Research Seminars, Colloquia and Reading Groups

Week 2, 30 April - Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford): The Myth of Recognition in The Second Sex 

Since Eva Lundgren-Gothlin’s Sex and Existence and Nancy Bauer’s Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism, several philosophical interpreters of The Second Sex have shared the assumption that The Second Sex is Hegelian and that “the Hegel question”—namely, the debate about whether and to what extent Beauvoir’s account of woman as the Other is indebted to Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic—is best answered by reading Beauvoir through “French Hegel”, and especially through the reading of Alexandre Kojève. This paper argues on historical, textual, and conceptual grounds that Beauvoir’s philosophical and political project in The Second Sex is better characterized as anti-Hegelian, sharing methodological and political commitments with the “turn to the concrete” and “French Marx”. Moreover, reading Beauvoir as a "French" Hegelian theorist of recognition overlooks her suspicion—a longstanding suspicion in French philosophy—of what she calls the "myth" of recognition itself.