Michelle Boulous Walker

Transcription

1 SPECIAL ISSUE MAX DEUTSCHER VOLUME 1V ISSUE ISSN: X Pages Michelle Boulous Walker Writing Couples: Reading Deutscher on Sartre and Beauvoir ABSTRACT The figure of the writing couple is a useful starting point for thinking about what it is that Max Deutscher does in his book Genre and Void: Looking Back at Sartre and Beauvoir (2003). This particular couple occupies a considerable imaginary space in twentieth century philosophical discussion, and Deutscher s approach does much to bring it into a contemporary and even very local focus. His desire to keep [both Sartre and Beauvoir] in motion as part of contemporary thinking (p.ix) finds expression in an idiosyncratic or homely reading that brings the couple back to us anew. A certain peripheral vision guides Deutcher s looking back, allowing him to develop Sartre s and Beauvoir s work in relation to a new and contemporary horizon. As a consequence, Deutscher s homely reading engages in ethical ways with their work, bringing to light the wondrous qualities in Sartre s and Beauvoir s writing that we have, over time, lost the ability to see. BIOGRAPHY Michelle Boulous Walker lectures in philosophy at The University of Queensland and is a member of the European Philosophy Research Group. She is author of "Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence" and editor of "Performing Sexualities". She publishes in the areas of Feminist philosophy and European philosophy, with a particular focus on questions of ethics and aesthetics. She is currently writing a book on ethics and reading, "Philosophy, Reading and Love." 45

2 WRITING COUPLES: READING DEUTSCHER ON SARTRE AND BEAUVOIR I get a new grip on what I am framing, for myself, the way in which another views me. I go past simply being an object for the other, and establish my own point of view upon the way I have been framed. It is in this way that I can frame the way someone has been framing me that I get beyond myself, as it were, so as to see knowledge, as if from the point of view of others, as simply there. i Many of us have thought long and hard about the relation between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Beauvoir, i.e. as a couple in the various senses of the term: emotional, intellectual, symbolic, and, of course, writing. ii, iii The question of the writing couple Beauvoir-Sartre (for why should he always come first?) might be a useful starting point for how we think about what it is that Max Deutscher does in his book Genre and Void: Looking Back at Sartre and Beauvoir. iv And I m led to think so by recalling something that Alice Jardine wrote well over twenty years ago now. In Death Sentences: Writing Couples and Ideology, Jardine has the following to say: The question of the couple has become the object of contemporary philosophical fascination, where all metaphysical couples are in the process of being discoupled, recoupled differently and urgently: active/passive, form/matter, speech/writing, conscious/unconscious. This work has been pursued by some of us because these couples, intrinsic to the ensemble of symbolic systems in the West would indeed appear to be modeled on the couple: Man/Woman, Masculine/Feminine Couples. We tend to think in couples even when we try very hard not to; we revise the concept of the couple, we re-write it, we mediate it in new ways, but couples are very hard to get away from. It s just the way we think in the West, have been trained to think based on the force of the copula, of copulation v The various senses of the term writing couple that Jardine alludes to in this work the conceptual couple and the biographemic real-life human couple offer us a way of posing questions to Deutscher s book: how is this most famous of philosophical couples rendered here? What kind of Sartre and Beauvoir emerge from these pages? Of course we can extend these questions to the much more general one: Why Sartre and Beauvoir? And if we do, we open a myriad of concerns that touch upon the central significance of the couple, Sartre and Beauvoir, for the contemporary philosophical imagination. Again to Jardine: By what authorization may I write of them now? [It is Sartre has just died, Beauvoir remains behind. ] But I will, because one of the things the thousands of people (including myself) who walked behind Sartre s coffin in Montparnasse were saying was that we both can and cannot continue, now, without the couple, Beauvoir and Sartre; that, in any case, no one can continue to think/write in the ways that it is urgent for us to think/write in the West without first having written and thought with Sartre the philosopher. Phenomenology, empiricism, metaphysics, the ego cogito, the Imaginary, the Other, dialectics, even ideology, or poetics, become just so many contemporary buzz words unless one has recognized that 25 years of French thought have been transcribing those words through Sartre, against Sartre killing the Father. Foucault was one of the very few to recognize that fact. And what of our feminist-mother? My thoughts of her are haunted by this death of a monolithic couple and its discourse. vi Remember, Jardine is writing (originally) in 1982 in the immediacy of Sartre s death, at a time when France and possibly the entire western philosophical imagination is coming to terms with the loss of the couple, Sartre and Beauvoir. (When Sartre dies, the couple dies too? vii ) In a significantly different world, that is, Australia in 2003, Max Deutscher revisits this most fascinating of writing couples in order to bring them back to life, to work upon ideas to be found in Sartre and Beauvoir, so as to keep them in motion as part of contemporary thinking viii Now, despite the enormous chasm that separates Jardine in 1982 from Deutscher in 2003, it is noteworthy that he begins with the following words: To conduct contemporary philosophy in the light of the phenomenological tradition within which Being and Nothingness and The Second Sex occurred as such striking events, requires that one find idiomatic ways of reading being, nothingness, being-in-itself, being-foritself and being-for-others ( L ệtre, le néant, l être-en-soi, l être-pour-soi and l être-pourautrui ). ix, x Deutscher reminds us that the contemporary philosophical terrain bears a certain considerable debt to this writing couple. Not just to Sartre. Not any simple debt, and certainly not any simple couple. It is, I think, a debt that is bound to the order of memory and forgetting. And no doubt mourning and melancholia, as well. Of course I use these not in sentimental terms, but rather in the way that Freud intends. Our remembering Sartre and Beauvoir today involves an active, transferential relation to them. It necessitates a re-reading that allows us to re-cast their work, to re-write it if you like. And this is, I believe, precisely what Deutscher has done. For instance, Deutscher returns to Sartre s project of recognizing being conscious without making a thing of it through Sartre s neologism néantir (to nihilate or void ), and imagines it here, today, as making nothing of or even more idiomatically, making light of ; we are free to make a lighter reading of consciousness is a 46

3 nothingness. To be conscious is to make nothing of something about being to make light of how things are. xi, xii By doing so, Deutscher begins the work of bringing the Sartre of 1943 into a contemporary place and time. xiii Interestingly, he refers to this as a homely reading, noting that we shall create at least one very satisfactory and revealing reading if we hear to nihilate as to make nothing of, or to make light. xiv, xv This homely reading extends to Deutscher s re-imagining the orthodox being-for-itself as living for oneself, and being-for-others as living for others. xvi, xvii The importance of this imaginative, contemporary rendering lies, Deutscher says, in the fact that we have little way of avoiding the hypnotic effect of reification xviii unless we divest the orthodox term of its sedimented aura. Now it is this homely reading that I think characterizes the heart and soul of Deutscher s book on Beauvoir and Sartre. xix It is this desire to render contemporary, to render now to keep them in motion as part of contemporary thinking that lends it its distinctive tone, its distinctive appeal. We might think of this homely reading, as Matthew Lamb suggests, as a kind of peripheral reading, an observing from the peripheries of a metropole philosophy; and this is possibly, as well, a particularly Australian way to read. Just as Beauvoir, in her day, is able to read Sartre from the peripheries as a woman finding vistas in his work that other metropole philosophers (such as Foucault) would miss, Deutscher, too, as distant Australian reads with a certain peripheral vision (hears with a foreign ear?), and this permits a new and contemporary horizon. No need, then, to kill off the Father. Beauvoir and Deutscher thus escape Foucault s rather Oedipal fate. Now all of this brings back to mind Meaghan Morris piece, published in the year after Sartre s death, Import Rhetoric concerning the real work that we do here observing/reading from the peripheries, and translating what comes in from over there. xx So, Deutscher s homely reading literally brings Beauvoir and Sartre home to us here and now, allowing us to hear their work in new and contemporary ways. And one of the ways that this homely reading proceeds is to turn up the (historical) volume on what passes between Sartre and Beauvoir. xxi This might help us to understand something of the Beauvoir-Sartre writing couple that Deutscher constructs. xxii From the outset, he wants to capture something of the (unconscious? unintentional? peripheral?) irreverence that Beauvoir s re-working of Sartre s terms achieves. xxiii Indeed, he writes: Beauvoir s debt to these terms is less continuous and less intense. I hope to show that in making more connections with biology, economics, history and social circumstances and, not least, sexuality and sexual difference, her use has already shifted a good deal more towards a flexible idiom, xxiv an idiom we might think of as grounded in the materiality of the world. Now Beauvoir, in Deutscher s description, re-writes Sartre in a manner which interestingly anticipates Deutscher s own project. She is the voice that inflects Sartre s words toward the other in a more intimate, and we might say homely, manner. We have seen, Deutscher writes, how Beauvoir is subverting his phenomenology of an inevitable antagonism between I and Other, both by an ethical appeal ( generosity ) and an importation of issues of economy, social structure and political factors into a philosophical understanding of what goes on in constructing an Other. xxv, xxvi, xxvii If this is the case, if Beauvoir paradoxically completes Sartre s account by subverting (revising or extending xxviii ) it, then what does this mean for our writing couple? Are we to think of Beauvoir as the one who writes at home or who is at home in a way that Sartre can never be? xxix Or are we to think of her as always having the final say? Certainly some have interpreted La Cérémonie des adieux in this manner. Whatever the case, it is worth pondering what we might refer to as the transferential relations Deutscher sets up between Beauvoir and himself. In this book, Deutscher arguably plays contemporary Beauvoir to the Sartre of old. Deutscher identifies with Beauvoir xxx to the point that the famous writing couple comes to live again to be updated for the modern age. This identification allows Deutscher an unusual intimacy with Sartre s work an intimacy that develops a conversational, idiomatic exchange. It frees him to speak with Sartre, to listen and then to respond as if conversing not simply reading or reacting. Now, a psychoanalytic reading might suggest something along the lines that Beauvoir s maternal voice is spoken for here, allowing a certain access to the Father s speech. Of course this presupposes Beauvoir and Sartre as mother and father in a slight twist on the traditional Oedipal scheme. Beauvoir, as mother at home and homely re-writes the father s abstract and antagonistic account of self and other in more generous terms. Beauvoir s homely revision resists the brutality of Sartre s public domain. In The Second Sex Beauvoir s homely re-working of existential themes resists what we might think of as Sartre s efforts to domesticate (her) thought. And it is precisely this homely position that Deutscher develops further in his own account. To say this is to suggest, quietly, that Deutscher takes on the mother s homely role, that he becomes Beauvoir in writerly ways. But, equally, it might be to suggest that Deutscher plays go-between (translator) between Beauvoir and Sartre between mother and father carefully teasing out the possibility of a continued exchange in imaginary (and imaginative) ways. If this is the case, then Deutscher s role, or roles, are crucial in our understanding of precisely what kind of writing couple his work constructs. 47

4 While much of Deutscher s account goes on to depict the Beauvoir-Sartre writing couple as one embodying significant (theoretical) tension, or at least as a work in process a process of initiation (Sartre) and critical revision (Beauvoir) in his closing remarks, Deutscher re-unites this writing couple in what we might cautiously think of as a kind of idealized (parental?) unity: Allow me, he writes, in departing this text, a laudatory remark about Beauvoir and Sartre s writing that I make in the face of the recurring tendency to disparage any new philosophy by condemning it as fashionable or modish. xxxi The phrase Beauvoir and Sartre s writing suggests in these final pages a unity, a construction at odds with Deutscher s earlier analysis of a couple (or ensemble) comprising two independent writers. Beauvoir and Sartre s writing becomes, briefly, a thing spoken of in the singular an object both identifiable and secure. Despite the criticism that Sartre and Beauvoir s language and method has attracted, they did succeed in clearing a track between a dualism that occludes mentality from view and touch, and a materialism that oversimplifies what is available to perception in the body s motions and dispositions. This work is now the common inheritance of all philosophers serious money in intellectual terms. And for us of this new century, we need to re-invent this legacy from Sartre and Beauvoir s domesticated and sexualized phenomenology. For otherwise we seem unable to find an escape route from the legacy of the last century. The dogged alternatives of extreme materialism, or of a mystery in simply being conscious a dichotomy only exacerbated by analytical philosophy. xxxii There is a sense, here, that the unity Sartre-Beauvoir, the couple reunited, serves as privileged moment in the past, capable of projecting us safely into the future. To be sure, we need to rethink this legacy to re-invest it. But as Deutscher suggests, the advantage of so doing is to avoid the staggering inertia of finding ourselves caught back in between the alternatives of extreme materialism and idealism a warring couple if ever there was one! This desire to reunite the couple and have it serve as ground for our own projects of philosophical renewal can be read in the closing passage to Deutscher s book when he writes: Beauvoir s and Sartre s work is now so far from being fashionable as to be at risk of being appropriated by the conservatism of tradition. But it was the height of fashion. It is the space of half a century that frees us to perceive the force of their writing, and thus to resist that conservative appropriation. We can be reminded by their adventures that we must fashion philosophy. Otherwise we only hammer at its perennial problems. Beauvoir and Sartre challenge us to keep philosophy open to diverse genres of discourse. We can then take our turn in disrupting the illusion that knowledge and understanding are voiced as if by one, unique, speaking subject. At the same time we can play our part in renewing the xxxiii, xxxiv sometimes-lyrical power of philosophy s reason. What emerges from Deutscher s account of the unity Beauvoir and Sartre is the sense in which the Beauvoir-Sartre writing couple continues to function in highly symbolic and imaginary ways. xxxv While each of these writers can be and is, of course, considered in his or her own terms, it is the couple united the two together that arguably continues to draw our most passionate consideration and reaction. While there are various ways that we might begin to think through the reasons for this attraction, and Jardine, of course, offers some of these, I think that one of the many strengths of Deutscher s account lies in the way that it perhaps unconsciously brings questions, such as these, to the fore. Deutscher s own rendering of the writing couple is arguably symptomatic of a cultural fascination based on the force of the copula, and simultaneously an invitation to think through what this might possibly mean. And yet there is more to say. The sub-title to Deutscher s book Looking Back at Sartre and Beauvoir brings us back to what I think of as the ethical gesture of his reading. In looking back, Deutscher does a number of things. To begin with, he reminds us of the centrality of Sartre s work on the gaze or look (le regard). Simply put, Deutscher s reading returns the gaze, looking back at the object Sartre and Beauvoir. Deutscher frames the couple from the perspective of here and today. And yet, this is no adequate description of what Deutscher ultimately achieves. To simply return the gaze would be to counter Sartre in wholly Sartrean terms; to remain within the Sartrean universe. And in addition, it would be to trap Beauvoir in this world as well. The self-conscious use of such an over-determined Sartrean motif in any return to Sartre and Beauvoir would mean a framing of their complex and individual works in arguably reductive Sartrean terms. So, what is it that Deutscher does when he looks back? I have, in part, already indicated a possible response to this question. When Deutscher looks back, it is often Beauvoir who is doing the looking (countering, disarming, or neutralizing the Sartrean gaze). Beauvoir s sophisticated re-workings of Sartre s ontology provide the gaze that positions Sartre s work in very particular ways (a looking back at Beauvoir looking back at Sartre?) But this 48

5 looking back is anything but a simple objectified return of the gaze. It is arguably a regard of an entirely different kind. We might, for example, think of this looking back as a loving regard ; xxxvi a look that engages the other in ethical ways, extends the other, entices more from the other. xxxvii Now, it is this regard, I think, that motivates Deutscher s own regard his own looking back. And I want to suggest that when he looks back from here and now from the antipodean peripheries of French philosophical thought that this local or homely regard provides him with an ethical space that allows for a reading of an entirely different kind. Let me suggest that Deutscher s homely reading allows him to look back at Sartre and Beauvoir in wonder, and that (like Descartes) he is surprised by what he finds. xxxviii When he looks, he is full of admiration for possibilities that have still to be found within their writing. Rather than imagining that we have said all that there is that can possibly be said of the two, Deutscher insists that if we look again, we will be surprised by what we might have overlooked. Now to suggest this is, of course, to think of the important work that Luce Irigaray has done in retrieving wonder from Descartes work, and it is to think of the work of looking back as the ethical space that affords us the time to contemplate in wonder. This contemplation allows us the space/distance/interval to engage the other in this sense to experience Sartre and Beauvoir anew. Wonder, according to Descartes, is the first of all the passions. xxxix It is a sudden surprise of the soul which causes it to apply itself to consider with attention the objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary. xl It is, perhaps, (in Freud s terms) an unheimlich encounter that repositions the familiar in a wondrous or even disconcerting way: for we shall only wonder at that which appears rare and extraordinary to us, and nothing can so appear excepting because we have been ignorant of it, or also because it is different from the thing we have known; for it is this difference which causes it to be called extraordinary. xli This unheimlich encounter troubles the certainty of our knowledge of the world. Wonder provides the passion of movement that for Irigaray enables us to remain faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world. xlii Wonder, she claims, is indispensable to the creation of an ethics. xliii It is the point of passage between two closed worlds, two definite universes, two space-times or two others determined by their identities, two epochs, two others. xliv In Irigaray s hands, Descartes wonder becomes a model of ethical encounter, and I think that what she sees here is a good way of thinking about what Deutscher s reading achieves. In his homely reading, Deutscher somewhat paradoxically brings us toward the unheimlich the unrecognized or not yet recognized elements in Sartre s and Beauvoir s thought. In the coupling of Sartre with Beauvoir, Deutscher leaves an interval that allows us to wonder at their difference, and thus to experience them anew. And it is this space, both between Sartre and Beauvoir, and between Deutscher and the two, that makes possible the ground for an ethical encounter ethics here denoting a willingness to be surprised by what we believe we already know. xlv This wondrous reading slows our impulse to read too quickly, too hastily, offering us cause to ponder the meanings that Sartre s and Beauvoir s work might hold for us today. Wonder, too, counters the twin specters of angst and objectifying gaze that haunt the Sartrean text, re-positioning philosophy and philosophical work as an open and optimistic engagement with the other. It is little wonder, then, that Deutscher s reading inspires the perpetual movement of thought, reminding us that our philosophical work is so much more than simply a means to some already known or imagined end. REFERENCES My thanks to Matthew Lamb for his helpful reading of this work. i Max Deutscher, Genre and Void: Looking Back at Sartre and Beauvoir (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 169. ii I say this, but more accurately I mean that of those of us who work on Beauvoir s writing there is much thought given to the couple Beauvoir-Sartre. Those who focus on Sartre rarely, if ever, consider his work in relation to Beauvoir. The couple exists for those of us with a serious interest in Beauvoir s thought. This situation mirrors, in an interesting way, the arguably asymmetrical writing couple that Beauvoir and Sartre themselves comprise. While each reads the other, there is little direct evidence of this point in Sartre s own writing. Sartre makes few references to Beauvoir s writing in his published works. However, Beauvoir famously provides frequent literary references to Sartre s writing in her own published works. For a discussion of the complexity of influence and reference between the two, see my Love, Ethics and Authenticity: Beauvoir s Lesson in What it Means to Read, Hypatia 25, 2010 (forthcoming). iii The couple who both write can also be thought of as the couple who, over decades, write to each other as well. iv Deutscher, Genre and Void. 49

6 v Alice Jardine, Death Sentences: Writing Couples and Ideology, in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), From earlier papers presented at the MLA in 1982 and Columbia University Colloquium on Poetics in vi Ibid., 88. vii Perhaps, but if so, then Beauvoir wreaks her ghostly revenge with the publication of La Cérémonie des adieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). The couple may well have died, but the situation for the writing couple is somewhat more complex. The writing couple effectively died before Sartre s death (with the decline in his health), and yet continued well after his death in the sense that Beauvoir revives Sartre in her farewell to him in Adieux. Beyond both their deaths, though, they remain for us the writing couple in our own attempts to look back at their work. My thanks to Crossroads anonymous reviewer for help with clarification of this point. viii Deutscher, Genre and Void, ix. ix Ibid. x At the beginning to chapter eleven, Deutscher cites Michèle Le Dœuff s satirical comment in relation to Sartre s influence: Might not the great echo which Sartre s philosophy found in the collective consciousness arise from the fact that, far from displacing the models of social relations, it recycled their subjective quintessence using language in which they were unrecognizable? Michèle Le Dœuff, Hipparchia s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc.(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991: 195). xi Deutscher, Genre and Void, 42. xii And further: To be conscious is to make nothing of something (or other) also makes light of nihilation itself. If we make nothing of nihilation itself it won t settle into a process behind the scenes. As if thus we might have understood how we experience the world that appears to us in all its guises, ibid., 43. And: [Sartre] finds objectification in face-to-face encounters inevitable. In contrast, Beauvoir, by first taking in Hegel s analysis of the master and servant and then surpassing it, has placed herself in a position to describe what refused to stay in focus for Sartre, ibid., 178. xiii In relation to Le Dœuff s revisions, Deutscher comments: What we bring into being when we do something in philosophy is a temporary use, a particular inflexion, a bending back on itself, a flexing over and around the objects of pre-existing discourse, ibid., xxx. xiv Ibid., xiii. xv And further: Just as, after much complex discussion, bad faith emerged as an evanescent phenomenon something that disappeared as one went to get a secure grip on it so too did consciousness. There is no such thing it is a nothing, a void, an effect rather than a cause of the sheer fact that as living organisms dealing with a world, we are engaged from the start as nihilating as making nothing of something in order to make something of something else, ibid., 251. xvi Ibid., xiii. xvii We could say that Deutscher s homely reading takes its cue from Beauvoir s and Sartre s early motivations: Metaphysics is domesticated one can write philosophy about anything. Equally, the domestic takes on a metaphysical aura ibid., xv. xviii Ibid., xiv. xix Deutscher s own idiomatic rendering of Sartre s terms is central to the success of his homely reading. Expressions such as stuck in the gullet and lumpiness cross the expanse between Sartre s existential vocabulary and our own. Cf. ibid., xx See my Bringing Le Dœuff Back Home in Max Deutscher, ed., Michèle Le Dœuff: Operative Philosophy and Imaginary Practice (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), for a discussion of Morris work; cf. Meaghan Morris, Import Rhetoric: Semiotics in/and Australia, in The Foreign Bodies Papers (Surry Hills: Local Consumption Publications, 1981), Matthew Lamb s thoughts on reading from the peripheries in relation to a metropole philosophy come from his own work on the writing of Luis Costa Lima, whose peripheral Brazilian perspective arguably permits a critical distance from the centre (Europe/France) that simply isn t open to those working on the same central terrain. Of course, there are close links here with Gilles Deleuze s minor literature. See Lamb s editorial introduction to the special issue on Costa Lima s work in Crossroads: An interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Hidstory, Philosophy, Religion and Classics 2.2 (2008): 3 7. xxi This desire to keep them in motion as part of contemporary thinking may involve a (theoretical) mourning for Beauvoir and Sartre, an attempt to symbolize and represent loss in contemporary engagement one that literally brings existential phenomenology back to life. Which is much more than saying that Deutscher merely return[s] to a cell of the past. Deutscher, Genre and Void, xxxi. xxii In Infinite Bodily Consciousness (ibid., ), Deutscher explores what Sartre and Beauvoir, respectively, have to say about the possibility of the couple. Here Sartre s predictable proclamation that I and the Other must fail in our desire to constitute a couple fully grasped by each partner is contrasted with 50

7 Beauvoir s discussion of generosity as the possibility of a couple between the two. There are various reasons why Beauvoir has placed herself in a better position to take on the possibility of observing and relating to another without objectification. She has worked her way through Hegel more thoroughly than did Sartre. She takes on, not just as an aporia on which to place a signpost, Hegel s account of the conflict that arises between one being and another as each becomes aware of the other s consciousness. She then sets out in a somewhat more hopeful fashion to use Hegel s realization of the need the dominant consciousness has of the one dominated, ibid., 192. xxiii Deutscher s positioning of Beauvoir against Sartre (though not in any simple or straightforward way) is, importantly, inflected through Le Dœuff s historically important readings of this famous writing couple. From the late seventies on, Le Dœuff constructs what is arguably a wholly new way of thinking about Beauvoir s (theoretical) relation to Sartre, and the debt of this intervention is clearly legible in Deutscher s own account: [Le Dœuff] was amongst the first to show how Beauvoir s writing amounts to a significant and generous inflexion of the transcendentalism of existential phenomenology, whose abstractions of being, nothingness, the for-itself, the in-itself and being-for-others interact with the sexual imagery and anecdotes to generate a philosophy that appeared essentially misogynist (p.xxvii). And further: Le Dœuff distinguishes Beauvoir s use of existentialist philosophy from Sartre s, showing how Beauvoir makes phenomenology bend in unexpected directions, able to hear voices not its own and then to say more in response to them (pp.xxix-xxx). See also my Love, Ethics and Authenticity: Beauvoir s Lesson in What it Means to Read, Hypatia, Vol 25, forthcoming xxiv Ibid., ix. xxv Ibid., 250. xxvi Deutscher notes that Beauvoir wrapped up [Sartrean] existential phenomenology in current literature, sociology and everyday observation within her revised phenomenology, ibid., xxii, n.15. And futher: In fact Simone de Beauvoir used a system of phenomenology that in Husserl s and Heidegger s hands was blind to sexuality, and in Sartre s, biased against women in its imagery, structure and anecdote, ibid., xxii. xxvii Deutscher writes: Beauvoir s work, some six years after Sartre s, has begun to shift the field of our thought, experience and preoccupations. The look that objectifies achieves its effect because of a real or assumed power differential between observer and observed, ibid., 177. xxviii Where in Sartre s hands the system of being-for-oneself as against being-for-others conveys a sense of a threat to myself, Beauvoir built what became a feminism from within such a framework. In describing woman as man s Other, she diagnoses an error based in confusion and men s self-interest. The threat in being observed by another ceases to be intrinsic to the difference between myself and an Other, becoming an object of critical scrutiny sometimes farce [Beauvoir] challenge[s] the idea that we are free simply in being conscious, which would cause the distinction of a liberating and oppressive situation to fall away, ibid., xxiii. And further: [Beauvoir] challenges Sartre when he says outright, It is senseless to dream of complaining, since nothing alien has decided for us what we feel, what we live, what we are. She argues that one s situation may make this impossible. Women must act and go beyond a status of subjection, but others may abuse their power and nullify the possibilities for freedom. My freedom lies also in the hands of others, ibid., xxiii xxiv. xxix For Sartre: Totalisation fails, and this is to say that I can never be at home with myself or with another, ibid., xvi. In another vein, Deutscher notes (in relation to Le Dœuff s thought) that nomadic thought (paradoxically) allows us to dwell in places other than home so that we become at home with being able to live as more than a tourist, elsewhere, ibid., xxix. xxx Are there moments when Deutscher s identification runs to Le Dœuff? There is a hint of this when he writes: [Le Dœuff s] critique gives new life to the phenomenological tradition, ibid., xxxi. xxxi Ibid., 254. xxxii Ibid., , emphases added. xxxiii Ibid., 254, emphases added. xxxiv Just prior to this Deutscher writes: But Beauvoir and Sartre s daring adventures in negativity and their searches into the void in existence and les petits riens in every moment and detail of everyday life are there, still to stir us from that complacency, ibid., 253. In the introduction to the work, Deutscher speaks of their theory in the singular, and how they figure, only to unsettle this somewhat a few lines further on, with their (differently) idiosyncratic appropriations of Husserl s phenomenology, ibid., xv. xxxv For a discussion of feminist reactions to the symbolism of the Beauvoir-Sartre couple, see my Love, Ethics and Authenticity. xxxvi We can rework Glen Mazis discussion of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, to rethink Beauvoir s reading of Sartre in terms of a loving regard. Cf. Glen A. Mazis, Touch and Vision: Rethinking with Merleau-Ponty and Sartre on the Caress, Philosophy Today 23 (Winter 1979): Deutscher raises the possibility of an alternative and more loving gaze in chapter nine, in his discussion of Irigaray s engagement with Sartre s philosophy of regard; cf. Lost in La Motte-Picquet-Grenelle, Genre and Void

8 xxxvii For a exploration of what such a regard might entail, see my discussion of authentic love and authentic reading in Love, Ethics and Authenticity. xxxviii In French, Descartes wonder is l admiration, denoting a means of escaping the mundane or everyday. In Deutscher s case, I want to suggest that his homely reading has the ability to somewhat paradoxically position our world as unheimlich, or wondrous to behold. xxxix René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 358. xl Ibid., 362. xli Ibid., 364. xlii Luce Irigaray, Wonder: A Reading of Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 80, 82. For a discussion of Irigaray s work on wonder, cf. my Wonder: Coupling Art with Sexual Difference, in Veil, ed. Judith Wright (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1998), xliii Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 74. And further: Before and after appropriation, there is wonder In order for it to affect us, it is necessary and sufficient for it to surprise, to be new, not yet assimilated or disassimilated as known, ibid., xliv Ibid., 75. In the chapter entitled Lost in La Motte-Piquet-Grennelle (Deutscher, Genre and Void, ), Deutscher engages Irigaray s work on wonder (in An Ethics of Sexual Difference), reading it in part as a response to Sartre s discussion of regarding and being regarded by others, ibid., 199. Here he demonstrates the difference wonder can make, pointing out that Irigaray reconstructs the Sartrean grammar of domination. If each person can wonder at the other, there will be two-way predication, ibid., 202. From here he goes on to explore another of Irigaray s responses to Sartre in Entre Deux (Paris: Grasset, 1997). He writes: Irigaray s strategy is to relieve the pressure of the masculine-feminine division by working against the division of activity and passivity. Sartre s consciousness as an active for-itself working upon a passive in-itself implies that women and men, being conscious, are equally active. His persistent identification of the image of the in-itself with the feminine, however, results in a picture of man making himself a for-itself in the very struggle of escaping femininity. Like the in-itself of which it is a trope, this feminine now appears everywhere within his own initself, within the feminine in other men, and in women. Irigaray points out how Sartre s allegations about desire achieve these identifications, Deutscher, Genre and Void, 211. Cf. Irigaray, Entre Deux. xlv Irigaray writes: This first passion is indispensible not only to life but also or still to the creation of an ethics This other, male or female, should surprise us again and again, appear to us new, very different from what we knew or what we thought he or she should be, Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference,