Cluster Introduction

These three fine articles provide innovative readings of a central element in Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical method: the description of lived experience. Reading the articles while editing Beauvoir's forthcoming Diary of a Philosophy Student: 1927–30, my initial interest was in noting how the descriptions are foreshadowed in the student diary. Only later did I realize with a shock that the articles help solve a mystery surrounding Beauvoir's diary: why so much of it is missing from her autobiography.

Verónica Zebadúa Yáñez proposes an approach, which she calls “politico‐biographical hermeneutics,” to reading the genre of biography as political theory. She focuses on two biographical texts: one by Hannah Arendt on Rahel Varnhagen (1957) and the other by Beauvoir on the infamous Marquis de Sade (1952). Zebadúa Yáñez writes that their method of interpreting sociopolitical forces and situations at the micro‐level of an individual life reflects a shared “preoccupation with lived experience” (this issue, 94), a method that Beauvoir used in The Second Sex (1949), as Zebadúa Yáñez notes, and one that she will use in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), the first volume of her autobiography.

We can trace Beauvoir's preoccupation with lived experience to her enthusiasm for Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness in an August 16, 1926 entry in the first volume of her student diary (Reference Beauvoir, Beauvoir, Simons and TimmermannBeauvoir 2006, 66). A March 26, 1927 diary entry in our forthcoming volume records Beauvoir's early interest—as a woman—in this method: “I am very much a woman in that ideas interest me only insofar as they are lived.” The forthcoming volume also includes Beauvoir's first reference to “lived experience” in a diary entry dated February 10, 1928, when Beauvoir is writing a philosophy paper for a professor at the Sorbonne, the Husserlean Jean Baruzi, and discussing her ideas with a student at the École Normale Supérieure, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty.

Beauvoir and Arendt share another preoccupation, according to Zebadúa Yáñez: a value of freedom that respects and furthers the freedom of others and rejects individual and political sovereignty in favor of connection and joint action. Zebadúa Yáñez gives the clearest account I've read of Beauvoir's political analysis of Sade, writing that Beauvoir sees him as “a living embodiment of Enlightenment values, stripped bare” (this issue, 102). Criticizing Sade's solipsism, Beauvoir argues that the “stubborn sincerity” of his life makes Sade a “great moralist.” But as Zebadúa Yáñez writes, Sade, who was caught “in the inescapable tensions… between individual desires and social imperatives” (this issue, 101), paid a terrible price for his authenticity: he was incarcerated for most of his life and died in an insane asylum.

Beauvoir might have found a cautionary tale in the life of Sade, whom Debra Bergoffen has described as “Beauvoir's Janus‐faced ally” (Reference BergoffenBergoffen 2014). Beauvoir's January 23, 1928 diary entry shows the strength of her “crazy desires” and her defiance of social imperatives: “With crazy desires… and the certitude of such a complete liberation from everything and everybody. Aside from killing, what wouldn't I do?… I am different from everyone; I enjoy… remaining so distant underneath my well‐behaved airs!” Beauvoir would later decide to omit, for example, the account of her sexual relationships with women, chronicled in her Wartime Diary, from her autobiography.

Megan Burke focuses on Beauvoir's description in The Second Sex of women's lived experience of time as “an underlying structure of sexual objectification” (this issue, 113), reflecting the denial of women's transcendence and her confinement to immanence. Burke argues brilliantly that Beauvoir challenges the triadic structure of time in classic phenomenological accounts by describing three violent “ruptures with the past” (this issue, 117) that “annex a woman into the universe of men” (this issue, 118) and confine her to “the temporality of waiting, or a passive present” (this issue, 111). These “ruptures in time” coincide with the developmental events of girlhood, heterosexual initiation, and marriage, events “noteworthy because of their harm and violence” that “diminish[…] a woman's capacity to build her own world” (this issue, 121). Beauvoir's description in The Second Sex may have drawn upon the account in her diary of her own heterosexual initiation (which reads like date rape) in the fall of 1929 and its emotional aftermath in 1930, an account missing from her autobiography. What remains are a defiant refusal of marriage and celebration of (hetero) sexual nonmonogamy.

A classic account of time challenged by Beauvoir might be Bergson's Time and Free Will, which she used as a foil in her prewar masterpiece, She Came to Stay (see Reference Simons and CardSimons 2003, 107–28). The distinction between transcendence and immanence surely comes from Hegel's Phenomenology, which Beauvoir's Wartime Diary shows her reading during the first weeks of the Nazi occupation. Burke's analysis invites a new understanding of Beauvoir's philosophical move from a Bergsonian celebration of immediate experience in She Came to Stay, to a postwar critique of immanence, as a confinement to the present, in The Second Sex.

Jessica Kean contrasts the lived experience of nonmonogamous relationships, as depicted by Beauvoir in its full emotional and philosophical complexity in She Came to Stay, with the conventional view of nonmonogamy as inevitably marred by jealousy. Kean's refreshingly thorough review of the literature (including a great quote from Mary Evans on Beauvoir's pre‐emptive interpretation of her own work turning “the task of the critic… into an act of antagonism” [Evans 1983, 70]) does not stop Kean from providing the most original and convincing interpretation I've ever read of the murder that concludes the novel. Kean reads the fictional murder as “a gesture of protest” (this issue, 141) “within the novel and through the novel” (this issue, 140), illustrating “the fury that can result from having your complex subjectivity” (this issue, 141) explained away as jealousy.

Kean's interpretation of the novel also provides a key to understanding Beauvoir's motive twenty years later for erasing much of her life—including her sexual relationships with women and her achievement in originating the philosophy in She Came to Stay—from her autobiography. Infuriated by conventional misreadings of her unconventional life and well aware of the dangers of open defiance, Beauvoir decided to sacrifice the authenticity that she so admired in Sade and portray herself in more conventional terms as a heterosexual woman and philosophical follower of her male lover—in a nonmonogamous, heterosexual relationship—in order to win the fight for sexual freedom and equality.