For almost twenty years, feminist readings of Simone de Beauvoir s feminist classic The Second Sex have been dominated by dismissive interpretation of Beauvoir s philosophy as Sartrean and phallocentric. Beauvoir s angry refusal to acknowledge either her philosophical originality or her lesbian relationships led to an interpretive impasse on two issues: her relationship to existentialism and her relationship to feminism. It was not until Beauvoir s death in 1986 that this interpretive impasse would be broken. Feminist scholars reacted to news of Beauvoir s death in 1986 by initiating a reevaluation of her life s work, a task encouraged by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, her adopted daughter, who edited for posthumous publication many of Beauvoir s personal notebooks and letters to Sartre. Some of the most exciting new interpretations of Beauvoir s philosophy that have resulted are brought together here for the first time; many of them, indeed, were written expressly for this first volume of essays on Beauvoir s philosophy written since her death.
From phenomenology and literary criticism to analytic philosophy and postmodern deconstruction, this collection presents a unique variety of methodological approaches to reading Beauvoir: placing her within the phenomenological tradition and identifying the Husserlean influence on her work; using the posthumously published letters and notebooks to shed light on Beauvoir s own experience of oppression and to deconstruct the philosophical movement that exploited her; analyzing the themes and structure of Beauvoir s novel The Mandarins to study her philosophy of the erotic; examining the structure of her argument about women s biology and sexual difference to challenge the criticism of Beauvoir s phallocentricism; locating her writings on decolonization as a historical antecedent of the postmodern philosophy of destruction. Of particular interest may be the scholarly reading of little-known texts, such as Beauvoir s essay on the Marquis de Sade, or her essay Literature and Metaphysics, in the context of her better-known texts, such as Ethics of Ambiguity, to trace Beauvoir s philosophical development and challenge the view that Beauvoir was either Sartrean or phallocentric."