Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T06:51:32.828Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Voice of Ambiguity: Simone de Beauvoir's Literary and Phenomenological Echoes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alexandra Morrison  and
Laura Zebuhr
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this essay we investigate several moments in Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical and literary texts in which she refers to echoes and echoing. We notice that echoes help Beauvoir to figure and amplify the ethical character of her concept of ambiguity, which is so central to her thought. We argue that, for Beauvoir, literature has privileged access to the ambiguity of existence and therefore maintains a special status in exposing us to alterity and bringing us face to face with ethical responsibility. Considering her literary portrayals of echoing helps to explain why, despite her life‐long philosophical engagement, Beauvoir preferred not to call herself a philosopher. Finally, Beauvoir's phenomenological insight is that in order to carry ethical resonance, the form of a written work must mirror the fundamentally ambiguous or echolalic ontological structure of human existence.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , Spring 2015 , pp. 418 - 433
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andrew, Barbara S. 2003. Beauvoir's place in philosophical thought. In The Cambridge companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Card, Claudia. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1954. Les mandarins. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1962. Prime of life. Trans. Peter Green. Hammondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1976. The ethics of ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1992a. All men are mortal. Trans. Leonard M. Friedman. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1992b. Force of circumstance, vol. 1. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Paragon House.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1999. The mandarins. Trans. Leonard M. Friedman. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2004. Literature and metaphysics. InSimone de Beauvoir: Philosophical writings, ed. Simons, Margaret A. with Timmermann, Marybeth and Beth Mader, Mary. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2006. Diary of a philosophy student: 1926–27. Trans. Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret A. Simons. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011a. An American renaissance in France. In “The useless mouths” and other literary writings, ed. Simons, Margaret A. with Timmermann, Marybeth. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011b. My experience as a writer. In “The useless mouths” and other literary writings, ed. Simons, Margaret A. with Timmermann, Marybeth. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011c. What can literature do? In “The useless mouths” and other literary writings, ed. Simons, Margaret A. with Timmermann, Marybeth. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berger, Anne‐Emmanuelle. 1996. The latest word from Echo. Trans. Rachel Gabara. New Literary History 27 (4): 621–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carson, Anne. 1986. “Echo with no door on her mouth”: A notional refraction through Sophokles, Plato, and Defoe. Stanford Literary Review 3 (2): 247–61.Google Scholar
Carson, Anne. 1992. The gender of sound. In Glass, irony, god.New York: New Directions.Google Scholar
Cixous, Hélène. 1976. Fiction and its phantoms: A reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The “uncanny”). New Literary Review 7 (3): 525–48.Google Scholar
Daigle, Christine. 2012. Thinking with Simone de Beauvoir… and beyond. Sapere aude 3 (6): 96–106.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Signature event context. In Limited inc. Trans. Samuel Weber. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 2005a. Not utopia, the im‐possible. In Paper machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 2005b. Others are secret because they are other. In Paper machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. 1972. Sein und Zeit, 12th edition. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. 2002. The origin of the work of art. In Off the beaten track. Trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 1964a. Cézanne's doubt. In Sense and non‐sense. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice.1964b. The metaphysical in man. In Sense and non‐sense. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 1964c. Metaphysics and the novel. In Sense and non‐sense, Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 1964d. Signs. Trans. Richard McCleary. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 1973. Adventures of the dialectic. Trans. Joseph Bien. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Morrison, Alexandra. 2013.The ruination of the artwork: Materiality, repetition, difference. In The proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Heidegger Circle. New Haven: Southern Connecticut State University.Google Scholar
Mussett, Shannon. 2012. The literary grounding of metaphysics: Beauvoir and Plato on philosophical fiction. In Beauvoir and western thought from Plato to Butler, ed. Mussett, Shannon M. and Wilkerson, William S. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Nouvet, Claire. 1991. An impossible response: The disaster of Narcissus. Yale French Studies 79: 103–34.Google Scholar
Raffoul, François. 2008. Derrida and the ethics of the im‐possible. Research in Phenomenology 38 (2): 270–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simons, Margaret A. 1989. Two interviews with Simone de Beauvoir. Hypatia 3 (3): 11–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simons, Margaret A. 2011. Introduction. In “The useless mouths” and other literary writings, ed. Simons, Margaret A. with Timmermann, Marybeth. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. Echo. New literary history 24 (1): 17–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar