In 1972, Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her last memoir Tout compte fait that her “relation to others” had been the most important to her. Taking this as an axiom of both her philosophical and political thought, two new ambitious and provocative interrogations of Beauvoir’s thought shed light on her political thinking more broadly, arguing that Beauvoir’s theorization of “freedom” and “emancipation” may be of particular relevance to contemporary politics and to the reinvention of political thought. Lori Jo Marso and Elaine Stavro both insist on not reading Beauvoir as a canonical author, but instead encourage readers to, as Marso puts it, “read her in dialogue with others, as thinking with and against others” (pp. 4–5). Both books are symptomatic of recent intellectual engagements with Beauvoir as a philosopher and political (and feminist) theorist. Staging Beauvoir “in conversation” is indeed the theme of the fall 2019 special issue of the Simone de Beauvoir Studies journal, signaling an especially exciting moment for the return to Beauvoir as theorist, model, and interlocutor.

Although Marso and Stavro offer different modes of engagement, they have in common some methodological and theoretical concerns that make these two books complementary works. The force of these volumes lies in their choice to read Beauvoir expansively through a range of her texts—political, polemical, literary, and philosophical—thereby tracing some of the enduring themes and issues that have structured her thought, with particular attention to the political as an object and mode of her philosophy. They highlight how Beauvoir remains fundamentally a contemporary thinker, rather than an arcane historical figure. What is striking is precisely how both authors use the mode of conversation as a theoretical strategy and, especially for Marso, what constitutes the heart of Beauvoir’s thought. They do so in radically different styles, but that methodological emphasis successfully defamiliarizes Beauvoir’s writings and highlight places where her writings remain a productive site of engagement. Both books engage a range of texts, especially those that are not usually considered central to Beauvoir’s thinking, thus encouraging us to pay attention to the unfolding of Beauvoir as a political thinker. Unsurprisingly, both Marso and Stavro also begin from Beauvoir’s theorizing of the “lived body” to suggest how to think through the impasse of politics and the possibility of intersectional and coalitional politics in contemporary debates. Through their attentiveness to what they show to be Beauvoir’s genealogy of embodiment, materiality, and theorizing of the political that does not ignore the role of emotions, experience, and matter, Marso and Stavro offer bold interventions into contemporary debates over race, class, social justice, feminism, and intersectionality.

Lori Jo Marso, whose long-standing engagement with Beauvoir shapes her scholarship on feminist theory, proposes that the force of Beauvoir’s thought is especially evident when “read in encounter, and in and out of context” (p. vii). For Marso, Beauvoir must be dislodged from the weight of history and her canonical place in feminist and French thought, “where she is forever trapped as our (difficult, disappointing, although sometimes wise) mother” (p. 205). Instead, she boldly proposes to read Beauvoir as a “theorist of encounter” for whom engagement with others “is not only a fact of existence; it also the only way to produce and experience freedom” (p. 2). In seven intriguing short chapters, Marso stages a number of “encounters” between Beauvoir and other cultural texts. What happens when we read Beauvoir alongside and with some of her contemporaries, such as Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, and Violette Leduc, as well as contemporary works that fictionalize questions of sex, power, and freedom, such as those of filmmakers Chantal Ackerman, Lars von Trier, Margarethe von Trotta, and Alison Bechdel? Marso’s thematic organization of her readings as Beauvoir’s “enemies, allies, and friends” (p. 11) foregrounds her argument that we can grasp the force of Beauvoir’s elaboration of the conditions for “collective freedom” in these conversations (p. 3). Although her recuperation of Lars von Trier may feel a tad less convincing and her pairing of Beauvoir with Hannah Arendt is more suggestive, her most interesting chapters focus on pairing Beauvoir with Frantz Fanon and Richard Wright, authors who wrote on colonialism, race, violence, and the conditions for subjectivity freed from oppression.

In her discussion of Fanon, for example, Marso argues, rightfully, that “Beauvoir sees all forms of violence as political” (p. 23). In contrast to the more conventional and obvious pairing of Fanon and Sartre, she traces the commonality between Fanon and Beauvoir’s political and philosophical projects: both are focused on making sense of the violence of oppression, “alienated embodied practices,” and the conditions for “agency” (p. 99). Marso highlights how both argue that “oppression itself is lived immanently and chaotically” and “is imprinted on bodies in comportment and repetitive habits.” She therefore insists that both thinkers “together help us think about how political actors, as individuals motivated towards collective action, can move from submission … to resistance and a transformation of the political and social situation that makes new forms of collective life possible” (p. 101). At the same time, Marso suggests that Beauvoir’s insistence on ambiguity may yield a more productive imagination of freedom than can Fanon. In her chapter on Wright, she focuses on the question of identity and how “Wright and Beauvoir foreswear identity to pluralize perspectives, while still constructing a political ‘we’ that defines a concrete alternative to the false universalism of the American national story and the patriarchal norm” (p. 132). For Marso, both Beauvoir and Wright trouble and “destroy” even the “universal ‘we’” (pp. 134–35). She argues that, as with Fanon, the encounter between Wright and Beauvoir points to how the collective can be reimagined (p. 147).

Stavro’s analysis of Beauvoir as a thinker of “emancipation” focuses instead on a series of Beauvoirian themes—embodiment, agency, freedom, and the role of emotions; influences, especially Merleau-Ponty; and the ways Beauvoir’s thought may be used to reflect on feminist and other political genealogies. Unlike Marso who eschews textual close reading, Stavro explores a number of Beauvoir’s texts, including her novels (pp. 322–33) that she interprets alongside and in conversation with debates on feminist epistemology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and colonialism to reveal how “Beauvoir knits together domains of the political that often remain separate” (p. 4). Stavro especially emphasizes how Beauvoir’s “notion of embodied and situated subjectivity revives [concepts of freedom, oppression, and autonomy] without presuming an abstract universalism” (p. 5) and how her “living body’s engagement with other bodies can potentially have positive effects, materially instantiating freedom” (p. 17). As does Marso, Stavro shows that Beauvoir’s work may suggest ways to intervene in seemingly intractable contemporary debates on identity, the role of “critical intellectuals,” and coalitional politics. She pays attention to Beauvoir’s political activism (p. 297), which has usually been considered anecdotal, and shows how her emphasis on the “role of affect and emotion” (p. 285) may help us rethink the conditions for politics and offer a powerful critique of affect theory and some new currents of materialist feminism. In these rich and engaging chapters, Stavro considers how Beauvoir stood as both thinker and “critical intellectual” and how attending to the “ambiguity” of her “political thinking” helps us reconsider how she proposed “ethically engaged action” as a foundation for emancipation (pp. 267, 235).

While these works attend to Beauvoirian thought in productive ways, both authors are obviously committed to the recovery of her theorizing of the political, though sometimes at the expense of a more systematic exploration of the ways her writings (and political involvement) were haunted by ambiguities and, some might argue, blindspots. Marso’s staging of Beauvoir with Fanon and Wright and Stavro’s detailed analysis of Beauvoir’s engagement in the Algerian War and in defense of the tortured Algerian nationalist, Djamila Boupacha, do not fully explore how her writings remained occasionally and problematically blind to the work and effects of race and racism. Marso indeed points out that Beauvoir did not consider the experience of “slave women in The Second Sex” (p. 137), whereas Stavro notes that “Beauvoir herself is culpable of Eurocentrism in her reflections on Muslim women.” She adds, however, that her “theoretical problematic of embodiment and situatedness can appreciate difference and thereby avoid abstract universalism and Eurocentrism” (p. 12). Beauvoir’s attention to “Othering” may offer this possibility, but one wishes that these ambiguities would have received further elaboration, especially in works attending to contemporary intersectional feminist thought and politics. This may, in turn, have required a deeper consideration of the historical context that both Marso and Stavro rely on. For the historian, the situatedness of Beauvoir’s writings troublingly operates against a “flat” historical background in both books, rather than one that might illuminate the very complexities of Beauvoir’s own thinking of the political. I would argue that it is her own ambiguities that make her a fascinating thinker of the political. As Marso and Stavro demonstrate so deftly, however, we are not done (and, they would argue, should not be done) returning to Beauvoir as a theorist for our present.