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Abstract
Pamela Sue Anderson urges feminist philosophers to embrace Michèle Le Doeuff’s revaluation of women in philosophy through according “fair value” to intuition as an intellectual faculty, a view of intuition articulated by Henri Bergson. She asks whether women who follow Bergson could be given fair value along with intuition. She turns from Le Doeuff’s writings on intuition to writings by Bergson and by Beauvoir, but periodically returns to Le Doeuff herself. In the end, a picture of freedom, friendship and feminism emerges from readings of all three. This is a portrait of confident and capable interactions in creativity and dynamic projects, which transform our becoming within life, on the assumption that the love of friendship is between like-minded, embodied and interrelated selves. She explores whether we transform our lives in freedom and in love between friends. Although attracted to the human – and humane – solidarity in freedom of “great souls,” as in Beauvoir’s women of action, she instead aligns herself with Le Doeuff’s critical caution against naturalizing a timelessly abstract female soul for contemporary feminist philosophers. She concludes her proposed orientation with a Le Doeuffian feminist image of living life freely for and with friends.
Notes
This publication of my research into Bergson’s conception of the freedom of “a life” – as the human capability for becoming creative in, and open to, love – was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation for the Enhancing Life Project. It is a revised version of a paper presented on 19 September 2015 in Paris. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
1 Mme Guyon.
2 Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, tome II (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) 584. In English translation:
There are women of action like […] Joan of Arc, who are well aware of the goals they set themselves and who lucidly invent the means to reach them: their revelations merely give an objective form to their certainties; they encourage them to take the paths they have carefully planned. There are [also] women narcissists […] who, at the limit of silent fervour, feel suddenly “in an apostolic state”. They are not very precise concerning their tasks: and – like patronesses seeking excitement – they do not care too much what they do as long as it is something. (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (London: Cape, 2009) 733–34)
3 Michèle Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing, trans. Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code (New York and London: Routledge, 2003) 15–16; Le Sexe du savoir (Paris: Aubier, 1998) 43–45.
4 Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing 16.
5 Ibid. 15–16; emphasis added.
6 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1977) 53, 227–28.
7 Michèle Le Doeuff, “Toward a Friendly, Transatlantic Critique of The Second Sex” in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Emily R. Grosholz (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 22–36.
8 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998) 4.
9 For reference to female mystics in Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, see note 2 above.
10 Beauvoir, The Second Sex 726–34.
11 Pamela Sue Anderson, “An Eruption of Mystical Life in Feminist Action: Mysticism and Confidence after Bergson” in Mysticism in the French Tradition: Eruptions from France, eds. Louise Nelstrop and Bradley Onishi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), especially 39–45, 48–50.
12 Creating one’s own freedom could be re-stated as becoming autonomous in self-governance; rational and sensible human subjects liberate themselves, give themselves autonomous life, with their own capability for making and doing, that is, for making sense of life and for loving it by actually and virtually living it.
13 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. Frank Lubeck Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001) 231–32.
14 This interpretation is informed by Michel Foucault’s conception of “subjectivation” as the relation to oneself, which continues to create itself; see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. and ed. Sean Hands (London: Continuum, 2006) 80–101. In Deleuze’s own words:
[S]ubjectivation, the relation to oneself, continues to create itself, but by transforming itself and changing its nature […] Recuperated by power-relations and relations of knowledge, the relation to oneself is continually reborn, elsewhere and otherwise. (86)
The struggle for a modern subjectivity passes through a resistance to the two present forms of subjection, the one consisting of individualizing ourselves on the basis of constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized identity, fixed once and for all. The struggle for subjectivity presents itself, therefore, as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis. (87)
15 Tom Conley, “Folds and Folding” in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. Charles J. Stivale (London: Acumen, 2005) 180.
16 Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, Henri Bergson: Key Writings (London: Athlone, 2002) 42.
17 Ibid. Cf. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 53; Anderson, “An Eruption of Mystical Life in Feminist Action” 37–57.
18 Deleuze refers his readers at this point to Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion where “the three mysticisms” of the Greeks, the Orientals and the Christians are discussed; see Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 216–34.
19 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism [1966], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991) 112.
20 The “French Hegel” refers to the highly idiosyncratic, yet influential appropriations of Hegel in France from 1929, when Jean Wahl first published Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Rieder, 1929); the latter was followed by two more highly significant books on Hegel, by the French philosophers Jean Hyppolite and Alexandre Kojève; each of their distinctive French readings of Hegel would shape how French philosophy developed, especially in 1960s Paris. For more historical, bibliographical and philosophical details about French readings of Hegel, see Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988); and the more recent account in Bruce Baugh, French Hegel (London: Routledge, 2003).
21 Deleuze, “Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation)” in Foucault 80–101; and Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 2006).
22 Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 268.
23 Ibid. 53; Anderson, “An Eruption of Mystical Life in Feminist Action” 37–57.
24 Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 53.
25 Anderson, “An Eruption of Mystical Life in Feminist Action” 43–44, 54; Pamela Sue Anderson, “Confidence in the Power of Memory: Ricoeur’s Dynamic Hermeneutics of Life” in Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Religion, eds. Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Block (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015) 51–70.
26 Is this merely another example of what Le Doeuff diagnoses as the Héloise complex? See Michèle Le Doeuff, “Long Hair, Short Ideas” in The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (London: Athlone, 1989) 102–10, 119–20.
27 For an example of appropriating Joan of Arc to make a case for transgender, see Tia Michelle Pesando, Why God Doesn’t Hate You (Bloomington, IN: Balboa, 2014).
28 Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 257.
29 Le Doeuff, “Towards a Friendly, Transatlantic Critique of The Second Sex” 33–34.
30 Ibid.
31 Pamela Sue Anderson, “The Other” in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, eds. Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013) 83–104.
32 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, 2nd ed., trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam, and Eliot Ross Albert (London: Continuum, 2002); Dialogues II, new ed. (London: Continuum, 2006) 11–12, 113–14, 120 n. 5, n. 7, n. 8. Michèle Le Doeuff, “Women in Dialogue and in Solitude,” Journal of Romance Studies 5.2 (2005): 1–15. See also Pamela Sue Anderson, “In Dialogue with Spinoza and Others: Deleuze, Le Doeuff and the Ethics,” Paragraph 37.3 (2014): 341–55.
33 Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc., trans. Trista Selous, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 2007) 107. Cf. Pamela Sue Anderson, “Believing in This Life: French Philosophy after Beauvoir” in Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life, eds. Katharine Sarah Moody and Steven Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) 34–37.
34 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994) 45. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 2001) 18–19.
35 Deleuze, Pure Immanence 18–19.
36 Anderson, “An Eruption of Feminist Action in Mystical Life” 37–58.
37 See next note for reference.
38 Deleuze, Bergsonism 111.
39 Ibid. 112.
40 Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 311; also 99–100, 213–15, 227–38, 244–49. See also Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing 16–18, 199–208.
41 See note 40 (above); see also Pamela Sue Anderson, “Shadows of the Past: Phantoms of the Negative and Traces of the Affective,” Literature and Theology 28.4 (2014): 371–88.
42 Beauvoir writes in her Diary, on 9 August 1926, about Bergson’s account of a profound self; see Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student, vol. 1 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2006–) 60.