Phenomenology of the Female Spirit: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

It has been fifty years since Simone de Beauvoir, a well-known French intellectual
and Sartre's "life companion", decided to write a book on woman. This
book with the telling title of The Second Sex, raised a lot of dust at
the very first publication of some fragments in the journal Les temps
modernes; later, it become one of the most controversial books of the
century. If a catalogue of the ten most influential books of the century were
compiled, the book would figure rather high on the list. The position of
Beauvoir could be perhaps best characterised by the metaphor of externality,
exclusion, misrecognition: Beauvoir – la onzieme ... That is, the
path-breaking work of Simone de Beauvoir has yet to become a legitimate part
of  knowledge, yet to be included in
study, research, and educational programmes, and is still subjected to
criticism ad hominem. Last, but not least: the Slovene translation
"is late" by half of a century.
The reason for this can be found in the book itself. If I begin to
write, and am a woman, Simone de Beauvoir develops her argument, then I first
have to study the special situation and to analyze what that might be: a woman.
Between the man, who writes, and the woman, who writes, there is no symmetry,
no reciprocity, and also no equality. A man is first of all a man, i.e. in the
medium of the universal, the woman is first of all a woman, to be
differentiated from a man. Man is the norm, the ?law, the model; woman is the
deviation from the norm, the novella of the law, a copy of a model. The special
situation of woman is inscribed in the very beginning, the introductory
statement, the hypotheses. The woman is the Other: "She is defined and
differentiated with reference to man, and not he with reference to her; she is
the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject,
he is the Absolute; she is the Other."
Simone the Beauvoir is considered one of the most controversial figures
of the intellectual life of our time. Her work and her life show, at the end of
the twentieth century, how difficult the position of the female intellectual was.
Even at the time of her death one could hear voices of denunciation and relief:
when this "phallic" figure of womanhood finally disappeared, the real
emancipation would be possible. On the other hand, soon after the publication
of the book and of its English translation, it was generally acknowledged that
for thousands and thousands of women The Second Sex drove them out of
their "dogmatic dream", and that (their) image of the universe was
turned upside down.
The Second Sex is interesting also from the point of view of
somewhat peculiar editorial tendencies: more than once the book has been
abridged. Could one come across the idea of shortening Aristotle or Heidegger,
or, in Slovenia, Cankar or Prešeren? Could such exploits be meant as a helpful
tool for  female audiences unused to
reading? The unmutilated The Second Sex, including nearly one thousand
pages, has been translated into Slovene by only one female translator. What we
are now confronted with is the great task of close reading and thorough interpretation
of probably the most revolutionary book of the modern age.
Eva Bahovec

Participants: Eva D. Bahovec, Zalka Drglin, Tatjana Greif, Majda Hrženjak,
Karmen Klavžar, Suzana Koncut, Marta Verginella.

In cooperation with : Revija Delta.