A Genealogy of Alienation in Post-Beauvoirian Philosophies of Gender

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The aim of this project is, first, to elaborate how, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir develops a materialist theory of alienation, and, second, to consider how this reading of Beauvoir can help us reread philosophers of gender influenced by her thought. The (admittedly sparse) extant literature on Beauvoirian alienation resists interpreting her metaphysics of gender on Marxist terms, despite the vast evidence of her Marxist affiliations. Toril Moi, for instance, argues that Beauvoirian alienation is influenced by Hegel's dialectic and Lacan's account of desire (Moi, 1992). Marx, in this essay, is nowhere to be seen. Kristina Arp gestures towards Marxism in her reading of Beauvoirian alienation, but this brief exploration functions as an afterthought to her broader argument on the social construction of passivity (Arp, 1995: 174). Critical literature on feminist philosophy since The Second Sex is similarly averse to highlighting Beauvoir's materialism, with such networks of influence rarely being outlined in light of her Marxism (two brief exceptions to this rule are: Bergoffen, 2012: 368-70 and van Leeuwen, 2018) and never with respect to alienation.My core research questions will thus be: To what extent is the account of sexual difference that Beauvoir offers in The Second Sex, and especially the alienated nature of this metaphysics, a materialist proposition? And what does such materialism mean for how we read gender theory influenced by Beauvoir's landmark text? By unearthing the materialist nuance of Beauvoir's philosophy of gender, I will show that the dialectic of Otherness that she argues to be fundamental for understanding sexual difference is not only a metaphysical dialectic, but also a political one. And by re-framing the history of post-Beauvoirian feminist thought through Beauvoir's own theory of alienation, this project will demonstrate the value of reconciling the contributions of post-Beauvoirian philosophies of gender with the political urgency that Beauvoir's materialism posits. This will comprise of close readings of three groups of feminists whom Beauvoir influenced: 1970s materialist feminists (especially Christine Delphy, Shulamith Firestone, and Monique Wittig), slightly later psychoanalytical feminists (especially Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler), and post-2000 new-materialist feminists (especially Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, and Paul Preciado).As the title suggests, this project will be a genealogy in the Foucaultian sense of a history of knowledge that neither seeks to establish origins nor imagines the teleology of its object of study. Beauvoir's positing of alienation is, of course, not an original purity from which post-Beauvoirian feminism deviates, nor do the feminists I will analyse belong to a trajectory within which alienation may reach its telos. Rather, the history I will trace will be a genealogy of alienation's various emergences and disappearances that refuses to situate such events within any metahistorical teleology.