Anonymity and Feminist IdentitySimone de Beauvoir’s Agon and Ours
£105.00
About this book
Situates anonymity with respect to women’s demands for recognition from one another despite differences of class, ethnicity and sexuality
- Addresses anonymity as an overdetermined and complex phenomenon at the interstices of various discourses and technologies
- Draws on social psychology and different strains of psychoanalysis to interpret problems of competition and agonism between women in personal and political life
- Situates Simone de Beauvoir’s distinctive philosophy of individuation, including phenomenological investigations of the genesis of intersubjectivity and historical reflections on techniques for publicity and privacy
- Draws on recent legal theory and sociology, as well as Hannah Arendt’s critique of manufactured superfluousness, to distinguish anonymity from privacy
- Proposes a distinctive interpretation of 'conversion' in Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity
Anonymity is a condition that both intrigues and terrifies us. Such emotions reflect historical inequities of power as well as the limits of human cognition and imagination. How do they affect women’s relationships at the emotional, philosophical, and political level? How might they inflect women’s responses to bullying, economic and academic competition, and even philosophical teaching and writing?
Laura Hengehold uses Simone de Beauvoir’s novels and philosophical texts to provide insights into women’s hopes and fears regarding anonymity, while also acknowledging their desire to be recognized in a definitive sense as these particular human beings. In an age of rapidly changing identification technologies, Beauvoir’s works turn our attention to women’s ongoing struggles to individuate from one another and from men, in defiance of the presuppositions that resources and attention are scarce goods.
Reviews
The valorization of anonymity is both unexpected and convincing, even in an age of anxiety over mass surveillance and digital masking of identity. The way in which the text opens up a multiplicity of ways of thinking anonymity in a feminist context, drawing on philosophers from Leibniz to Husserl to Bergson to Fanon, and literary figures from Morrison to Atwood to Beauvoir’s own novels, displays the stunning range of Hengehold’s investigation. Anonymity is analyzed with respect to the (Hegelian) fight for distinctness and recognition, considering both its dangers and the opportunities it affords for women and other marginalized groups.
There is so much confusion in current scholarship about questions of identity and the extent to which they should be mobilized for political action. This very much needed book shows how de Beauvoir's philosophy can illuminate the tension between individuality and collective action. The result is a compelling account of how identity can remain open, relational and contested, while still supporting feminist solidarity and collective struggles.
In this rich and thought-provoking intervention, Laura Hengehold brilliantly brings Beauvoir’s life and philosophy into dialogue with other thinkers to illuminate the problem of anonymity and individuation. Particularly attentive to historical contexts and to women’s positions within the university, the study invites necessary reflection on feminist research ethics: a much needed challenge to the competitive individualism of neoliberal academia.
Table of contents
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1. Woman and her Doubles
2. Mirages of Alterity
3. Indiscernible
4. Struggle for Recognition
5. Useless Mouths
6. The Politics of Attention: Multiple Others, Multiple Worlds
7. What Can Philosophy Do?
8. The Bourgeoise in Her Sunday Best
9. Whither Recognition?
10. A Life That Has Never Been Only My Own
Works Cited