Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Individuation: The Problem of the Second Sex

Laura Hengehold presents a new, Deleuzian reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenology, the place of recognition in The Second Sex, the philosophical issues in her novels and the important role of her student diaries.

Most studies of Simone de Beauvoir situate her with respect to Hegel and the tradition of 20th-century phenomenology begun by Husserl and Heidegger, and often stress the importance of Hegel’s struggle for recognition. Hengehold, in comparison, reads de Beauvoir through a Deleuzian lens, and looks at de Beauvoir’s early interest in Bergson and Leibniz.

Hengehold clarifies the elements of Deleuze’s thought - alone and in collaboration with Guattari - that may be most useful to contemporary feminists who are simultaneously rethinking the becoming of gender and the becoming of philosophy.

Laura Hengehold is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of The Body Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007) and co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Wiley/Blackwell, 2017). She is also translator and editor of Law and the Public Sphere in Africa: La Palabre and Other Writings by Jean Godefroy Bidima (Indiana University Press, 2013) and translator of Kafka’s Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa by Seloua Luste Boulbina (Indiana University Press, 2019).