Adieu to Empire

Reviewed by: No Exit: Arab existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and decolonization by Yoav Di-Capua Hugo Zetterberg No Exit: Arab existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and decolonization By Yoav Di-Capua. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Jean-Paul Sartre is well known to scholars, students and general readers alike, and much has been written and commented on his work over the years. The same can also be said of French intellectuals' role in shaping the discussion of decolonisation—the work of James D. Le Sueur in particular stands out in this aspect.1 Focusing on Sartre but looking beyond the hexagon, Yoav Di-Capua fills an important scholarly gap as he shows the impact that the famous existentialist had on literature and society in independent Arab nations. Providing a thorough overview of the literary establishment mainly in Egypt and Lebanon, Di-Capua traces its transformation throughout the 1950s and 1960s and how it was influenced by Sartre. The book is organised to lead up to Sartre's visit to Egypt and Israel in 1967, with the first chapter explaining the background and introducing the main protagonists for the journey that was organised by Les Temps Modernes in order to make Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir acquainted with the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The visits were followed by a special issue of the journal, containing articles by both Arab and Israeli writers and Sartre's Arab followers also expected him to take a public stance in support of Palestine. As Sartre and De Beauvoir instead came out in support of Israel on the eve of the 1967 war (a topic dealt with in the ninth chapter), the existentialist went from being seen as a hero to a traitor, and the Arab writers who had produced the impressive canon of wujudiyya or Arab existentialism severed their ties to Sartre. The second chapter takes a step back and introduces the reader to a number of leading writers in the pre-war and immediate post-war period and shows that some—notably Suhayl Idris—were more willing than others to adapt Sartrean existentialism to the context of Egyptian decolonisation. The third chapter continues with the theme of commitment and the debate that it caused between a newer generation who wished to be committed writers and the older pre-independence authors who believed in "art for art's sake" (79). The picture is further complicated by Communism, which also favoured commitment but of a different kind that did not require intellectual freedom. The fourth and fifth chapters explore the tensions that intellectuals faced as the Pan-Arab state encouraged a certain version of the intellectual and victimised those who diverged from their proscribed role. The sixth chapter turns to the reception of Sartre's works in the region before 1967 and shows that his philosophy often was confused with that of Camus. The seventh chapter provides a detailed overview of Sartre's global engagement, noting how his preface to Fanon's book made readers link him to violence. This, taken together with the importance of Sartrean concepts for understanding the cultural and social impact of (neo-)colonialism made Arab readers expect Sartre to support the Palestinian cause. Chapter eight, which covers the visit of Sartre and De Beauvoir to the region shows that neither philosopher–both sympathetic to the State of Israel as a consequence of having witnessed state Anti-Semitism in France–was prepared to question the Jewish state's right to exist. The ninth and concluding chapter outlines the aftermath of the trip, and the reactions to Sartre signing the open letter in support of Israel together with other French intellectuals. With an extensive survey of wujudiyya literature and its writers, Di-Capua convincingly demonstrates that Sartre did have an extensive impact on Arabic writing. The published sources are complemented with correspondence between Les Temps Modernes and the Israeli and Arab co-organisers of the visit, as well as with official papers from Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other archives in the country. This impressive body of source material is used to show what was at stake for each actor, whose life trajectory is conveyed to the reader through...

Simone de Beauvoir and the Colonial Experience: Freedom, Violence, and Identity interprets the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir and her intellectual trajectory through the perspective of French colonial history. Nathalie Nya considers Beauvoir through this lens not only to critique her position as a colonizer woman or colon, but also as a means of situating her in one of France’s most vexing and fraught historical moments. This terminology emphasizes the weight of French colonialism on Beauvoir’s identity as a white French woman, as well as the subjective and interpersonal dialectic of colonialism. Nya argues that while the French republic was systematizing colonialism, all of its white citizens were colons whereas natives from France’s colonies were the colonized.Simone de Beauvoir and the Colonial Experience presents a gendered and female perspective of French colonialism between 1946 and 1962, a time when French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon rallied against the political system, and which ultimately brought about an end to French colonialism. It adheres to a reading of Beauvoir as foremost an intellectual woman, one who reflected upon the legacy of French colonialism as an author and whose nation-bound status as a colonizer played a role in the alliance she created with Gisele Halimi and Djamila Boupacha. Beauvoir’s colonial reflections can help us to better gauge how women—White, Asian, Arab, Caribbean, Latina, mixed race, and Black—decipher the crimes and injustices of French colonialism.

In critical passage of introduction his Birth of Clinic, Michel Foucault suggests that we belong age of criticism whose lack of primary keeps us distance from an original (Foucault 1973, xv) and dooms us to patient construction of about discourses (xvi). Thus for Foucault comment is to admit by definition an excess of signifier over signified; necessary, unformulated of thought that language has left in shade-a that is very essence of that thought, driven outside its secret-but comment also presupposes that this unspoken element also slumbers within speech, and that by superabundance proper signifier, one may, in questioning it, give voice content that was not explicitly signified (ibid.). It will be my contention that in thebirth of modern we find nuanced discourse about gender that has for far too long been left in shade. Eclipse of Simone de Beauvoir For those of us who have followed history of modern from its inception, contribution of Simone de Beauvoir philo sophical question of gender is unformulated remainder that is yet be explicitly signified. For while Simone de Beauvoir explicitly sought give body and substance (materiality) Sartre's existential philosophy of Other by way of instance of gender (Le Doeuff, 1989, 52; Le Doeuff 1981), that substance has become so deeply buried in fabric of contemporary about that we do not even talk about it anymore. Indeed Simone de Beauvoir, sole heir philosophical tradition that seems have died with Jean-Paul Sartre,' has been buried along with him. difficulty of course is that she has, all intents and purposes, been buried alive. It is in this that case of Simone de Beauvoir presents us with hermeneutical puzzle in its own right. On one hand she is hailed as prophetess extraordinaire (O'Brien 1981, 65) and Mother of Us All (Ascher 1987; qtd. in Dietz 1992, 74), the emblematic intellectual of twentieth century (Moi 1994, 1), the greatest feminist theorist of our century (Moi 1994, 2), author of the definitive analysis of sexism (Firestone qtd. in Dietz 1992, 74), the classic manifesto of liberated woman (Dietz 1992.74), on other, we have dismissed her (work) even before we have encountered it. As Mary Dietz has recently pointed out: The Bible of contemporary American Second Sex seems have been worshipped, often quoted, and little read (Dietz 1992, 78). Even with re-situation of academic feminist theorizing,2 break with what Rosi Braidotti calls a crusade against feminism (Braidotti 1991, 168), we have not seen an end feminist neglect of her thought as some suggest we have (Dietz 1992, 81). For those of us still locked into looking for Simone de Beauvoir in first stage of feminism, leap into recuperation is less than clear; particularly as it depends on prior appreciation of her workthe allegedly Beauvoir-style feminism-that still remains enigmatic, if only because it is so fundamentally untheorized and undivulged. For she is equally absent from pages of Sartrean existentialism and phenomenology that, at very least, she is (by feminists) given belong3 and faithful follower eventually bumps up against what Margaret Simons describes as the nearly universal failure of contemporary American phenomenologists acknowledge contribution of Beauvoir in Second Sex phenomenological analysis of social world (Simons 1983, 563). Whatever happened Simone de Beauvoir? How did she slip so unmentionably past us? In short discussion that follows, I propose do some digging unearth some of that life that vibrates today more than ever before in what Michele Le Doeuff calls tremendously well-hidden philosopher June philosophe formidablement cachee] (qtd. …

Before taking on a role as one of the personages of French existentialism (Camus 1991), Sisyphus had been mentioned by James Phillips Kay (1832, 8), and in turn by Engels (1987), 193n) and then Mar...

Views of women and men in the work of Simone de Beauvoir

Reviewed by: We Are Not Born Submissive: How the Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives by Manon Garcia Mariah Devereux Herbeck (bio) Garcia, Manon. We Are Not Born Submissive: How the Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives. Princeton UP, 2021. Pp [i]-xiv; 234. ISBN 978-0-691-20182-5. $27.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-691-22320-9. $22.95 (paper). Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 The Second Sex finds renewed significance for the twenty-first century in Manon Garcia's We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives. Garcia's research is not based solely on the indisputable bible of second-wave feminism, nor does it claim to analyze every aspect of the feminist manifesto, however, she describes succinctly how de Beauvoir's philosophy is key to understanding women's submission (and eventual path toward liberation) in Western society: "this book is not primarily a book on de Beauvoir's philosophy but it argues that the best way to understand women's submission is to think with Beauvoir" (author's emphasis, 21). Garcia inspires the reader to return to the seminal text, as well as to the work of other influential thinkers from Catharine MacKinnon and Gayatri Spivak to Hegel and Martin Heidegger for answers to the following question: why do some women submit to and perpetuate the patriarchy? In response to this question, as well as to other related inquiries, the book relies heavily on The Second Sex as it peels back the layers of social, political, religious and historical factors that create and (re)affirm the gender hierarchy that determines submission as the only viable option for (many) women. In the work's preface and conclusion, Garcia book-ends her research with reflection on the relationship of her manuscript to the contemporary #MeToo movement and society's response to the women involved—seen as victims by some and by others as manipulators who are willing to submit to men in order to advance their careers. In chapter one, she guides the reader in a detailed examination of the definitions of "domination" and "submission," underlining, in particular, that "to submit" is paradoxically an active verb: "it is an activity in passivity: what the subject decides, whatever the degree of rationality or complexity of this decision is to not be the one who decides" (17). Unless one is threatened with violence or physically restrained, submission is the result of a conscious decision, and an appalling one at that since it requires that one renounce one's freedom, as Garcia demonstrates via Rousseau's The Social Contract: "to deprive [man's] will of all freedom is to deprive his actions of all morality" (2). However, for women, "submission is prescribed as the normal, moral, and natural behavior" (3). Subsequently, Garcia poses a series of related questions: Is submission feminine? Is femininity a submission? Are women masochistic? And [End Page 186] finally, importantly, she questions whether or not submission is the "experience of all women" (106). As Garcia deftly explains, to answer these questions, one must invert the examination of the hierarchy; instead of viewing it from the top down (Rousseau's and other male philosophers' point of view), we must view submission from the perspective of those who live it, in this case, women. Simone de Beauvoir's work provides an ideal launchpad for such an investigation given her "meticulous research on a multiplicity of diaries, memoirs of famous women, and studies in psychology and sociology" (97). Throughout her work, Garcia repeatedly appreciates de Beauvoir as a philosopher in her own right (independent from her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre), such that, at times, the book feels like a defense of de Beauvoir as much as a defense of a woman's right to freedom from predestined submission. This is not a slight of the book since Garcia's detailed analysis of the similarities and differences between the philosophers' approaches to existentialism are detailed and informative. In conclusion, Garcia demonstrates to what extent—contrary to the opening analysis of the definition of submission—women do not have a choice; one's destiny is "predetermined by social norms" (194). However, she does her best to end on a hopeful note...

What does mean to French intellectuals? Is it a postmodern ideal situated beyond history and metaphysics? A source of spiritual decadence that threatens the European tradition? Or is it Extreme-Occident, the Far Western site that gives historical reality to the utopias of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment? Jean-Philippe Mathy offers a systematic examination of French texts that address matters relating to America. He shows how prominent French intellectuals have represented America as myth and metaphor, covering the entire ideological spectrum from Maurras to Duhamel, and from Sartre to Aron. The texts themselves range from novels and poems to travel narratives and philosophical essays by Claudel, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Kristeva, and many others. Mathy deftly situates these discourses on America against the background of French intellectual and political history since 1789. The judgements on American culture that originate in France, he contends, are also statements about France itself Widespread condemnation of American materialism and pragmatism cuts across deep ideological and political divides in France, primarily because French intellectuals still operate within a framework of critical and aesthetic models born in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance and elaborated in the age of French classicism. Mathy engages issues central to interpreting the American experience, such as controversies over multiculturalism and Eurocentrism. Although Mathy deals mainly with French authors, he does not limit himself to them. Rather, he uses a comparative, cross-cultural approach that also takes in accounts of America by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Junger, Gramsci, and other Europeans, as well as American self-interpretations from Emerson and Dewey to Cornel West and Christopher Lasch.

In 1987, five years after his death, Georges Perec's last completed novel, Life A Users Manual, was published in Britain and America to great acclaim. In the following ten years all of his completed, published, novels and his final uncompleted novel, were published in English translation plus a collection of shorter, non-fiction works. And in 2014, his first, but unpublished, novel, Portrait of a Man, was also published. Further, in 1993, the translator of many of his most significant works, David Bellos, produced an exhaustive biography called Georges Perec: A Life In Words that was highly praised and which won the Prix Goncourt for Biography in 1994. As well as garnering significant critical acclaim all of these works in translation sold well. So for a French writer, who died young, Perec probably achieved greater prominence and commercial success in translation than many French writers, if not quite reaching the household name status of a Sartre, Camus, De Beauvoir, or Derrida. On the other hand, it is also true that he remains somewhat unknown and enigmatic. And this is perhaps because he cannot be slotted into any easily recognised categories and he remained somewhat elusive as a “personality”. His final three major works – A Void, W, and Life a Users Manual – may seem, on the surface, lightweight, ludic, constructed with and round a number of self-imposed rules and constraints, and rather haphazardly put together. This surface appearance is a consequence of his membership of OuLiPo where the literary and personal content might seem subservient to the mathematical and games-playing demands and skills. And yet, at the same time, each of them deal, if somewhat elliptically, with some very intense and personally and historically significant themes – of mass destruction and genocide, of abandonment, emptiness and anomie, and of how to speak of the unspeakable. And they do so in a way that unexpectedly hits the reader with great emotional force. Moreover, unlike his perhaps better-known near contemporary Patrick Modiano, Perec never wrote the same book twice, preferring, as he put it, to try and write in every style possible. John Sturrock sums up the situation in this way: Perec was a Parisian and an intellectual in many of his tastes, but too nervous and too sincerely democratic ever to have wanted to start pronouncing on this and that in the megaphone role of the of a Paris intellectual….(Like Jean-Paul Sartre and others) Perec, too, went to Left-Bank cafes, not in his case to lay down any law…but rather to play the pinball machines…Which is a more human way than most of coping with ennui. (Sturrock, 1997, px). All this makes him hard to categorise and so, perhaps easy to ignore or overlook. Sturrock also points out that anyone reading Perec is better off knowing the terrible facts of his childhood, “ since not knowing them will make at least some of his writings seem much less affecting than they actually are ”(ibid, pxi). I hope, in what follows, that by uncovering something of what lies concealed in ‘W’, his greatest and most challenging work, that it will be easier to appreciate the depth of his skill and the extent of his importance as a contemporary writer.

Freedom is a concept frequently used in our daily lives as we interact with one another in society. Everyone wants to be free. We realize that it is a concept that is not clearly understood by many people causing misunderstandings among people. It is an existential problem that continues to persist. It is a topic that philosophers such as Simone De Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have addressed. De Beauvoir is an existential philosopher who has extensively dealt with freedom in her works. It is impossible to discuss freedom while ignoring the problem of human dignity. It is also noted that certain circumstances undermine the girl child's dignity as she attempts to define and find purpose in her life, making her appear unauthentic. Therefore, our main concern in this article is to show how De Beauvoir understood dignity. Then using her views on freedom, we elucidate how it enhances the dignity of the girl child today. The article expresses why the girl child and not boy child by using the example of the Maasai community in Kenya. Lastly, the researchers give some objections and conclude the findings.

Several years before Doris Lessing and Clancy Sigal reciprocally purloined details of their intimate liaison for their respective literary purposes, another romantic relationship with uncanny parallels to theirs unfolded between a European woman writer in her late thirties and a Leftist Jewish writer from Chicago. The relationship lasted for four years, its "half-life" for many years afterward. Soon after the actual relationship ended, the female partner established herself as a pioneer of feminism, publishing a landmark book concerning, among other subjects, female sexuality, the vexed relations between the sexes, and the difficulty of autonomy for women in patriarchy. In 1947, several years before her major reputation was secured by her groundbreaking work, The Second Sex, the French writer and philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, visited the United States for the first time. While in Chicago, she met (through a friend's reference) and fell passionately in love with Nelson Algren, a writer who had published two novels and a volume of short stories but not yet his own breakthrough and award-winning novel, The Man with the Golden Arm (1949).1 Although de Beauvoir, then approaching 40, had been Jean-Paul Sartre's intellectual and intimate partner for nearly two decades without benefit of marriage, her acquaintance with Algren rapidly developed into a full-fledged romantic affair that lasted until 1950. After the two confirmed their passionate love for each other during the winter of 1947, de Beauvoir returned to France. During the lovers' time apart, they maintained a prolific correspondence; apparently, only de Beauvoir's side has been preserved (A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren).KeywordsIntimate PartnerRomantic RelationshipLove AffairLove StoryAmerican WriterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

As I began to read Hazel E. Barnes' autobiography, The Story I Tell Myself,1 when it was published recently, my first impression, in addition to the very real pleasure of reading it, was the thought: here is a perfect book for undergraduate women philosophy majors. For I have noticed throughout my many years of teaching that, while I often have bright talented majors of both sexes, women, more often than men, seem to be unsure of their ability; they express doubts about their aptitude in regard to a future career; they take criticisms too seriously. One might, perhaps, sum up their attitude in one sentence: young women take philosophy personally. Now I do not want to deny that young men might have similar tendencies, which they do not express as often, because of cultural expectations of how males ought to act. In fact, I think that the story Hazel Barnes tells herself, along with other stories she has told throughout her career, has value for all of us because of her unique and interesting philosophical position. In this essay I will outline my conception of several important aspects of Hazel Barnes' philosophy. In my view her central philosophical discussion emphasizes the notion of a singular universal, which she prefers to call "a unique universal" (Story, xii), i.e., a conscious existing pour-soi who makes free choices and is, therefore, self-creating and self-determining in the situation in which she finds herself. In the first part of my essay I will outline some of Barnes' themes concerning the situation of the singular universal. This is preliminary to my major discussion of her philosophical notion of the free self in part two. In these sections I will refer to a book she wrote in the late nineteen-sixties, An Existentialist Ethics,2 as well as to brief passages in some of her other books, essays, and translations of Sartre. Finally, in my third and last section, I will sum up the major points of Barnes' philosophical position and discuss, at least briefly, her contribution to American philosophy and to feminism. My last section has implications for some of the strong criticisms of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre voiced by many contemporary feminists, including some of those whose primary interest is Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy. I have heard Margaret A. Simons, the dean of Beauvoir scholars in the United States, say that she hates that man, and at times she refuses even to say his name. I think that it is natural that early work on Beauvoir as a philosopher in her own right would take place from a vantage point hostile to Sartre; after all, the energy necessary to pull one philosopher out from under another one,3 with whom she has chosen to be buried, requires vigorous effort if not actual violence. As time goes by, however, I think that we will begin to appreciate a more positive influence from Jean-Paul Sartre. Much of human existence results from mere chance, but I do not believe that it can be an accident that one of the greatest woman philosophers of the twentieth-century, Simone de Beauvoir, and one of our most important contemporary American woman philosophers, Hazel E. Barnes, could claim the same man as a major influence on their philosophical lives, unless there were some value for women in that man's philosophy. In the end I will suggest that when Beauvoir and Barnes applied the philosophy of Sartre to their own lived experience, each one created an original, unique interpretation of existentialism. I confess that this is the first time that I have ever written a paper on the philosophy of a living person who can actually reply to my remarks. Like J. Alfred Prufrock, I anticipate that she might say "That is not what I meant at all./ That is not it, at all."4 My terror in this situation is mitigated only by my joy that Hazel Barnes is here with us, and my hope that we will have the pleasure of her philosophical conversation for many years to come. Since Sartre claimed that he never learned anything at all from any critic or commentator, I console myself with the thought that if this paper inspires a similar judgment, at least I will be in company most excellent. …

Recent scholarship has seen a return to the conceptual question: What is existentialism? This chapter identifies some contested theses of early existentialisms and traces their emergence in France in the period from 1925 to1943, from Gabriel Marcel’s ‘Existence and Objectivity’ to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and atheistic existentialism’s ethical turn in Simone de Beauvoir’s Pyrrhus and Cineas. Objecting to the claim that Heidegger ‘introduced’ existentialist themes into French thought, it outlines Beauvoir’s early formulations of existentialist claims in the late 1920s and draws attention to the significance of French personalist concepts (such as Emmanuel Mounier’s devotion [le dévouement]) in the development of existentialist ethics. Particular focus is given to the variety of early existentialist conceptions of the ‘situation’, ‘freedom’, and ‘love’ in the works of Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Edward and Kate Fullbrook's new book, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction (1998) builds on their earlier discovery, reported in Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (1994), that Beauvoir's 1943 novel, L'invitée (She Came to Stay 1990), traditionally read as Beauvoir's application of Sartre's 1943 philosophical essay, Being and Nothingness (1956), was instead its philosophical source. In their new book, the Fullbrooks provide a comprehensive introduction to Beauvoir's philosophy, highlighting Beauvoir's early philosophical originality and the historic importance of her postmodern anti-universalism and her concepts of narrative self, embodiment, and intersubjectivity. Their study encompasses Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity (1948) and The Second Sex (1952) and others such as Les Belles images (1968), Woman Destroyed (1969), and La Vieillesse (1970), her essay on old age entitled Coming of Age in the American edition. But where the Fullbrooks really shine is in their analysis of the philosophical program in Beauvoir's early fiction and nonfiction, texts often ignored by those who assume that Beauvoir's philosophy begins with Sartre.

Reviewed by: Simone de Beauvoir: Le combat au féminin by Éric Touya de Marenne E. Nicole Nunn Touya de Marenne, Éric. Simone de Beauvoir: Le combat au fémini. Presses Universitaires de France, 2019. Pp 128. ISBN: 978-2-13-081465-8. 9€ (paper). This concise Que sais-je? volume provides a superb and nuanced overview of Simone de Beauvoir, her life, influences, philosophy, novels, essays, autobiographical works, travel narratives and one play. The complexities of both [End Page 227] the woman and her writing shine through. Whether a Beauvoir scholar or a new(er) reader of her works, this well-organized, carefully researched volume offers a convincing interpretation both of the latest de Beauvoir critics (from Kristeva to collections such as L'Herne Beauvoir) and Beauvoir's own work and life. Touya de Marenne's first chapter overviews the relation of life and writing. The death of her childhood friend Zaza, her education, her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, and especially the pivotal occurrences of her time (the Occupation, her suspension from her teaching duties by the Vichy authorities, Sartre's imprisonment, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) incite philosophical, political and autobiographical reflection. Touya de Marenne convincingly considers Beauvoir's development of feminist thought, her original philosophy, and the reverberations of her oft-cited "On ne naît pas femme, on le devient." Her questions "Qu'est-ce qu'une femme?" and "Qui suis-je?" paradoxically raise the lack of parallel for men. Citing Danièle Sallenave's apt description in relation to Beauvoir: "La fiction est bien ce mensonge qui dit la vérité," Touya de Marenne's third chapter "Pouvoirs de la fiction" is a rapid tour de force. As he himself notes, the question of identity is at the heart of her novel(s). In addition, the discovery of the horror of the concentration camps and other contemporary events inspire both her own existential approach, and the necessity of witnessing the human experience. The fourth chapter addresses the contradictions, lack of mutual reciprocity, and other essential questions raised by Beauvoir's Le Deuxième sexe. His next chapter "Engagements politiques" develops the "combat" of the subtitle, arguing that "la liberté est au cœur de son combat," (73) while the many injustices of her time (whether those she experienced during the Occupation or others encountered through her travels to America, the USSR, China and Cuba) drive her to writing. The Resistance, the Liberation, and the War of Algeria mark her profoundly, whether in her political, autobiographical or fictional writings. Touya de Marenne argues that these pivotal events lead her to recognize the main contradictions of human existence when racism and sexism reign (77), and to declare herself a feminist (MLF). One of the many appealing aspects of Touya de Marenne's argument is his linking to our current moment (e.g., "#Me Too," present-day limitations on abortion (86) and other human rights violations). Confronting discrimination and sexism remains a leitmotif throughout Beauvoir's writings. "Étude de reception," the sixth chapter's first section, returns to critics' often opposing interpretations of her texts. Some write of her incoherent contradictions, essentialist thought, and devaluing of women. Touya de Marenne describes the complexities of labeling Beauvoir a feminist, while letting Beauvoir have the last word on the distinction between men and women being cultural (93). Across the entire chapter, Touya de Marenne highlights Beauvoir's impact on current feminist thought. Closing the volume, his final chapter discusses the "Héritages" which follow Beauvoir's groundbreaking work. Citing Sallenave, he queries: "Peut-on jamais conclure sur Beauvoir ? Peut-on en finir avec celle qui est certainement l'incarnation et la représentante absolue de ce XXe siècle ?" (105). Indeed, this [End Page 228] volume opens up current questions which occupy us now, leading to fascinating reflections that stretch the boundaries of gender in important ways. E. Nicole Nunn Augusta University (GA) Copyright © 2019 Women in French Studies

Since the publication of The Second Sex in 1949 Simone de Beauvoir has been a source of philosophical inspiration for feminists worldwide. Beauvoir was born in Paris, January 2, 1908, the daughter of Fran9oise Brasseur de Beauvoir and Georges de Beauvoir. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Superieure. After completing the agregateon in 1923, she taught philosophy in Marseilles, Rouen, and Paris. In 1944 Beauvoir decided to become a full-time writer. Simone de Beauvoir formed many lasting friendships including, most notably, her life-long friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre, the individual who most influenced her ideas and writing. She traveled widely and was particularly impressed by her visits to China, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the United States of America. She took part in numerous political demonstrations, among which were the opposition to the German occupation of France, to French colonial rule in Algeria, to the war in Vietnam, and to sexism in women's lives. Simone de Beauvoir died in Paris, April 21, 1986.