HPhil Seminar: November 28, 2024

The HPhil (History of Philosophy) Research Group of the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon announces the 2024/25 edition of its permanent seminar on the history of philosophy, devoted to the presentation of conferences by renowned specialists while also creating opportunities to emerging scholars, aiming to promote advanced studies in groundbreaking debates and the permanent training of its academic community.

In this session of the seminar, Mariana Teixeira (CFUL) will present a paper, entitled “Simone de Beauvoir between Eco- and Xeno-feminism”, (abstract below)

The session will take place on November 28, 2024 at 5 p.m., in the Room C201.J (Room Mattos Romão, Department of Philosophy). Admission is free.

Abstract

 

The feminist distinction between gender as a social construction and sex as a biological fact has well-known emancipatory implications: if women are not naturally inclined to certain social roles, spaces and activities, if these constraints are rather historically imposed, then they can also be historically transformed. However liberating its effects may have been, this idea was later criticized for an alleged masculinist devaluation of nature in favor of human agency aimed at supplanting the natural realm. One can observe these opposing stances in the confrontation between xeno- and ecofeminism: while the former sees emancipation as transcendence, as mastery over nature, the latter equates it instead with immanence, with a harmonious connection with nature.

In both cases, however, the sex/gender divide tends to be preserved in its apparently insurmountable dichotomy. To avoid a one-sided espousal of one of the poles – either nature or culture, immanence or transcendence – I suggest casting a fresh eye on the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and her approach to (what later became known as) the distinction between sex and gender. While Beauvoir is sharply critical of women’s longstanding confinement to immanence, she does not simply equate emancipation with an increase in women’s control over their bodies and the natural world: immanence is taken not only as a limit to transcendence, but also as its very condition of possibility.

Hence, Beauvoir’s intersubjective conception of subjectivity formation and her rejection of an ontological duality between nature and spirit – something that becomes clear when one examines her engagement with the ‘master-slave dialectic’ in its Hegelian and Kojèvian versions – allow for a conception of the human condition as both subject and object, as transcendence and immanence. In addition, to account for how this permanent tension is differently experienced by differently positioned subjects (for instance: by men and women), I also propose a distinction between existential ambiguity and contingent dilaceration. Thus, from a Beauvoirian perspective, emancipation would be conceived of not as the elimination of the ambiguity between immanence and transcendence. It would involve instead the overcoming, through the reciprocal movement of embodied subjectivities, of their unmediated dilaceration.