« Nous ne sommes nous qu’aux yeux des autres, et c’est à partir du regard des autres que nous nous assumons comme nous » (see?)
(which is, approximately. . .) "We are not ourselves except in the eyes of others, and it's from the gaze of others that we assume the status of ourselves" (I'm a little unsure about this translation; "s'assumer comme quelquechose" is a turn of phrase that is so particular, I did some searching to see if anyone else had translated it, and ended up surfing to an academic article, not too surprisingly, about Simone de Beauvoir. And I found the wonderful passage:
"Now, what specifically defines the situation of woman is that she-a free and autonomous being like all human creatures-nevertheless discovers and chooses herself in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.3 They propose to turn her into an object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is for ever to be transcended by another consciousness which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject-which always posits itself as essential-and the demands of a situation which constitutes her as inessential." (SS, 29; DSa, 31; TA)
Following this characteristically beautiful writing by Beauvoir, Toril Moi offers the following interpretation:
"This is perhaps the single most important passage in The Second Sex, above all because Beauvoir here poses a radically new theory of sexual difference. While we are all split and ambiguous, she argues, women are more split and ambiguous than men. For Simone de Beauvoir, then, women are fundamentally characterized by ambiguity and conflict. The
specific contradiction of women's situation is caused by the conflict between their status as free and autonomous human beings and the fact that they are socialized in a world in which men consistently cast them as Other to their One, as objects to their subjects. The effect is to produce women as subjects painfully torn between freedom and alienation, transcendence and
immanence, subject-being and object-being. This fundamental contradiction, or split, in which the general ontological ambiguity of human beings is repeated and reinforced by the social pressures brought to bear on women, is specific to women underpatriarchy. For Beauvoir, at least initially, there is nothing ahistorical about this: when oppressive power relations cease to
exist, women will be no more split and contradictory than men."
The idea here is deeply suggestive to me about the existential situation of any group facing structural alienation, not only women on the basis of sex in a patriarchy, but also, for instance, the oppressed group in a colonial context. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's leave aside Beauvoir and Moi for the moment. And back to Sartre, which is what I meant to talk about in the first place. And to my life, which was really the starting point for all of this talk in the first place.
Last night was a magical dance of three active minds in the playground of my little cottage in the country, that lasted until past five o'clock in the morning. Katie and John came over sometime around nine or ten, on their way back from Jackson. When I heard they were coming, I pulled myself together a little after feeling rather funky all day long, and put a chocolate sour milk cake in the oven and mulled wine on the stove, with green cardamom, white pepper, cloves, cinnamon, a bay leaf, turbinado sugar, Grand Marnier, and some thinly sliced, succulently ripe Valencia orange. And together, we talked, laughed, ate, drank, read poetry aloud, listened our way through any and every kind of music you could think of, played music on the accordion and the guitar, unearthed old travel photographs hidden away in the vintage suitcase behind my sewing machine, told stories, opened books of anthropologists, womens studies scholars, biographers, and journalists, and ate a 3 am snack of cream of tomato soup with spinach and rye bread with stinky brie. I introduced them to palinka and slivovic, we finished off the fig brandy from Croatia in the plastic bottle I carried back from someone's garage on the southern part of the island of Krk, and we found recesses of the mind and life that, well, at least in my case, hadn't been dusted off or looked at in years.
And so, this morning, seeing their little note of thanks and the neatly folded blankets on my big red couch in the living room, and the thin photographic evidence of this whole experience that we accumulated, I couldn't help but think of Sartre. Because no matter what you imagine yourself to be, whatever layers of experience you accumulate in a lifetime, it never seems to have any meaning until you are yourself with others, and they see you, and you become yourself. So it isn't just hell that is other people. It's also heaven.
For more on this:
Ambiguity and Alienation in The Second Sex by Toril Moi. boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), pp. 96-112. doi:10.2307/303535 Link through jstor if you have institutional access.
