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Jo-Ann Pilardi. Simone de Beauvoir Writing the Self Philosophy Becomes Autobiography. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. 155 pp. ISBN 0-31330253-7, $49.95 (cloth); ISBN 0-275-96334-9, $15.95 (paper).
Simone de Beauvoir is the twentieth century author of five novels, one play, numerous volumes of autobiography and a wide variety of political and philosophical works. She is best known for the revolutionary sociopolitical essay Le Deuxieme Sexe [The Second Sex] which concerns the mythical and real relationships existing between men and women in society, and which laid the foundation for twentieth-century discourses concerning sexuality, gender relations, and feminism after 1949. In spite of these numerous accomplishments, it was commonly believed during her life, and for some time after her death in 1986, that Beauvoir imitated Jean-Paul Sartre in all of her writings and was not worth studying as a philosopher in her own right. During the last two decades, it has slowly become popular to challenge this assumption. Jo-Ann Pilardi's Simone de Beauvoir Writing the Self Philosophy Becomes Autobiography thus joins the ranks of others who, in reconstructing the intellectual relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre, demonstrate Beauvoir's importance as an independent thinker. Pilardi provides a wealth of information on the development of Beauvoir's notion of the self throughout the philosophical and fictional works published during her lifetime. Her study proposes first to isolate a Beauvoirian theory by examining the ways in which Beauvoir's philosophical essays agree and disagree with Sartrean existentialism. Then it plans on using this theory to identify the self crafted for her readers and herself.
Of appeal to those with little background in philosophy or in Beauvoir studies, as well as to a seasoned scholar, the introduction establishes the tradition in which Beauvoir wrote as existentialism (otherwise known as "existential philosophy"), and explains that this means that the self consists of an interaction between consciousness and its "by-product," the ego. Beauvoir's point of departure was thus Sartre's interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology, which establishes two types of being: "the intentional" and "the nonintentional," to use Pilardi's nomenclature. It was the intentional self, first discussed as a problem of existential phenomenology by Sartre, that Beauvoir developed into what Pilardi calls "the gendered self." Pilardi stresses that Beauvoir's gendered self is also clearly an intentional self Beauvoir's conclusion to...