Weiss, Gail. Review of Penelope Deutscher's THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR. NDPR (February 2009).

Deutscher, Penelope. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. Penelope Deutscher's The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance is a wonderful addition to the Beauvoirian canon. Meticulously researched, this book offers an original interpretation of central existential concepts including ambiguity, repetition, freedom, alterity, reciprocity, and sedimentation, and their changing meanings in Beauvoir's work. Deutscher is thoroughly familiar with the growing body of Beauvoir scholarship and she does a masterful job of integrating key insights from Beauvoir's many commentators into her analysis. The animating concept that structures the text as a whole is "conversion," a term that Deutscher takes up from Beauvoir and uses both literally and metaphorically as a way of understanding Beauvoir's own philosophical methodology. Throughout the book, Deutscher shows us the creative and often conflicting ways in which Beauvoir appropriates and transforms the phenomenological, existential, anthropological, Marxist, critical race, and psychoanalytic insights of her predecessors and peers to address oppressive phenomena such as sexism, racism, and ageism. Each chapter focuses on a particular "conversion" (ambiguity, bad faith, repetition, alterity, and reciprocity), and together they provide: 1) close readings of how other authors including Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Levi-Strauss, Wright, Myrdal, Kristeva, and Freud have described this experience; 2) detailed analyses of how Beauvoir interprets these experiences in her own work at varied points in time; and 3) provocative suggestions for how to further develop Beauvoir's insights regarding the existential and ethical significance of ambiguity, alterity, reciprocity, and vulnerability to combat social and political marginalization. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15185.