Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations and acronyms
- Preface
- Prologue The Johannesburg Moment
- Acknowledgements
- CONVERSATION 1 SOCIOLOGY AS A COMBAT SPORT
- CONVERSATION 2 Theory and Practice
- CONVERSATION 3 CULTURAL DOMINATION
- CONVERSATION 4 COLONIALISM AND REVOLUTION
- CONVERSATION 5 PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED
- CONVERSATION 6 THE ANTINOMIES OF FEMINISM
- Beauvoir Meets Bourdieu
- Transforming Patriarchy?
- CONVERSATION 7 INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR PUBLICS
- CONVERSATION 8 MANUFACTURING DISSENT
- Epilogue Travelling Theory
- Bibliography
- Index
Beauvoir Meets Bourdieu
from CONVERSATION 6 - THE ANTINOMIES OF FEMINISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations and acronyms
- Preface
- Prologue The Johannesburg Moment
- Acknowledgements
- CONVERSATION 1 SOCIOLOGY AS A COMBAT SPORT
- CONVERSATION 2 Theory and Practice
- CONVERSATION 3 CULTURAL DOMINATION
- CONVERSATION 4 COLONIALISM AND REVOLUTION
- CONVERSATION 5 PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED
- CONVERSATION 6 THE ANTINOMIES OF FEMINISM
- Beauvoir Meets Bourdieu
- Transforming Patriarchy?
- CONVERSATION 7 INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR PUBLICS
- CONVERSATION 8 MANUFACTURING DISSENT
- Epilogue Travelling Theory
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If the scholarly principle of her literary ‘vocation’, of her emotional ‘choices’ and even of her relation to her own status as a woman offered to us by Toril Moi have but little chance of appearing as Simone de Beauvoir, this is because she is separated from this by the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to whom she delegated, in a way, her capacity to do philosophy .… There is not a better example of the symbolic violence that constitutes the traditional (patriarchal) relationship between the sexes than the fact that she will fail to apply her own analysis on relations between the sexes to her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.
She loves this destiny [aggrégation in philosophy] like she loves he who embodies the realisation of what she would long to be: Normalien, instituted by the rite of the concours in a superman socially authorised to despise the inferior castes … a philosopher who is sure of being one – sure to the point of destroying, for the sole pleasure of shining or of seducing, which are the same thing, this is the project of Simone de Beauvoir.
Bourdieu (1995: viii)Bourdieu very rarely refers to Beauvoir, but when he does it is with undisguised contempt, reminding us of his treatment of Fanon. Of course, both had a close relation to Jean-Paul Sartre, Bourdieu's imagined combatant and intellectual nemesis. The passages above are drawn from Bourdieu's preface to the translation of Toril Moi's biography of Simone de Beauvoir. In this preface written under the mocking title, ‘Apology for a dutiful woman’,1 Bourdieu claims that Beauvoir had no ideas of her own independent of Sartre, and then reduces her to a project of his own (Bourdieu's) projection – to be a philosopher dismissive of those beneath her.
This strategy of reductionism justifies the silencing of Beauvoir. If her ideas are an emanation of Sartre's, then there's no need to take them seriously. Bourdieu thereby exercises the very symbolic violence he condemns, namely the masculinist practice of silencing women. The final move in this denigration is to appropriate Beauvoir's ideas from The Second Sex (1989 [1949]) – a foundational classic in the analysis of masculine domination as an expression of symbolic violence. Bourdieu's Masculine Domination (2001 [1998]) is but a superficial and diminutive gloss on The Second Sex.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Conversations with BourdieuThe Johannesburg Moment, pp. 123 - 144Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2012