Customer Reviews

The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir

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This is a collection of essays written by academics for academics. As a lay person, I would like to see each of these re-written in a more accessible form.

I did come away with two understandings. One is the place and time of SDB, how the prewar, war and post-war environment of France shaped her and how she shaped her ideas from the time. The other is the problem of the English translation of the 2nd sex.

One essay is devoted to the problems of the translation, but these problems are cited in almost every essay. I was not aware of how egregious a problem this is. The examples given show that the translator not only took poetic license with word choice, but in some instances infused his own ideas. Scholars have complained, but translation is expensive and The Second Sex continues to sell as is.

With the French original and the English translation side by side, even with my limited French, I can see how the differences have mitigated SDB's ideas for the English reading audience. The original French shows her to be WAY WAY ahead of her time.

This book, like many such collections (especially those that bring together papers from a conference), is tremendously uneven in quality. There are a few good essays here--and they are by persons who have written illuminating and substantial pieces in the past. And then there are a lot of weak essays here--pieces which do not get de Beauvoir right or which attempt without success to advance certain themes that are supposed present in her work. The volume's introduction is especially flawed in this respect--as a piece of intellectual history or contextualization it is not bad (though not original either), but as a piece of philosophy it is . . . well, not philosophical. Volumes by Arp, Berghoffen, and Bauer measure up very well to this collection.