IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

In this paper, I focus on the term ‘immanence’ in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and show how it relates to her historical account of sexual oppression. I argue that Beauvoir's use of Hegel's master?slave dialectic and of Claude Lévi‐Strauss's reflection on the prohibition of incest lead her to claim that in all societies “woman” is constructed as “absolutely other.” I show that there is an ambiguous logic of abjection at work in Beauvoir's account that explains why men are the only examples of transcendence in history, whereas women lack it. Finally, I discuss the way in which the relation between immanence and abjection helps to explain the intellectual relation between Georges Bataille and Beauvoir.     

Beauvoir,Hegel, War

The importance of Hegel to the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, both to her early philosophical texts and to The Second Sex, is usually discussed in terms of the master‐slave dialectic and a Koj$eGve‐influenced reading, which some see her as sharing with Sartre, others persuasively describe as divergent from and corrective to Sartre's. Altman shows that Hegel's influence on Beauvoir's work is also wider, both in terms of what she takes on board and what she works through and rejects, and that her reading of Hegel is crucially inflected by two additional circumstances that Sartre did not entirely share: the experience of her first serious study of Hegel as a noncombatant in Paris during the German occupation and her earlier direct exposure to an eccentric, idealist reading of Hegel as developed by the group Philosophies in connection with surrealism and the artistic avant‐garde. Altman also explores the afterlife of Hegel's influence on Beauvoir on second‐wave feminism in the United States and Europe, and suggests continuing relevance to feminist theory today.     

Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics of Freedom and Absolute Evil

Simone de Beauvoir held that human experience is intrinsically ambiguous and that there are no values extrinsic to experience, but she also designated some actions as absolute evil. This essay explains how Beauvoir utilized an intrinsic absolute value to ground an action‐guiding principle of freedom that justifies her notion of evil. Morgan's analysis counters Robin May Schott's objections that Beauvoir failed to systematically justify her notion of absolute evil and that Beauvoir shifted from a “logic of action” to a “logic of history” when she utilized the concept.     

From pastoral to georgic: the Dutch Jewish country house as a rhizome

ABSTRACT

Scholars often analyze houses’ “Jewishness” vis-à-vis Jewish law and rituals. For Dutch Sephardic Jews during the long eighteenth century, however, identity is better understood using a model of rhizome in which “Jewishness” consists of the deliberate interbraiding of multiple traditions. Jewish identity was inextricable from the cultures in which Jews lived. Jewish homes along the Vecht River near Amsterdam exemplify the rhizome model. They embody the same braided pastoral ideal found in eighteenth-century Dutch Sephardic literature and material culture. As Sephardic Jews relocated to Netherlands Antilles, the rhizome present in country houses shifted, taking into account Jews’ new role as slave owners. Thus while buitenplaatsen along the Vecht embraced the Jewish pastoral ideal of a retreat from mercantile life, landhuizen in Curaçao evoked a georgic ideal that channelled the residents’ gaze not on rivers, gardens, and grottos, but on guard stations, slave huts, and enslaved workers. Leisure became redefined as an ability to watch rather than retreat from labour. Taken together, Dutch Jewish country houses along the Vecht and in Curaçao challenge the notion that Jewish material culture has a “single root system.”     

The Viability of the Philosophical Novel: The Case of Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay

This article begins by asking if the project to write a philosophical novel is not inherently flawed; it would seem that the novelist must either write an ambiguous text, which would not create a strong enough argument to count as philosophy, or she must write a text with a clear argument, which would not be ambiguous enough to count as good fiction. The only other option available would be to exemplify a preexisting abstract philosophical system in the concrete literary world. To move beyond such an impasse, this article turns to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's unique aesthetic theory in “Literature and Metaphysics” envisions philosophy as an integral part of the literary text and sees the novel not as an argument but as something called a “philosophical appeal” (Beauvoir 2004b). In her first novel, She Came to Stay, such a concept of the philosophical novel allows Beauvoir to make an original contribution to the philosophical tradition—one in which Beauvoir rethinks the problem of solipsism—while still creating a stunning literary work (Beauvoir 1954). A study of the theory and the novel together thus provides a solid understanding of what philosophers stand to gain from the philosophical novel.     

Women,Hegel, and Recognition in The Second Sex

This paper develops a new account of Beauvoir's “Hegelianism” and argues that the strand of contemporary interpretation of Beauvoir that seeks to represent her thought in isolation from that of Jean‐Paul Sartre constitutes a betrayal of the philosophy of recognition that she derives from Hegel. It underscores the extent to which Beauvoir influenced Sartre's Being and Nothingness and shows that Sartre and Beauvoir both adapted Hegel's ideas and agreed in rejecting his optimism.     

Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguous Ethics of Political Violence

In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate ate what is presupposed by a resistant politics that adopts violence as its instrument, Beauvoir illuminates the problems encountered by the kinds of “realistic and positive” and “idealistic and moral” arguments through which the use of violence in politics is routinely justified. At the same time, Beauvoir demonstrates that to deconstruct the question of the legitimacy of violence is neither to banish nor resolve it. She does not offer a recipe for determining the legitimacy or otherwise of the use of violence in politics in general; instead, she illuminates the irremediable difficulty and inescapability of such judgments in a violent and intransigent world.     

Gender as Lived Time: Reading The Second Sex for a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality

This article suggests that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers an important contribution to a feminist phenomenology of temporality. In contrast to readings of The Second Sex that focus on the notion of “becoming” as the main claim about the relation between “woman” and time, this article suggests that Beauvoir's discussion of temporality in volume II of The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir understands the temporality of waiting, or a passive present, to be an underlying structure of women's existence and subordination. Accordingly, I argue that Beauvoir does not see “woman” as a mere becoming, as that which unfolds in time, but instead understands becoming a woman to be realized as lived time. As such, Beauvoir's account shows that gender and temporality are deeply entangled, and thus she challenges the classic phenomenological account of temporality as a general, given structure of human existence. More specifically, I argue that her account shows how a particular experience of time is an underlying structure of sexual objectification, a claim that expands on the feminist phenomenological claim that a particular relation to space becomes a way in which women take up and negotiate their own subordination and objectification.     

Beyond the east-west divide: rethinking the narrative of the Jews’ political status in Europe, 1600–1750

The enduring cliché of the east-west divide obscures the nature of the Jews’ changing political status in Europe: the period 1600–1750 cannot be described using the binary of a progressive “West” and a backward “east.” Rather, Jews in Western Europe developed a new political status of “civic parity” (Holland, England) or “corporate parity” (southern France), while Jews in Eastern Europe, especially in the private towns of magnate estates, similarly acquired a new status of “corporate parity” with Christian burghers. It was in Central Europe that Jews in this period lagged behind: while they gained a form of juridical standing in the Holy Roman Empire, their privileges were largely gained as individuals or collections of individuals. In terms of political status, the period is marked by a tripartite division of progressive west and a progressive east contrasted with a backward Central Europe.     

Alterity in Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Levinas: From Ambiguity to Ambivalence

This article is meant to stage an encounter, a kind of rendezvous, between Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir regarding how alterity seems to enable an ethical relation for Levinas while closing one for Beauvoir. I will argue that Beauvoir's reading of Levinas on “the other” is not a charitable one, and the ethical ambivalence in Levinas's notion of alterity can motivate the praxis Beauvoir seeks for undoing social forms of oppression. I will start with Beauvoir's interpretation of alterity as “feminine otherness” in Levinas's ethics that, for her, originates in the violent perspective of male privilege. Then I will move to Levinas's response to this critique in a set of interviews with Philip Nemo, and to consideration of how a more charitable reading of alterity, understood as a sort of ambivalence in the structure of subjectivity, creates a close proximity between Levinas's and Beauvoir's ethics of action. I contend that both Beauvoir and Levinas respectively developed their ethics of action, either of ambiguity or of ambivalent alterity, in order to free thought from the absolute seriousness with which normative standards are held.     

Computers and life styles

There is a relation between people's psychological build‐up and their attraction to computers.

Flexibility and curiosity are essential qualities.

Teamwork must be encouraged and developed, as does creative imagination harnessed to method and discipline.

Semantic and syntactic knowledge are essential for solving computer problems.

The challenge, however, remains: “free man from his machine,” or at any rate, “free him somewhat from his status as slave/master to his slave.”

Keywords: education, computers, ability to adapt, wisdom of man, relations with computers, language     

Singularity in Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity

Though it has gone unnoticed so far in Beauvoir Studies, the term “singularity” is a technical one for Simone de Beauvoir. In the first half of the essay I discuss two reasons why this term has been obscured. First, as is well known Beauvoir has not been read in the context of the history of philosophy until recently. Second, in The Ethics of Ambiguity at least, singularité is translated both inconsistently and quite misleadingly. In the second half of the essay I attempt to demonstrate the importance of this term in The Ethics. The will to disclose being is the will to disclose the singularity of the other, whether human, land, sky or painting. Ambiguity, which Beauvoir distinguishes from absurdity in Camus, is an image suggesting this necessarily mutual disclosure of singularity.     

On the last Jews in Iraq and Iraqi national identity: a look at two recent Iraqi novels

After 2003, Iraqi literature, particularly the novel, rediscovered the now extinct Jewish community in Iraq. The Jews were the first major community in Iraq to be completely erased. Writing about the Jews served to underline the pluralism of Iraqi society in the past and to admonish against a similar fate awaiting other small communities in Iraq today. This article will focus on two recent Iraqi novels, written by two of Iraq’s prominent novelists, in which Jews are at the centre of the narratives: ‘Ali Badr’s “Haris al-Tabagh” (The Guardian of the Tobacco Shop), 2008 and Khdair al-Zaydi’s “Atlas ‘Azran al-Baghdadi” (‘Azran al-Baghdadi’s Atlas), 2015a. These are not only ordinary Jews, they are the last Jews of Iraq and Baghdad. As such, I will argue, they are doomed by the writers to serve as symbols for something exceeding their lives (and deaths) as individuals or Jews. The novels thus are more about Iraqi national identity after 2003 than about the last Jews. By choosing “the last of the Jews” as a protagonist the authors signal a pessimistic end to the illusion of sustaining a version of a pluralistic and accommodating Iraqi national identity.     

Kant and German idealisms

This paper considers whether Hegel's master/slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit should be considered as a refutation of solipsism. It focuses on a recent and detailed attempt to argue for this sort of reading that has been proposed by Frederick Beiser – but it argues that this reading is unconvincing, both in the historical motivations given for it in the work of Jacobi and Fichte, and as an interpretation of the text itself. An alternative reading of the dialectic is proposed, where it is argued that the central problem Hegel is concerned with is not solipsism, but the sociality of freedom.     

BOOK REVIEWS

This paper deals with the traumatic departures of Jews from Morocco during the 1950s and 1960s. The issue is analyzed through a set of diverse oral narrations. The study is based on several interviews conducted both among Jews who left Morocco and Muslims still living in the city of Meknes. The repression of the memory by Muslims of two young Jews murdered in 1967 in Meknes is questioned. In fact, although the perceptions concerning the Jews' departure differs according to the interviewee's social class, a common feeling appears to be shared by different societal sectors regarding this specific issue, which still comes across as a sensitive one today. The representation of Jews traditionally depicted as “fearful” and “weak” turns into “courageous” and “strong” during the Six‐Day War. This new representation perturbed the Muslim population, which seemed to be unable to deal with the new status Jews were acquiring. In fact, emigration was commonly considered to betray a lack of virility. The paper argues that the unexpected departure of an historic component of Moroccan society has left an open wound in Morocco. Even the memory of the “events” by the Jewish population appears to be fragmented into ambiguous constructions, leading, on the one hand, to perceptions of fear and uncertainty and, on the other, to images of affectionate relationships and intense nostalgia.     

Taboo desires,creativity, and career choice

Two studies suggest that Protestants are more likely than Catholics or Jews to sublimate taboo desires into motives to pursue creative careers. The results are consistent with a synthesis of psychological and classic sociological theories. In Study 1, Protestants induced to have taboo sexual desires were likely to express a preference for creative careers (as opposed to prosocial ones). In Study 2, a national probability sample revealed that “conflicted” Protestants—who had taboo desires but tried to rule their sexual behavior according to their religious beliefs—worked in the most creative jobs. The effects in both studies did not hold for Catholics and Jews. Results suggest that intrapsychic conflict can partially motivate important real-world decisions, such as the choice to pursue a creative career.     

Response to Strenger

Despite certain apparently common values, Strenger's critique is addressed largely to an inaccurate account of my views. It is also internally contradictory in various ways. On one hand, for example, Strenger favors a dialectic of science and the humanities as they bear on psychoanalysis; on the other hand, he declares science to be the exclusive psychoanalytic “metaphysic.” Remarkably, he claims that my critique of technical rationality is tantamount to advocating a passive reflective stance on the analyst's part, precluding anything akin to “coaching” to foster change. But I've written consistently about the dialectic of proactive therapeutic influence and critical reflection on that very influence and its implications. What's unacceptable about technical rationality is its positivist confidence about the effectiveness of prescribed interventions based on allegedly scientific evidence. With his lengthy survey of extra-analytic studies, Strenger evades engaging my specific arguments since they are strictly about the unwarranted privileging of the findings of psychoanalytic process and outcome research relative to clinical experience. He mistakenly equates my repudiation of such privileging with rejection of the value of “science” altogether for psychoanalysis. Finally, Strenger's claim that my “dialectical constructivism” eschews formulating universal truths about human nature ignores my consideration of human potentials for both denying and confronting mortality and the associated challenge of human agency. Embracing that challenge constitutes a moral position for psychoanalysis that is unequivocally opposed to uncritical compliance with culturally shaped demands for various types of therapeutic services.     

“As his name indicates”: R. S. Woodworth's letters of reference and employment for jewish psychologists in the 1930s

Letters of reference from Robert S. Woodworth identified some psychologists as Jews and reveal an implicit stereotype of Jewish “objectionable traits.” I examine these conceptions of “Jewish character” in the context of Woodworth's general views on individual differences and in the broader context of Jewish immigration to America and enrollment at Columbia University in the early 1900s. Constructing the exclusion of Jews from academic psychology in terms of the personality and social behavior of the individual and dividing of Jews into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” allowed for a face-saving gloss on the generally antisemitic hiring practices in 1930s American academia.     

Through Thick and Thin: Validity and Reflective Judgment

The application of “thick” ethical concepts is best understood as a process of reflective rather than deductive judgment. Taking the form “B is as X as A,” where X is a thick ethical concept and A and B are narrative wholes unified through X (for example, “Those who hid Jews from the Nazis were as brave as Achilles”), reflective judgment opens thick ethical concepts to transformation. Though interpretive, such reflective judgment may still be able to provide validity without recourse to “thin,” purportedly context‐neutral terms.     

KUZGUNCUK AS A VILLAGE OF MUTUAL RESPECT AND HARMONY: MYTH OR REALITY?

My research concentrates on the Jews of Istanbul and especially on the Kuzguncuk neighbourhood. My aim is to understand the changes within the social structure of the Jewish community of Turkey and its relationship with the dominant Muslim society. Different from other important Jewish neighbourhoods of Istanbul such as quarters in Balat, Haskoy and Galata-Pera district, Kuzguncuk is known as the “village of harmony” and a “place in which all religious and ethnic groups live in peace, harmony and mutual respect”. In this article, I try to answer the question of whether this is a myth or the real experience of Kuzguncuk. Whether a myth or a real experience, can it be a model for people “living together in peace and harmony”? I will also explore the situation of Jews after the foundation of the Turkish republic. In order to understand the changing structure of Jews of Kuzguncuk, I conducted interviews with seven actual and former residents of Kuzguncuk, who now live in Israel, Kuzguncuk and other districts of Istanbul.