Critical Remarks on a Classic of Feminism

Roswitha Scholz

Introduction

For a long time, Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex played almost no role in feminist theory. Recently, however, de Beauvoir has reappeared not only in new overviews of the classics of feminism, but also in an increasing number of conferences and events devoted to her and her theory. She is also mentioned more frequently in the arts pages. This is probably not only due to the usual events on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of her birth in 2008 and the 25^th anniversary of her death in 2011, but also to the self-reflection of feminism and gender studies in the current crisis situation.

As late as the 1970s, an equality feminism in particular had invoked de Beauvoir with the slogan: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Soon, however, difference feminism accused her of applying male criteria of normality to women. Finally, in the 1990s, a deconstructive feminism accused her, despite all her criticism of gender relations, of clinging to a dualistic way of thinking and pursuing a renewed production of gender dualism.

Today, a time of balancing/reflection has begun: What comes after equality, difference and deconstruction? What will happen to gender studies after it has been questioned on the one hand and postulated as necessary to maintain on the other? In this time of uncertainty, people are returning to classics like de Beauvoir. However, there seems to be no desire to enter new territory; the appetite for a transcendence of previously existing thought has not yet emerged. The old theory is apparently supposed to remain within the familiar immanent frame of reference. Thus, there is a convulsive attempt to make “queer” theory compatible with the claims of a materialist feminism. It is precisely in this context that de Beauvoir is invoked, as I will briefly show below.

My paper deals with three questions: First, the objective significance of de Beauvoir in the context of a critique of capitalist value-dissociation society; second, agreements and disagreements with de Beauvoir from the point of view of the critique of value-dissociation that I represent today; and third, why and in what way de Beauvoir is currently being brought out of obscurity again. My main concern here is, in the context of a historically specific subject-object dialectic of capitalism, to highlight the object side of her own structuring social environment, which is to a certain extent independent of the subjects and which is largely neglected today. The isolation of the subject, an important point of reference of (also Sartrean) existentialism in the wake of a problematic reception of Heidegger, is, in my view, the result of the capitalist value-dissociation socialization and its presupposition is, conversely, not a (gender-neutral) ahistorically-ontologically conceived “existence.”

I would like to begin by restating some of the basic ideas of The Second Sex. As is well known, de Beauvoir’s thinking is rooted in existentialism and here especially in Sartre’s; a thinking that she helped to shape on the basis of a lifelong dialogue. The core point is that man is condemned to “freedom” because of his “thrownness” [Geworfenheit] into the world. He must invent himself and is absolutely responsible for himself. To cite external conditions as the reason for his decisions is therefore considered a mere evasion. There is no presupposed human being, man and his existence basically coincide with the “act” in which he transcends himself; indeed, in acting he goes beyond his existence. This is true not only for the individual, but for the whole of humanity.

This idea is also the basis of The Second Sex. Here, the man is considered the subject, the woman the other/particular. The category of the other characterizes existence as such. However, while it is generally characterized by reciprocity, this is precisely what is lacking in gender relations. Women consent to this one-sided relationship. Not least for reasons of convenience, i.e. to escape responsibility, they choose to remain in patriarchal immanence. Although de Beauvoir believes that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (an often quoted phrase), she vacillates between biological and social explanations, to which she attaches her existentialist worldview. For her, biology is primarily ballast that must be discarded if women are to achieve transcendence. Consequently, she rightly supported abortion campaigns and saw lesbian love as an alternative to heterosexual relationships, because the heterosexual sexual act “always represents a kind of rape.” For her, however, it is not sexual practice as such that is crucial, but the compulsive exclusivity of heterosexuality (de Beauvoir, 2011, summarized by Hagemann-White, 1992). 

For the women’s movement in the wake of 1968, The Second Sex was, as has often been noted, a kind of bible. This is true for protagonists like Shulamith Firestone and Alice Schwarzer, for Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (an anti-rape book), and for Christina Thürmer-Rohr with her “complicity” thesis, which to this day is traded as a mere counter-position to “victim feminism” instead of seeing that both variants of feminism (the victim’s side and the complicity side) basically have an existentialist foundation. Even in difference feminism, be it that of Irigaray or that of the so-called Bielefeld women, the patriarchal conception of woman is to a certain extent taken over as a utopian conception and always thought of as transcendent, now in fact from the – in reality just as immanent – female side.  Irigaray and de Beauvoir in particular are to be seen as complementary, insofar as de Beauvoir defines woman as the deficient other of the male subject, while Irigaray instead sees the hidden other of the feminine as the actual thing to be respected.

On the Significance of Existentialism in the Capitalist Value-Dissociation Society

De Beauvoir and Sartre, like other theorists, underwent transformations in their work. A phenomenological and existentialist phase in the narrower sense was followed by a return to Marxian theory after the Nazi invasion of France. The formation of French existentialism is often associated with this invasion and with the necessity of the Resistance. This is, of course, different from Heidegger, to whom Sartre and de Beauvoir also refer. Heidegger’s philosophy developed against a very different social background in Germany. His existential philosophy articulated the basic feeling of the National Socialist petty-bourgeois mob. De Beauvoir, on the other hand, also incorporates Marxist thought into her theory. However, this is less with regard to the socio-economic causes of women’s oppression, but, as is usual in a phenomenological-existentialist view, with a more descriptive intention to determine the primarily existentialist underpinnings of The Second Sex.

Even though the theoretical development of Sartre and de Beauvoir has undergone metamorphoses, I would like to briefly refer to the core message of Sartre’s essay “Materialism and Revolution” in order to confront it with a central argument of “History and Class Consciousness” by Lukács. In doing so, I want to show the opposition of existentialism to a critique of social fetishism with regard to the fundamental dimension of form (and in this context, as already mentioned, of a dialectic of subject and object) from the perspective of the critique of value-dissociation. Important impulses for this were given to me by Winfried Dallmayr in his essay “Phenomenology and Marxism in Historical Perspective” from 1977.

For Sartre, a vulgar materialism is the basis of his critique: “In order to eliminate subjectivity, the materialist declares that he is an object, that is, the subject matter of science. But once he has eliminated subjectivity in favor of the object, instead of seeing himself as a thing among other things, buffeted about by the physical universe, he makes of himself an objective beholder and claims to contemplate nature as it is, in the absolute” (Sartre, quoted in Dallmayr, 1977, p. 32). According to Sartre, Marxism equates social structures with the laws of nature. Instead, Sartre argues, Marxism must be linked to existentialism. For him, this means abandoning a contemplative materialist position. In contrast, he is concerned with the interplay of knowledge [Erkenntnis] and praxis, conceived in existentialist terms, linking praxis to “labor” in an ontological sense, much like other traditional Marxists. According to Sartre, conventional Marxism, which he identifies as a materialist, contemplative ideology, is based on the thinking of the ruling class. By contrast, the proletariat is predestined to engage, even if it requires an Marxist epistemological foundation.

Phenomenology, his own existentialism, and a Marxist conceptual schematism are now linked in Sartre as follows. Sartre demands an epistemology “which shows that human reality is action and that action upon the universe is identical with the understanding of this universe as it is” (Sartre cited in Dallmayr, 1977, 33). Being, or being understood in Marxist terms, materiality, is thus ultimately dissolved in Sartre’s truncated understanding into consciousness understood in existentialist terms, with the construction of the possibility of a completely different design of society, starting from the proletariat. Therefore, he argues, Marxism must be a theory of transcendence. Dallmayr comments that even in the postwar period, Sartre “remained basically faithful to the radical concept of freedom of his early writings, although the concept was now more strongly mediated with reality by the emphasis on labor. The naturalization of this concept of freedom in Marxism, however, has serious consequences that Sartre does not mention. Just as the early phenomenological work was characterized by the opposition of consciousness and the world of things, so now revolutionary practice only makes sense against the background of permanent exploitation, just as in Being and Nothingness consciousness as ‘for itself’ could never merge with ‘in itself’ despite assiduous efforts, so too in ‘Materialism and Revolution’ the class struggle can never come to an end. Sartre’s historical perspective, therefore, does not so much envisage a classless society as an alternation of different varieties of social sadism and masochism. His later writings may have mitigated this dilemma, but they never eradicated it” (Dallmayr, op. cit., pp. 34 f.). Somehow there must always be something to “go beyond”; this belongs to Sartre’s concept of philosophy par excellence.

Thus, from the point of view of the critique of value-dissociation, Sartre remains trapped in ontological thinking and, in principle, in an indissoluble subject-object dualism. Even when he emphasizes Marxism, he must ultimately hold on to the existentialist act, to the project, which is basically always that of a labor-act. Dallmayr notes that Sartre falls behind Lukács’s comparable essay “History and Class Consciousness” “in some respects – for example, in the individualistic accent and conceptual schematics” (op. cit., p. 35). However, Dallmayr does not concretize this, certainly not with regard to the social form, the value form or the value-dissociation form, as I will try to do  now on the basis of a central idea of Lukács.

To be sure, Lukács is also undoubtedly an apologist for class struggle and labor in the sense of traditional Marxism. Nevertheless, in his famous essay on reification (1967), he was the first to comprehensively address the problem of the overarching fetish form of the commodity, which transcends both capitalist and proletarian and cannot be grasped in terms of a cheap immanent functional contradiction. In this respect, the object cannot be dissolved into the subject, as is ultimately the case with Sartre, but rather, mediations are necessary. This contrasts with a traditional base-superstructure scheme in the sense of a simple theory of reflection. Central to this is the historical perspective. Lukács, for example, writes: “However, it should not be forgotten that immediacy and mediation are themselves aspects of a dialectical process and that every stage of existence (and of the mind that would understand it) has its own immediacy in the sense given to it in the Phenomenology [Hegel’s, R.S.] in which, when confronted by an immediately given object, ‘we should respond just as immediately or receptively, and therefore make no alteration to it, leaving it just as it presents itself.’ To go beyond this immediacy can only mean the genesis, the ‘creation’ of the object. But this assumes that the forms of mediation in and through which it becomes possible to go beyond the immediate existence of objects as they are given, can be shown to be the structural principles and the real tendencies of the objects themselves. In other words, intellectual genesis must be identical in principle with historical genesis [in contrast to Hegel, R.S.]” (Lukács, 1967, p. 155; emphasis in original).

Lukács is thus not always concerned with an objectively conceived Marxism, but he goes beyond the notorious external dualism in traditional Marxism of materialism/objective structures on the one hand and subjectivity/consciousness on the other in dialectical mediation. Even though he relies on the proletariat as an immanent force, he is not, at least in this famous essay, at the mercy of immediacy to the extent that existentialism fundamentally is. Of course, Sartre, along with Heidegger, has always been concerned with the abstract man in the world, that is, with the man in the street who “exists” directly and absolutely; his philosophy is inconceivable without this figure and begins with it in a directly “practical” way. His concept of totality, or his concept of the concrete totality as a “synthetic totality,” thus always already has this “immediateist” [unmittelbaristischen] reference, even when he has in mind the whole of humanity, whose existence is to be transcended from precisely this starting point, which is itself abstract. Thus, what is decisive for Sartre and then also for de Beauvoir is actually an ideology of dismay against the background of an abstractly posited “existence,” which basically gets by without a fundamental reference to a socio-historically constituted outside world in the sense of a fetishistic constitution.

For Sartre, existentialism is an (abstract) humanism; the individual in itself, the “human being” also in the sense of humanity in general, is grabbed by the lapels in false immediacy. In the case of women, this may fall on particularly fertile ground due to patriarchal history, although it must be said that this immediate concern in the sense of existentialism turns out to be less than maudlin and tends to end in a kind of pessimism, for example, in de Beauvoir a downright indictment of “the woman” who is content in immanence. But what is accused here is also hidden in her own theoretical presuppositions. For from these, the woman can bend to the conditions sadomasochistically-immanently, as testified by Thürmer-Rohr’s existentialist-confessing-humility complicity thesis. This thesis is problematic because it cannot locate the problem structurally-objectively in an overall social context that is upstream of the subjectively confessing complicit woman. The aim should be to criticize this social context, not the woman herself.

Gender Relations and Social Structure

Both Sartre and Lukács basically start their analysis with labor and the working man as their point of departure. While Sartre, because of his existentialist philosophical background, is already relegated to the ground of immediacy, Lukács opens up the possibility of critiquing the social form in the same way as Marx. This can potentially be used both in the sense of questioning abstract labor as a basic principle and in the sense of a critique of value-dissociation, which again modifies the status of abstract labor. In this case, however, the above quotation from Lukács would have to be extended in terms of the critique of value-dissociation in order to redefine the “structural principles and the real tendencies” that, as forms of mediation, transcend the immediacy of Dasein. I can only sketch this in broad outline here.

As is well known, the critique of value-dissociation assumes that certain reproductive activities (housework, “love,” nurturing), corresponding attitudes (such as caring) and inferior qualities (such as sensuality, emotionality, weakness of character and intellect, etc.) are dissociated from value and abstract labor and assigned to women. Such attributions also essentially characterize the symbolic side of the commodity-producing patriarchy, a side that cannot be grasped by the Marxian conceptual apparatus. Likewise, socio-psychologically, the male child must turn away from the mother and perform a dissociation/devaluation of the feminine in order to be able to form a masculine identity; while the girl must identify with the caring mother in order to become a “woman.”

Gendered dissociation is necessarily established co-originally with value, belongs to it and is its mute precondition, without which it cannot exist; at the same time it is its other and as such unrecognized by it or its “subjects.” Thus, the one cannot be derived from the other, but both moments emerge from each other and thus establish a historically dynamic movement of the extraction of surplus value, which is historically unique. At the same time, value-dissociation as a basic principle runs through all spheres and domains, so it cannot be mechanically divided into the opposition of the spheres of private-public, production-reproduction. Even if women today are “doubly socialized,” and thus considered equally responsible for family and career, as Becker-Schmidt says, and are to a large extent integrated into official society, they still remain, in contrast to men, primarily responsible for household and children, they earn less than men, although they surpass them in terms of education, and they have to fight harder for access into the upper echelons. Even in today’s call for quotas, there is still a traditional patriarchal imagination, according to which the woman in crisis is declared to be the all-responsible “born rubble woman” of the social, when the commodity-producing patriarchy comes apart at the seams. In this context, the androcentric social unconscious that still enables patriarchal commodity-producing relations today would have to be made an issue.

“The woman” in the material, socio-psychological, and cultural-symbolic fabric of value-dissociation as a fundamental principle is thus confronted with both immediacy and the mediated overall context in a different way than it appears in de Beauvoir, who makes an abstract “existence” the socially indeterminate primordial ground when, oscillating between using and relativizing biology, she writes: “Thus we will clarify the biological data by examining them in the light of ontological economic, social, and psychological context. Woman’s enslavement to the species and the limits of her individual abilities are facts of extreme importance; the woman’s body is one of the essential elements of the situation she occupies in this world. But her body is not enough to define her; it has a lived reality only as taken on by consciousness through actions and within a society; biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question […]: why is woman the Other?” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 2011, emphasis in original). The ahistorical abstractness of the point of departure and the related indeterminacy of the social mean that de Beauvoir cannot adequately grasp the projections onto the biological.

Nevertheless, her works also belong to the theoretical preconditions of the critique of value-dissociation, which determines the dissociation of the feminine as the “other of value” and thus takes up a basic idea of de Beauvoir. However, the concept of the Other in terms of gender relations does not remain in the air, as it were, in a kind of existentialist immediacy, but rather is placed in the specific historical constitution of capital and its structural-dynamic context, so that it is no longer just a question of gender relations as such, but, starting from value-dissociation as a basic principle, of the “structural construction” of the social fetish relation as a whole.

The common ground with de Beauvoir here is that in the capitalist-patriarchal reality, the man is the (general) subject and the woman is the particular, and corresponding evaluative hierarchies are established. This, of course, also concerns the relation between official production (in the diction I advocate for with Marx conceived as abstract labor) and “housework” as a complementary activity for the determination of male generality and female particularity. Likewise, the critique of value-dissociation shares with de Beauvoir the radical critique and rejection of the role of women; today, therefore, also of the imposition to be equally responsible for family and job in order to bring into the world, in the post-post-society, high-performing, perfect middle class children. In addition, Simone de Beauvoir, like the theory of value-dissociation, questions compulsory heterosexuality, without, however, denying the existence of a sexual body as such; even if de Beauvoir still partly assumes false ontological-biological foundations, which have made her vulnerable to the attack of an equally false radical constructivism.

The critique of value-dissociation decisively agrees with de Beauvoir that the existing gender relation still has to be thematized as hierarchical, but precisely by returning to the specific social form-determinacy of this hierarchy and not by separating from it in an abstract and existentialist way. Even in this critique of de Beauvoir, both her approach and the critique of value-dissociation stand in clear contrast to today’s dominant deconstructivism, which systematically obfuscates hard hierarchies. Finally, the critique of value-dissociation, like de Beauvoir, also criticizes a classical feminist perspective of difference, but not in the context of an equality-thinking, but by striving to overcome abstract-bourgeois equality, biologist difference and postmodern-affirmative deconstruction in equal measure.

Gender Relations and History

It is de Beauvoir who, for the first time in modern history as a woman, systematically presents a large-scale analysis of gender relations, albeit on her existentialist foundation, which makes it impossible for her to locate herself historically in the process of capitalist development. In doing so, she also works through the few male-feminist thinkers that have existed in history. It is no coincidence, however, that her point of view has gained new effectiveness. In recent decades, women can no longer afford to be merely housewives, even in their own minds. Today, when men can no longer manage due to the obsolescence of abstract labor, women are supposed to become responsible for everything, in the sense of rubble women [Trümmerfrauen], even their own gender-symbolic devaluation. Andrea Truman is undoubtedly right in her criticism of de Beauvoir’s fixation on labor and a conception of transcendence based on it, of all things.

Crucial for a sufficient understanding of the modern (and postmodern) historical development is the overarching structure of the value-dissociation relation, which processes itself, even if this context does not exist independently of the actions of individuals; for Marx, too, the fetishistic social context, which has become independent, is created by people themselves, even if unconsciously. From the point of view of the critique of value-dissociation, which is oriented towards historical dynamics, the reception of de Beauvoir was significant for the treatment of contradictions in a certain phase of capitalism, namely the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism.

The female urge for a certain kind of transcendence, which was not yet linked to the whole of the capital fetish, thus inadvertently became fitting for the immanent development. As Susanne Moser notes: “Existentialism anticipated much of what is still the order of the day today: no longer does a God-given order determine the place that the individual occupies. One has to fight for one’s place in society. […] We all have to find ourselves, from our jobs to the meaning of our lives. So what was discussed purely theoretically back in Beauvoir’s time has become reality today” (2008).

After an emphatic celebration of Simone de Beauvoir in the 1970s, the evaluation of her views changed into the negative after a phase of difference feminism, insofar as in queer politics and queer theory gender was now considered completely contingent and some even think today, in a shallow scene interpretation of Judith Butler’s theory, that gender can be changed like clothes. However, gender has in common with queerness the fundamental idea of the assignment of meaning and the “production of gender” against the background of a hypostasis of culture and language that is largely uncritical of the capitalist form.

De Beauvoir is thus accused of reifying gender dualism. In this vein, Butler writes: “The discursive construction of ‘the body’ and its separation from ‘freedom’ in Beauvoir fails to mark along the axis of gender the very mind-body distinction that is supposed to illuminate the persistence of gender asymmetry” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990, p. 17). Ergo: De Beauvoir is accused of not fully hypostasizing the cultural gender track that Butler supposes to be decisive! On the contrary, de Beauvoir’s analysis, with its insistence on thematizing real hierarchies, is a prerequisite for illuminating the fundamental patriarchal constitution of capitalism. This cannot be invalidated by a superficial deconstructivist intermingling; quite apart from the fact that Butler herself falls prey to this mind-body dualism when she assumes that sex is always already gender, and that for her culture, quite in line with classic patriarchal views, prevails over nature in a non-dialectical way and is the main creative force. Although de Beauvoir, against the background of her existentialism, ultimately tends towards a biological-ontological view of hierarchical gender relations, which is to be criticized, she is nevertheless more correct in saying that this gender asymmetry is not in a state of unquestionable harmony than Butler with her all too smooth culturalist analysis.

It is true that Butler criticizes de Beauvoir, as I do, for the humanistic-existentialist understanding of the subject, but with a completely different and downright opposite context of justification. For Butler, the social totality, especially in Gender Trouble, is in a sense merely a totality of language and discourse. A comprehensive understanding of totality as a subject-object dialectic of the fetishistic formal context is absent; indeed, in Butler’s work there is virtually a mere reversal of the base-superstructure scheme, in that culture, discourse, and language are made, as it were, the substructure of material realities. Thus, their theory is ultimately false and, as is common in postmodernity, “over-simplified” in an ontology of the cultural that is not able to address the real social relation in its fetishistic mediatedness as value-dissociation socialization. (Cultural) identity in general or cultural gender identity, on the other hand, is not the very first problem for the critique of value-dissociation. It is primarily concerned with the fundamental form of value-dissociation as a basic social principle, which as such constitutes “objective forms of existence” (Marx) and is therefore also the presupposition of cultural identity formations. Without the critique and analysis of this presupposition, deconstructivism, like existentialism, hangs in the air.

Why A Reminiscence of de Beauvoir Today?

These days, collections of essays with titles such as “All Gender?” “Gender in Motion,” “What Comes After Gender Studies?” etc. are appearing, even if the generic, boring consequence is that after gender studies is before gender studies. But “gender” is apparently kind of worn out. In retrospect, it seems to me to be a mere welfare-state theory ideologeme, appropriate for a phase in which women had won rights of participation and on this basis, with the assumption that this would probably continue, displayed a rather phlegmatic attitude. Today, a criminal neglect of the still hierarchical realm of gender is evident. After this problem was considered to have been almost “eaten,” it is now clear that gender structures and gender identities apparently run deeper than assumed, even if it was initially reserved for bourgeois alpha girls to formulate such an affirmative “uneasiness” compatible with neoliberalism.

In addition, the general social crisis situation, which makes even middle class individuals increasingly suspect the fall, suggests a recourse to material levels, which a culturalist queer and gender perspective not only lacks, but from this point of view has also arrogantly dismissed as secondary for a long time. The representatives of this attitude are now losing hope, thus hastily rediscovering the material level, which is suddenly supposed to be wonderfully congruent with deconstructivist thinking. The assumption is that different feminist concepts supposedly all want the same thing anyway. The much-invoked respect for difference, for the differences between the individual concepts, is thus eclectically leveled at the very moment when it can no longer be exhausted in a non-committal pluralism, in order to plow over these very differences in a still postmodern “anything goes.” Different theoretical concepts are to be made compatible almost by force and brought under a postmodern tailor-made mantle of reconciliation.

And it is precisely in this context that Simone de Beauvoir, now neglected for decades and even reviled by both difference feminism and deconstruction feminism, suddenly reappears as a controversial foundation: “Because of their questioning of the supra-temporal and supra-regional category(ies) of ‘woman’ (and ‘man’), and their rejection of a common ground for all women, Butler was accused of making it impossible to effectively combat the oppression of women in society. Here, again, a look at Beauvoir is helpful. She proves the opposite in several ways. On the one hand, in a very practical way, her book has fueled the struggle for equality between men and women. On the other hand, by fundamentally questioning a ‘natural’ basis for gender, she in no way denies that there are currently in fact and in very real terms men and women in this society, and that a permanent offensive struggle is necessary to end discrimination and violence against women. Thus, it must be about a coexistence of these two perspectives if, on the one hand, one wants to take into account the current needs of people (and thus also act effectively against current discrimination and violence) and, on the other hand, hold on to the goal of a better society in the future, in which patriarchal and capitalist relations of domination are overcome” (Voß, 2011, p. 15).

Voß simply omits the fact that de Beauvoir was extremely ambivalent about the biological body. Silvia Stoller writes: “In Beauvoir’s time there were serious inequalities, so the demand for equality was important – and we still cannot do without it. But thinking in terms of difference is also important today. In times when plurality is a positive value, we need to have a notion of difference. The problem, however, is that difference is handled very criminally […] There is a compulsion to assimilate others – for example, if you wear a headscarf, don’t speak German or whatever. In this respect, we are not yet thinking radically enough about difference. And last but not least, we cannot do without the idea of construction. Butler has taught us to look behind the obvious. She shows us that the all too ‘natural’ is not natural, and encourages us to ask questions such as: Who is really a woman now? […] Every one of these theoretical analyses and demands is relevant today. […] If you were a deconstructionist, you could hardly [in the nineties, R.S.] bring Irigaray’s notion of difference into play. ‘Difference’ immediately evoked the notion of ‘gender dualism,’ ‘heterosexuality,’ ‘conservatism,’ and so on. I never understood this negative evaluation, because the plurality that construction theorists call for is, after all, built on difference. Without difference, there is no plurality” (Stoller, 2011).

Instead of overcoming the various truncated perspectives in feminism and arriving at a new view at the cutting edge, what is eclectically proclaimed here is equal acceptance and at the same time a conciliatory seeing of commonalities, with gender difference appearing contingent, as one difference among others.

When the situation of life becomes more precarious, more “existential” in the literal sense of the word, it is precisely this development of crisis that makes an abstract-universalist calibrated and sometimes shallow phenomenologism increasingly fashionable. It is also in this ideological context that a renewed return to de Beauvoir can be observed, especially with regard to her problematic philosophical foundations. “Man in the world,” the most absurd question of all, has not by chance become topical again; it has even turned against post-structuralism, whereby today the problem of alienation collides with new stratifications beyond the traditional class society. Thus, in the wake of middle class fears of falling away, Heidegger is increasingly being reconsidered. And even where Heidegger is not explicitly mentioned, one basically uses his questions and the corresponding approach. Carl Schmitt and his decisionism have also been celebrating a happy reign in the post-Foucauldian age for some time now. A sanguine, postmodern reception of Heidegger in the sense of “vive la différence” with recourse to Derrida, for example, who still wanted to surpass Heidegger with his own metaphysical critique, seems to be coming to an end; it still seems to have belonged to the consumption based phase of post-Fordist financial bubble capitalism.

In this context, it also seems to me that Sartre, but also de Beauvoir, are reappearing today with their problematic philosophical ideas in a left phenomenological-existentialist turn. For example, in the “anti-German” context, as far as the analysis of anti-Semitism is concerned, as if a dangerous anti-Semitism as an ideology of crisis could be answered at all in the context of “decision-philosophical” questions, out of hasty fears of abstraction, which are themselves anti-Semitically mediated. In the concrete historical situation of the interwar period, there was still the alternative between National Socialism and a Stalinist “real socialism” (which itself had anti-Semitic features in a different way). For this reason, however, no decisionist analogy can be drawn from an abstract existence as a general ground underlying a fundamental critique of capitalism or decisive parts of it. Even if the actual possibilities of decision are not always determined in this way in the concrete, they always move as such within a fetishistic coherence of coercion, which also conditions these decisions, even if they do not merge into it and responsibility for them can be imputed.

Voluntarist attitudes are today newly legitimized both by situationism (or neo-situationism or vulgar situationism – see the bestseller The Coming Insurrection with its dangerous proximity to Sorelism) and by some “anti-Germans” who, without justification or mediation, put an abstract “decision” into space (i.e. for or against socialism, in truth for or against capitalist enlightenment reason). It is not by chance that there are already congresses on the compatibility of, but also difference between Sartre and Adorno, in which a fundamental desire for reconciliation, rather than resolving the differences anew, is clearly on the program. Instead, the responsibility of individuals for social development can only be determined in a context of critical reflection on fetishism, which in no way denies a dialectic of structure and action in this sense (i.e. including the blind presupposition of social forms).

Almost completely unnoticed, and unfortunately I cannot go into this in more detail here, is the “gypsy” as subhuman/non-human/homo sacer par excellence in the constitution of modernity. Anti-gypsyism as a variant of racism is finally being increasingly addressed, but hardly in its full scope. In the history of modernization, Sinti and Roma, as populations declared per se declared outlaws, form a necessary presupposition of value-dissociation relations, marking in an extreme way a dimension of “existential” repulsion and feeling this “indiscriminately.” This basis remains largely unmentioned as such, especially when it is projected as an ideology of fear onto today’s potential decline of the middle class (see Scholz 2007).

In this context, I consider it an illusion and a rationalization to ignore or to “existentially-ideologically” dissolve into the subject what might be called the existential question of overcoming the fetishistic value-dissociation relation, which appears as an (always also practically-immediate) subject-object question not least and especially in the persecution of the “Gypsy.” Rather, the balancing act between subject and object in a historically understood sense, which includes the immediacy conveyed in a practical understanding, must be endured in order to arrive at a concrete-historical transcendence. Structurally, therefore, the value-dissociation society is necessarily to be presupposed, irrespective of the empirical women (and men) who, although individually not absorbed in it, nevertheless cannot escape this social context of constitution. The fetishistic social synthesis of modernity in its concrete totality forms the deeper reason why abstract questions about “the” existence of “man” in the world arise in the first place; because an unhistorical-abstract man does not exist like that at all. The problem, which is absurd in itself, can only be explained concretely, historically and logically by value-dissociation and its history.

From this, I would like to emphasize once again, also follows a perspective of critique that is oriented beyond capitalistically determined equality, difference and deconstruction, and thus also beyond existentialist or other attitudes, in order to open the way for something radically different. It is necessary to distrust both the ideologies and abstractions of a false notion of transcendence and those of an equally false determination of immanence, which do not know their own presuppositions – however appealing the black turtlenecks and the filterless Gauloises[1] of the French existentialists may seem. Today, however, the Gauloises existence would be exchanged for a Heideggerian herbal existence. For us, however, “existence” only really exists within the fetishistic conditions of value-dissociation, and not as an ontological “thrownness,” whose concept itself has always been primarily middle class prefigured. That an ahistorical concept of “existence” must always necessarily be maintained is a self-misunderstanding of the consciousness of these relations, which apparently need an ontological underpinning.

In this context, value-dissociation as a basic social principle, which cannot be grasped directly-empirically, should be emphasized. This even more today when one can hardly find fundamental theoretical considerations with regard to social fetishism or asymmetrical gender relations. The fact that women in particular were not enslaved within their own societies, as de Beauvoir notes, points to the relevance of the body (see De Beauvoir 2011). A superficial comparison with Jews and blacks, as de Beauvoir makes it, may be appropriate to a certain, but it does not touch on the deeper dimension of value-dissociation socialization. Sheer “existence” as the ultimate vanishing point is meaningless. Such (fashionably speaking) “intersectional” questions can only be clarified with reference to this fundamental dimension [value-dissociation], and, only in this context, also in their own meaning, which is not absorbed in it.

In times of postmodern discourse hegemony, however, one can obviously no longer afford to ask the damnable question about the body; on the other hand, it is still a mute pre-theoretical presupposition in many conceptions of gender. Only non-essentialist and non-biologistic reflections on the sex-gender dialectic would lead out of this dilemma. However, this is not in vogue because it does not simply merge into a culturalist race-class-gender dimension. The category of “gender” is radically different from such understandings and cannot be “deconstructively” equated with other forms of inequality. Only this insight would make a mediation of gender with the latter as truly “other” possible in the first place.

If Lukács demanded that the “immediate immediacy” and the negative-fetishist objective structural laws or objective principles of construction be dialectically mediated against a materialist Marxian background, I have tried to do so in a modified way with regard to the historical assessment of de Beauvoir in the context of my value-dissociation theory. In order to really transcend the structures described by this term, we need insight into this concrete-historical doom instead of existentialist “attitudes” that end up in a false voluntarism that no longer cares about negative objectivity.

The conceptuality of dissociation designates the mute presupposition of modernity as the “other” (here Simone de Beauvoir speaks) of commodity production and the capital fetish, and as such it represents a completely different fundamental – in a sense even deeper –structural level that goes beyond the Marxian concept of fetishism. Thus, the dimension of value-dissociation does not merely encompass an asymmetrical gender relation, but targets society as a whole. Transcendence in the sense of the critique of value-dissociation is therefore something different from an androcentric-universalist critique of value, but also something different from de Beauvoir. In this respect, feminism, in the sense of thematizing value-dissociation as a basic principle that offers structure, can no longer afford a mere clumsy admission of complicity, which ultimately leads treacherously into the factually neutral gender perspective. Likewise, the thematization of this presupposed principle (insofar as it is aware of its mediations) is precisely necessary in order to allow for the relevance of the “other others” in the sense of a concrete totality that is not conceptually hierarchically inferior.

In this sense, against all new editions or variations of the abstract-ontological existential philosophy I must insist, even out of individual self-defense in the “existentialist” sense, if you like, that I speak as a historically constituted (female) individual and as a theorist on a certain historical stage of socialization, and to that extent also in a certain “situation” in the decay of the fetishistic and automatized value-dissociation socialization. This conditional context has brought me forth in the first place, even if I am not absorbed in it, otherwise I could not speak as I do. But the “transcending” of these conditions requires first of all the insight into the historical dimension of this complicated subject-object-dialectic, which goes not only beyond me as an individual, but also beyond an imagined abstract humanity in the humanistic sense.

This subject-object dialectic, which also constitutes the single (gender-)individual, limited in his or her so-being, must be approached radically and critically in its historical limitation. Precisely in this respect, one is “individually” thrown back to an existentially lost position, which cannot be ignored even by a critical understanding. But this understanding cannot be achieved by ignoring negative objectivity and taking ontological-existential shortcuts. Only on the contradictory basis of a will to transcend that is aware of its own conditions can we speak of a real “possibility of decision” at all, if it is not to remain stuck in the abstract-immediate. This is particularly important in view of today’s objective crisis situation, which is also subjectively threatening.

[1] TN: Gauloises are a brand of French cigarette

This text is the written version of a presentation given at the “Institut für vergleichende Irrelevanz” (Frankfurt/Main) on November 10, 2011.