This piece originally appeared via Joshua Glenn’s awesome Hilobrow.com
The twentieth century princess of all that is cool, the intellectual brainchild who gave birth to existentialism, the diva for whom Sartre was a love-toy (and rival)… All of these are true when it comes time to highlight the heroin (an intellectual lovedrug) / heroine that was Simone de Beauvoir. In her novels, stories, and essays, Beauvoir champions a feminist existentialist pathway that she herself forged—before Beauvoir (and Sartre and Camus) there is no “ist” for the feminine; no “ist” for devotees of the existential.
When she writes, “It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them,” as she does in The Second Sex, we find the fusion that would fire the activism of feminists and existentialists alike, a simultaneous embracing of the subjectivity of women and an existentialist reminder to speak up or disappear.
She was a precocious intellectual—at 21 she passes her agrégation in philosophy, her marks bested only by her soon-to-be companion / antagonist Jean Paul Sartre (do note, it was the second time he took the exam!).
These were heady days for Beauvoir (and it only accelerated in the years that followed)— buddies with Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and lovers with a series of women and men (that Sartre, the horny cad, tried to bogart), living a life that many today would associate with the Kardashians (with a library). But you don’t have to picture Foucault in his leather chaps to know that French brainiacs have a knack in the 20th century for making intellectual history and being erotically rambunctious (do a Google search for de Beauvoir, Sartre, and sisters Wanda & Olga Kosakiewicz if you doubt).
Simone de Beauvoir is a hero of mine who came to me through the advice of another hero, Gayatri Spivak, whose moving admonishments basically taught me how to read — I think of both brainy women as I look on the picture of Beauvoir included above.
All I can think of is cropping out Sartre, who I adore, but who in this instance, just gets in the way.