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The Other (Woman): Limits of Knowledge

in Beauvoir’s Ethics of Reciprocity

Ellie Anderson
emory university

abstract: The ethics of reciprocity offered by Simone de Beauvoir is founded upon

an irreducible epistemic gap between self and other. This gap is often overlooked by
commentators, who have tended to imply that the ethics of reciprocity requires recogni-
tion of oneself in the other. I claim that Beauvoir’s ethics forecloses such recognition of
oneself in the other and reveals that it is at once illusory and dangerous. Recognition
in this sense is based upon a false notion of self and constitutes a violation of the alter-
ity of the other. I argue that Beauvoir stages this dangerous form of recognition in her
novel She Came to Stay, while her claims about reciprocity in The Second Sex provide an
image of a different, more positive recognition capable of respecting alterity. Finally,
I claim that the epistemic gap characteristic of reciprocity also holds with respect to
one’s self-relation.

keywords: Beauvoir, reciprocity, ethics, recognition, Hegel

Attention to Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of reciprocity has proliferated in

recent scholarship.1 Beauvoir offers a vision of human subjects capable of
recognizing each other’s freedom and engaging in ethical relations that
avoid relationships of mastery and possession. I would like to argue that
Beauvoir’s account of reciprocity, however, is essentially predicated upon a

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 28, no. 3, 2014

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
 beauvoir’s ethics of reciprocity 381

recognition of others in their alterity, rather than on symmetry, similarity,

or sameness. I claim that this is frequently overlooked in work on Beauvoir,
due in part to the fact that her strongest indications of this quality of reci-
procity are not found in her explicitly ethical writings. Furthermore, I claim
that this account of self–other relation is predicated on Beauvoir’s notion
of the subject as incapable of self-knowledge. I thus hold the epistemic gap
between self and other, including this gap between self and other within the
subject, to be central to an understanding of Beauvoir’s ethics of reciprocity.
The centrality of this recognition of the irreducible otherness of the
other is often neglected in accounts of reciprocity in Beauvoir. Penelope
Deutscher, for example, argues that a kind of reversibility of perspective
is crucial between individuals, while Debra Bergoffen conceives of reci-
procity as the recognition of oneself in the other.2 What is lost in these
otherwise nuanced accounts is the epistemic gap between self and other
that marks interpersonal relation for Beauvoir. I will draw attention to this
gap by analyzing the triangular romantic relationship of She Came to Stay
as a crucial formulation of Beauvoir’s refusal of a self–other relation that
would be based on recognition of oneself in the other. I will then turn to
Beauvoir’s vision of reciprocity in The Second Sex and finally bring it to bear
with respect to one’s relation to oneself in The Prime of Life.
Beauvoir’s 1943 novel She Came to Stay (L’Invitée) is a cautionary tale
about grounding human relationships on the illusion of recognizing one-
self in the other. Here, Beauvoir dramatizes the triangular relationship
between Françoise and Pierre, a longtime couple with successful careers
in theater, and Xavière, a younger woman who befriends Françoise and
with whom Pierre ends up falling in love. Pierre and Françoise are open
to affairs, each carrying on liaisons with other people, but consider them-
selves to be primary partners. But while Françoise had no trouble accepting
Pierre’s previous affairs, Pierre’s relation to Xavière presents itself as pro-
foundly unsettling to Françoise. Françoise’s attempts to accustom herself
to the arrangement fail due to the threat she feels that the other woman
presents to her sense of self, and she ends up murdering Xavière at the end
of the novel, reflecting to herself, “Either she or I. It shall be I.”3
The plot of the novel is an enactment of the dialectic between the lord
and bondsman in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Indeed, the epigraph
of the novel is a quote from this very section in Hegel: “Each conscious-
ness seeks the death of the other.”4 In both Hegel’s Phenomenology and
Beauvoir’s novel, one consciousness is faced with another consciousness
382 ellie anderson

and forced to realize that its implicit solipsism is mere illusion. This
threatens self-consciousness with inessentiality, and it thus seeks the death
of the other. Beauvoir’s fictional portrayal of the struggle for recognition,
however, ends differently from Hegel’s. While in Hegel, self-consciousness
risks death in the hope of recognition, Beauvoir’s account ends in the actual
death of Xavière. Recognition does not occur in She Came to Stay. Whereas
some scholars have taken Beauvoir’s ethics as a rejection of the Hegelian
struggle, I situate it at the heart of Beauvoir’s conception of the ethical
relation between self and other for two reasons. The first is that Beauvoir
affirms that the struggle for recognition is a stage that self-consciousness
must go through before reaching a more ethical bond of recognition and
reciprocity with other subjects. Second, the structure of this struggle
reveals the epistemic gap between self and other that I consider crucial for
Beauvoir’s ethics.
The master–slave dialectic as cast in She Came to Stay occurs not
between the primary partners in the romantic relationship but, rather,
between Françoise and the other woman, Xavière. If being faced with the
self-consciousness of another is what gives rise to the struggle for recogni-
tion, why is it that, long before Xavière entered the scene, Françoise and
Pierre never had such a struggle? Why did they never seek recognition
from each other? My claim is that what Beauvoir draws out is that roman-
tic relationships often bring about a conflation of self-consciousnesses
between their members rather than a struggle between them. Because of
the intimacy of such a relation, deepened through repeated sexual union,
communion via shared intellectual standpoint, and the recounting of one
another’s daily activities through conversation, two subjectivities become
fused into what appears to be a unity.5
For Beauvoir, the unification of self-consciousness between the lovers
occurs on a variety of levels—corporeal, cognitive, affective—all of which
find their locus in the fantasy of complete knowledge of the other. I find
it useful to dub this desire for complete knowledge of the other “epis-
temic unity.” The yearning for union with the lover does not pertain to
the kind of reciprocal love Beauvoir will later describe in The Second Sex
but, rather, to a kind of possessive love—we might characterize it as love
in bad faith—that is not to be striven for in a truly ethical love. While
Beauvoir recognizes that “in all love . . . exist at once selfishness and gen-
erosity, desire to possess the other and to give the other all,” the tendency
toward the unification of the self-consciousnesses of lovers is, rather,
 beauvoir’s ethics of reciprocity 383

something to be warned against.6 She Came to Stay demonstrates that this

desire for epistemic unity with the lover is an attempt to overcome other-
ness. The desire to know everything about another person to the point at
which one feels one has unmediated access to the other’s self-consciousness
is in a sense the desire to kill the other—because it is the desire to kill the
other as other. Desire for full knowledge is desire for the destruction of
otherness. Françoise and Pierre do not feel that they constitute threats to
each other, because their relationship, insofar as it produces a sense of con-
flation between them, has circumvented any struggle for recognition by
preemptively, and unconsciously, killing the other.
A key element of this possessive conflation as Beauvoir construes it
is its gendered asymmetry, although this will only become explicit in The
Second Sex, written six years after She Came to Stay. Yet, even here in the
novel, the unification of self-consciousness in the intimacy between men
and women is not equal. It is Françoise who fully gives her subjectivity
over to Pierre, losing all sense of independence, while Pierre retains some
autonomy. Although they have crafted a life together in which each of them
attempts to forge a union with the other, the novel attests to Pierre’s main-
taining some sense of self apart from the relationship. Françoise, on the
other hand, can only refer to “our past, our future, our ideas, our love . . .
never did she say: ‘I.’”7 Over the course of her romance with Pierre, Françoise
has lost her very subjectivity, having become completely submerged within
the “we” of Françoise and Pierre.
In a sense, the entire drama of She Came to Stay consists in Françoise’s
realization that unification with Pierre is an illusion. Xavière’s entrance
into the relationship shatters Françoise’s comforting sense of epistemic
unity with Pierre. Pierre’s love for Xavière—for the element of love was
never present in any of Pierre’s other, nonthreatening affairs—is what
causes the boundary lines between Françoise and Pierre to reappear, after
years of successful persistence of the illusion of their union, and this reap-
pearance is so intolerable to Françoise that she must kill its source, Xavière.
Françoise cannot cope with the fact that Pierre is irreducibly other. In her
love for Pierre and desire to be loved by him, Xavière places a demand for
recognition that Françoise equally places, and it is impossible that both
should be unproblematically met.
Throughout the novel, Françoise attempts to deny this threat by
fostering her own relationship with Xavière. Françoise feels that if
she can come to understand Pierre’s passion for this other woman, then
384 ellie anderson

she will be able to sustain her illusion of epistemic unity with Pierre. She
thus pursues a double goal: on the one hand, to internalize Pierre’s love
for Xavière by developing a romantic relationship with the woman herself
and, on the other hand, to treat Xavière as an object in order to deny her
independent self-consciousness.8 However, Xavière resists Françoise’s
attempts, her relation to Pierre developing further in passionate directions
that Françoise can never fully grasp. This leads Françoise to feel an ines-
sentiality that is “like death, total negation, an eternal absence.”9 Whereas
the dissolution of self-consciousness in her relationship with Pierre is not
threatening, because it is the melding of two self-consciousnesses, this
dissolution in the face of Xavière is a total annihilation. This sense of anni-
hilation drives Françoise’s decision to murder Xavière. She gains resolve
before acting by recalling to herself the intolerable essentiality of Xavière’s
consciousness: “Annihilate a consciousness! How can I? Françoise thought.
But how was it possible for a consciousness not her own to exist? In that
case, it was she who did not exist. She repeated, She or I, and pulled down
the lever.”10
Beauvoir offers a more prescriptive account of love in The Second Sex.
This alternate vision of love is characterized by reciprocity, or the recogni-
tion of another self-consciousness without attempting to fuse with it or
annihilate it.11 However, the lesson of She Came to Stay cannot be forgot-
ten in analyzing the meaning of reciprocity as a foundation for Beauvoir’s
ethics. Specifically, one must be cautious about misreading reciprocity as
a kind of relation in which one recognizes the other in oneself or a kind
of relation in which one can know another completely. We have seen that
these attempts are destructive, unethical, and based on illusion.
For Beauvoir, reciprocity between individuals is possible but extremely
rare. It stems from the overcoming of desire for possession or annihilation.
This reciprocity demands the acknowledgment that the other is never mine
and that, while the lines between self and other may certainly be blurred,
there is nevertheless a self–other relation that fundamentally constitutes
one’s experience in the world. Pierre and Françoise attempt to attain this in
their relationship, and yet She Came to Stay shows that these attempts are
extremely difficult even for lovers committed to loving each other as other.
Beauvoir tells us, “Françoise had made up her mind to love him even in
his freedom, but she detected too easy an optimism in such a resolution.”12
Loving another as other, which for Beauvoir is tantamount to loving the
other in his or her freedom, is eminently difficult to achieve.
 beauvoir’s ethics of reciprocity 385

Part of the difficulty is that recognition produces the risk of inessential-

ity. But for Beauvoir, this risk and the vulnerability that results are necessary
for interacting with others. One must go through the disorienting experi-
ence of recognizing another person as a self-consciousness and respecting
the otherness of that consciousness. This recognition can lead to a kind of
love that does not seek to possess the other or force the other into a relation
of supposed epistemic transparency. As Beauvoir famously states in The
Second Sex, “Genuine love ought to be founded on the mutual recognition
of two liberties; the lovers would then experience themselves both as self
and as other.” She goes on to say, “For the one and the other, love would
be revelation of self by the gift of self and enrichment of the world.”13 Genuine
love is “revelation of self” because it discloses the fact that to be a self is
at the same time to allow another to experience me as other.14 In loving
another person, I give the gift of myself, asking the other to recognize me
as another self-consciousness with equal claims on the world but acknowl-
edging that this gift also entails the possibility that the lover will refuse to
recognize me as an other and will try to possess or annihilate me.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir describes the erotic experience of sexual
relations as the most concrete example of reciprocity. For Beauvoir, the sex-
ual act “most poignantly discloses to human beings the ambiguity of their
condition; in it they are aware of themselves as flesh and as spirit, as the
other and as subject.”15 Beauvoir emphasizes that this experience of being
at once other and subject “often fails,” as there is no guarantee of mutual
recognition between lovers. And for Beauvoir, this is gendered insofar as
it is more often the woman who may experience herself as becoming an
object in the sexual act and thus may be denied recognition. However,
sex also offers the possibility of recognition in a concrete form between
two lovers because the erotic act is essentially “a movement toward the
Other.”16 Sex provides the ecstatic breaking point of self-consciousness and
yet always already entails the recognition of otherness.
This erotic relation entails the risking of subjectivity, which Debra
Bergoffen underscores in her work on Beauvoir.17 Bergoffen describes
eros for Beauvoir as “the moment in which I recognize myself in the other
without reducing the other to my double or dissolving myself in their
otherness.”18 Bergoffen is right to juxtapose the erotic with any attempt
to reduce the other to oneself or to dissolve oneself into the other, both
of which occur between Pierre and Françoise. However, I perceive a dan-
ger in the claim that recognition is the recognition of oneself in the other.
386 ellie anderson

For Beauvoir, recognition is precisely not recognizing oneself in the other.

Insofar as I recognize the other as an independent self-consciousness with
equal claims on the world, I recognize that other as having something that
I too have. However, recognition of an independent self-consciousness is
the suspension of recognizing myself in that self-consciousness. It is rec-
ognizing the lack of myself in the other. It is only in recognizing the lack
that necessarily marks my relation to the other—namely, the lack of epis-
temic unity between self and other—that I recognize the other as other. In
Beauvoir’s work, recognition is reciprocal insofar as both parties mutually
recognize each other as other but is not reciprocal in the stronger sense of
seeing oneself in the other.
Part of the reason this recognition of self in other is undesirable for
Beauvoir is that it is impossible given her account of the self. Beauvoir’s
autobiographical writing suggests that self-knowledge is impossible, and
therefore it is easy to see why complete knowledge of the other is impos-
sible.19 For Beauvoir, epistemic opacity is the rule not only with respect to
others but also with respect to oneself. This radical notion of subjectivity,
one that likely goes unnoticed in Beauvoir’s writing due to her adherence
to an existentialist subject characterized by freedom and transcendence, is
most clearly indicated in her late work The Prime of Life (La Force de l’âge).
Here, she states: “The self [moi] has only a probable objectivity, and one say-
ing ‘I’ only grasps the outer edge of it; an outsider can get a clearer and more
accurate picture. Let me repeat that this personal account is not offered in
any sense as an ‘explanation.’ Indeed, one of my main reasons for under-
taking it is my realization that self-knowledge is impossible, and the best
one can hope for is self-revelation.”20 For Beauvoir, it is the other who has
more knowledge of me than I have of myself. However, we have seen in the
analysis of She Came to Stay that the other can never have full knowledge
of me, either. Beauvoir asserts that she does not, and cannot, know herself.
What is to be sought is self-revelation rather than self-knowledge.
The reciprocal relation to the other that Beauvoir sets out in her
account of genuine love can serve as a model for the relation of oneself
to oneself. In the sexual act, the revelation of self is always at the same
time a revelation of otherness—of the fact that my lover is other and of
the fact that I am other for my lover. Beauvoir speaks in the same terms of
“revelation” with regard to her self-relation here in The Prime of Life, and
here too, revelation is opposed to a model of epistemic transparency that
would attempt to eliminate otherness. Thus, we see that Beauvoir’s claims
 beauvoir’s ethics of reciprocity 387

about the essential otherness of recognition and reciprocity in love can also
be located on the level of one’s own self-consciousness. Beauvoir offers an
account of subjectivity that is radically marked by a lack of transparency.
While other people are always necessarily other to me, I am always also
other to myself.
This acknowledgment of otherness within the self must be taken into
account in any analysis of Beauvoir’s ethics of reciprocity. It is not that
reciprocity demands recognition of myself in the other but, rather, that reci-
procity demands recognition of the otherness of the other, the otherness of
myself, and the otherness of the other within him- or herself. This ethics
must be based on an acknowledgment that human subjects are never self-
transparent, never in full possession of themselves. The lesson that She
Came to Stay offers is that any attempt to unify my subjectivity with that of
another is doomed to fail and based on a fundamental illusion of the self
as epistemically transparent. What the figure of the “other woman” teaches
us is that I can never know another person fully, and we find that, in turn,
I can never know myself fully. One can only ever move toward the other,
both within and without, in an erotic motion that risks the possibility of not
being recognized by the other and that acknowledges the impossibility of
ever possessing or knowing another or oneself.

notes
1. See, for instance, the work of Penelope Deutscher, Debra Bergoffen, Ursula
Tidd, and Julie K. Ward.
2. Penelope Deutscher, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity,
Conversion, Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Debra
Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic
Generosities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
3. Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger
Senhouse (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), 402 (originally published as L’Invitée
[Paris, Gallimard, 1943]).
4. Ibid., 7; translation modified. Moyse and Senhouse translate conscience as
“conscience,” but I have chosen to alter their translation to render conscience
as “consciousness,” which more accurately reveals the Hegelian undertones of
Beauvoir’s use of the word.
5. Toward the outset of the novel, Pierre tells Françoise, “You and I are simply
one. . . . Neither of us can be defined without the other.” Françoise echoes, “We are
simply one” (ibid., 25–26).
388 ellie anderson

6. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley

(New York: Vintage Books [Random House], 1989), 417 (originally published
as Le deuxième sexe, 2 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, 1949]).
7. Beauvoir, She Came to Stay, 175.
8. This drives what Beauvoir describes as Françoise’s “need to keep this
amorous face forever turned toward hers, and to be able to say with passion,
‘She is mine’” (ibid., 247).
9. Ibid., 291.
10. Ibid., 403–4; translation modified. Again, I have altered the translation from
“conscience” to “consciousness” where the French word conscience is found.
11. This vision of ethical love fits in with the ethical model Beauvoir provides
in The Ethics of Ambiguity and Pyrrhus and Cineas, although there is not space to
explore their resonances here.
12. Ibid., 278.
13. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 667; my italics.
14. Nancy Bauer points out the originality of Beauvoir’s insight here, stating,
“Beauvoir is to my knowledge wholly original in her figuring reciprocal
recognition as requiring the acknowledgment of one’s own and the other’s
essential nature as objects as well as subjects” (Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy,
and Feminism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2001], 186).
15. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 402.
16. Ibid., 446.
17. Bergoffen, Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, 161.
18. Ibid., 120.
19. For this connection between self–other relation and self-relation in Beauvoir’s
autobiographical work, I am indebted to Ursula Tidd’s essay “The Self–Other
Relation in Beauvoir’s Ethics and Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Simone de
Beauvoir: Critical Essays, ed. Margaret A. Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2006), 228–40. However, Tidd problematically characterizes reciprocity as
a collapsing of difference between self and other (230).
20. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green (Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin Books, 1965), 368 (originally published as La Force de l’âge
[Paris: Gallimard, 1960]).