I’m finishing work on a big (in length and, well, I have to hope, significance—who would write without such doses of delusion?) essay on Judith Butler, focusing on the roots of the idea of ‘gender’ in Butler’s 1980s engagement with Gadamer(‘s Hegel), French existentialism, and the lesbian/feminist ‘sex wars’. As part of that, I’ve been revisiting Beauvoir, whom Butler wrote about back then in rather disparaging and limited terms, in part surely out of an anxiety of influence thing (Kristeva also shit a lot on Beauvoir in the 60s and 70s as she was coming up; and Butler shit on Kristeva—it’s like those SHADY DIVAS ON DIVAS Youtube compilations I love to watch).
For a few years, Beauvoir was a big part of my thinking (not least because I was teaching The Second Sex at UChicago) and writing. I was somewhat interested, in my very early days of public writing on politics and political thinking—in 2019—in seeing how Beauvoir’s phase of non-communist existentialist leftism, from say 1945 to 1949 (the period in which The Second Sex was written) could be a resource for reviving what I took to be the failing intellectual and affective basis of our liberal democracy, and also (is this a contradiction?) for kicking the latter’s rotten timber.
Thus there was an essay for Tablet appreciating Beauvoir’s defense of the death penalty, and of the proper role of hate in politics (I’d now say, via Arendt and Michael Denneny, that this is about the importance of personal, ethical judgment—that is, evaluations that engage our own personhood and that of the person judged—beyond universal moral norms or practical political decisions about what to do with society’s enemies). Which led to another defense of hate, as well as resentment, in my review of a book by a former student of Martha Nussbaum who tried to lend some legitimacy to this emotion constitutive of our political life and of our ‘identities’ (he did not like the review—which he’d solicited from me!).
A few weeks ‘before’ Covid (that is, before Covid became a problem for me personally) I wrote something of a ‘Straussian’ interpretation of Beauvoir’s short and not much read book about her travels in the United States, America Day by Day, thinking about the tension between her desire for social democracy and universal equality, on the one hand, and her aristocratic view of the life of the mind on the other—a problem of course that runs through Tocqueville’s book about the US, as well as the Straussian tradition (I’ve written about it in Fukuyama and Bloom)—and, I’ve argued, through the work of thinkers like Susan Sontag.
At the same time, I gave a lecture at St John’s College Santa Fe on another rather forgotten Beauvoir book, Old Age, arguing that, seen from its vantage, we can appreciate the ways in which Beauvoir—concerned with the meanings of unavoidable and even tragic biological realities, and the difficulty of living them rightly—is much more interesting and challenging than a prophet of the social construction of gender. A point I furthered a year later in a little essay on her notion of lived experience, which is anything but authoritative.
I tried in other ways, too, to sell Beauvoir to ‘the right’, as if this might make the latter less retarded (it didn’t; what could?), bringing her in, for example, to an essay on (the I wanted to stress, not simply Laschian—I think Lasch is retarded, although sometimes I have said so more gently) idea of ‘narcissism’ as a political phenomenon in City Journal:
In his Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud defined narcissism as a perverse over-investment in one’s own image. He associated it with depression, arguing that as individuals withdraw their interest from the external world, often in the aftermath of some disappointing experience, they frequently reorient their attention to themselves. Unable to create a satisfying reality, they try to maintain a pristine self-image.
Such efforts are doomed to fail, as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in her account of narcissism in The Second Sex. Arguing that women are particularly vulnerable to narcissism in a sexist society that limits their ambition, Beauvoir noted that narcissists only seem to turn inward. In fact, they desperately need external validation to maintain their precarious sense of themselves. People who cannot find satisfaction and a sense of identity through their activity in the real world, she warned, will not be able to find them in the cultivation of a positive self-image. Women who seek validation from men, for instance, however fascinating they may be to men in the short-term, will inevitably spoil their own efforts with their unsatisfiable demands, making their partners and themselves miserable.
Beauvoir hoped that, as opportunities for women in the workforce grew, narcissism would cease to be a problem. Instead, as Christopher Lasch observed in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, narcissism became the general condition of late-twentieth-century life. Lasch argued that in the face of growing economic and cultural precarity (evidenced by the stagnation of wages, decline of unions, and more general erosion of institutions for civic association such as clubs and churches), individuals could no longer count on their professional roles or identities within their families and communities to sustain their sense of self. What looked to some optimistic observers as a blossoming of self-expression and alternative lifestyles—gay liberation, feminism, and the more general vogue for therapeutic self-exploration—was, from Lasch’s perspective, a desperate attempt by lonely, vulnerable people to replace material and psychic security with the illusory security of a self that, amid the uncertainties of a world in flux, could at least be known and declared to others.
Sometimes my having fun with the idea of a ‘based Beauvoir’ was more pointed at the tensions within lib pieties, as in this aside from my essay on how my students combined progressive and meritocratic discourses in their sad nervous narratives about themselves:
…centuries of oppression would seem rather likely to diminish the capacities of members of oppressed groups. When I confront students with Simone de Beauvoir’s version of this argument as we read The Second Sex (Beauvoir was concerned to explain why there had been, in her opinion, no female geniuses), they are horrified to find the mother of modern feminism insisting that oppression makes the oppressed objectively “inferior.” Women, still suffering the effects of historical and present-day sexism, are not yet “as good” as men in many fields, Beauvoir claimed. But students, and Americans more generally, prefer to imagine that oppression, however traumatic, in no way deprives the oppressed of merit. Thus, we can both speak of racism and sexism, in ever more dramatic terms, as terrible national problems, without having to imagine that increasing “diversity” in various fields of work will mean any loss of competence.
And, finally, feminism being the practice of bashing other women’s theories of feminism, I invoked Beauvoir to dump on Lauren Berlant, Andrea Long Chu, and Anastasia Berg for being annoying dum-dums in last year’s essay on Chu:
In her magisterial The Second Sex (1949), for example, Simone de Beauvoir gave exquisitely detailed, sensitive, and often scathingly moralistic attention to the seductions of femininity—from the role of mommy’s good little girl to that of the vamp, the housewife, or the lesbian—without, however, ever forgetting that the point is not to condemn either individual women’s choices or a free-floating “femininity” (as ghostly and unkillable as the “masculinity” at which Solanas and Chu took aim) but to change our material conditions.
For Chu, following Berlant, however, the horizons of politics and feminism have receded to an anguished coming-to-terms with our problematic desires. Gender, and indeed race, appear in her work as something one ought not to want. Femininity, especially in the autogynephilic form Chu revels in, strikes anyone who has gone to graduate school in the humanities as the historical product of pernicious ideologies of patriarchal power. Race, such people likewise know, is an exclusionary, imaginary community founded on the violent suppression of difference and the establishment of hierarchies. But Chu wants them, and she insists that “we” want them, too. As she put it to an apparently delighted Anastasia Berg, “everyone should be allowed to want things that are bad for them.”
In Chu’s essays, Berlant’s attempt to consider how our desires may lead us to self-defeating patterns of identification and action—particularly, she argued in the more lucid moments of Cruel Optimism, in our political and economic context characterized by “impasse” and declining prospects—becomes an excuse to celebrate, first, “bad” desires as fascinatingly messy and complex, and second, Chu herself, as someone at last brave enough to admit that we want bad things.
These essays and asides about Beauvoir didn’t generate much of anything in the larger discourse, and in the past year or two I’ve been thinking more, woman-wise, with Arendt, Sontag, and Kristeva (getting slightly closer to the present, but still not in our century)—and I suppose I’m getting pretty bored of the move of finding surprising, provocative, problematic dimensions of this or that thinker (Beauvoir from the left, Schmitt from the right, say) by which to appeal both to liberalism’s defenders and its enemies (both of them, of course, living in my head) and show that we could imagine our attachment to our regime in novel, exciting terms, as well as of the move of showing that the thinkers who laid the groundwork for postmodernity (Foucault, Barthes, queer theorists—and, watch out, Butler) offer us a repertory of concepts and moves for resisting the retardedness of the contemporary cultural left, which ought to be resisted, critically, for the sake of postmodernity’s real and recoverable affordances, its lost treasures.
No one was buying! I was struck, for instance, how at St John’s the faculty, who after all had invited me and were very nice, had little engagement with po-mo and more contemporary thought outside, for a few of them, of a particular Heideggerian tradition. And of course the broader moment of critical theory being taken up by the right, which people like Geoff Shullenberger have described (and participated in) has mostly worked in an incredibly stupid and destructive way that is basically hostile (characterized by opposition to ‘the system,’ elites, rationality, etc, and basically by posturing as if they want to do a right-wing version of the late 60s) to what I see as the constructive dimensions of postmodern thought, a critique that I started to make with Michael Cuenco in this ‘blueprint’ for a new politics (my contribution is mostly a critique of right-wing Foucauldians, and of Foucault—though I still love him!).
At my age Beauvoir was working on an essay Pyrrhus et Cinéas in which all action is haunted by the question, “and then what?”—the task I guess of thinking and aging is getting oneself to ask it instead more as “What Now?”
The journey from Beauvoir to Banks…