Bauer, Nancy. Review of Simone De Beauvoir, THE SECOND SEX. NDPR (August 2011).

De Beauvoir, Simone.  The Second Sex.  Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.  New York: Random House, 2010.

This is a review of the new English-language translation of Simone de Beauvoir's magnum opus, Le Deuxième sexe (1949), particularly with respect to its value for readers interested in Beauvoir as a philosopher. An important and unqualifiedly positive difference between this translation and the only other one available in English, which came out in 1952, is that the new translation has restored 145 pages of the original 972-page French original that the older English version omits, often willy-nilly and always without annotations or signposts. For the first time, Anglophone readers do not have to wonder whether the particular section of the book they're reading is filled with hidden holes.

We must not undervalue the importance of this restoration. And it is a relief to find that some of most grievous errors in the old translation have been eliminated. But the new translation is on the whole a disappointment, and not just from the point of view of those interested in the book as a work of philosophy, though the sting for us will be especially acute. Some of the problems that plague the old translation reappear in the new, and there are fresh ones as well. Most exasperatingly, the translators of the new version often sacrifice readability and clarity in favor of a highly unidiomatic word-by-word literalism that hampers the flow of Beauvoir's prose and often obfuscates its meaning. There are crucial places in Beauvoir's argument in which the new translation is decidedly superior to the old. On the whole, however, the new version often taxes the reader's patience and obscures Beauvoir's views. . . .

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25488-the-second-sex/

"Simone de Beauvoir Now: a Symposium to Mark the 25th Anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir's Death," Centre for Philosophy and Literature and Department of Women's Studies, Duke University, September 23, 2011.

Confirmed Speakers:
Emily Apter (French, New York University)
Stella Sandford (Philosophy, Kingston University, UK)
Ursula Tidd (French, University of Manchester, UK)
Linda Zerilli(Political Science and the Center for Gender Studies, University of Chicago)

Respondents:
Nancy Bauer (Philosophy, Tufts University)
Toril Moi (PAL; Literature, Duke University)

Visit: http://www.duke.edu/web/philartslit/events.html.

Romano, Carlin. "The Second 'Second Sex.'" CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION June 20, 2010.

As translation contretemps go, the one surrounding French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) and her foundational work of modern feminism, Le Deuxième Sexe, first published in two volumes in French in 1949, remains one of the most tempestuous and fascinating. For decades, Beauvoir scholars in the English-speaking world bemoaned, attacked, and sought to replace the widely used 1953 translation by H.M. Parshley (1884-1953), a zoologist at Smith College who knew little philosophy or existentialism, had never translated a book from French, and relied mainly on his undergraduate grasp of the language. A few years back, they succeeded in getting the rights holders, Gallimard in France and Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage in the English-speaking world, to commission a new translation. Now that second version has appeared from Knopf (The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, "A New Translation of the Landmark Classic by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier," with an introduction by Judith Thurman, "Complete and Unabridged for the First Time").

If Knopf and its partners expected to be showered with feminist appreciation, they've been sorely disappointed. The Norwegian Beauvoir scholar Toril Moi, a professor at Duke and one of the foremost critics of Parshley's translation, savaged the new version in the London Review of Books. Francine du Plessix Gray, in The New York Times Book Review, also expressed reservations. How everyone involved got from vituperative discontent to hopeful triumph and back to discontent makes an instructive tale in itself and offers some lessons for what matters and doesn't in the evolution of a classic. . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Second-Second-Sex/65962/.

Du Plessix Gray, Francine. "Dispatches from the Other." NEW YORK TIMES May 20, 2010.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New Translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Intro. Judith Thurman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier’s new translation of The Second Sex is the first English-language edition in almost 60 years, and the first to restore the material Parshley excised. In this passionate, awesomely erudite work, Beauvoir examines the reasons women have been forced to accept a place in society secondary to that of men, despite the fact that women constitute half the human race. Supporting her arguments with data from biology, physiology, ethnology, anthropology, mythology, folklore, philosophy and economics, she documents the status of women throughout history, from the age of hunter-gatherers to the mid-20th century. In one of her most interesting chapters, “The Married Woman” (a chapter Parshley particularly savaged), she offers numerous quotations from the novels and diaries of Virginia Woolf, Colette, Edith Wharton, Sophia Tolstoy and others. She also scrutinizes the manner in which various male authors, from Montaigne to Stendhal to D. H. Lawrence, have represented women (and, in many cases, how they treated their wives). Urging women to persevere in their efforts at emancipation, she emphasizes that they must also do so for the sake of men: “It is when the slavery of half of humanity is abolished and with it the whole hypocritical system it implies that the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its authentic meaning and the human couple will discover its true form.” How does Beauvoir’s book stand up more than a half-century later? And how does this new translation compare with the previous one? I’m sorry to report that The Second Sex, which I read with euphoric enthusiasm in my post-college years, now strikes me as being in many ways dated. Written in an era in which a minority of women were employed, its arguments for female participation in the work force seem particularly outmoded. And Beauvoir’s truly paranoid hostility toward the institutions of marriage and motherhood — another characteristic of early feminism — is so extreme as to be occasionally hilarious. Every aspect of the female reproductive system, from puberty to menopause, is approached with the same ferocious disdain. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Gray-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=all. Read the introduction here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/excerpt-introduction-second-sex.html. Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 "Biological Data" here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/excerpt-first-chapter-second-sex.html?ref=review.

Mussett, Shannon. "Simone De Beauvoir." INTERNET ECYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY Updated January 17, 2010.

Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most preeminent French existentialist philosophers and writers. Working alongside other famous existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir produced a rich corpus of writings including works on ethics, feminism, fiction, autobiography, and politics. Beauvoir’s method incorporated various political and ethical dimensions. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she developed an existentialist ethics that condemned the “spirit of seriousness” in which people too readily identify with certain abstractions at the expense of individual freedom and responsibility. In The Second Sex, she produced an articulate attack on the fact that throughout history women have been relegated to a sphere of “immanence,” and the passive acceptance of roles assigned to them by society. In The Mandarins, she fictionalized the struggles of existents trapped in ambiguous social and personal relationships at the closing of World War II. The emphasis on freedom, responsibility, and ambiguity permeate all of her works and give voice to core themes of existentialist philosophy. Her philosophical approach is notably diverse. Her influences include French philosophy from Descartes to Bergson, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and the idealism of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F Hegel. In addition to her philosophical pursuits, de Beauvoir was also an accomplished literary figure, and her novel, The Mandarins, received the prestigious Prix Goncourt award in 1954. Her most famous and influential philosophical work, The Second Sex (1949), heralded a feminist revolution and remains to this day a central text in the investigation of women’s oppression and liberation. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/beauvoir/.

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.

Steinbauer, Anja. "What Simone Said." PHILOSOPHY NOW (September October 2008).

We must ask together with de Beauvoir: What is a woman? What is an existentialist? What is a philosopher? And do any of these shoes really fit her without aches and blisters? . . . Read the answers here: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue69/69steinbauer.htm.

Henri-Levy, Bernard. "A Woman in Full." NEW REPUBLIC June 6, 2008.

It is time that we pay tribute to Simone de Beauvoir. Posterity being what it is--unjust, capricious, confusing and chaotic, making a great deal out of very little, force-feeding us May '68 nostalgia and treating the dead as if they have not lost any of their formidable, vibrant virulence (not that this is, in this case, such a terrible thing)--it is time we celebrate Simone de Beauvoir on a scale commensurate with the 100th anniversary of her birth, which passed nearly unnoticed on Jan. 9.. . . Read the rest here: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8102090c-dd86-4eed-8888-827e3fd04635.

Tindall, Gillian. "Review of Seymour-Jones' GLUED TOGETHER BY THEIR LIVES." LITERARY REVIEW (April 2008).

Seymour-Jones, Carole. Glued Together by their Lies: a Dangerous Liaison. Thomaston, ME: Century Press, 2007. Let me put my cards on the table. On many occasions, both in France and in England, I have heard or read women of my own generation, the generation of the daughters that Simone de Beauvoir did not have, say what an important book her Le Deuxième Sexe was to them in youth, how it shaped their thinking. I listen uncomprehendingly. To me, this, Beauvoir's most famous work, is a baggy, old-fashioned French academic thesis, groaning under the weight of piled-up examples of all kinds and dates. Many of its assertions were already out-of-date in even mildly liberal circles long before it was written. Yet in spite of its over-copiousness it has huge gaps in coverage and central areas of obtuseness. To believe, as Beauvoir apparently did all her life, that 'a woman is not born but made' is already a substantial handicap. A worse one, however, was her complete inability, remarked upon even by her most sympathetic contemporaries, to understand maternity as anything but a stultifying trap. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/tindall_04_08.html.

CFP: "Age / Aging: On De Beauvoir's THE COMING OF AGE," Institut für Philosophie, Universität Wien, February 22-23, 2008.

An international conference on the occasion of Simone de Beauvoir’s 100th Birthday (1908–1986). Further details here: http://beauvoir2008.univie.ac.at/.

Chrisafis, Angelique. "Academic Tug-of-Love Over De Beauvoir Legacy." GUARDIAN January 4, 2008.

As France begins a glittering celebration of the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir's birth next week, some academics have warned against the rush of debate and publications descending into prudish attacks on her deliberately outrageous sex life. De Beauvoir's partnership with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has been called the "original open relationship" - one of France's most celebrated and unconventional intellectual couplings. They met in 1929 and never married but devoted themselves to each other while agreeing they should be free to engage in sexual and emotional entanglements with others - as long as they shared the details. Their long list of sometimes mutual partners included well-known intellectuals as well as some of De Beauvoir's awestruck young women students. One of them, Bianca Lamblin, later wrote a pained memoir entitled A Disgraceful Affair, telling how Sartre said before seducing her for the first time in Paris: "The hotel chambermaid will really be surprised, because I already took a girl's virginity yesterday." Read the rest here: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2235338,00.html.

CFP: "The Legacies of Simone de Beauvoir," 16th International Conference, University of Northumbria, June 13-15, 2008.

This international conference aims to re-evaluate Simone de Beauvoir's contribution to 20th century fiction, autobiography, philosophy and politics. Her influence as a major intellectual figure in the history of post-war France will be considered. The conference will assess Beauvoir's legacies in terms of her influence on subsequent generations of writers and critics, both in France and internationally. Questions of reception, dissemination and translation of Beauvoir's oeuvre will also be addressed, particularly in the light of recent publications. It is hoped that this focus on Beauvoir's legacies will be of interest not only to Beauvoir scholars but also to those working in Gender Studies, Philosophy, 20th Century French fiction and life writing. Proposals are invited for papers lasting twenty minutes in French or English. Please send abstracts, in English or French, of not more than 350 words, to the conference organisers, Dr Alison Holland (alison.holland@northumbria.ac.uk) and Dr Susan Bainbrigge (susan.bainbrigge@ed.ac.uk), by Monday 19th November 2007. For more information, please go to http://simonedebeauvoir.free.fr/colloques/uk.html.

CFP: "De Beauvoir's Philosophy," Panel Sponsored by Simone de Beauvoir Society, Annual Meeting, EPTC, University of British Columbia, June 3-5, 2008.

The philosophic relevance of Beauvoir's work has been overshadowed by her relationship with Sartre, her literary imagination, her lack of a complete coherent philosophic system and her denial of her own philosophic abilities. However, many scholars have worked diligently to make room for her in the philosophical canon as a crucial figure of existentialism and phenomenology. At her centennial, Beauvoir has been realized as a philosopher in her own right. Her ethical, political, phenomenological, and existential import can no longer be overlooked as her thinking serves to provide us with an understanding of and possible solutions for contemporary problems associated with identity, embodiment, alterity and intersubjectivity. These fundamental philosophic questions have become more and more problematic during the course of the 20th century as philosophers of all movements, but especially post-structuralists, have questioned, and sometimes even dismissed, such categories or concepts. These, however, lie at the heart of ethical and political theorizing. Their problematization or dismissal thus further makes ethics and politics difficult, if not altogether impossible. We believe that Beauvoir's existential/phenomenological approach to such fundamental concepts can help us re-think ethical and political problems that still plague us today. Analyzing how Beauvoir questioned such categories all the while reconstructing them around such more fundamental ideas as that of ambiguity can potentially lead us to a more fruitful approach to ethical and political thought. We thus think that it is very timely to re-examine Beauvoir's philosophy and that it is highly pertinent and relevant to do so today. Our panel will be a celebration of the contemporary relevance of Beauvoir's philosophy. We are planning to have 7 papers. Some papers will be by invitation but we are also welcoming paper submissions from EPTC members. French submissions welcomed! If you are interested in presenting a paper on the contemporary import of Beauvoir, please email Christine Daigle or Christy Landry as soon as possible. For further information, see the CFP here: http://simonedebeauvoir.free.fr/colloques/philo.html.