Sublime

Beauvoir is right to observe that the kind of equality romance requires cannot involve a collapse into tedious sameness. Instead, she reminds us, “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,” as people in their own right who are also changed by

Quand la femme n’est pas l’ambition suprême de l’homme, quand elle n’est pas la fin de toute initiative en ce monde, la vie ne mériterait ni ses joies ni ses peines.

It is difficult enough to think of oneself as free at all, but Sartre goes further by saying that I am literally nothing beyond what I decide to be. To realise the extent of my freedom is to be plunged into what both Heidegger and Kierkegaard called ‘anxiety’ — Angst or, in French, angoisse.

She also understood that it was no compliment. Any woman who doesn’t give a fuck is simply abandoning her soul to adhere to the rules.

Si les femmes vous trouvent de l'esprit, du talent, les hommes le croiront, si vous ne les détrompez pas.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth. Simone de Beauvoir

I will show that even in this super-rational world increasingly run by super-impartial supercomputers, women are still very much de Beauvoir’s Second Sex – and that the dangers of being relegated to, at best,…

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