Abstract
The Italian edition of The Second Sex – published in 2008 for the centennial of Simone de Beauvoir’s birth – is definitively a new edition, though not a thoroughly Italian one. In fact, the Foreword by Julia Kristeva – ‘Simone de Beauvoir, freedom at risk’ – is the text of the opening speech Kristeva gave, in French, at the international Symposium ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ (Paris, January 2008), that led to the proceedings (Re)découvrir l’oeuvre de Simone de Beauvoir (Kristeva et al., 2008), but not to a new French edition. A French critical edition had been edited some years previously by Ingrid Galster (2004), but consisted of a collection of articles and responses to the first edition.
Thus the Italian edition gives a helpful indication of one way in which feminist theory travels across countries and languages. It is in some ways a new, transnational edition, as it opens with Kristeva’s text, and presents the Italian genealogy of the reception of the book in the Afterword by Liliana Rampello, offering a snapshot of which women had been reading it during the last 60 years in Italy. Thanks to both the Foreword and the Afterword we are provided, in different ways, with some keys to understanding its meaning in relation to contemporary challenges.
Kristeva’s introductory text is interpretative. The ex ergo – ‘the free woman is becoming only now’ (p. 641) – establishes a kind of continuity between this text and the feminist standpoint it initiated, and the feminisms of the later decades, gathering them in a long-lasting process of liberation. In other words, it initiated the birth of the figure of the ‘free woman’ as a subject, a true ‘anthropological mutation’. De Beauvoir’s thought, so deeply rooted in her life as a woman, is hardly reducible to the realm of disciplines – ‘Philosopher? Sociologist? Activist? Writer?’ – therefore, Kristeva chooses to start from ‘the experience of Simone de Beauvoir’ in order to focus on some elements ‘so deeply intertwined with our destiny . . . that we found ourselves “written” by her’ (p. 9). 1
These statements provide a new possible standpoint and interpretation of de Beauvoir’s text, as feminists of ‘difference’, like Kristeva and, in a different way, Luce Irigaray refer to her work. Indeed, Irigaray asks, ‘which woman hasn’t read The Second Sex? Which one hasn’t been reanimated by it? Hasn’t become, maybe, feminist because of it?’ (Je, tu, nous, p. 9). De Beauvoir’s reception, across time, languages and feminist traditions, allows the possibility of keeping together equality and difference and to inherit de Beauvoir’s legacy in a way that differs from the reading given by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble of the famous ‘one is not born, one becomes a woman’, as one who jettisons the signifier ‘woman’.
The clues to this different reading are given by Kristeva in the very first paragraph: One is born woman, but I become it. De Beauvoir’s urgency has been to think women’s liberation, but its full development would have been, in some contradictory stance, the participation (inclusion) in a We-subject – the one ‘of Plotinus, of the Republican ideal of the Universal Man’. This contradiction – liberation through ‘the triple negation of the feminine body, homosexuality and maternity’ – raises the issue of freedom to think in itself, ‘with or against her’ (p. 10). In Kristeva’s second paragraph, The couple as the space of thinking, the contradiction develops: the liberated Subject, expected to be One, is split from the inside by the ‘war of the sexes’, as represented by the feminine characters of de Beauvoir’s novel (The Woman Destroyed), by the renewed removal of maternity and by the return of a so-called scientific biologism.
The short and impressive Foreword ends with the last paragraph, The novel as a political philosophy of singularity, in which Kristeva considers de Beauvoir’s experience beyond what she wanted to state, and finds a dimension of her life and work that connects the author to other women – ‘. . . I become it’. In fact, de Beauvoir’s literary writing, much more than her essays, becomes:
. . . the existential affirmation by which the unbearable singularity becomes a political challenge and vice versa . . . her novels destroy the feminist statue but bring The Second Sex at the deep heart of everyone. It thus becomes more than a myth: the invitation to singularize the political and to politicize the singularity. (p. 13)
There continue to be promises and risks entailed in the relation between the collective dimension and singularity, that is to say: how can we recover a collective subject – necessary as it is to politics – without erasing once again the difference and the differences?
The contemporary value of The Second Sex appears, according to a different approach – a historical and genealogical approach – in the ‘Afterword, Voices from Italy. A short history of the Italian reception’. Liliana Rampello, feminist, literary scholar and editor at Il Saggiatore – the Italian publishing house that first translated The Second Sex – is well placed to point out, as she does, that it is about three stories in one:
The editorial debate that preceded the publication, the very different and sometimes conflictual readings of women intellectuals and activists, and the encounter between the book and thousands of ordinary readers. (p. 701)
The first story begins on 15 October 1949, when the innovative Alberto Mondadori (who inherited one of the most important Italian publishing houses from his father Arnoldo), received a letter about a book that ‘is making a mess’ and is selling ‘500 copies a day’. The director decided to publish it, partly because of his collaboration with Jean-Paul Sartre, that had begun the year before, thus challenging the previous negative judgements about The Woman Destroyed – for ‘its irritating and overflowing verbalism’ – and about The Ethics of Ambiguity – for ‘the argument already appears in Sartre’s work’. The editorial process starts then with the refereeing by Remo Cantoni, who writes:
The conclusions are the ones of the existentialist ethics . . . the reading is quite pleasant, the book is written with clarity, it is rich in examples . . . the second part [‘The lived experience’] is longer than the first one, but it is more exciting and teasing, because it illustrates an unending series of situations. . . . De Beauvoir is not a great writer, nor a deep thinker, but she has gathered materials that are interesting in their variety and spiciness, that she controls with a remarkable journalistic skill. (p. 702)
The book was translated but not published until 1961. As Rampello says, the cultural atmosphere in the Italian 1950s was not friendly to the projects of Alberto Mondadori, who is depicted in de Beauvoir’s words as ‘a wonderful pirate’. It was only because of some radical editorial innovations, entailing collaboration with intellectuals such as Enzo Paci, Giulio Carlo Argan and Ernesto de Martino, that a new horizon opens up for a different style in writing and different disciplines. The book immediately became a best seller.
But the original, untranslated version of The Second Sex was already circulating by the mid-1950s among those women who were involved in the major Italian parties (PCI, PSI, DC – the Communist, the Socialist and the Democratic-Christian parties) and national women’s associations such as the UDI (Italian Women’s Union).
On the one hand, Luciana Castellina of the political group Il Manifesto (currently the leading radical newspaper which she co-founded) – who had been expelled from the Communist PCI in 1969 – tells how she was reading the book during the Hungarian revolt and how other women in the party stopped talking to her, because they considered the book an attack against Communism. Such a hostile reaction was not for feminist reasons, but because Sartre had retired from the French Communist Party that same year. On the other hand, Miriam Mafai attributes to The Second Sex the ‘improvement of my political education in respect of women’s rights’ (pp. 704–705).
Inside the UDI the book is considered a point of reference for conceptualizing women’s emancipation in terms not only of political action but also as ‘an opportunity for the cultural uplift of women’, as Giulia Dal Pozzo says (p. 706). As a result, the circulation of the book served to fuel some major struggles, such as the one that aimed (from 1962 to 1964) to transform ‘the feminine question’ into ‘a national question’, for ‘emancipation doesn’t consist in the equality of rights only’ (Giglia Tedesco, p. 707). Another struggle was the one about the recognition of the ‘specificity of the feminine question’ that couldn’t and shouldn’t be considered just one aspect of the more general and universal class struggle.
By the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s feminist thinking engaged with The Second Sex and, rather than a ‘woman’s question’, looked for a feminine culture, autonomous from a culture that reproduces hierarchies between the sexes (p. 710). Nevertheless, de Beauvoir’s thesis was considered unequal to the task of identifying the new issues at stake ‘among women’, and the new order of practices and discourse that it engenders.
Carla Lonzi, one of the most eminent feminist thinkers and activists of that period, quotes an interview by de Beauvoir who admits that ‘feminists refuse to be women-alibi as I have been. They are right.’ De Beauvoir admits that there is a contradictory status in her being an ‘exceptional woman’, but considering herself different and ‘distant from the ones who have not chosen the path of emancipation, of inclusion’ (p. 710).
The gap between feminist theorization and The Second Sex became wider and deeper over the years, and in the 1980s the text was read and studied as a classic only in the very few Italian Women’s Studies courses. On the feminist side, as Luisa Muraro says, other authors like Luce Irigaray and Virginia Woolf were drawn upon in the political aim of overcoming the horizon of emancipation and in opening up a space for a substantial ‘liberation’.
By the 1990s there was a resurgence in reading of The Second Sex, thanks to the attention of younger readers who were impelled by two urgent sets of needs: the need to recover a macroanalysis, in relation to both the fundamentals of knowledge and of culture and disciplines; and, because the book is a daring and very rich analysis of women’s lives and so can offer ways to overcome the opposition between equality and difference, between social participation and expression of oneself. A few years later these issues were crystallized in Butler’s Gender Trouble – translated into Italian in 1991 – and used to criticize new forms of biologism.
Rampello’s Afterword ends with the story told by Rossana Rossanda – co-founder of Il Manifesto – about her friend Simone during the days following Sartre’s death. She had been with him until the end but, after the funeral, she could not get into his apartment because his wife, Arlette Elkaïm, did not let her in:
It was the only time I saw her crying. Maybe there was a deeper suffering, concerning the proposal of a free [sentimental] life, maybe it had been a mistake, the undervaluing of a disparity between them from the beginning. (p. 715)
Nowadays the text again passes from hand to hand among younger women – those already politically aware and those who want to reclaim previous feminist challenges. In some cases it happens through the reading of Judith Butler (showing the importance and intertextuality of translated feminist theory for feminist practice), in others the encounter happens in order to cope with the renewed struggles for equality and desires for self-expression that are threatened by contemporary social and political reorganization. A new standpoint is at stake, looking for feminism after and beyond queer theories: the translation serves to bring Italy and France closer once again, as seems to be the case in the recent work by Catherine Malabou (2009).