Simone de Beauvoir’s death in 1986 awakened a renaissance of scholarly interest in her philosophical work,1 a renaissance encouraged by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir’s publication in 1990 of her adoptive mother’s war diary and letters and her donation of several manuscripts, including handwritten diaries and the typescript of The Second Sex (1949),2 to the Bibliothèque Nationale. The heightened interest has extended to the general public as well, with discussions of research on Beauvoir’s philosophy appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (September 4, 1998), the New York Times (September 26, 1998), and the Chicago Tribune (March 31, 1999). When Time magazine selected the top ten nonfiction books of the twentieth century, the list included The Second Sex, “Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical treatise on the condition of women in modern life” (June 8, 1998). Life magazine named Simone de Beauvoir one of the one hundred most influential people of the millennium: “She developed existentialist philosophy in novels and nonfiction, . . . and wrote the most influential feminist book of the twentienth century.”3
But despite the scholarly research and wide public interest, Beauvoir’s philosophy remains relatively unanalyzed and widely misunderstood. One reason may be Beauvoir’s highly original philosophical methodology. Beauvoir rejects traditional philosophical system building, which she characterizes as “a concerted delirium” requiring that philosophers stubbornly give their “insights the value of universal keys.”4 Instead, Beauvoir argues that philosophy should reflect the ambiguities of actual life. “In truth, there is no divorce between philosophy and life,” Beauvoir writes in the preface to a 1948 collection of her essays. “Every living step is a philosophical choice and the ambition of a philosophy worthy of the name is to be a way of life that brings its justification with itself.”5 In order to present the opacity, ambiguity, and temporality of lived experience, Beauvoir began her career by writing philosophy in literary form, confronting the problem of the Other in her metaphysical novel She Came to Stay (1943).6 Even later, when she began writing philosophical essays as well, she focused on concrete problems, pioneering the phenomenological description of oppression in The Second Sex.
Another reason, in addition to her original methodology, that Beauvoir’s philosophical work has remained unanalyzed and misunderstood is that it has been overshadowed by that of her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose relationship with Beauvoir was chronicled in her multivolume autobiography. Beauvoir was a trained philosopher with a graduate diplôme on Leibniz and an agrégation degree in philosophy. But from the beginning, she was assumed to be Sartre’s philosophical follower and her work merely an application of his philosophy. The postwar French popular press ridiculed Beauvoir as “la grande Sartreuse” and “Notre-Dame de Sartre.”7 Even serious critics subsumed her work under his. Maurice Blanchot’s 1945 critical discussion of Beauvoir’s philosophical novels, for example, appears in an article entitled “Les romans de Sartre” (Sartre’s Novels).8 By the mid-1950s, when Beauvoir was beginning her memoirs, the sexist assumption that she was merely Sartre’s philosophical disciple was deeply embedded in the scholarly literature.9 Beauvoir’s memoirs only compounded the problem, since in them, and in later interviews, Beauvoir paradoxically disavows her work in philosophy, deleting references to philosophy from diaries and letters excerpted in her memoirs and describing herself as never “tempted to try my hand at philosophy.”10 In our 1979 interview, for example, Beauvoir declares adamantly: “Sartre was a philosopher, and I, I am not; and I never really wanted to be a philosopher. I like philosophy very much, but I have not constructed a philosophical work. I constructed a literary work.”11
It was not until 1994, after both of their deaths, that this account of their work was effectively challenged. A study by Edward Fullbrook of their posthumously published letters and diaries found that Sartre had read a second draft of Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, just as he was beginning work on Being and Nothingness (1943). Thus Beauvoir’s novel, long assumed to be an application of Sartre’s philosophy in his essay, was instead discovered to be one of its sources.12 My analysis of Beauvoir’s 1927 diary, written while she was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, two years before her first meeting with Sartre, confirms her early determination to become a philosopher: “Oh! tired, irritated, sure of arriving at nothing through this desperate appeal to philosophy—and yet I want it, I owe it to myself to do it. . . . To reason coldly. Ah! there’s a lot to do to make myself a philosopher!” The diary also reveals her passionate commitment to philosophy: “I didn’t know that every system is an ardent, tormented thing, an effort of life, of being, a drama in the full sense of the word and that it does not engage only the abstract intelligence. But I know it now, and that I can no longer do anything else.”13
That Beauvoir saw herself as constructing a philosophical work in the following decades is also clear. In a 1945 interview, for example, Beauvoir describes herself as having constructed an original existentialist ethics: “No ethics is implied in existentialism. I have sought, for my part, to extract one from it. I expounded it in Pyrrhus and Cineas, which is an essay, then I tried to express the solution that I found in a novel and a play, that is to say in forms at once more concrete and more ambiguous.”14 Beauvoir’s commitment to philosophy also seems clear in her defense of her methodology in “Literature and Metaphysics” and in the 1948 preface cited above. Not even the critical failure of her philosophical novels, Le sang des autres (The Blood of Others) in 1945 and Tous les hommes sont mortels (All Men Are Mortal) in 1946, lessens her commitment. In a 1948 letter to Nelson Algren, Beauvoir declares her intention to “find an answer to this problem” of writing philosophy in literary form, an effort that would eventually find success in her award-winning 1954 novel, Les Mandarins (The Mandarins).15
Why Beauvoir should have denied her work in philosophy remains something of a mystery, but one possible explanation is suggested by the timing of the disavowals, which apparently began in 1958 with the publication of Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter). When asked in a 1960 interview why she was writing her memoirs, Beauvoir replies that she wanted to show her readers who she was, in order to counter the dismissive reading of The Second Sex as a work of “feminine resentment”: “I would like it to be known that the woman who wrote The Second Sex did not do it at forty years of age in order to avenge a life that would have been totally unhappy and that would have embittered her. If one interprets the book in that way, one might as well say that one repudiates it.”16
Had Beauvoir recounted in her autobiographies the full story of her early philosophical ambitions, as well as her failure to win recognition for her achievements that followed, including her formulation of the problem of the Other and her construction of an existentialist ethics, which were both credited to Sartre, it would have seemed a bitter tale indeed and a painful reminder of Sartre’s failure to come publicly to her defense and acknowledge his philosophical debt to her. The story would have thus stirred up painful memories and fueled the dismissive reading of The Second Sex as a work of resentment that she sought to counter. Whatever the reason, the suppression of the full story has contributed to the misunderstanding of her philosophical work.
A third factor contributing to the misunderstanding, at least in English-speaking countries, is that much of her work has not been readily available in full, accurate English translations. In the 1960s, when the popularity of French existential phenomenology was at its height and scholars were writing its history, Americans read English translations of essays by Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir’s colleagues first as philosophy students and then as coeditors of the journal Les temps modernes.17 But most of Beauvoir’s essays from the same period remain untranslated even now and her contributions to Les temps modernes and, more generally, to the development of French existential phenomenology, largely overlooked. Furthermore, when Beauvoir’s texts have been translated by commercial publishers the accurate and consistent translation of philosophical terms has not been a priority.
Indeed, this problem is already apparent in the first text by Beauvoir to appear in English translation, an article entitled (by the editors of Harper’s Bazaar) “Jean-Paul Sartre: Strictly Personal,” which was published in the January 1946 issue of the magazine. Karen Vintges found, in comparing that version with the recently discovered French typescript of Beauvoir’s article, that the magazine had deleted fifty-five lines of Beauvoir’s discussion of Sartre’s philosophy, retaining only a biographical sketch. This obscured the deeper implications of Beauvoir’s approach, which presents philosophy not as timeless, abstract reasoning but as a way of life. It also misled critics who read the article’s exclusive focus on Sartre’s life as part of a publicity campaign designed to make him a celebrity.
The English edition of Beauvoir’s most historically important text, The Second Sex, is also marred by deletions and mistranslations. The translator, H. M. Parshley, a zoologist and authority on sex and reproduction, deleted more than 10 percent of the French text and mistranslated key philosophical terms. He justified his disregard for philosophy in the preface: “Mlle de Beauvoir’s book is, after all, on woman, not philosophy.”18 Unfortunately this trend of providing popular editions at the expense of the integrity and accurate translation of Beauvoir’s texts has continued. The 1991 English translation of Beauvoir’s Letters to Sartre (1990) deleted one-third of the French text. Despite the translator’s claim to have preserved “all discussion of De Beauvoir’s own or Sartre’s work,” thirty-eight references to Beauvoir’s work on She Came to Stay have been deleted from letters in November and December 1939 alone. There are also mistranslations, such as the translation of “the central subject” of She Came to Stay, “Françoise’s problem with consciousnesses,” as the “problem with consciousness,” which misconstrues a social problem as an individual one.19 Such mistakes are all too typical of translations of Beauvoir’s texts by translators lacking the requisite philosophical background and required by commercial publishers to make substantial cuts.
A determination to change this situation has brought together an international team of scholars in philosophy and French language and literature united in the goal of providing scholarly and complete English translations of all of Beauvoir’s available texts with introductions explaining their philosophical significance. Supported by a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Matching Funds Grant from the Illinois Board of Higher Education, we are translating seven volumes of Beauvoir’s texts. In addition to the present volume of philosophical writings, we are translating student diaries recounting her struggle against despair and her early dedication to philosophy; a war diary recording the writing of She Came to Stay and her developing sense of social responsibility during the Nazi occupation; works of fiction; and essays on literature, politics, and feminism.
Our goal of providing complete and accurate translations of Beauvoir’s texts has guided our translation of Beauvoir’s philosophical writings. We have, for example, included the original French terms, within brackets, when necessary for clarity or to highlight a French term whose English translation varies depending upon the context. We have also retained Beauvoir’s practice of using the male pronoun to refer to individual humans, since she wrote before the day of gender-neutral usage. Finally, we have retained her capitalization of terms meant in an absolute sense; for example, “the Other” is another person who is treated not as a peer but as an absolute object with no possibility of reciprocity.
Given our interest in Beauvoir’s philosophy, one might ask why we have decided to provide scholarly translations of all of her available texts. Our decision has been guided by Beauvoir’s own unique philosophical methodology, which produces not only formal essays on existentialist ethics but also works of fiction and articles on political affairs. Our selection of texts has thus been limited solely by practical considerations, which necessitate giving priority first to previously untranslated texts and then to shorter texts requiring retranslation.
Beauvoir’s methodological focus on the exploration of concrete, lived experience has also posed a dilemma for the organization of the volumes. Assigning some texts to a volume of “philosophical writings” and others to volumes of “literary” or “political” writings imposes problematic distinctions that run counter to Beauvoir’s philosophy. But the alternative of publishing all of her texts in a chronologically ordered “Collected Works” is, we decided, more problematic. While such a publication would highlight the historical connections between the texts and avoid the misleading division of texts into topics, it would be too expensive and unwieldy for classroom use. Since one of our goals is to introduce a historically important woman philosopher into the philosophical curriculum where women’s voices are currently under-represented, we have chosen to organize the volumes by topic, retaining a chronological organization for the individual texts within each volume and providing introductions pointing out connections with other texts.
The present volume of philosophical writings obviously does not include all of what might be defined as Beauvoir’s philosophical work in the narrow sense, since it does not include such important and lengthy essays as Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex. But the volume does bring together diverse elements of Beauvoir’s philosophical work, ranging from metaphysical literature to essays on existentialist ethics, and highlights continuities in the development of her thought. It includes some of Beauvoir’s most important essays, including Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944), an essay in existential ethics, translated here for the first time, which lays the groundwork for her Ethics of Ambiguity. Framed as a confrontation between the man of action and the cynic, for whom every action seems absurd, Pyrrhus and Cineas provides a historic precedent for the contemporary problem of postmodern disengagement and argues for the fundamental intersubjectivity of human reality.
Also included in the volume are four essays in existentialist ethics and aesthetics originally published in Les temps modernes in 1945–46 and later reprinted in a volume entitled L’existentialisme et la sagesse des nations (Existentialism and Popular Wisdom) (1948): “Moral Idealism and Political Realism,” which posits existentialism as an alternative to the dilemma of moral purity and political cynicism; “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom,” a defense of existentialism against the charge that it is a philosophy of despair; “An Eye for an Eye,” Beauvoir’s response to the treason trial of the collaborationist newspaper editor Robert Brasillach, where she confronted the life-and-death consequences of being a politically engaged writer; and “Literature and Metaphysics,” where Beauvoir defends her methodology of writing philosophy in literary form.
The volume begins with a recently discovered 1924 essay in the philosophy of science written for a senior-level high school philosophy class, the only surviving text from Beauvoir’s years as a philosophy student, her diplôme on Leibniz having apparently been lost. The student essay is followed by two unpublished chapters of She Came to Stay, which tell the story of the novel’s protagonist, Françoise, in her youthful confrontations with being. Beauvoir’s 1945 review of Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception, published in the second issue of Les temps modernes, is also included, as is the article on Sartre discussed above and Beauvoir’s 1946 article “Introduction to an Ethics of Ambiguity,” which was later revised and incorporated into the first chapter of The Ethics of Ambiguity.
The volume ends with two articles published in American newspapers at the end of Beauvoir’s extended visit to the States in 1947. “An Existentialist Looks at Americans,” originally published in English in the New York Times, is the only text in the volume for which we were unable to find the original French typescript, and thus the only one reprinted without retranslation. The final text in the volume, “What Is Existentialism?” is a defense of existentialism published in the American French-language newspaper France-Amérique. Spanning the first twenty-five years of Beauvoir’s work in philosophy, the texts assembled in this volume provide an introduction to Beauvoir’s early philosophical work and thus a useful context for reading not only other early texts, such as When Things of the Spirit Come First, She Came to Stay, The Blood of Others, Les bouches inutiles (Useless Mouths) (1945), All Men Are Mortal, and The Second Sex (1949), but her later work as well.20
The introductions to the texts in this volume together highlight several interesting and surprising themes. The biggest surprise may be the early date of the appearance of key elements in Beauvoir’s philosophical methodology. Her rejection of philosophical absolutes and turn to the “disclosure” of concrete reality, traditionally assumed to reflect the influence of Bergson’s philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology, are already suggested in her 1924 student essay on the philosopher of science Claude Bernard. Scientific discoveries, according to Bernard, require the rejection of philosophical absolutes and the assumption of one’s freedom. Beauvoir’s later concept of philosophy as a way of life, with its call to reject the quest for being, embrace the exhilarating if uncomfortable reality of one’s freedom, and pursue the disclosure of being, seems to reflect Bernard’s philosophy.
Another interesting theme in this collection is Beauvoir’s turn to the philosophical novel for a methodological alternative to philosophical absolutes and system building. As she later explains in “Literature and Metaphysics,” the author of a metaphysical novel is able to disclose the reality of human experience in its opacity, ambiguity, and temporality, which is not possible in an abstract philosophical essay. The struggle between the desire to be and the desire to disclose being is a subject of her first published philosophical work, the metaphysical novel She Came to Stay. The novel’s two unpublished chapters included in this volume form a short story chronicling the temptations of solipsism and conventional identity for a young girl who eventually rejects the quest of being for the joys of embodied experience and friendship with a resolutely separate other.
Perhaps the most important theme in this collection is Beauvoir’s development of an existentialist ethics, a development that is framed, surprisingly often, by a discussion of violence. She Came to Stay concludes with an act of murder that highlights Beauvoir’s early, solipsistic ethics of radical freedom, an ethics undermined by the Nazi occupation, which gave her a new awareness of her connection with others. In the texts that followed, several of which are included in this volume, Beauvoir seeks to construct an alternative to the moral solipsism of She Came to Stay, initiating what she later termed the “moral period” in her literary life. A key theme is the development of an ethics based on the concept of ambiguity.
Beauvoir already explores the ambiguities of self and other, present and future, and consciousness and embodiment in She Came to Stay. But her early philosophy ignores the full ambiguity of social and historical existence. Pyrrhus and Cineas, a tragic vision of the inevitably violent human condition written during the occupation, retains from She Came to Stay a concept of inner freedom as immune from the other’s power, but it moves beyond moral solipsism in its ethical attentiveness to the singular other, an awareness that our actions produce the conditions in which the other acts, and an exploration of the notion of “appeal.”
In “Moral Idealism and Political Realism,” Beauvoir emphasizes the social and temporal ambiguities of human reality as she takes up the question from her 1945 novel The Blood of Others of whether moral action is possible in the ambiguous and violent world of politics. In “Eye for an Eye,” Beauvoir seems to abandon her earlier claim of an inner freedom immune from the power of the Other. She condemns Brasillach’s exposure of Jews to murder by the Nazis, as the degrading of a man to a thing. Such a degradation, which touches a person’s inner depths, is made possible by the tragic ambiguity of our human condition as consciousness and material thing. But, Beauvoir argues, we can found an ethics on the reciprocal affirmation of this ambiguity, which I experience differently in relation to myself and to others. Beauvoir’s project of constructing an ethics founded on a metaphysical account of the fundamental ambiguity of the human condition culminates in The Ethics of Ambiguity, which lays the groundwork for her later account of freedom in situation in The Second Sex.
A fourth theme in the introductions to the texts in this volume highlights the influences that Beauvoir drew upon in constructing her philosophy. There is, first of all, the surprising evidence of Beauvoir’s early interest in Claude Bernard and the intriguing references in her philosophy school textbook to Hegel and Fouillée. Hegel’s influence is evident in many of the texts, from Pyrrhus and Cineas to “What Is Existentialism?” Bergson’s influence is evident in Pyrrhus and Cineas as well, as it is in “Literature and Metaphysics” and in Beauvoir’s review of Merleau-Ponty’s text with its appreciation of the flow of experience underlying theory.
The introductions identify phenomenology as another important influence. Beauvoir first read Husserl in 1934–35, before writing the two unpublished chapters of She Came to Stay, and as we know from a letter to Sartre, she first read Heidegger in July 1939.21 Heidegger’s influence is evident in several works, including Pyrrhus and Cineas, “Literature and Metaphysics,” and “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom.” And there is evidence of Husserl’s influence as well. In her introduction to Beauvoir’s “Review of The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Heinämaa notes Beauvoir’s reference to the ethical implications of the phenomenological notion of intentionality. In “Introduction to an Ethics of Ambiguity,” Beauvoir makes the Husserlian distinction between the desire for being and the desire to disclose being a centerpiece of her ethics, through the concept of an existential conversion, a concept modeled on Husserl’s notion of epoché, as Holveck notes in her introduction to “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom.”
These texts also clarify and complicate our understanding of Beauvoir’s intellectual relationship with Sartre, as several of the introductions point out. For example, Heinämaa argues that Beauvoir, in her review of Merleau-Ponty’s book, takes distance from Sartre’s ontology and describes Merleau-Ponty’s non-dualist notion of subjectivity based on the experience of temporality as a fruitful alternative. Heinämaa asks whether Beauvoir’s discussion of subjectivity is really similar to Sartre’s or nearer to that of Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger.
The questions for further research raised by these texts form a final theme in this volume. How does Beauvoir’s later work respond, for example, to the question raised by Bernard of the role and method of philosophy in the absence of absolutes and system building? How do Beauvoir’s works of philosophical literature written during her “moral period” develop themes evident in these essays? What evidence is there of the influence of Heidegger’s concept of temporality in Beauvoir’s novel All Men Are Mortal? Many of these essays are framed in terms of dilemmas, that is, Pyrrhus versus Cineas or Antigone versus Creon, an approach that seems to characterize Beauvoir’s discussion of race in America Day by Day, which is constructed as a search for an alternative to nominalist and essentialist views. Is this a method that characterizes Beauvoir’s work in general?
Bergoffen, in her introduction to Pyrrhus and Cineas, asks whether Beauvoir’s later works mute the tragedy of the human condition so starkly delineated in Pyrrhus and Cineas. What happens to the focus on violence in her later work? How does Beauvoir, in The Second Sex and The Mandarins, address the shortcomings that she saw in the work of her “moral period,” that is, its excessive individualism, ahistorical perspective, and abstraction from a social context? How does she develop the concept of freedom in her later work, particularly in reference to new concepts such as “situation”? What role does the concept of “ambiguity” play in her later work?
1. Recent books on Beauvoir include: Kristana Arp, The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 2001); Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (New York: Summit, 1990); Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Joy Bennett and Gabriela Hochmann, Simone de Beauvoir: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1988); Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Catharine Brosman, Simone de Beauvoir Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1991); Claudia Card, The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Margaret Crosland, Simone de Beauvoir: The Woman and Her Work (London: Heinemann, 1992); Christine Delphy and Sylvie Chaperon, Cinquantenaire du deuxième sexe (Paris: Syllepse, 2002); Elizabeth Fallaize, The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir (London: Routledge, 1988) and Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 1998); Penny Forster and Imogen Sutton, eds., Daughters of de Beauvoir (London: Women’s Press, 1989); Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Simone de Beauvoir, trans. L. Nesselson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989); Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Basic, 1993) and Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); Sara Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Eleanore Holveck, Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Lived Experience: Literature and Metaphysics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Barbara Klaw, Le Paris de Simone de Beauvoir: Beauvoir’s Paris (Paris: Syllepse, 1999); Michèle Le Dœuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc., trans. T. Selous (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991); Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sexand Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” trans. L. Schenck (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996); Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994); Wendy O’Brien and Lester Embree, eds., The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 2001); Jo-Ann Pilardi, Writing the Self: Philosophy Becomes Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999); Margaret A. Simons, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1995) and “The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir,” special issue, Hypatia 14, no. 4 (Fall 1999); Margaret A. Simons, Beauvoir and “The Second Sex”: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999) and “Présences de Simone de Beauvoir,” Les temps modernes, June–July 2002; Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, trans. A. Lavelle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
2. Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), trans. H. M. Parshley as The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1952).
3. See ‹http://www.life.com/Life/millennium/people/71.html›, accessed March 25, 2004, where Beauvoir is listed as number 72.
4. Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 254.
5. Simone de Beauvoir, “Préface,” L’existentialisme et la sagesse des nations (1948; Paris: Nagel, 1963), 11. The book contains four of Beauvoir’s articles reprinted from Les temps modernes: “L’existentialisme et la sagesse des nations,” “Idéalisme moral et réalisme politique,” “Littérature et métaphysique,” and “Oeil pour oeil.” Translations of Beauvoir’s preface and all four articles are included in the present volume.
6. See Simone de Beauvoir, L’invitée (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouser as She Came to Stay (Cleveland: World, 1954).
7. Simone de Beauvoir, La force des choses, folio ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 1:71.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “Les romans de Sartre,” L’Arche 10 (October 1945), reprinted in La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 200, 203–4; Beauvoir erases this slight in her reference to Blanchot’s essay in her autobiography (“Blanchot, dans son essai sur ‘le roman à thèse,’” in La force de l’âge, 622).
9. See my “Sexism and the Philosophical Canon: On Reading Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,” in Simons, Beauvoir and “The Second Sex,” 101–14.
10. Beauvoir, La force de l’âge, 253.
11. “Beauvoir Interview,” in Simons, Beauvoir and “The Second Sex,” 9.
12. See Fullbrook and Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Edward Fullbrook, “She Came to Stay and Being and Nothingness,” Hypatia 14, no. 4: 50–69.
13. Simone de Beauvoir, fourth notebook, holograph manuscript, 1927, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, transcription by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret A. Simons, 116, 133–34 (my translation).
14. Dominique Aury, “Qu’est-ce que l’existentialisme? Escarmouches et patrouilles,” Les lettres françaises, December 1, 1945, 4.
15. Simone de Beauvoir, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, trans. E. G. Reeves (New York: Norton, 1998), 212–13. Thanks to Evangelia Romoudi at St. Louis University for referring me to this letter.
16. “Une interview de Simone de Beauvoir par Madeleine Chapsal,” in Les écrivains en personne (Paris: Julliard, 1960), 17–37, reprinted in Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 381–96; the quotation is from page 396.
17. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Criterion Books, 1955), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
18. See my “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex,” in Simons, Beauvoir and “The Second Sex,” 61–71.
19. Simone de Beauvoir, Lettresà Sartre, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 1:178; Letters to Sartre, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York, Arcade, 1992), 111.
20. Written from 1935 to 1937, Quand prime le spirituel, Beauvoir’s ironically titled study of bad faith, remained unpublished until 1979. See Simone de Beauvoir, Quand prime le spirituel (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), trans. Patrick O’Brian as When Things of the Spirit Come First (New York: Pantheon, 1982).
21. See Beauvoir’s Lettres à Sartre, 1:77, and Sartre’s Lettres à Castor, ed. Simone de Beauvoir, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 1:235 (“Enfin, vous avez lu Heidegger”).