaps to be filled by the reader and with variations in reception. Nevertheless, this relation is not something that is easily apprehended by the subject of the writing.

The decision of writing corresponds to the decision of a search for that identity, as a reconquest of itself; but it is also the constitution of a distance between the I that describes and the I that lives, between life and representation. Representing oneself by the act of writing corresponds to what Gusdorf understands as a double risk: On one hand, the project of saying does not coincide with the intention of saying in a total, integral way since some residue to be described would always remain.

Life will always be confronted with the I that describes it, always unable to close its autobiographical project with a final period. On the other hand, the risk is also doubled when it is perceived that the I that describes itself and the I that is described never join one another in the space of writing Miraux , 15 owing to the fact that the closing of the subject in the textual body finds no equivalence in the continuous process of a subject of writing.

The latter propels itself into life in search of new experiences and describes it in order to give meaning to that same life. In fact, the textual locale is the place of incompleteness and should be filled by the experiences of reading. This done, one is faced with the continuous challenge of knowing how to reconstruct the historical process through which the text is always received and interpreted in a varied way by readers from different times.

What is created in the process of reading are the aesthetic judgements that arise when one compares, in some form, the current effect of a work of art — and especially a literary autobiographical text — to the historical development of its experience. Broadly considered, this communication can be revealed with enunciations that display openings or gaps to be filled in, according to Iser, but also with demands for changes in habitual projective representations, to be put forward with certain variations of reception Iser , Her autobiographical writings allow varied conceptual correlations.

The question of whether they are, precisely, in the register of autobiography or of memoirs is not a simple matter. They show both a speaking about the self that speaks mainly of the other, and are the description of history of which she is a part and that she resignifies in the process of her writing. Memory and Aesthetic Reception Her writings uniquely intensify the place of communication as the project of saying something about oneself without, however, that coinciding with the need for everything to be said.

This is also the place of emphasising the feminine in culture, the feminine in a contingent situation, before the possibility of questioning history from the perspective of the ethics of ambiguity. What is seen to emerge in her writing, as the point of departure, is the question of the inconclusiveness of existence and a relation of moral judgements through which she records what she would have been and lived from the perspective of what she is, precisely in the act of writing.

There arises, right at that point, the understanding of the status of identity that the autobiographical texts construct. Beauvoir shows that she knows how to move around with masterful naturalness in this textual complexity, pointing up the occurrences of a historical period, provoking the displacements of the understanding of existence. In her axiological and hermeneutic revisions of existence, Beauvoir brings new references to the textual corpus of autobiography.

And this idea of situation offers to the field of memory texts a normative aspect of value. If it is not possible to translate humanity through the impossible aspect of totality or universality, to think of the situation is, nevertheless, on par with not being checked by the limits imposed by culture or even by the data of the repetition of history. Her autobiographical works show themselves to be sustained by questions of importance that help us understand the reception and the sense of the memory text in the 20th century, as well as the place it comes to occupy, as philosophical and feminist, at the core of the relation between memory and aesthetic reception.

Beauvoir shows in her accounts the complexity of the relation between the naming of that which has been and which she has lived, with giving value to the I that has lived by a narrating I. Before the profundity of lived life and the possibilities for describing it, the horizon of situation is brought by her to the programme of analyses as a means to reflect the axiological junction among the varied times manifested in the text, the narrated past and the present that gives it value.

Susan Bainbrigge admits that Beauvoir anticipates several doubts expressed in the last half of the 20th century regarding the relation between experience and its autobiographical representation, as well as between identity and its shape in autobiography Bainbrigge , For Bainbrigge, despite the controversies that appeared in the s about the position that Beauvoir took with relation to existentialist valuation — were it masculine or truly feminine language — today there is no longer a place for problematising such questions, taking into consideration the many studies made in the recent decades on the place that Beauvoir occupies in the literary and philosophical fields.

Memory and Aesthetic Reception at specific moments, such as her friend Zaza Beauvoir , her mother Beauvoir and Sartre himself Beauvoir In her memory texts, Beauvoir points to a model of the subject that emerges from the conceptual emptiness stipulated by culture. Although the feminine is not culturally recognised as a genuine subject, it does not allow itself to be overturned by stigmas of inferiority.

The character reveals itself as a decentralised cultural voice that demands to be heard as something different from the prototypes of male writing. Trying to read the world and herself as a subject in this world, Beauvoir deciphers the image of the feminine, which is, at the same time, both her own image and the one that she constructs for her time, with a great impact on the future. In addition, in her autobiographical writings, such as La Force de Choses and Tout compte fait , when speaking of herself and of the 20th-century woman, in fact she writes much more about others than about herself.

She discusses literature and philosophy, describes her friends and, above all, offers Sartre as her alter ego. The alterity achieves a privileged topos on this second level since it is from the place of the other, in its ambiguous meaning, that the feminine shines forth in the opacity of its historical path. From onwards, Beauvoir questions the illusion of trust, freedom and well- being from the perspective of a woman at the beginning of the 20th century. Beauvoir , 72 In the same work, one gradually realises her ability to alter the paradigmatic male voices. Nevertheless, the ambiguous dimension of her writings is very significant and valuable.

On one hand, she brings to the written language, in this work and various others that succeeded it, a model of neutrality. She invents for herself a place of parity among the writers and philosophers of her time, shaping an emancipated vision of herself. However, her evident fidelity to a male representational system occurs only to point out the fragility of memory and the difficult, complex place of the feminine in culture.

Beauvoir , On the other hand, in order to break the duality of analysis and interpretation, Beauvoir builds a critical and provocative feminine image in culture. She inserts into the context of philosophical questions the woman in her dimension of otherness in order to point out the conceptual fragility of the universal and systematic reason of the tradition. Beauvoir , When denouncing the bourgeois morality of the 20th century, Beauvoir opens up her private life to the reader; she criticises the caricature of the feminine subject and allows it movement from the moral rules composed by conservative positions to irreverent and provocative behaviour.

She describes herself building an independent life outside the canons of marriage and motherhood, as these were considered prototypes of achievement for every woman of that century. Memory and Aesthetic Reception reconstructs the aspect of the feminine, opening up perspectives for dignity in its existence. In her building of a paradoxical image of the feminine in culture, which was composed by reflections on her life and writing, Beauvoir therefore became one of the greatest political philosophers of the 20th century.

The hermeneutic level The third level, which I call the hermeneutic, is built as an intertwining and interpretative bridge to the first two reading points. This level defends the idea that the textual construction of the feminine the character lived by Beauvoir herself provides the necessary link between the text and its readers. The link also appears between Beauvoir and the autobiographical text, allowing her to create a proper identity, that of a 20th-century philosopher able to read and write in her own language about her own time.

But we need to take into account that the complex image of the feminine that results from the memory texts is also that which points to a critical language of its time. From a certain interpretative perspective, one can indeed understand that, to Beauvoir, literature takes the place of the critical dimension and the possibilities of reviewing the path of human existence. Her critical analyses, however, always show dialectic thought with interpretative variables, characteristic of the philosophical questions.

Magda Guadalupe dos Santos Moreover, taking her life experiences as a theme for discussion, she makes possible the signification of her texts as a form of questioning of her time. Francis and Gontier , 11 Her narrative of memory demonstrates the search of the subject for its identity. Indeed, it presents the trajectory of the feminine subject, who describes her history to the other and to herself as someone who reads and rebuilds oneself in the dimension of time.

Therefore, like her readers, I dare say that it is from our attempt at revising our interpretative criteria about the place we search for and construct in history that the longevity of her thought and her memory texts achieve an aesthetic effect of reading and representation. In La segunda Mirada. Edited by Doris Moromisato, 18— The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir.

Rodopi Faux Titre, Entretiens avec Jean—Paul Sartre. El acto de leer. Francis, Claude, and Gontier, Fernande.

In Simone de Beauvoir: Olhares sobre a mulher e o feminino. Perspectives on Women and Feminine. Memory and Aesthetic Reception Gusdorf, Georges. Lignes de vie II. In Feminist interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. Edited by Margaret A. In A Literatura e o Leitor. Texts of Aesthetics of Reception. Literature and the Reader. Edited by Luiz Costa Lima, 43— Simone de Beauvoir philosophe. Presse Universitaires de France. In Il Secondo Sesso. Translated by Ada Arduini. Las escrituras del yo. French Studies 62 2: In The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.

Piccioni et Piccioni La convergence se trouve dans le fait de repousser ceux qui tentent de concilier morale et politique. Rivista di Filosofia La force des choses. Settimanale di cultura contemporanea. Psicopatologia generale, traduit par Romolo Priori. Les Temps Modernes, , , , Politik — Wirtschaft — Kultur, Giornale di cultura This article will focus on the translations and metamorphosis that some central tenets of The Second Sex have undergone in contemporary feminist theory and practice: Nadia Santoro of the text her memories and experiences of herself and her acquaintances, which she reworked in her later volumes of memories.

So what did Simone de Beauvoir do? She gave an account of her own life while backing it up scientifically. She never stopped recounting it, bravely, at every stage. In so doing she helped many women — and men? I think she also helped them to situate themselves more objectively in relation to different moments in life Irigaray , 9. Against the clear-cut distinction between theory and praxis, de Beauvoir chose to keep both within a creative tension, rooting her research on the notion of transformative intellectual practice. They make possible further elaborations and connections among different concepts and the realities conjured up by them, rather than pinning down and reifying them.

As a matter of fact, it is possible to interpret her work and the different genres she adopted and intermixed essay, novel, memoir as an example of the politics of the Symbolic as it has been defined by the Italian thought of sexual difference, the philosophical practice that strives to connect words and bodies and criticises traditional conceptual paradigms in the light of the living knowledge of experience.

As Adriana Cavarero, among others, pointed out, this practice distinguishes the Italian thought of sexual difference from the French feminist thought in spite of their close bonding. Cavarero underlines how the peculiarity of Italian feminism resides in its dual nature, namely its mobile position between theory and practice, academic research and politics. Italian feminists of sexual difference operate, first of all, within the political practices and theorise on these rather than on the canonical philosophic texts.

In the practice of self-consciousness, by meeting in a common space, women talk about their own experience, exposing oneself to the others and bringing out the unconscious material of their lives. What she defines as her permeability, her porousness with respect to the philosophical systems Sartre had elaborated, highlights her refusal of an a priori method for dealing with reality, as Marisa Forcina has argued, and her ability to change her point of view in accordance with her metamorphic attitude to the world. If a theory convinced me, it did not remain external to me; it changed my relation to the world, and coloured my experience.

As Forcina has pointed out To claim freedom and not to set beforehand any paradigmatic plan to grasp the living meant, for Simone, to seize life in its entire contingency. Therefore, in a less categorical fashion, Ursula Tidd explains that Literary and philosophical concerns are not easy to separate in her writing. Working in both disciplines, Beauvoir cites literary examples in her philosophical writing and draws on her philosophical knowledge in her literary writing. What is clear here is that even when we consciously recognise something, and disagree with something, our investments in what embodies that something cannot simply be willed away.

Ahmed , — It is the relation with the other, as Judith Butler has shown in Giving an Account of Oneself, that can redefine our engagement with reality through the very opacity of the self and the necessary incompleteness of our self- accounts. The need to reconcile independence and dependence intertwines with the necessity to unravel the desire of freedom from a reality complete in itself and considered as immutable. Woman is doomed to immorality, because for her to be moral would mean that she must incarnate a being of superhuman qualities: Let her but think, dream, sleep, desire, breathe without permission and she betrays the masculine ideal.

Beauvoir , By reformulating the master-slave dialectics within the terms of gender asymmetry Butler , 12 , she developed the corporeal implications of the lack of reciprocity within self-Other relations. As Braidotti aptly puts it, Simone de Beauvoir observed […] that the price men pay for representing the universal is a kind of loss of embodiment; the price women pay, on the other hand, is a loss of subjectivity and confinement to the body.

The problematical and ambiguous relationship between biological body and subjectivity will be analysed by Butler, as well as by the Italian thought on sexual difference, as a strictly symbolic issue: Actually, the theme connecting the two sections of The Second Sex is the evident conflict between two conceptions of the body: As a condition of access to the world, the body is being comported beyond itself, sustaining a necessary reference to the world and, thus, never self-identical natural entity. See Butler , 12— Sexed Thought and Corporeal Politics body is lived and experienced as the context and medium of all strivings.

According to Beauvoir the issue of the other and the practices of othering are where our interrogation of the patterns of subordination and unilateral exclusion within the relationship between man and woman should start. But while, following Hegel, she reminds us that the master and the slave, through struggle and labour, are able to claim, in different phases of the historical process, their status as distinct subjects and recognise each other as a different self-consciousness, the woman is outside of this dialectics.

Nonetheless, Beauvoir states the contingency of this state of being: Bringing to the fore the binary economy that structures phallogocentrism, for the first time Beauvoir revealed the gendered meanings attached to the different embodiments of sexual difference: Going beyond the presumed and harmonious complementarity between men and women depicted by Hegel, Beauvoir shows how a different division of the symbolic labour works on the sexed subjects involved. This dream incarnated is precisely woman. She is the wished-for intermediary between nature, which is foreign to man, and the fellow who is too identical to him.

She opposes to him neither the enemy silence of nature nor the hard demand of a reciprocal recognition. By a unique privilege she is a consciousness; and yet it seems possible to possess her in her flesh. Thanks to her, there is a means of escaping from the implacable dialectic of master and slave that has its source in the reciprocity of liberties. Moreover, the questioning of the classical model of transcendence as disembodied freedom at work in The Second Sex leads to a thorough reconsideration of the meanings of autonomy and dependence.

Sexed Thought and Corporeal Politics respect to the autistic self-confidence of the master. In his search for symbolic and material liberty, Tommasi argues, the slave could transform his subaltern status into a more profound consciousness of the acquiescence he bestowed on the master. To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist for him also, mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.

The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles — desire, possession, love, dream, adventure — worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us — giving, conquering, uniting — will not lose their meaning. Going back to the master-slave dialectic, beside their asymmetrical relationship, she considered their reciprocal flight from a full acceptance of human embodiment see Beauvoir , Yet, it also relates to the need to rebuild the social contract on a new paradigm, one that is based on relationality, dependence on the other and bodily vulnerability.

As Penelope Deutscher has argued, the experience of eros, as discussed by Beauvoir, is one in which the ambiguity of our condition is most poignantly disclosed to us, here defining the ambiguity of our condition as our simultaneous status as subject and other, flesh and mind. Sexed Thought and Corporeal Politics the miracles — desire, possession, love, dream, adventure — worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us — giving, conquering, uniting — will not lose their meaning.

Authentic love ought to be founded on the mutual recognition of two liberties; the lovers would then experience themselves both as self and as other: For the one and for the other, love would be revelation of self by the gift of self and enrichment of the world. Beauvoir , Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Translated by Peter Green. By Dunham was already famous for her role in the ballet La Guiablesse, choreographed by Ruth Page, which was also based on and named after the Hearn story.

The ambiguousness of her allegiances—to the devil-woman or to the doudou?

The spell with which she attempted to curse me rebounded upon her. Her quimboiseuse must have mistaken the recipe.

Derniers numéros

But does one need a spell to charm men? Martinican women, daughters of love and sunshine, are everyone knows it the most beautiful of all Antillean women. What is a Guadelopean woman, for example, compared to a Martinican woman? Elvire was forgotten by the sun, she was a flower without perfume and all the quimbois in the world could not help her.

Quimbois and the supernatural become a way Martinican women can employ the doudou strategically, for their own social or material benefit. Who is to judge the sincerity of her apparently willing subjection? But what is meant by exoticism? The whole world belongs to us.

Être noir en Espagne

Breton erects a vision of Martinique that belongs to him, the disingenuousness of his claim lying in its overtly colonial language of possessing the earth. These branches, what bows drawn for the arrows of our thoughts! Doudouism at its most refined, at its most liberal. West Indian feminism occupies a space of the fantastic in order to reanimate the inanimate body of the land. This language of weeds and lianas, of conquering carnivorous flowers and strange fruits rising from the mulched and dead carcasses of their fellow plants, envisions a different way of moving through space.

As a result she resorts to the vertical rather than lateral movement of growing things, reclaiming and transforming the space from which she had historically been associated by men with access to lateral movement. Growth and, by association, female reproductive labor, is here valorized and qualified as a kind of movement, as a kind of exploration. It is a world where the surrealist and marvelous realities of night grapple with the mundane realities of a colonial daytime. It is not simply a matter of blasting these images of man and nature apart.

He does not struggle and strive but simply grows irrepressibly and involuntarily. His placenta nourishes the roots of coconut trees, 27 and his grave grows its stubble of grass in protest and defiance of death Quite the opposite of the guiablesse and the soukougnan, the plant-man is unable to use his paltry disguise to manipulate or beguile his potential oppressor. Through this pseudo-metamorphosis, the West Indian has only managed to fool himself.

Far from rhymes, from complaints, from breezes, from parroquets. Bamboo, we sentence doudou literature to death. To hell with the hibiscus, the frangipane, the bougainvillea. Martinican poetry will be cannibal or it will not exist. In this way she does not kill doudou literature but rather zombifies it, using its already dead husk to do her bidding. She understands that to disavow the landscape to which she is tied by birth and by literature, metonymically, is to disavow her own position as a woman of color. So she reanimates and makes literal the tropes of the doudou in the person of the plant-man, a changed and abstracted version of the flower and fruit women of doudou literature, defamiliarizing and literalizing, creating strange and surreal monsters out of the language that has been passed down to her.

She shows Hearn, Breton, and all the writers of doudou literature that she too can personify, she too can use metonymies of women-land to her own ideological ends. Both kinds of reproduction are the fruits of life in the tropics. When faced with the beauty of the tropics, even the most attentive of poets feel their powers of perception desert them, too overwhelmed by beauty to interrogate the reality beneath its surface: Hers is an expansion of the real to include the dreams of doudous far and wide.

Antilles-Africa, thanks to the drumbeats, allows nostalgia for terrestrial spaces to live within insular hearts. Who will fulfill that nostalgia? The fulfillment of the nostalgia for a lost African past results in the fantastic space of Antilles-Africa, which demands a reality in which the dream of unknown places complements the lived experience of the local—in short, a reality of diaspora.

This reality is hard-won in the face of great geographic and historical obstacles. Haiti, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Florida. Their plight is symbolized by the tail of a hurricane sweeping over these lands, unified in misery, standing in fellowship under the history that has happened to them, yet unaware even of their shared struggle. Misery, it seems, is general over the Caribbean, but can be conceptualized only in fragments.

Only from above—from the window of a Pan-American Airways flight, from the heights of hills in Haiti—can Caribbean reality be grasped and visualized as one of union rather than separation: And as for the hummingbird-women, the women of four races and dozens of bloodlines, they are no longer there. Nor are the heliconias, nor the frangipanis or the flamboyant trees, nor the palms in the moonlight, nor those world-famous sunsets.

While the stereotypes remain, the pan-Caribbean perspective minimizes them. The doudou is superseded by a feat of perspective. Allying Martinique with Haiti and ultimately with Africa shows that beneath the camouflage of a model colony—whose men have served as colonial administrators in West Africa, whose women have been concubines and lovers, whose children have learned French—lies a rejection of the sacrifices, inconsistencies, and betrayals necessitated by colonial life. The doudou is a skin she removes, like the fabled soukougnan, to reveal the pain and rage of Creole femininity.

Her camouflage into the beauty of the tropics masks her rebellious heart, just as her rootedness in the blockaded space of Vichy Martinique masks her affinity with other places of rebellion. For a full genealogy of the representation of female shapeshifting and vampirism in West Indian literature and folklore, see Anatol As Anatol notes, the soukougnan exists in various incarnations across the Afro-diasporic folklore, including that of the Anglophone Caribbean and the American South.

The French translation of this text in the s was popular both in the French West Indies and metropolitan France. Hearn , categorizes Martinican folklore as particularly outlandish: Fanon [] , 24 goes so far as to state that the goal of the text is to enable an idealized form of love: A prime example of this brand of scholarship is Arnold , which I discuss later in this essay. A few notable exceptions to this trend include Makward and Cottias and Dobie Sharpley-Whitting argues that this oversimplified reading actually denies the character the autonomy and financial agency that she exhibited in the book as a self-sufficient businesswoman 38— In Martinique the traffic in various charms, curses, and healing rites performed by local magicians are called quimbois.

Mais est-il besoin de sort pour charmer les hommes? Qui comblera cette nostalgie? Ni les balisiers, ni les frangipanier et les flamboyants, ni les palmes au clair de lune, ni les coucher de soleil unique au monde. Pourtant elles y sont. Sign In or Create an Account. Research Article September 01 Meridians 17 1: Standard View Views Icon Views. The Things That Fly in the Night: The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Volume 17, Issue 1. Women, Nature, and the Challenge of the Doudou.

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