REPETITION FACILITY

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Linnell Secomb and friends in Sydney for invaluable discussion of Beauvoir and feminist philosophy, and to the Departments of Philosophy and Gender Studies and other colleagues who provided a warm and stimulating research environment during a NSW Residency Expatriate Scientists Award visit to the University of Sydney in 2005, culminating in the ‘Gender and Temporality’ workshop. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for Australian Feminist Studies for helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. In The Prime of Life she describes her visit to a factory:

it was my first encounter with industry and made a violent impression on me. Though it was broad daylight outside, the workshops were gloomy as night, and the air we breathed was laden with metal dust. Numbers of women sat there in front of a moving belt, which was pierced with holes at regular intervals. On the floor beside them was a packing case; from this they took a brass cylinder and inserted it into a hole on the belt, which proceeded to whisk it away. To and fro went the arms, from case to belt and back again, with a quick, ceaseless, staccato rhythm. For how long? I asked. Eight hours at a stretch, in this heat and stench, chained to the horrible monotony of this in-and-out motion, without any respite. (1962, 65)

2. Here Marx cites Adam Ferguson's An Essay on the History of Civil Society ([1767] 1995, 174).

3. See Chapter 3, ‘The Point of View of Historical Materialism’, in The Second Sex. Beauvoir responds to Engels’ Origin of the Family which depicts the subjugation of women as arising from the sedimentation of patriarchal authority in conjunction with the accumulation of wealth which for men ‘created a stimulus to utilize this strengthened position in order to overthrow the traditional [maternal] order of inheritance in favor of his children’. Engels famously claims that this prompting of ‘the overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex’ (1948, 57). While Beauvoir agrees that ‘the turning point of all history is the passage from the regime of community ownership to that of private property’, she notes that it is by Engels ‘in no wise indicated how this could have come about’. Moreover, she remonstrates, ‘it is not clear that the institution of private property must necessarily have involved the enslavement of women’ (Beauvoir 1988, 86, 1989, 55–56, 1949, vol. 1, 98).

4. In an interview with Alice Schwartze, Beauvoir (1984, 75) comments that ‘there is no job which is degrading in itself. The degrading thing is working conditions. What's wrong with cleaning windows? It's just as useful as typing. What is degrading is the conditions under which the windows are cleaned.’

5. In The Second Sex, see her comment ‘in maternity woman remained closely bound [rivé] to her body like an animal’ (1988, 97, 1989, 65, 1949, vol. 1, 113). Also, Beauvoir argues that women do not risk death in maternity, agreeing that, historically, men have distinguished themselves from animals in their willingness to risk their lives (1988, 95, 1989, 64, 1949, vol. 1, 111). As Eva Lundgren-Gothlin argues:

The Second Sex conceives a continuity between human and animal similar to that described by Marx and Hegel. This continuity is broken by a decisive qualitative step: the struggle for recognition and productive activity, respectively. Both Hegel and Marx saw motherhood, and the activities related to it, as closer to the animal than were the activities of men, and since unfortunately Beauvoir does not criticize this androcentric view, she is apt to reproduce it. (1996, 81)

6. See also her chapter on ‘Sexual Initiation’: ‘instead of integrating the powerful drives [les forces spécifiques] into her individual life, the female is the prey of the species [en proie à l'espèce]’ (1988, 393, 1989, 372, 1949, vol. 2, 131).

7. The claim (repeated in the sections on biology, on nomads, and on sexual initiation) that women are more closely enslaved to the species is not the same as the claim she also seems to want to make, echoing formulations from Feuerbach, Marx and Hegel, that women are more closely enslaved to species life. The latter implies a distinction made between species life and species being, and the suggestion, echoed by Beauvoir but referenced by her to Merleau-Ponty, that humans are not ‘a natural species but an historical idea [n'est pas une espèce naturelle: c'est une idée historique]’ or an ‘historical reality [réalité historique]’ (Beauvoir 1988, 66, 84, 1989, 34, 53, 1949, vol. 1, 72, 95). Species being involves humans going beyond mere subsistence and producing value, or identifying themselves with being-human, or with the universal. Marx argues that humans prove themselves to be ‘species being’ in their transformation of the world in ways that transcend sheer need: ‘Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality’ (see Karl Marx 1975, 329). On these associations in Beauvoir's work, see Lundgren-Gothlin (1996), 88–91).

8. On the promise of economic reform, see Beauvoir (1988), 734, 1989, 725, 1949, vol. 2, 570).

9. Evidently she underestimates earlier forms of reproductive control in history and different cultures.

10. Beauvoir, however, does point out that historical materialism is at a loss when it comes to women's role in procreation: ‘A truly socialist ethics … will find most embarrassing the problems posed by the condition of woman. It is impossible simply to equate [assimiler à] gestation with a piece of work [un travail], or with a service, such as military service’ (1988, 89, 1989, 58–59, 1949, vol. 1, 102).

11. See also his explanation: ‘The capital given in return for labour power is converted into means of subsistence which have to be consumed to reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence’ (1976, 717).

12. See, for example, Catriona Mackenzie (1986), Mary O'Brien (1981), and Jean Leighton (1975).

13. Toril Moi (2002) has argued that perceptions of Beauvoir's antipathy to maternity are distorted by the errors in Parshley's English translation. For Beauvoir's later reflections on the status of maternity in her work, see ‘The Second Sex: Thirty Years On’: ‘I do not reject motherhood. I just think that these days motherhood is a very nasty trap for women. I wouldn't advise a woman to have children for that very reason … I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children’ (Beauvoir with Schwartzer 1984, 76).

14. Problematic as they very publicly were, Beauvoir may even have believed that the complex alternative family structures that she personally fostered and participated in under the name of ‘family’—however ruinously for some of those involved—and her later adoption of an adult woman, Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir (who described their relationship as ‘intimate’ and ‘carnal but not sexual’), were more ‘new’ than might have been the procreation, child raising or marriage she did not experience. On this topic, see Hazel Rowley (2005, 310).

15. See also her description: ‘la ménagère maniaque s'acharne avec furie contre la poussière, revendiquant un sort qui la révolte. A travers les déchets que laisse derrière soi toute expansion vivante, elle s'en prend à la vie même’, contracted in the English translation to ‘the maniac housekeeper wages her furious war against dirt, blaming life itself for the rubbish all living growth entails’ (1988, 471, 1989, 452, 1949, vol. 2, 237).

16. Letters from her lover Jacques Bost during his mobilisation depicted in eloquent detail just this kind of subjection: the love of officers for enforcing tasks of pointless repetition apparently designed to reduce the soldier into an animal state. See Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques-Laurent Bost (2004).

17. She claims that ‘the splendid Middlemarch still is not the equal of War and Peace; Wuthering Heights, in spite of its grandeur, does not have the sweep of The Brothers Karamazov (1988, 718–19, 1989, 709–10, 1949, vol. 2, 553).

18. In her letters to Nelson Algren she deems Carson McCullers too womanly, and compares Edith Wharton (despite admiration for her) unfavourably with Hardy (1998, 111). In The Second Sex, she seemed to be claiming that a silk purse (‘genuine’ transcendence) can never be made of the sow's ear, associated by Beauvoir with the category of immanence. For example, there may be a limitation to the creativity or novelty to be found if the problem of gender remains an overriding concern for women, even in the context of protest, resistance, or fine literature. Apart from the obvious irony that The Second Sex might be prone to this limitation, notice that the intention of an agent to critique, resist, create or innovate is greatly de-emphasised in its significance for Beauvoir.

19. On the other hand, Beauvoir had a great rhetorical flair for the depiction of that repetition; the passage on the manically and hopelessly sweeping housewife is rightly famous (1988, 470, 1989, 451, 1949, vol. 2, 235). We can add the question of what makes repition to Michéle le Doeuff's observation about The Second Sex that ‘by listening to the text carefully enough to hear in the author's tastes and dislikes, we realise that the thing that she perhaps hates the most in women's position is the type of repetative life associated with it’ (Le Doeuff 1991, 92).

20. She tends not to look for transformation, modification, differentiation or dislocation in repetition, as would, through their various means, a contemporary theorist such as Deleuze, Derrida or Butler. It is repetition as repetition, the repetitive nature of repetition, that preoccupies and disturbs her.

21. One that is striking, unlike, for example, the treatment of dislocating repetition by Judith Butler. Discussing ‘the rules that govern intelligible identity’, Butler argues that they ‘operate through repetition’. Discussing signification relating to gender and sexuality as taking place ‘within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat’, allows Butler to associate agency with ‘the possibility of a variation on that repetition’. It is, according to Butler's well-known argument, because gender norms must be repeated that the possibility of their planned or unplanned gender subversion is inevitable and constant. This leads Butler into reflections on the nature of subversive repetition. See Butler (1999, 185).