The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volume 49, Issue 1

March 2011

IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Zeynep Direk

abstract: In this paper, I focus on the term ‘immanence’ in Simone de Beauvoir’s

The Second Sex and show how it relates to her historical account of sexual oppression.
I argue that Beauvoir’s use of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and of Claude Lévi-
Strauss’s reflection on the prohibition of incest lead her to claim that in all societies
“woman” is constructed as “absolutely other.” I show that there is an ambiguous logic
of abjection at work in Beauvoir’s account that explains why men are the only
examples of transcendence in history, whereas women lack it. Finally, I discuss the
way in which the relation between immanence and abjection helps to explain the
intellectual relation between Georges Bataille and Beauvoir. sjp_ 49..72

INTRODUCTION

What makes The Second Sex1 a revolutionary work is its affirmation of a specific
situation that pertains to women.2 Simone de Beauvoir describes “woman’s
situation” in terms of the social and historical subordination of women to

Zeynep Direk earned her PhD at the University of Memphis in 1998. She is Professor in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Galatasaray, Istanbul, Turkey. She is the author
of essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Bataille and has published a book in Turkish titled Başkalık
Deneyimi (Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2005).
1
Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970); Le deuxième sexe, vol. 2
(Paris: Gallimard, 1969); Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany-Chevallier, ed. Alfred A. Knopf (New York: Random House, 2010). I will refer to the
French version as ‘LDS ’ and the English translation as ‘SS ’.
2
I acknowledge that there is a great philosophical complexity to the term ‘woman’ given all
the differences between women. Contemporary feminism raises the question how race, sexu-
ality, class, education, and age differences constitute our gender identity. How does the category
of woman stand in relation to transgender identities? Given that in this essay I am taking up the
concepts of immanence and abjection more in the genre of history of philosophy, I shall not be
able discuss Beauvoir’s problematic use of it. I simply note here that Judith Butler offers a
powerful critique of Beauvoir’s use of this category in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 49, Issue 1 (2011), 49–72.

ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2010.00044.x

49
50 ZEYNEP DIREK

men. Although the organization of social life has varied in different epochs of
history, for Beauvoir, the situation has changed little in its essence. She argues
that its historical stability is not proof of the fact that it originates in woman’s
nature. The situation of being the second sex constitutes in everyday life a
certain character or personality of which Beauvoir speaks in a highly critical
tone.3 She takes it, however, as a product of historical inequalities. Her
famous claim that “One is not born a woman, one becomes a woman”
licenses us to give a social, cultural, and historical interpretation of the
situation of being the second sex.4 Hence, Beauvoir’s account sets aside the
biological explanation of the male and the female sex in order to raise
the question of the social status of masculinity and femininity. Patriarchy
becomes the fundamental target, precisely because it is held responsible for
the constitution or the production of the meaning and the value of mascu-
linity and femininity. In The Second Sex the situation to which women are
bound and from which they must liberate themselves is called “immanence.”
There is little doubt that “immanence” is a key concept in Beauvoir’s text, but
from a philosophical point of view, it still preserves its enigmatic allure. Toril
Moi says that, in Beauvoir, the notion of “immanence” is accompanied by a
series of “astonishingly obsessional images such as darkness, night, passivity,
inertia, abandonment, servitude, enclosure, imprisonment, degeneration,
devaluation, destruction.”5 She also notes that Beauvoir would be reluctant to
make use of such terms as ‘rest’, ‘remembering’, and ‘tranquility’, which can
be positive aspects of passivity in immanence. Even though this negative
portrayal of immanence impresses the reader, Beauvoir holds that imma-
nence is irreducible in human existence, which is always simultaneously
immanence and transcendence (LDS, 2: 16; SS, 267, 443). Existence in imma-
nence amounts to repetition and seems to be analogous to the inertia of
animal life, which only reproduces itself and does not construct a world
through action. In fact, Beauvoir argues that it is possible to experience both
transcendence and immanence and to return from the world of action to the
realm of immanence in order to enjoy “peace.” However, such enjoyment is
possible only if one’s transcendence is not obstructed. In patriarchies, it is a
privilege that belongs only to men. Women, on the other hand, are robbed of

3
She “wallows in immanence, she is argumentative, she is cautious and petty, she does not
have the sense either of truth or of accuracy, she lacks morality, she is vulgarly self serving,
selfish, she is a liar and an actress” (LDS, 2: 306–07; SS, 638).
4
This claim anticipates the concept that feminists later called “gender.” Woman is not a
creature of nature but of culture. We are all born with specific corporeal features, capacities, and
tendencies, though their presentation, the decisions as to what they mean, and the value they are
given in their corporeal manifestations depend on the preexisting social and historical practices.
5
Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),
174.
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 51
their transcendence by men and find themselves enclosed in the pure opaque
presence of the real where they produce nothing else than “pure and identical
generality” (LDS, 2: 16; SS, 443). They live a contingency that they cannot
justify and, thus, remain the inessential beings that “cannot discover the
absolute in the heart of their subjectivity” (LDS, 2: 377; SS, 684). Thus,
although immanence is an irreducible constituent of human existence, and
the immanent and transcendent aspects of living experience are inseparable,
there is a fundamental difference between female and male experiences of
immanence. In this essay, I argue that the difference is to be found in the fact
that woman’s immanence is historically determined by abjection.
In Beauvoir as it is in Sartre, consciousness is essentially intentionality,
negativity, and transcendence. “Being condemned to immanence” is, for
consciousness, the experience of not being able to actualize its
transcendence—being riveted to one’s corporeal being, that is, a person’s
inability to escape from being seen only as one’s body. The impossibility of
making one’s freedom effective in the world implies the inertia of existence in
the plenitude and darkness of being in itself. Nevertheless, it is doubtful
whether the Sartrean ontological duality of “being in itself” and “being for
itself” can sufficiently account for the way Beauvoir uses the term imma-
nence. The term ‘facticity’ as it is used in The Second Sex is a difficult one. On
the one hand, it is used in both a Heideggerian and a Sartrean sense, that is
to say, roughly as worldly possibilities into which we are thrown. On the other
hand, it is made to coincide with the term ‘immanence’ that Heidegger and
Sartre do not use very much at all.6 It seems to feminist thinkers such as Eva
Lundgren-Gothlin and Andrea Veltman that Beauvoir’s use of the term
‘immanence’ can be accounted for with reference to her appropriation of
Hegel. Indeed, Beauvoir’s philosophical reflection on the history of patriar-
chy draws fundamentally from Hegel’s phenomenology of self-consciousness
in Phenomenology of Spirit, particularly from “A. Independence and Dependence

6
As Veltman notes, “there is only one relevant use of ‘immanence’ in Being and Nothingness
and the term is used to deny the equation of being-in-itself with ‘immanence’.” Andrea
Veltman, “Transcendence and Immanence in Beauvoir’s Ethics,” in Philosophy of Simone de
Beauvoir: Critical Essays, ed. Margaret A. Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006),
129. Sartre notes that being-in-itself should not be called “immanence,” for immanence is
relation with self (rapport à soi), and it implies “that very slight withdrawal which can be
realized—away from the self (elle est le plus petit recul qu’on puisse prendre de soi à soi).” Jean Paul
Sartre, L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 32. Being-in-
itself, on the other hand, has neither self-relation nor withdraws from itself. See Jean Paul
Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New
York: Washington Square Press, 1984), 27. I would say that the term ‘immanence’ still plays a
role in Sartre’s account of consciousness, despite the fact that he rejects the Husserlian account
of the constitution of transcendent objects in the immanence of consciousness.
52 ZEYNEP DIREK

of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage.”7 However, she also makes a

decisive use of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship in
which what is at stake is the enigma of incest insofar as it concerns the
transition from nature to culture.
By “the elementary structures of kinship” Lévi-Strauss means the struc-
tures that delineate “an immediate circle” of kin and relatives and prescribe
preferential marriage with certain relatives and prohibit it with others.8 A
system is “preferential” if, even in the absence of a clearly formulated pre-
scription, the members of a group tend to marry a certain kind of relative and
avoid marrying others. These structural phenomena exist universally even
though norms may differ from one culture to another, which Lévi-Strauss
assiduously documents. One society may prescribe marriage with parallel
cousins (descended from two sisters or two brothers) and regard cross cousin
marriage as incestuous whereas another society may just prohibit the former
and consider the latter as ideal. The hypothesis of the deleterious conse-
quences of the consanguine marriages did not exist before the sixteenth
century and a biological hypothesis is not necessary to explain the prohibition
of incest (ESK, xxix). It is a riddle because if one accepts the universality of
nature (instincts, biological heredity, and laws of nature) and the relativity of
cultures (rules, norms, customs, techniques, and institutions), the prohibition
of incest appears to be a scandalous fact, for it is a universal rule. It combines
“the two characteristics in which we recognize the conflicting features of two
mutually exclusive orders,” that is, nature and culture (8). Lévi-Strauss is
concerned with the ambiguity of the prohibition of incest, the fact that it is at
once “pre-social” and “social,” “on the threshold of culture,” “in culture,”
and “culture itself.” He argues that in the transition from nature to culture
“the change can and must necessarily take place in the field of sexual life
above any other” (12). According to him, neither the observation of the
natural life nor the observation of social life can account for the transition
because culture is a substitute for the natural life that it uses and transforms
in a way to make all regression to nature impossible (4).
The way Beauvoir ties Hegel and Lévi-Strauss together in the second part
of The Second Sex entitled “History” is not sufficiently explained in feminist
readings. The failure to take into account Beauvoir’s appeal to Lévi-Strauss’s
work leads to serious misunderstandings of Beauvoir’s characterization of

7
G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988); trans. by
A. V. Miller as Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Hereafter, these
works will be cited parenthetically using ‘PG ’ (followed by page number) and ‘PS ’ (followed by
section and page number).
8
ESK, xxv. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell
and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon, 1969). Hereafter referred to as ‘ESK ’.
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 53
woman’s situation in relation to both the master and the slave who are, for
Beauvoir, both male. It is true that woman is a kind of slave because she is a
servant. However, according to Hegel, what qualifies the slave as a slave
consciousness is the struggle for life and death and the experience of absolute
negativity, that is, the fear of death. This fear makes him a slave but renders
also possible, as Hegel remarks later, his experience of the essence of self-
consciousness, infinite fluidity as such. Hegel writes: “But this pure universal
movement, the absolute melting away of everything stable, is the simple,
essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self,
which consequently is implicit in this consciousness” (PG, 134; PS §194, 117).
The point is that formative activity or constructive work without this experi-
ence of the essence of self-consciousness in fear is not sufficient to constitute
an independent self-consciousness. Given these requirements of the master–
slave dialectic, Beauvoir concedes that this dialectic alone cannot account for
the specific nature of woman’s oppression. She attends to the specificity of
woman’s exclusion from humanity. Shannon Mussett is correct in arguing
that in Beauvoir’s account woman is the “intermediary between man and
nature, yet endowed with the inessential and dependent object conscious-
ness.”9 However, I suggest that if one inquires into woman’s function as
mediator between man and nature, one will clearly see that, in Beauvoir’s
account, woman mediates man’s relation to nature and not only because she
serves him and satisfies his sexual needs. She in fact mediates man’s relation
to immanence—the relation of transcendence to immanence within the limits
of certain rules and norms determined by the elementary structures that
prevail. She can fulfill that function of mediation because of her being origi-
nally posed by him as taboo.
Although I think that Beauvoir’s original synthesis of Hegel’s Phenomenol-
ogy of Spirit and the anthropological work of Lévi-Strauss must be given more
attention, this is not my fundamental task in this paper. My interest is in the
way the term ‘immanence’ relates to the phenomenon of abjection and the
intellectual relation of Bataille and Beauvoir as thinkers of that relation.
Bataille himself does not use the term ‘abjection’, though he conveys it
under several other terms, such as ‘abhorrence’, ‘repugnance’, ‘repulsion’,
and ‘horror’, whereas Beauvoir employs terms such as ‘fear’, ‘horror’, and
‘debasement’. Of course none of these terms can equate with abjection, as
abjection involves a coincidence with desire. Not only do Bataille and Beau-
voir attempt to think about the ambiguity of the object of man’s sexual
desire, but they do so with the same philosophical resources, that is, Hegel

9
Shannon M. Mussett, “Conditions of Servitude: Woman’s Peculiar Role in the Master–
Slave Dialectic in Beauvoir’s Second Sex,” in Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, 283.
54 ZEYNEP DIREK

and Lévi-Strauss.10 Furthermore, they both aim at rethinking the relation

between immanence and transcendence through sexuality, not only as the
coincidence of horror and desire, but also in terms of subordination and
sovereignty.
I begin by raising the question concerning the sources of Beauvoir’s use
of the term ‘immanence’. If it does not exactly mean the “in itself ” of Being
in the Sartrean sense, did Beauvoir get it directly from Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit? I argue that this cannot be the case. Second, I investigate the
significance of the absence of the master-slave dialectic in woman’s relation
to man and show that this nondialectical relation complicates the question
of woman’s independence and liberation. Immanence is what she falls back
to insofar as she is not transcending. But what is the essence of immanence
beyond such designations as “repetitive labor” or “mere repetition of life”?
In my view, Bataille is the fundamental thinker of Hegelian immanence on
the French scene. I would like to raise the question whether there is a
connection between Beauvoir’s and Bataille’s use of this term. As I see it,
Beauvoir and Bataille consider the same issue: women, who are destined to
give life and not to risk it, do not experience absolute negativity, but abjec-
tion. Woman’s function of mediation between nature and man is open to a
reading in terms of abjection. Even though Beauvoir does not use the term
‘abjection’, she invents another term to represent it, that is, ‘absolute alter-
ity’. Women, according to The Second Sex, are not relative others, but
Others. How can we explain the difference between the slave who is just an
other and the woman as Other if not by abjection? In concluding, I shall
briefly compare Bataille and Beauvoir and note the most significant differ-
ences in their approaches.

Eva Lundgren-Gothlin argues in her Sex and Existence that Beauvoir’s con-
cepts of transcendence and immanence (as they appear in the anthropologi-
cal description of the historical development of human society in The Second
Sex) are not quite Sartrean but, rather, derive from Beauvoir’s readings of
Hegel and Marx. Publication of her book prompted more scholarly atten-
tion in feminist literature to Beauvoir’s use of these concepts. It is possible to
argue that after a first wave of feminist interpretations of this dichotomy as
10
In The Second Sex, there are only two references to Bataille; however, her confessional
writing shows us that Beauvoir was in intellectual and personal contact with him during the
1940s. Bataille published The Inner Experience in 1943, Theory of Religion in 1948, and the first
volume of The Accursed Share in 1949. His fictional works, Le coupable, L’impossible, Madame
Edwarda, Le petit, L’archangélique, also date from the 1940s.
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 55
“metaphysical” and glorifying “traditionally male activities,” “denigrating
maternity and the labors that are seen as traditionally feminine,” etc., a
second wave of feminist reception of it came to the fore, which is more open
to the call for rethinking it.11 I agree with the second wave that seeing
Beauvoir simply as a Sartrean fails to attend to the deeper structure of her
text. She does not merely apply Sartre’s analyses to the situation of women
but creatively transforms the existentialist tradition by raising the question of
sexual oppression. I also think that this transformation takes place in Beau-
voir’s own attempt to interpret Hegel’s phenomenology. What kind of
impact does the second wave of interpretation have on our understanding of
the terms ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’? According to Veltman, for
example, transcendence in Beauvoir’s use is not characterized by intentional
consciousness but by “creative and constructive work,” and immanence is
not facticity but “unproductive maintenance of labor.”12 I hold that Beau-
voir’s employment of these terms is more complicated than that. Thus an
explanation of the philosophical web of relations that underlie Beauvoir’s
appeal to them may help us deepen our understanding. My concern with
the second wave of the feminist interpreters of the transcendence-
immanence pair is that they merely suggest a philosophical direction to follow
rather than actually following it. To verify this hypothesis, we need to pay
some attention to Hegel’s use of the noun ‘immanence’ or rather its adjec-
tive form ‘immanent’ in Phenomenology of Spirit.13 It is noteworthy that we find
no use of the terms ‘immanence’ or ‘transcendence’ in his account of self-
consciousness. This is why it is incumbent on feminist interpreters to show
why Beauvoir reads Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in terms of this opposi-
tion. It is possible that these pairs of concepts are borrowed by Beauvoir
from Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the
Phenomenology of Spirit. Indeed, Kojève makes abundant use of the term ‘tran-
scendence’ in a way that has much in common with Beauvoir’s use.
However, he does not use the term ‘immanence’ at all.14
Before revisiting Hegel’s use of the term ‘immanence’, let me briefly
mention the fundamental controversy over the term. Broadly, rethinking
11
For example, Veltman reads the transcendence–immanence dichotomy as being norma-
tive and thinks that feminists should not reject straightforwardly “an ethics structured around
the dichotomy between transcendence and immanence” (“Transcendence and Immanence in
Beauvoir’s Ethics,” 127).
12
Ibid., 124.
13
In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel does not use the term ‘immanence’; however, he uses the
adjective ‘immanent’ eleven times. See Joseph Gauvin, Wortindex zu Hegels “Phänomenologie des
Geistes,” Hegel Studien 14 (Bonn: Bouvier Grundmann, 1984).
14
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit,
assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1991).
56 ZEYNEP DIREK

immanence in a system of the unity of God, nature, and spirit was the
fundamental project of German idealism, common to both Schelling and
Hegel. The controversy around the term is found in Schelling’s The Essence of
Human Freedom, which was published in 1809, two years after the publication
of The Phenomenology of Spirit.15 There Schelling says that immanence is the
presence of all things in God. He distinguishes between the abstract and
mechanistic philosophy of immanence that he finds in Spinoza and his own
philosophy of identity. Although Spinoza’s pantheism is capable of account-
ing for the distinction of beings from God without their separation, in his
system, freedom does not maintain itself in opposition to God but disappears
in identity. This is because the principle of identity is not conceived correctly,
that is, as “a unity animated by a movement of rotation within the circle of
unicity.”16 Schelling attributes to this movement, not only the capacity for
progress but also sentiment and life.17
In the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel criticizes Schelling for
his abstractness and formality, that is, “the inability to master the absolute
standpoint” (PG, 13; PS §16, 9) but also for the fact that his conception of
the absolute did not include negativity. Even though Hegel’s system has
much in common with Schelling’s, such as a dynamic conception of nature
underlying the surface phenomena of mechanism, the interpretation of
being as will, the compatibility of the possibility of system with freedom, etc.
He also desires to distance himself from his dynamic philosophy of imma-
nence. In the Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, he explains “immanence” in
terms of the immanent movement of the Notion and the determination of
the content and emphasizes that negativity belongs to it (PG, 44; PS §59,
36). He uses the expression ‘immanent motion or self movement’ in order to
characterize the movement of the Notion (Begriff ), the principle of life that
eludes mathematical determination and that produces essential distinctions,
qualitative differences, and the transitions of opposites into their opposites
(PG, 33; PS §45, 26). Science is said to organize itself “by the life of the
Notion” and the dialectical movement of being is described as “consisting
partly in becoming other than itself, and thus becoming its own immanent
content” (PG, 39; PS §53, 32). Hence, the determination of the content is
not external, does not come from the outside, but is self-determination
(ibid.). This immanent content returns into itself for it is the immanent self

15
F. W. J. Schelling, Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1997),
9–21; F. W. J. Schelling, Of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (Chicago: Open Court,
1936), 9–24.
16
Of Human Freedom, 18.
17
Ibid.
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 57
of the content, “pure self identity in otherness” (PG, 41; PS §54, 33). Hegel
avoids using the term ‘God’ to characterize this movement because “God”
is not a concept but a proper name, “the fixed point of rest” and contents
of the speculative truths affirmed of God lack the immanent Notion (PG,
49; PS §66, 40).
Interestingly, Hegel does not use the term ‘immanence’ in “B. Self-
Consciousness,” in his account of Life and Desire, and he does not account
for the relation of particular self-consciousness to Life in terms of “imma-
nence.” Life is defined as a process, a simple universal fluid medium that
brings about differences that do not have an enduring existence but are
eventually superseded. In order to understand the determinations of Life, we
need to appeal to the infinity of the Essence and the Notion. The individual
consciousness is just a difference that Life brings forth and belongs to “this
dividedness of the undifferentiated fluid medium” (PG, 124; PS §171, 108). So
what is at stake for the individual consciousness is not to transcend the
immanent movement of Life, Essence, or Notion, which is by definition
impossible, but to become what it is as self-consciousness through desire, to
attain its independence in the division of substance.
As Hegel’s narrative goes, self-consciousness desires recognition by
another self-consciousness and does not completely reach its truth without it.
However, mutual recognition does not take place in Hegel’s account of the
master-slave dialectic. First, self-consciousness becomes a singular universal
through the experience of the unhappy consciousness by the overcoming of
the separation from the Absolute. As we get to “(AA.) Reason,” the stand-
point of consciousness that has the certainty that it is all reality is assumed.
In reason’s attempt to prove the truth of its certainty by searching to find
itself in the externality of nature, the term ‘immanence’ makes its reappear-
ance in Hegel’s discussion of the universality of organic life. Even though the
observing reason does not know it, we are told that the significance of
individuality results from “the oneness immanent in life” (PG, 200; PS §297,
179) and that the genus is constituted by the immediate unity of life with the
universal, a setting free of the qualitative manifestation of the Notion. The
lesson that observing reason must learn is that life is an activity that is
productive of itself and that the internal process cannot be accounted for by
external appearances, by just observing how life appears to consciousness.
Scientific classification of individual organisms under their species and
genera makes use of “representations” that evade the systematic develop-
ment of the oneness immanent in life.
Hegel remarks that the immanent movement of universal self-
consciousness implies the reciprocity of individual self-consciousnesses and
the becoming universal will of the individual consciousness. An individual
58 ZEYNEP DIREK

will that acts and builds a world is carrying out or realizing universal
freedom for “this immanent movement proclaims the absolute Being as
Spirit” (PG, 501; PS §771, 465).18 Finally in “C. (DD) Absolute Knowing,”
he refers to Spirit as “immanent differentiation” (PG, 525; PS §802, 488).19
The immanent movement explains the subsistence of existence on its own
account as “the Notion posited in determinateness” (PG, 528; PS §804, 490).
The simple substance becomes the Subject only as this negativity and
movement. We rapidly went through Hegel’s use of the term, but even this
brief exposition suffices to show that immanence for him is not something
to be superseded or left behind; it is the living movement of the Notion, the
identity of identity and difference. This is the movement of Aufhebung. It
concerns Life as the unfolding of Essence, as it is determined by the
Concept. It is clear that Beauvoir’s term ‘immanence’ does not derive from
Hegel’s use, at least not directly.
In “The Master and Slave Dialectic in The Second Sex,” Lundgren-Gothlin
corrects the erroneous readings of the master-slave dialectic in The Second Sex
and rightly questions the limits of the thesis that Beauvoir’s philosophy derives
from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.20 Nevertheless, she does not explain how
Beauvoir’s reading of Hegel can be oriented by Kojève’s interpretation of
Hegel in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Kojève uses the phrase ‘natural life’ as something to be surpassed with the
awareness of death, labor, work, and action by means of which man builds a
historical world of freedom. Both Bataille and Beauvoir find that framework
insufficient and rethink the question of the transition from nature to culture,
from animality to humanity in terms of sexuality.21 In both, we find the
emphasis that the awareness of death and work alone are not sufficient to
account for the creation of a human world. And they both rely on The
Elementary Structures of Kinship to support saying that. In the next section, I
return to Beauvoir’s historical account of woman’s oppression before I
proceed to take up the question of the philosophical relation between Bataille
and Beauvoir.

18
Note that the term ‘immanent’ is not found in the original text but is an addition of the
translator.
19
Here too the translator is adding the term ‘immanent’. I am not suggesting that these
additions distort the meaning of the original text. On the contrary, they make it more explicit.
But Hegel himself is not using the term.
20
See Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, “The Master and Slave Dialectic in The Second Sex,” in Simone
de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader, ed. Elizabeth Fallaize (London: Routledge, 1998), 93–94.
21
See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vols. 2 and 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Zone Books, 1993), 53; and Simone de Beauvoir, “L’Être et la parenté,” Magazine Littéraire,
Lévi-Strauss/Hors Série 5 (2006): 60–63.
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 59
2

Beauvoir holds that all human beings have the existential possibility of tran-
scendence. Nevertheless, she still finds it necessary to account for the condi-
tion under which male transcendence has become effective in history as well
as the problem with transcendence in the feminine situation. I argue that both
the actuality of male transcendence and the difficulty of the realization of
female transcendence are related to what can be called “abjection.”22 In order
to explain my thesis, I discuss how Beauvoir appeals to Hegel’s master-slave
dialectic with respect to which she depicts woman’s situation in terms of
immanence. The terms ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ are tied with the
riddle concerning the universal prohibition of incest. This is to say that
transcendence as it is historically effective is not just self-realization by cre-
ative work in the world and Mitsein that rests on recognition, for abjection is
constitutive of male transcendence and woman’s captivity in immanence. In
the review article “L’Etre et parenté ” concerning Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Struc-
tures of Kinship from November 1949, Beauvoir says that “being man is to
choose oneself as man by defining one’s possibilities on the basis of a recip-
rocal relation with the other; the presence of man is nothing accidental:
exogamy, far from registering it, constitutes it; man’s transcendence expresses
and realizes itself by it: it is the refusal of immanence, the exigency of a
surpassing.”23 In that essay, she points out that Lévi-Strauss accounts for what
Hegel fails to see, a gap in his account of history, but Lévi-Strauss’s theme of
the transition from nature to culture must in turn be supplemented by Hegel,
for otherwise he cannot account for history. And this is what she sees as her
own philosophical task in 1949.
As readers of The Second Sex know well, two universal claims sustain the
project as a whole: “One is not born a woman but one becomes a woman”
and the anthropological thesis that “in all societies in the world woman has
always been considered as the Other.” Let me note that the anthropological
claim is not present in Lévi-Strauss but is Beauvoir’s own formulation. In
The Second Sex, Beauvoir gives a historical account of what makes us women.
Her argument rests on a distinction made within the notion of “alterity.”
Since the beginnings of Greek philosophy, heteron refers to relative alterity.
If A is different from B, then B is different from A. Both A and B are
22
This insight belongs originally to Tina Chanter. See Tina Chanter, “Abjection and
Ambiguity: Simone de Beauvoir’s Legacy, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 14 (2000): 138-55.
23
Beauvoir, “L’Être et la parenté,” 63; my translation. The original reads: “être homme,
c’est se choisir comme homme en définissant ses possibilités sur la base d’une relation récip-
roque avec l’autre; la présence de l’autre n’a rien d’un accident: l’exogamie, bien loin de se
borner à l’enregister, au contraire la constitue; par elle s’exprime et se réalize la transcendance
de l’homme: elle est le refus de l’immanence, l’exigence d’un dépassement.”
60 ZEYNEP DIREK

self-same, thus same in self-sameness, nevertheless different from each other

in their determinations. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir constructs her argument
by adopting a well-known Hegelian premise according to which the self-
relation of self-consciousness is mediated by its relation to another self-
consciousness. A self-consciousness can be for itself, can have an identity for
itself only if it is for another, that is, it finds itself in a relation of recognition
with another self-consciousness. Hegel thinks that the possibility of recog-
nition presupposes the struggle of two consciousnesses. His task is to give a
dialectical account of the transformation of the asymmetrical relation of
power of one consciousness over the other into a relationship of mutual
recognition. He does not raise the question of sexual difference in this
context, which comes in question through Beauvoir’s engagement with
history in The Second Sex.
Beauvoir emphasizes that woman and man do not enter into the master–
slave dialectic, for it presupposes the reciprocity of two independent con-
sciousnesses (reciprocity of freedoms) (LDS, 1: 189, 190; SS, 160). She argues
that throughout history there is no relationship of recognition between the
male sex and the female sex because woman is construed as “Other” in the
history of patriarchy as well as in the matriarchal societies that preceded
the patriarchy. Beauvoir holds that woman’s alterity is not an alterity that is
“similar” to man’s, not a relative alterity (altérité relative), but an “absolute
alterity” (altérité absolue). For Beauvoir, woman’s difference is constructed as a
difference that does not return to the same, does not enter into the Hegelian
dialectic in which it could be sublated in the movement of “the identity of
identity and difference.” An asymmetrical relation between the same and its
similar other can transform itself into a relation of reciprocity. The paradig-
matic example of such a relationship is Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.
However, a relation between the same and the Other who is irreducible to the
same can never become a relation of equality and is likely to continue being
a relationship of domination, which is different than the slavery of the similar
other to the same.
Now, what is the nature of this absolute alterity? Beauvoir encounters its
face in the Mother Deity of matriarchy. During the time that preceded the
reign of the principle of patriarchy in history, woman was seen as “Earth,”
“Mother,” and “Deity”; femininity was celebrated as the creative principle of
life. Men had fear, respect, and reverence for her because she was constructed
as “the absolute other” or “the other that is not the same.” Thus, it seems that
the structure that led woman to her inequality and downfall in history had
been instituted in the so-called matriarchal order. Beauvoir agrees with Lévi-
Strauss’s thesis that even in matriarchies the society had always been mascu-
line, for power and authority lay in the hands of the uncle from the mother’s
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 61
side. Both Lévi Strauss and Beauvoir take Marcel Mauss’s “Essai sur le don”
(1923) and the question of the gift seriously. They infer from it that women
are not mere objects; instead, they are highly valued, luxurious objects, that
is, gifts. Beauvoir gives Lévi-Strauss his due, because he realized that the
relation between the two sexes rests on an asymmetry that does not turn into
reciprocity. What interests Beauvoir most in The Elementary Structures of Kinship
is the following thesis: “The duality that can be seen in one form or another
at the heart of society pits one group of men against another; and women are
part of goods men possess and a means of exchange among themselves” (LDS,
1: 92; SS, 80). Beauvoir’s conceptual contribution to Lévi-Strauss’s descrip-
tion is found in her insight that the practice of exogamy is based on man’s
relation to woman constituted not as the same but as the Other. In other
words, exogamy is the gesture in which women are manifested as Others.
Beauvoir argues that marriage is instituted on the prohibition of incest
because the primitive marriage achieves a symbolic break with sameness. She
writes: “depending on the types of relations recognized in different societies,
the banning of incest takes on different forms, but from primitive times to our
days, it has remained the same: man wishes to possess that which he is not; he
unites himself to what appears to him to be Other than himself” (LDS, 1: 96;
SS, 83). The institution of marriage not only permits man to take possession
of woman but, in it, he also acquires the social status of being an adult, finds
his proper place in the world, and transmits his acquisitions to his inheritors,
etc. More significantly, and what Lévi-Strauss’s analysis implies in Beauvoir’s
reading, it is because of this institution that man becomes the unique incar-
nation of transcendence in the world and woman remains riveted to her being
in immanence, which does not let her assume her own existential possibility
of free self-realization in the world. Beauvoir thinks that a being condemned
to immanence has not yet attained humanity, that is, it remains excluded
from it. The lack of transcendence in radical alterity makes her a being in
itself, which cannot be for itself; it imprisons her in being. Hence, Sartrean
terms do in fact come in, but they are not explanatory; they do not constitute
the fundamental philosophical thread of Beauvoir’s account. The domicile,
the domestic life is woman’s enclosure in being, because the essence of
exogamy (despite all the differences in the practices of marriage with which
Lévi-Strauss deals meticulously in The Elementary Structures of Kinship) unfolds
itself in a logic of gift that presupposes and ascertains woman’s absolute
alterity.
Beauvoir argues that the authority that man has over woman is somehow
restricted due to his feelings of horror and anxiety at the face of her fertility
and alterity. She is dependent on him, but his horror gives her some power
over him; thus, he is also dependent on her. This relationship of mutual
62 ZEYNEP DIREK

dependence saves her from being enslaved by him. The slave is not protected
by any taboo; although he is considered to be inferior to the master and has
the social status of an animal with a human face, he is not essentially different
from the master in being man (LDS, 1: 102; SS, 86). In contrast to the slave,
woman is protected by the taboos that concern her fecundity. For man, the
other who is similar to himself, who is essentially the same, and with whom
relations of reciprocity are held has always been the man other than him, the
other man.
When patriarchy took over and established its historical reign, woman and
her children were not enslaved but, rather, dominated in the sense that they
were subjected to servitude.24 Given that a slave’s labor brought more returns
than woman’s, with the appearance of slavery (esclavage) she lost the economic
power that she held in the tribe. Hence, Beauvoir does not accept the claim
that women were slaves in history, even though she affirms that they were
placed in the service of men (asservissement). What is the specificity of this
notion of servitude, which is not slavery? Man enslaves the other who is
similar to himself and finds a radical affirmation of his own sovereignty in the
relationship with his slave.
However, a dialectical movement that has lasted for centuries has brought
the downfall of this relationship of domination and has transformed it into a
relationship of mutual recognition in which the slave is liberated from slavery.
But the situation of the woman is very different from the situation of the slave.
When woman is constituted as the “absolute other” by man, he confuses her
with the forces of life and nature, attributes to her magic powers on the
grounds of her fertility, fears her, and poses her as the “essential.” Neverthe-
less, even though she is posed as the essential, woman, just like Nature, is a
possessed and exploited being. Given that the role of being essential is
assigned to her by him, she is on the side of the inessential (LDS, 1: 92; SS, 82).
The Mother Deity, no matter how much power she has, is constituted by the
male consciousness. As he becomes self-confident over against the forces of
nature, he can dethrone the idol that he has feared for a long time (LDS, 1: 95;
SS, 85). Even though this subjectivity has alienated itself temporarily in nature
and woman, it can take itself back from this alienation. Man is still subject to
24
What makes possible the passage from the matriarch to patriarchy? According to Lévi-
Strauss, the passage can be accounted for by the fact that man felt a stronger attachment for his
sons rather than his nephews and, at a critical moment, chose to affirm himself as father rather
than uncle. On the other hand, Beauvoir prefers to explain the passage from matriarchy to
patriarchy by appealing to a moment of rupture or transformation in agricultural culture. This
is the moment of the invention of the instrument, of the coming into being of the homo faber, of
man’s overcoming of the horror and the confusion he had at the face of nature and woman-
hood, of his return to himself from alienation, and the consequent change in his relation to the
world. The birth of rationality and of mathematics on the one hand and the enslavement of men
on the other take place simultaneously (LDS, 1: 97–98; SS, 84).
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 63
the contingencies of nature, to the sun, the rain, the drought, and the flood,
but he has learned how to project his possibilities and build a world. He has
attained a clearer consciousness of himself, come in contact with his tran-
scendence; his spirit and will have begun to affirm themselves against the
confusion and the contingency of life.
The victory of patriarchy in history is described by Beauvoir as follows:
“Spirit prevailed over Life, transcendence over immanence, technology over
magic, and reason over superstition” (LDS, 1: 97; SS, 84). Thus, one gets the
sense that patriarchy was historically necessary in the development of human-
ity. However, I think that what Beauvoir argues for is the necessity by which
Spirit arises from and transforms natural life in which it lacked self-
consciousness. For Hegel, as it is for Schelling, nature bears the mark of the
spirit; it is intelligence albeit petrified (versteinerte Intelligenz) or ossified in the
rigidity of being.25 The question whether the devaluation of women precisely
through their valuation (as gifts) by matriarchies and patriarchies was neces-
sary for the coming to consciousness of Spirit is not sufficiently discussed by
Beauvoir. She simply says that the devaluation of woman is a necessary stage.
What is the ground of this necessity? Is it based on the fact that woman
receives her value only from the fears and weaknesses of man? Is that horror
a contingent fact? What does it mean to say that “the triumph of patriarchy
was neither an accident nor the result of a violent revolution” (LDS, 1: 101;
SS, 85)?
Beauvoir depicts men as having biological privileges or advantages that
enable them to affirm themselves as sovereign subjects (LDS, 1: 100; SS,
85–86). At times, she sounds as if the history of the two sexes was originally
determined by men’s biological advantages. However, like most feminist
interpreters, I take her analysis as anticipating the notion of “gender.”
According to this interpretation, neither men’s biological advantages nor
women’s relative physical weaknesses, nor the inequality between the pro-
ductive capacities of the two sexes that follows from these biological and
physical differences, necessarily imply that men should be in the position of
the oppressors and women in that of the oppressed. Beauvoir refuses biologi-
cal determinism, against which feminism has fought since its very beginning.
Beauvoir’s thinking of the organic body and her critique of biological deter-
minism rests on Hegel’s critique of the observing reason in Phenomenology of
Spirit. For Hegel, the Idea does not exist perfectly in nature; the observing
reason fails when it takes the exterior as an expression of the interior. Thus

25
G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with
the Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1991), §24A.
64 ZEYNEP DIREK

there is no relationship of logical necessity between biology and history.26

Beauvoir remarks that woman cannot think and work in the world like man
does because she gives birth to children and takes care of them. This is why
she cannot participate in the Mitsein of men with men. If what she calls “the
biological privilege of man” does not amount to the sublimation of the male
body, can Beauvoir be talking about an advantageous incapacity? The capac-
ity of giving birth should not be construed as a disadvantage, if the inequality
between the two sexes does not originate in the biological capacities or
potentials that pertain to male and female bodies but is a result of the sexual
division of labor within society.
Insofar as Beauvoir describes the domestic life of women in marriage, the
experiences of pregnancy, child birth, and breast feeding, not in terms of
their positive potential as sources of pleasure and pride, but as a curse, a
burden, a handicap for women, she criticizes a culture in which these expe-
riences inevitably impede women’s spirituality, not only their intellectual
life, but more fundamentally their world-building activity. The female body
becomes a handicap, not because of its biological constitution, but because
society impedes the possibility of its free spiritualization. And this happens
because the female body is historically and culturally constituted as the
“Other.” In The Second Sex, the cultural formation of the female body, the
process of its gendering, is explained in terms of its constitution as an alter-
ity. This is the very mechanism that robs women’s possibilities of existence
from them, and reinstitutes them as beings in immanence. But why does
this happen? The subordination of women to men goes back to how man
saw woman as “the confused source of the world and the troubled organic
becoming” (LDS, 1: 206; SS, 170; translation modified).27 To the extent that
Beauvoir fails to give a phenomenological account of this regard, her proto-
feminist discourse risks falling prey to abjection. Even though I argue that
The Second Sex reveals the logic of abjection that underlies the history of
male transcendence, I also think that Beauvoir’s own discourse on the
female body suffers from that very logic. Toril Moi recognizes this when she
says that, in The Second Sex, the descriptions of the female sexual experience
exhibit “a visceral disgust for the female sexual organs.”28 Thus, there is a

26
PS §§277–80. Body’s appearance in the world cannot be explained in terms of determin-
ism. This is why the question of transcendence in Beauvoir’s account is decisive.
27
The expression is awkward in French: “elle est la source confuse du monde et trouble
devenir organique.”
28
Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 196. Elsewhere she says that “there can be no doubt that
Beauvoir’s visceral disgust at the female sexual organs reveals an unconscious horror of more
than just patriarchy: here, surely, lurks the threatening image of the mother, so central to the
melodramatic imagination of L’invitée” (193).
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 65
sense in which Beauvoir oscillates between an internalized abjection of
female sexuality and a description of the conditions of sexual oppression in
terms of abjection.

When Bataille introduces the term ‘immanence’ in Theory of Religion (1948),

what is at stake is the immanence of the living organism to the world.29 A
living organism is tied by the relations of immanence to the outside, provided
that it can nourish itself. Immanence is the flow between the living body and
its environing outside.30 Bataille thinks of immanence as organic life, organic
communication. His fundamental task in Theory of Religion is to explain the
human exit from immanence by the invention of the tool and the construction
of the discrete world of things and to account for religion in terms of our
desire to relate back to where we came from, that is, our own immanence. In
the first volume of The Accursed Share (1949), the transition is not thematized in
terms of the “negation of immanence” and the “transcendence of Reason”
but in terms of “general economy” and “restricted economy.”31 Lévi-Strauss’s
The Elementary Structures of Kinship had a great impact on Bataille who com-
mented on it extensively in the early 1950s. In “History of Eroticism,” which
is the second volume of The Accursed Share, and in Eroticism, human sexuality is
distinguished from animal sexuality, which Bataille calls “erotic experi-
ence.”32 In these works, human sexuality as distinct from animal sexuality
becomes a necessary component of the account of the transition from natural
life to human world. Let me note that the term ‘immanence’ is not present in
them.

29
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992),
19. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as ‘TR’.
30
TR, 20. Bataille is familiar with how Jean Hyppolite in Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit (originally published in 1946) makes use of the term ‘immanence’, although
Hyppolite stresses the immanent finality in the organic, the immanence of the concept in
organic nature. See Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.
Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974),
242, 243, and 249. Bataille’s emphasis lays not on the teleological self-reproduction of the
animal life in nature but on communication.
31
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Consumption, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Zone Books, 1991), 25. The first volume of The Accursed Share was published in 1949, the same
year as The Second Sex, but Bataille had been working on it since 1946. Hereafter referred to as
‘AS ’.
32
Georges Bataille, Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986).
In order not to risk a confusion that can arise by the two different translations of the same
French term ‘érotisme’ as “erotism” and “eroticism,” I shall refer to this work as Eroticism.
Hereafter referred to as ‘E ’.
66 ZEYNEP DIREK

Despite the lack of the term, I still think that Bataille’s main philosophical
question is man’s relation to immanence. It is my contention that Bataille
takes up the term ‘immanence’ in a reconsideration of Hegel’s notion of Life
and his discussion of the observing reason at the face of the organic life. After
1943, Bataille rethinks Hegel’s “immanent movement” in terms of “inner
experience.” His “inner experience” is construed in opposition to the expe-
riences of observing reason and, more importantly, to the projects and
achievements of acting reason as these two shapes of consciousness appear in
Phenomenology of Spirit. Since Inner Experience, he insists that, and we find the
same thesis in Eroticism; “eroticism” is an aspect of man’s inner life.33 In Inner
Experience, Bataille says that Hegel gives no account of eroticism as an expe-
rience born of not-knowing.34 But what does “inner” mean if not “imma-
nent”? Immanence and its relations do not give themselves to a consciousness
that observes them from the outside. In Eroticism, which is written on the basis
of familiarity with Lévi-Strauss’s work, the erotic experience as the inner
experience of eroticism is defined as an impersonal experience “conditioned
by taboos and transgressions” (E, 35). Beauvoir agrees with Bataille as to the
absence of an account for erotic experience in Hegel, but she is more
concerned with the fact that Hegel has no account of sexual difference in
Phenomenology of Spirit. I tend to think that The Second Sex attempts to provide a
Hegelian account of sexual difference by bringing in what Bataille later says
that Hegel left out—sexual taboos and transgressions. But why does Beau-
voir’s The Second Sex make no more than two references to Bataille? I will
provide an answer. Bataille writes that only the inner experience can “supply
the overall view, from which they are finally justifiable” and that “inner
experience is the strings of life within ourselves” (E, 37), a position he main-
tains after 1943. Now Beauvoir likes to distance herself from such an “inner
experience.” Let me recall here that Sartre attacked Bataille for being “a new
mystic.”35 In Eroticism, Bataille says that the historian, the psychiatrist, the
psychoanalyst—because they seek an objective description of taboos and
transgressions—fail to capture the significance of their experiences. As I have
said, the same emphasis can be found in the Inner Experience insofar as the
erotic experience is concerned. Clearly, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir takes the
attitude of a historian.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir undertakes to make manifest the logic of
oppression that sustains sexual inequality and the sexual division of labor.

33
E, 31. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1988).
34
E, 254, and Bataille, Inner Experience, 8.
35
Jean Paul Sartre, “Un nouveau mystique,” in Critiques littéraires (Situations I) (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1975), 174–229.
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 67
The dimension of radical alterity and the condition of dependency to which
it gave rise does not immediately result from woman’s reproductive capaci-
ties. What I call “the logic of abjection” concerns the assimilation of woman’s
fecundity, by the male consciousness, to the absolute secret of life. Due to this
assimilation, man fails to recognize her as being akin to him. Just like Beau-
voir, Bataille asks why woman does not find herself in a life and death struggle
with man. And he gives the answer that “prohibitions eliminate violence” (E,
38), which is close to Beauvoir’s remark that woman was protected by taboos.
In order to show the dialogue between Beauvoir and Bataille, it is worth
visiting their views about male experience of female fecundity, marriage as
return to immanence, and the possibility of generosity in transcendence.
Bataille insists that the event of birth, of absolute beginning, exceeds the
order of worldly significations and provokes in man a horror in the face of
life itself. When he writes in the second volume of The Accursed Share that “It
is clear that we are sorry we came to life from meat, from a whole bloody
mess. We might think, if need be, that living matter on the very level at which
we separate ourselves from it is the privileged object of disgust he could be read
as responding to The Second Sex (AS, 2: 63). Horror arises from the inad-
equacy of any representation to that which the consciousness is directed to
grasp. Here the representation itself bears various confusions, is internally
split, and is fundamentally ambiguous. The confusion here conflates the
categories of animal, human, and divine and even blurs the line between
the living with the nonliving, between life and death. Given these confu-
sions in the implicit horizons of sense giving, the female body that is
capable of pushing forth from itself another body different from itself sig-
nifies to the male consciousness an object of disgust and reverence at the
same time. She is at the same time an uncontrollable, threatening origin of
life and finitude, thus a sacred, divine being to be revered, as much as a
repelling, disgusting, base, monstrous being that is less than human. This
ambivalent, ambiguous logic of abjection constitutes the ground for the
exclusion of women from history, both as subservient subhumans who do
not make up part of the world history and divinities that transcend the
profane world and its history. What is the sense of the male experience of
fecundity, by what is it mediated?
Bataille inquires into abjection as the interrelation of life and death and
understands it to be the condition of transcendence. As I read him, abjection
is the very mechanism by means of which a profane world of hierarchical
power relations comes into being by a separation from, a rupture with, or the
negation of the immanence of life. Feminist readers have not so far taken
abjection to be an explanatory term in interpreting The Second Sex. The sole
exception to this is Tina Chanter’s essay, “Abjection and Ambiguity: Simone
68 ZEYNEP DIREK

de Beauvoir’s Legacy.” There Chanter argues that abjection works in an

oscillating movement or that it implies a double movement. Woman is reviled
and reified or represented as the omnipotent castrating Other.36 Beauvoir’s
myth of the eternal feminine reflects the ambiguous logic of abjection. Its
unity is hard to grasp, for in it inheres several contradictions. According to
this myth, woman is both an idol to worship and a maid, a sacred and
repellent being, that is, the taboo itself, both the source of life and a dark
force; the primal silence of truth and superficiality, artificiality, gossip and
dissimulation; healer and sorcerer; man’s prey and the catastrophe that leads
man to his ruin. She is what man is not but desires to possess, “his negation
and his raison d’être” (LDS, 1: 193; SS, 162).37 The Second Sex implies that the
ambiguity caused by a constant passage of opposites into one another con-
stitutes the content of the idea of woman’s radical alterity.
I would like to turn to Beauvoir’s characterization of man’s relation to
immanence after he attains his transcendence in the world, because this
question of the relation of transcendence to immanence is also crucial in
Bataille’s thought. Beauvoir speaks as if man in his transcendence superseded
the confusion and the contingencies of immanent life. It seems that in the
temporality of immanence there is no future different from the past. Tran-
scendence opens a sense of future, a time beyond the present. However, in
transcendence there is in man a contradiction that cannot be resolved, a
spiritual distress, and an anxiety that cannot be cured. Even though he
progressed to the light of reason, from the confusion of his initial conscious-
ness, he finds himself lacking and dreaming for an opaque plenitude, that of
immanence. For him, woman is the incarnation of this dream of immanence.
Marriage provides man, who returns home to rest from his own transcen-
dence, a comfort that a slave cannot provide. According to Beauvoir, woman
is the mediation or the middle term between nature that resists man with a
silent hostility and the other male that is too similar to him and with whom the
struggle for recognition is harsh and strenuous. Despite the lack of reciprocal
recognition between man and woman, she is not an enemy of man. No male
consciousness can substitute for the female consciousness in her unique posi-
tion in relation to man. The specificity of this position is that, while all
consciousness resists possession, it is possible to possess this consciousness in
the flesh to which it is riveted. If a female consciousness had not been present

36
Chanter, “Abjection and Ambiguity,” 151–52.
37
Beauvoir cites Kierkegaard when she enumerates the contradictory attributes that this
myth inheres in itself: “ ‘To be a woman’ says Kierkegaard in Stages on the Road of Life, ‘is
something so strange, so confused, so complicated, that no one predicate comes near expressing
it and that the multiple predicates that one would like to use are so contradictory that only a
woman could put up with it’ ” (LDS, 1: 193; SS, 162).
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 69
in man’s life, he would not have had the slightest chance to absolve himself
even for a moment out of the master–slave dialectic that inevitably deter-
mines male-to-male encounters. The woman who appeases male anxiety is a
being of absolute alterity, of opaque plenitude, which is generated by the
inactivity of her capacity for transcendence. In her, the act of assuming
existence is possible, though not actual. That kind of absence or lack in the
fullness or opacity of being enables her to fill up a lack in male consciousness,
to fulfill his desire to be for itself and in itself at the same time. Thus, woman
who is posited as a radical alterity fills a lacking at the heart of the male
existence.38 Man can actualize himself in the world, project himself to the
future and go through a movement of becoming. In this way, he transcends
his present being and, as mediated by the woman, seeks to coincide with
himself and to find the being that he lost in the world; she makes it possible
for him to rejoin himself (se rejoindre). The ambiguity that man experiences
between existence and being, between the authentic and inauthentic selves, is
the ontological condition of a human being, according to The Ethics of Ambi-
guity.39 However, woman’s right to this ambiguity is lost. She finds herself
within the limits of marriage, riveted to an immanence missed or dreamed by
another consciousness.
This line of thought in Beauvoir is significant for my account because
Bataille’s whole concern in The Accursed Share is the economical relation
between transcendence and immanence and the erotic experience, includ-
ing sexuality in marriage, which is relevant for transforming a discussion of
a general economy to a restricted one. By ‘eroticism’ Bataille refers to the
sexual activity of man in contrast to that of animals (AS, 2: 27). The Accursed
Share insists that “in its initial movement, marriage is the gift that takes us
out of animal life.” It is essentially ambiguous because it “combines self-
interest and purity, sensuality and the prohibition of sensuality, generosity
and avarice” (2: 56). According to Bataille’s discussion of sexual intimacy in
marriage, the “sexual act performed in marriage would have been at its
origin, the object of a prohibition: the prohibition would be the rule and
marriage the violation” (2: 124–25). Thus, transgression of taboo in mar-
riage would be “an existence outside the rule by right” (2: 125). It is the
Aufhebung of sexual taboos, for it preserves them as valid while violating
38
The logic of exclusion works by way of the ambiguity of abjection. We could show that the
analysis that Derrida has carried out in Of Grammatology, within the project of the deconstruction
of metaphysics, to the effect that a logic of the supplement (la logique du supplément) underlies the
metaphysical opposition between man and woman implies even more fundamentally a logic of
abjection. Woman can be taken to supplement man who is in fact a complete being, only if she
is at first constituted and excluded as a being of abjection.
39
Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (Paris: Gallimard, 1947); Simone de
Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Kensington, NY: Citadel, 1976).
70 ZEYNEP DIREK

them. In general, Bataille would agree that there can be no transcendence

without relation to immanence, for we still need to relate to the totality of
life in its continuum, which is only thinkable in terms of general economy.
His argument rests on the claim that without taking into account the laws
of general economy we cannot come to terms with the prohibition of incest,
the institution of marriage, and the patriarchal order of subordination of
women to men. If this is right, it seems to me that the question of the
liberation of women cannot just be a question of transcendence but must
also be a question of the possibility of generosity between women and men.
And Beauvoir takes that ethical direction and inquires into an ethics of
general economy.
According to Beauvoir, the virtues such as friendship and generosity are
not easy to practice precisely because they require the mutual recognition
of two free beings. These virtues are the highest accomplishments of a
human being for they make possible a life lived in the truth of its being. A
life lived in the truth of being is what Beauvoir calls “a conversion.” Here
it seems we are at the core of Beauvoir’s rethinking of authenticity because
conversion implies the overcoming of the alienation to one’s self, to one’s
own transcendence, and the entering into the movement of assuming one’s
own existence. Generosity is the critical virtue for such a life because the
things we own manifest our quest for being. In a relationship with the
other, the effort to possess him or her is also part of our quest for being. We
know that the male subject attains self-consciousness in his relation with the
other males. Mutual recognition, conversion, and generosity are thus pos-
sible in the relation between two men. If mutual recognition is the precon-
dition for the possibility of generosity and friendship between woman and
man, in the case of its absence, the relation between the two sexes is at best
a one-sided relation of immanence, in which generosity and friendship are
out of the question. Let us note that generosity in Beauvoir does not lead
back to immanence but accompanies transcendence, whereas for Bataille it
leads us back to immanence, if it is indeed a “sovereign expenditure”
without return.

CONCLUSION

Even though Beauvoir remains, overall, within the horizon of an “anthro-

pological reading of Hegel,” she also departs from it in two respects. First,
she raises the question of the specific nature of sexual oppression, and
second, she reads Hegel’s problem of recognition by tying it with what I
describe as “abjection.” Leaving aside the difficult question of the event of
 IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN BEAUVOIR 71
mutual recognition in Hegel, we can say that for Beauvoir, the drama of
the master and the slave will be overcome at the end of a movement in
which two consciousnesses set themselves and each other forth as both
objects and subjects for each other, that is, with the self-recognition of the
one in the other. Mutual recognition is possible only if both consciousnesses
recognize themselves as well as the other consciousness as being worthy of
recognition without losing themselves in the other. The question of recog-
nition is tied to that of abjection because a mutual recognition between
man and woman is difficult for historical reasons. Woman and man do not
enter in the master–slave dialectic because woman does not experience
absolute negativity but abjection, constitution as absolute alterity. Women
remain in immanence, excluded from the history of transcendence that they
make possible.
I have given an account of the Beauvoirian notion of “immanence” in
terms of “abjection,” in an attempt to show that Beauvoir’s philosophical
legacy is more complicated than an uncritical employment of both Sartrean
and Hegelian categories. Beauvoir is making an original synthesis of Hegel
and Lévi-Strauss, which is worth comparing to Bataille’s synthesis of these
two thinkers. I see more Bataille than Kojève in Beauvoir’s reworking of the
woman’s situation in terms of Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology, in The Elementary
Structures of Kinship, and Hegel’s master–slave dialectic. According to the
narrative of The Second Sex, woman has been considered as both a sacred and
a horrifying object of desire by man due to her fecundity and maternity. In
The Accursed Share, Bataille writes: “I think that the feeling of horror (I am not
talking about fear) does not correspond, as most people believe, to what is bad
for us, to what jeopardizes their interests. On the contrary, if they horrify us,
objects that otherwise would have no meaning take on the highest present
value in our eyes” (AS, 2: 104). The radical alterity of the taboo implies a
nondialectical Other. The relation between transcendence and abjection
becomes manifest as soon as we inquire into the relation between the building
of a profane world and the construction of the woman as the radical other.
The control of life’s forces and the control over women’s bodies mutually
imply each other and are made possible by one and the same process of
abjection. The repetition, the internalization, and the forgetting of abjection
make worldly transcendence possible.
For Bataille, the movement of valuation and devaluation of women or
abjection is an event whose necessity would be thinkable in economical terms.
He argues, “The prohibition of incest is less a rule prohibiting marriage with
the mother, sister or daughter than obliging the mother, sister or daughter to
be given to others” (AS, 2: 44). Both Beauvoir and Bataille look for the
possibility of a generosity to interrupt the founding logic of gift. In general, we
72 ZEYNEP DIREK

can construe the main difference between them as follows: Bataille and
Beauvoir question the meaning of our sexed being or existence. However,
while Bataille privileges the term ‘inner experience’ and understands history
in terms of his political economy, Beauvoir takes an objective historical,
cultural, psychological approach. Although they share a great deal, there is a
significant difference: Bataille revalues immanence over against transcen-
dence understood as work and the accumulation of surplus, whereas Beauvoir
does not take this path.40

40
I thank the Research Fund at Galatasaray University for supporting this project.