The Quarrel

In Simone de Beauvoir's introduction to The Second Sex, Emmanuel Levinas's understanding of otherness and alterity is presented and quickly dismissed. She quotes from his text Time and the Other, a compilation of his lectures given in 1946–47, “Is there not a case in which Otherness (altérité) unquestionably marks the nature of a being, as its essence … Otherness reaching its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning” (Reference BeauvoirBeauvoir 1952/1989, xxii). Beauvoir finds that for Levinas, the essence of this other in the feminine is in some way equal to consciousness, but is its “opposite.” The being whose essence is the opposite of consciousness is the feminine, where the feminine as other becomes itself, and where this otherness as alterity becoming itself occurs in a non‐conscious way. Perhaps this happens unconsciously, nonconsciously, nonrationally, irrationally, or in a way that is perpetually misunderstood.

Levinas scandalously proceeds to call the feminine event in existence a way of hiding, or modesty, different from the spatial transcendence contained in social, political, or even intelligible realms. Since the feminine is the movement opposite to consciousness, he sees “no other possibility than to call it mysterious” (Reference LevinasLevinas 1947/1987, 88), to which Beauvoir responds, “when he writes that woman is mystery, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege” (Reference BeauvoirBeauvoir 1952/1989, xxii). We may superficially ask whether Levinas ever intended an “objective description,” since he fancied himself a descriptive phenomenologist who brackets the search for objective truth and essence in any fixed manner. However, more than just pitting one phenomenologist against the other and defending one as more or less feminist than the other, as do the insightful articles in Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, the goal of this article is to find converging ideas between Beauvoir and Levinas. For this I will investigate the transhistorical notion of alterity, the historical abuses of certain terms like mystery and modesty, and the importance of ambiguity in ethics. Even after considering the differences between Beauvoir's and Levinas's reflections on these central concepts, both authors are shown to make use of an ambivalent subjectivity. I argue that Levinas more fully develops ambivalence in the alterity of ethical subjectivity that prioritizes the other, ultimately aligning with Beauvoir's goal of exposing the tradition of violence in moral discourses and providing a useful praxis for Beauvoir's moral theory.

Before turning to Levinas's work to see how his employment of the ontological term mysterious‐feminine applies to any subjectivity regardless of the empirical facts of an individual's embodied subjectivity, it is important to see all the ways in which Beauvoir's phenomenology finds that woman was subjugated by this category of the “mysterious,” of being capable of conspiring with the unknowable forces of nature. Her reading of Levinas is consistent with the way she continues in her phenomenology of woman's experience to describe the subjugation of woman's body in the course of history by using those categories, such as “the mysterious sex.” Some of the most insightful work in The Second Sex shows how early mythology took the empirical fact of a woman's flesh and turned it into that which had to be cultivated by ritual, purification rights, and eventually cultural norms that hide woman's natural functions. As such, woman was relegated to a realm beyond the social and political spheres. She was then precluded from acquiring power of her own in the messy but vital social and political spheres.

According to the quoted passage from Levinas, this otherness as feminine is beyond power, as a “modesty” or passivity. In her section “Facts and Myths—History: Early Tillers of the Soil” Beauvoir writes,

Woman contains this otherness, or alterity, which in many societies was a disquieting mystery. More than just the apolitical social position, other purifying rites, ceremonies, and links with Nature beyond human comprehension also aligned her with evil forces for which cleansing was needed (169). It is actually in this ambivalence of holding a divine status that is more than human, while at the same time holding one that is less than human, less rational and capable of engaging social life that Tina Chanter finds that woman becomes “a privileged site of the ambiguity of abjection” (Reference ChanterChanter 2000, 140–44). As abject, woman is not an object in her own right but demarcates normative boundaries of what is good, holy, proper, and acceptable from what is evil, profane, and perverse. Woman holds the place most fearful for man, which is a border that can disrupt his normative social order, rules, and laws. The power of this nexus in ambivalence will return in the final section of this paper.

Beauvoir continues to condemn those whom she calls antifeminists who accept the essence of woman as mystery, where her alterity is absolute. As such, antifeminists who insist on feminine mystery “absolutely den[y] her access to Mitsein,” that is, the community where each individual can freely recognize the other and enter reciprocal relations (Reference BeauvoirBeauvoir 1952/1989, 7, 172). Instead of trying to understand a woman, this prejudice against her capacity to reason is justified by naming her “feminine mystery.” When feminine mystery is attributed to women in this way, men are not obliged to seek clarity in her expressions. Instead, her mystery is used “as an alibi, indeed, that flatters (his) laziness and vanity at once” (256). When she is assimilated to Nature, the myth of woman justifies man's privileges and authorizes certain kinds of abuse. After all, Nature is meant to be cultivated, controlled, and eventually utilized for the multiplication and enhancement of man's power.

Man is set up as the essential, assertive, social subject that can transcend human relations through his manipulation of natural forces in a community with other men. He views himself in this way. Woman also views him in this way, just as she views herself as inessential. Beauvoir writes that this division between the sexes has traditionally led to the subordination of woman in this difference: “Thus, humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being …. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the Absolute—she is the other” (xxii). Further citing Lévi‐Strauss's anthropological studies on the elementary structures of kinship, Beauvoir describes how cultures from the most ancient times have developed through the organizing principle of this same–other duality that has condemned woman to a cross‐cultural symbolic status of the other, inessential, and second sex. An example of her inessential status is illustrated in at least one version of the myth of creation. Adam is created first through divine intervention, then she is created from this secondary creature to prevent man's loneliness. Her sole purpose is to serve a function for man.

Now that I have surveyed some of the ways in which Beauvoir found that these categories of the other, alterity, and mysterious are pernicious for the cultural status of women, we may look at passages where she says that the existential ideal of freedom is one of transcending mere being, and being valued as a subject in one's own right (247). Joseph Mahon registers that while Beauvoir argues that social and biological determinations are essential to a woman's situation, she also shows how “these are insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes; they fail to explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her to remain in this subordinate role forever” (Reference Mahon and CamplingMahon and Campling 1997, 65). Mahon states this as a fact of Beauvoir's existential work, but does not focus as in the next section on Beauvoir's more subversive use of terms like the Other and alterity that shifts the traditional hierarchy of the sexes. I find that Beauvoir uses a second notion of alterity and mystery that is ontologically available to both man and woman. Neither any sex nor any gender has to be equated with “the other,” as when it is designated by man and projected onto woman.

In the section “Woman's Life Today, the Formative Years: Sexual Initiation,” Beauvoir writes “As we have seen, she wants to remain subject while she is made object. Being more profoundly beside herself than man because her whole body is moved by desire and excitement, she retains her subjectivity only through union with her partner; giving and receiving must be combined for both. If the man confines himself to taking without giving or if she bestows pleasure without receiving, the woman feels that she is being maneuvered, used; once she realizes herself as the Other, she becomes the inessential other, and then she is bound to deny her alterity” (Reference BeauvoirBeauvoir 1952/1989, 397). Reciprocal recognition between them is required to realize her alterity. Reciprocity characterizes these two subjects, but not when erotic pleasure is reduced to immanent and separately felt sensations. Beauvoir argues that woman must relinquish the attribute of servitude in her essence, and resist the temptation to engage in social niceties that reward the docile, well‐behaved woman. Though each individual is contained as a separate embodied consciousness, each is substantially identical in their freedom from the facts of their lives. Before turning to what role the body has to play, it should be clear that alterity here signifies something beyond distinctions of subject/object, same/other, and essential/inessential.

Affirming woman's alterity signifies a positive condition of thinking, and being thought of, as a subject along with her partner in a reciprocal exchange. Beauvoir writes, “It is possible to rise above this conflict if each individual freely recognizes the other, each regarding himself and the other simultaneously, as object and as subject in a reciprocal manner …. But this true nature is that of a struggle unceasingly begun, unceasingly abolished; it requires man to outdo himself at every moment … attaining an authentically moral attitude when he renounces mere being to assume his position as an existent” (140). In this relation, each does not recognize they are equal in their inequality since these can repeat the old and limiting archetypes for any sex or gender. Instead a generative freedom can undo, outdo, and redo identity since at bottom subjectivity is its withdrawal from the facticity of its mere being. An experience between equals can occur where both are understood as free “to surpass the given toward an open future,” both to pursue their own passions (Reference BeauvoirBeauvoir 1948/1976, 91).

The reciprocity that Beauvoir argues needs to occur between two is often restricted by categories such as “the mysterious other.” Typically, man will not see that woman is capable of building, creating, and transcending social and political reality just as he can. However, instead of living out, and living in relation to these projections of oneself on the other, or living only up to introjected social ideals, Beauvoir writes of another sense of mystery in subjectivity. Her position comes into closer proximity to Levinas when she writes that mystery in subjectivity, as such, makes the condition of reciprocity difficult, but possible.

Beauvoir writes, “Surely woman is, in a sense, mysterious, ‘mysterious as is all the world,’ according to Maeterlinck. Each is subject only for himself; each can grasp in immanence only himself, alone: from this point of view the other is always a mystery …. The truth is that there is a mystery on both sides: as the other who is of masculine sex, every man, also, has within him a presence, an inner self impenetrable to woman; she in turn is in ignorance of the male's erotic feeling” (Reference BeauvoirBeauvoir 1952/1989, 257). Even if man grants himself the sole privilege of transcending social evaluations, mystery also ensures his capacity to enter a reciprocal relation with woman. Beauvoir goes on to characterize mystery as a “stammering presence” that prevents one from making oneself totally present to oneself. For that which is nothing but what is created in its actions and existence, and which cannot clarify itself completely at any time, ambiguity is its fundamental position (257). The mystery in both creates an abyss in oneself and between two. Similarities in experiences and ontological sameness can help bridge this abyss between different subjects so that they can transcend toward an open future. Men have built communities with other men based on this sameness. A given mystery in every subject, however, can be utilized as an antidote to fossilized categories, ideals, and relations of sameness that deem one side essential and the other not.

Just as heat melts marbleized fat from raw meat, I find that the reminder of a basic mystery, or ambiguity, in all meaning can similarly melt the apparent rigidity of social and moral norms. In this exchange between two, if both “should assume the ambiguity with clear sighted modesty, correlative of an authentic pride, they would see each other as equals and would live out their erotic drama in amity” (728). Beauvoir uses the term modesty here, similar to Levinas's use, as an opening toward any other. No matter how much I understand myself, there are events that remain unclear for which I should maintain a certain intellectual and existential “modesty.” Even before any event, already in the expression of meaning and language there always remains an amount of ambiguity that should be actively remembered. An existential attitude of modesty enables the other to challenge identifications that are often held passionately and in violence.

Similar to more careful uses of mystery, embodiment regardless of sex or gender is another condition of subjectivity that clarifies Beauvoir's understanding of ethical ambiguity. The condition of having a body creates particular perceptions, leading to its perspectives, and finally to its knowledge claims. Beauvoir writes, “In both sexes is played out the same drama of the flesh and the spirit, of finitude and transcendence; both are gnawed away by time and laid in wait for by death, they have the same essential need for one another; and they can gain from their liberty the same glory” (728). These conflicting demands are made from any sex, for example, of flesh and spirit, finitude and transcendence, while always experiencing the ambivalence of living in the constant dread of death. Both also have an essential need for the other. At the same time that free subjectivity guarantees the possible withdrawal from pure immanence, its embodiment also always makes it situated with others. The other body serves to disrupt the possible fixation one can have on oneself. Anybody who shares this ontological status, among the demands of flesh, history, and an individual perspective that is made among others, experiences the ambivalence and resulting ambiguity of situations particular to their lives.

Beauvoir's existentialist ethic goes further than others in her time that focused on subjectivity as the abstract, transcendental freedom of an individuated self. The creation of novelty for Beauvoir happens not only by one's free choice, but also by moving through a general ambiguity where “new relations of flesh and sentiment of which we have no conception will arise between the sexes; already, indeed, there have appeared between men and women friendships, rivalries, complicities, comradeships—chaste or sensual—which past centuries could not have conceived” (730). Embodied relations of flesh, and further reflections on these, create new configurations in sentiment and thought. Her use of terms like relations and between the sexes anticipate a libertarian future where each has autonomy. These terms also anticipate discourses in relational ethics. Although Beauvoir rejects mere individuated immanence as a way of understanding embodied subjectivity, in her view the alterity of the other is still only instrumental for disrupting the self and producing freedom for the isolated subject.

An important difference regarding the possibility of moral praxis separates Beauvoir from Levinas after she rejects individualized immanence and values transcendence in relations between two. For her, the alterity of the other is incidental to the importance of finding one's own. Instead, Levinas moves ethical subjectivity through the ambiguity of its embodiment, to the height of an ambivalent self that searches for alterity with a particular other. Beauvoir accepts the importance of the other's demand that comes before one's own interests, for example, in claiming that “the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom” (Reference BeauvoirBeauvoir 1948/1976, 91). However, the free existence of another is an instrument, a mere means that guarantees my own freedom. By focusing on the ambiguity that is created for the individuated self in the exercise of its freedom, the paradoxical truth and mutual dependence of finding one in the other and the other in oneself is not taken to its full conclusions in her work.

Similarly to Beauvoir, Levinas shows the ambivalence that constitutes subjectivity; however, an infinite alterity creates in each a demanding bind to prioritize the other. The goal of Levinas's first major work, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, is to assert the primacy of the idea of infinity, “as produced in the relationship of the same with the other, and how the particular and the personal, which are unsurpassable, as it were magnetize the very field in which the production of infinity is enacted …. The ambiguity of this verb conveys the essential ambiguity of the operation by which the being of an entity simultaneously is brought about and is revealed (in the gleam of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the other)” (Reference LevinasLevinas 1961/1969, 24–26). Exteriority and transcendence for ethical subjectivity become the space and possibility to preserve the particular alterity and personal liberty of the other over one's own. The paradox of finding oneself in the face of the other and vice versa leads to a notion of proximity, for example, that emphasizes forgotten histories and the relational distances between two rather than emphasizing the autonomy of each individuated subjectivity. I find similar paradoxes of a relational subjectivity in Beauvoir and will show how these can motivate her ethics of ambiguity, but first it will help to clarify Levinas's development of mystery in ambivalent alterity where the other is necessary for the self.

Levinas's Response

Thirty‐six years after Beauvoir wrote her critical remarks in The Second Sex, a series of conversations between Philippe Nemo and Emmanuel Levinas was published in the book Ethics and Infinity. Nemo asks Levinas about the passage Beauvoir used in her introduction. After Nemo presents Levinas with the same paragraphs from Time and the Other that Beauvoir uses in The Second Sex, Levinas responds, “this last proposition attests to the care of thinking time and the other together. Perhaps on the other hand, all these allusions to the ontological differences between masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and in the feminine were the attribute of every human being” (Reference LevinasLevinas 1961/1969, 68). In other words, Levinas clarifies that any human body, whether female or male, or gendered in any way, contains the polarity of “femininity” that he describes as “otherness,” “modesty,” or passivity.

Regret is noted for his systemic use of a term like the feminine that can be easily reduced to an ontology of subservient woman or, worse, an occluded ontology altogether for her sexual difference. How far his use of these terms and images traditionally associated with these bodies is metaphorical, literal, or ironic remains a question that feminist readers of Levinas must continually interpret across his texts. The pairing in his ethics between a privileged alterity and the feminine, however, arguably provides a resource for overturning a patriarchal tradition that values only systematized and abstract knowledge presumably unavailable to woman (Reference Chanter and ChanterChanter 2001, 10). By characterizing “mystery” as the feminine that is attached only to the female's embodied experience as woman, Beauvoir projects onto Levinas the traditional thought that mystery can be contained in one form of identity and not another. She misses that they both aimed at exposing the biases and violence that result from this tradition of essentializing identities in its goal of systematizing knowledge.

If it were the case that only woman contained a “feminine mystery,” then man is also condemned to none other than an imperialism of power over what is known and knowable. Even if the traditional perspective has privileged the power of rational knowledge embodied in man, the reading is contrary to the rest of Levinas's work. His writing values knowledge‐production that exceeds cognition, illustrated in his central concept of the face as visage. The face expresses a nonempirical trace of what he called an infinitude that becomes present in an ethical relation with the other. Challenging traditional philosophy, Totality and Infinity argues that the principal modality of existence in the world is of embodiment. All meaning commences after a confrontation with the face of the other realized in relations of radical dependency between particular, ontological bodies.

Proximity is the paradoxical, absolute separation and absolute relation between any ontological self and other by which thought, words, and encapsulated experiences arise (Reference LevinasLevinas 1961/1969, 205–06). Any sensible reactions from these relations are posterior to a necessary condition that obsesses each individual with another, like a persecution. There is first a demanding relation between the self and its others that affect it, before the following possibility of choosing individual liberty. The face, as necessary grounds for any meaning, signifies without comprehension, while “infinity, thought as absolutely separated alterity, assigns a certain (negative? Non? Pre?) dialectical primacy to the object over that of the subject” (25). An alterity that is not confined to anyone provides the space for prioritizing the other. Levinas's concluding remarks on “Being as exteriority,” and alterity specifically, challenge grand narratives that either find an abstract and absolute moral imperative or admit of none, similar to Beauvoir's own critique of patriarchal society and the radical freedom of a Sartrean individual existentialism.

In the spirit of casting suspicion on grand narratives that reconcile all possible meanings under one totalized God's‐eye view, alterity is a way of prioritizing that which must remain other in each subjectivity, approach, relation, and that along with these differences preserves the paradoxical capability of standing in an immediate relation. Levinas's philosophy of the other walks a difficult line between conflicting demands, on the one hand claiming to be based on preserving difference, while on the other remaining indifferent to empirical differences. Any particular differences can be transcended by the demand the other makes that comes prior to the recognition of their empirical qualities. Echoing Luce Irigaray's criticism of the lack of sexual difference in Levinas (Reference Irigaray and ChanterIrigaray 1993/2001), Sonia Sikka criticizes Levinas's notion of a radical alterity that cannot take into account the specificity of each person's differences (Reference Sikka and ChanterSikka 2001, 115). Although this may be true of Levinas's earlier writings, by the time he writes Otherwise Than Being he comes to reflect on the specificity of living after the Holocaust as a male Jewish philosopher, a specificity that is admittedly limiting but serves as a paradigmatic phenomenology of the difficulty of being a particular existent that is responsible for the other (Reference LevinasLevinas 1948). As such, his continued work on the infinitude of a nonempirical face and the immediacy of proximate relations amongst radically different and particular individuals sidesteps any essentialism based on sex, gender, and in his personal case, religion.

Ambivalence arises for individuated ethical subjectivity that comes undone in welcoming and hosting traces of the other who is always found in an embodied subject. Levinas's infinite other appears in an embodied face, but as a nonempirical site that overflows consciousness and its objects. When vulnerability and destitution are “seen,” alterity is used to denote a capacity of relating to a particular other that exceeds mere empirical sensing. The face expresses vulnerability, where no propositional knowledge is necessary for its judgment. The face as visage is only loosely associated with the empirical front of one's head since a hunched shoulder can express this vulnerability just as well. By finding resources for knowledge that exceed rational and empirical reasoning, Levinas opens the door for any subjectivity's engagement in ethical discourse.

In contrast to his use of the term alterity, which positions two subjects in an immediate relation in spite of their historical and social categories, Levinas writes in “Reality and its Shadow” that the historical use of the term mysterious has been used suspiciously to bewitch ethical subjectivity. Similar to Beauvoir's suspicion of the historical use of the term mystery to denote woman, for Levinas the face‐to‐face relation is prevented from welcoming the other's alterity when its “mystery” is alluded to. Mystery denotes that which is not present in being, but the presence of an absent object, “as though the represented object died, were disincarnated in its own reflection” (Reference LevinasLevinas 1987/1998, 7). Both representations of woman as divine and profane are disincarnated either beyond or below being, and her body is deemed abject—an absent object. Just as art visually engages one's senses and suspends perception from the possibility of ethical engagement for Levinas, so can woman who is deemed the “mystery of being” suffer violent cruelties from an ethically blinded other.

At times “mystery,” for Beauvoir, also designates a quality in subjectivity that is similar to alterity. Levinas made an argument using the term alterity without equating it with a social or historical “other,” although social and historical designations are necessary for a movement into alterity (Reference LevinasLevinas 1947/1987, 83). The more rigidly social and historical designations are held, the more the possibility for an ethical relation is reduced. Alterity uniquely signifies the ability to break any chain of discourse and signification. Any identifications made of oneself can freely change in the face‐to‐face encounter. One can say then that, for Levinas, mystery lies in any self that returns from its relations to the other, since the self cannot know how it will be changed and generated anew through them.

When Levinas wrote of immemorial time as a modality of subjectivity that is otherwise than being, a transhistorical sense of modesty, or passivity appears, and, similarly to Beauvoir, refers to an existential position for any ethical subjectivity (Reference LevinasLevinas 1974/2009, 24–26). For the ethical encounter, the ego bows in modesty for a free exchange. The encounter brings about a change in subjectivity by the exteriority of the other. In the section of Time and the Other from which Beauvoir quotes, Levinas explicated his view on the nature of time, but not as a dynamic dialectical movement between complementary, gendered terms that presuppose a pre‐existing whole. For the philosopher who argued that ethics is first philosophy, time is a movement between the presence of a being and a responsible preservation of the alterity in any human other in its many particular forms. Alterity is not “merely the unknowable, but a mode of being which consists in slipping away from the light.” Similarly, Beauvoir writes that there is a certain sense of mystery that is not a subjective isolation, silence, darkness, or absence, but is “a stammering” on the level of communication (Reference BeauvoirBeauvoir 1952/1989, 257). Beauvoir is approaching Levinas's use of alterity here, which is a relation with being that is not neutralized, dissolved, or violently negated as is “the female other,” but preserves it. Levinas calls this a loving relation that is not based on the romantic idea of love, but on an asymmetrical relation that conditions an ethical response.

In spite of mistakenly equating the feminine with a radical alterity that can never be known in his early writing, it is arguably because of those particular “feminine” attributes like modesty and welcoming the habitation of the beloved that “while characteristically, or stereotypically, feminine, is also the exemplification of the ethical response to the Other … in spite of himself, Levinas, while using the feminine as a condition for the possibility of the ethical relation, creates the conditions by which the feminine itself can and must participate in the ethical” (Reference Katz and ChanterKatz 2001, 162–64). Reading Levinas, Claire Katz finds that the feminine does not merely facilitate an ethical relation while it remains absent. Rather, characteristics of the ethical relation open the possibility for woman's engagement. Katz uses the biblical story of Ruth in relation to her mother‐in‐law Naomi to illustrate the paradigmatic principles of Levinas's ethical relation, but that occurs here between two women. Ruth is the first Jewish convert, taking an oath of loyalty to Naomi, her place of dwelling, her people, and her God. Ruth's vow is an ethical and political obligation to care for particular people. She is also shown to take care of her widowed mother‐in‐law by working in the fields to feed them both. Her creative work illustrates the transcendence of oneself for another who remains other, and in a relation that is not characterized by erotic desire. By mining this story, Katz finds traces of Levinas's ethic that involve actions performed by woman. Levinas is thus compatible with feminists’, and specifically Beauvoir's, attempt to signify a woman's capacity for ethical and social engagement.

Even if in Time and the Other (1947) Levinas equates the feminine with an absolute and radical alterity, by the time he wrote Totality and Infinity (1961), the feminine is not the absolute other and empirical woman has the potential for the ethical relation. Though not without controversy, in his subsequent work, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974), maternity turns into the image of the ethical relation, physically fragmenting oneself for gestating the other in the same‐self. Alterity then develops for Levinas into something that more closely resembles what Beauvoir describes in her Ethics of Ambiguity. Both insist that otherness and sameness are the basis of ontological thinking, but subjectivity characterized in its ambiguity requires a dose of modesty using these terms. Ontological modesty is one antidote for dissolving qualities that make the group of a “same” kind different from another.

One difference that Levinas develops in relation to this ambiguity is that the mystery of alterity is transhistorical, intersubjective, and “mysterious” only because it prioritizes “the other” with whom each is intersubjectively related (Reference LevinasLevinas 1961/1969, 101). Without the mystery of alterity, prioritizing social asymmetries becomes more difficult because of their reduction to determinate ontological relations of same–other, such as the free transcendental subject or unfree object. Levinas writes, “The Other as Other is not only an alter ego: the Other is what I myself am not. The Other is this, not because of the Other's character, or physiognomy, or psychology, but because of the Other's very alterity” (Reference LevinasLevinas 1947/1987, 83). The historical and social specificity of differences is not as important as one's post facto attunement to them after the relation. Experientially, however, can this indifference to difference arise without a mediating concept, such as an infinite alterity, for an ethical response? Without the transhistorical notion of alterity between two unequal subjects that appears in an embodied face, negotiating past terms of resentment seems impossible (Irigaray 2001, 131, 143). Remembering a state of ambiguity and ambivalence can quiet the strength of private convictions that often turn violent.

Beauvoir falls on the side of valuing existential freedom in action for each individual, albeit with a keen awareness of immanent social relations that inscribe limits on the body. One difficult question for those continuing to engage Beauvoir's work is how to develop an ethic for the second sex that will go beyond recapitulating identifications in experience that are already socially constructed under patriarchal terms. Using a hermeneutical lens but with a focus on ambivalence, Chanter uses ambivalent abjection to read Beauvoir's work and her reception by other feminists (Reference ChanterChanter 2000, 140). Abjection is used to describe the historically ambivalent status of woman who sustains an image of both the profane whore and the mythical virgin. Chanter uses the ambiguity of this status that Beauvoir develops as a means for creating a feminist history after Beauvoir, and in particular for developing “how abjection can operate either to consolidate group identities that support the status quo or to disrupt their stability” (140). Each can choose between repeating and disrupting these archetypes that have been historically projected by man onto woman after reflecting on this state of ambivalence.

Similar to Chanter's development of an abject ambivalence for the possibility of creating a new identity for woman, I would like to develop the ambivalence inherent in subjectivity that Levinas used to motivate a dynamic and dialectical ethical subjectivity. In other words, another way to develop the indifference to difference for the purpose of attuning to the particularities of the other is to turn back to Levinas's clarification with Nemo that “the participation in the masculine and the feminine were the attribute of every human being” (Reference LevinasLevinas 1961/1969, 68). Further developing the paradox of an ambivalent alterity where the self and other are found in each other can jump‐start free subjectivity out from the bind of ambiguously immanent, contextual experiences for creating new values, a goal that I find implicit in Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity.

Alterity

There are a few ways to understand, in practical terms, the theoretical power of reflecting on a radical alterity that arises between two. First, alterity challenges the priority of unity over difference, which Beauvoir may not have realized to the fullest in her own work. In the name of a unifying scheme under “subjectivity as freedom,” justifications can be given for violently suppressing those who are different, “the other,” whoever or however the other may be categorized. Today the debate rages about whether one who values freedom can ethically punch, or silence, the Nazi. A radical distance between subjects leads to acknowledging irremovable differences among all. On the other hand, these differences can be altered as each individual subject stands only in an unassumable proximity to the other. An encounter can then be staged, for example between the liberal minded individual and a particular Nazi sympathizer.

Appreciating an unassumable alterity as the condition for ethical subjectivity and the paradox of proximity also permits relations that are free of the possible tyranny of any identification. Like concentric circles going out toward past or present objects that make up identity, relations arise with an unimpeachable assignation. In this radical dependency on the other for having a self, embodiment then exceeds the isolated individual body and its privatized history. Proximity is an impossibility of moving away from others, like a persecuting demand (Reference LevinasLevinas 1974/2009, 87). When “I am ‘in myself’ through the others,” individual freedom is a mere means for the active responsibility each has for another's freedom (112). Their relation is evident in the incapacity to be indifferent to the other, and the bridge between them is language. Levinas often uses the word “trace,” which appears as language that goes toward the other, already bearing a responsibility for the other to whom one is responding. Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity also guarantees a subject that is assured the correctness of any moral action, but she does not abandon the absolute value of a transcendental ego. She prioritizes freedom and universalizes individual free choice over relatedness.

In distinction from Beauvoir's reading, exteriority or alterity for Levinas cannot be a subjective position of freedom authentically chosen by one, or intentionally held between two. If this were the case, then alterity would be converted into the same, a doubled ego or identity as freedom, which Beauvoir argues is the positive goal for woman. Freedom, however, remains under the panorama of masculine privilege. Woman is animated by the masculine desire of attaining transcendence through individual choice. When the other is an alter ego, a doubled identity, then it must be asked how much freedom is possible to create an ego for woman that is not in the image of man, which is what Beauvoir has condemned in the historical valuation of woman to date. For Levinas, “such a conception would in the end destroy exteriority, since subjectivity itself would be absorbed into exteriority, revealing itself to be a moment in a panoramic play (of sociological, psychological, and physiological perception of nature)” (parentheses added) (Reference LevinasLevinas 1961/1969, 290). Making the transcendental ego absolute and freedom its moral demand occludes the space of exteriority, which for Levinas remains without ego. Reflecting on a particular existence prioritizes the isolated ego, whereas prioritizing the relational individual in its various proximate relations takes us closer to various forms of standpoint feminist epistemologies and ethics of care. These break with the traditional discourse that merely doubles woman as free as man. Embodiment, for Levinas, likewise exceeds the individual in emphasizing its radical dependency. The panoramic play of identifications comes after an alterity that preserves each as a relational subjectivity, regardless of archaic bifurcations in gender and histories of power.

Bifurcations in gender and sex prevent thinking “the metaphysical other (as) other with an alterity that is not formal, is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the same” (38–39). Levinas agrees with Beauvoir's view that each subjectivity is created through its situation, but may not admit her next move that finds one's ethicality in the recognition of another, same, doubled identity as free. The metaphysical other does not only serve to disrupt the “identity” of an individuated subjectivity, but is valued as conditioning ethical subjectivity as such. Brian Schroeder writes in Altared Ground about the power of radical exteriority that is conditioned on the face of a particular body who “leaves open the possibility of radical surprise, a ‘breach’ of totality, precisely because it is the primordial orientation of subjectivity to the other (l'autre), of being to that which is wholly otherwise than being or essence” (Reference SchroederSchroeder 1996, 142). A relation with absolute alterity is available in history in the embodied face of another that disrupts its relations of immanence. What is most valued is apprehending the other, more than one's own disruption with another self‐same ego.

Another way of understanding the power of a concept such as alterity in practical terms is to accept the paradoxical differences between individuals and the asymmetries of power between one and the other, while simultaneously appreciating their capacity for an immediate, intersubjective relation that requires welcoming the other in a modest‐egoical submission to their call (Reference LevinasLevinas 1961/1969, 40). Levinas with Beauvoir calls for equality between subjective beings, but ontologically speaking, identity between two empirical objects is impossible. What Levinas calls the anarchic trace of the infinite that appears in the face of the other renders any logos one of ambiguity (Reference LevinasLevinas 1974/2009, 101). Still, this is not to go so far as to say that alterity does not include the body or is outside historical and social contexts, but only that rational deliberation cannot tease out conflicting desires between two particular egos for bearing ethical responsibility.

Schroeder continues, “this is the paradox and the enigma of the ethical relationship that testifies to the radical exteriority associated with the absolutely other prior to the incarnational constitution of the world of meaning for subjectivity. The ethical saying, though antecedent to ontology, which is to say to history, is diachronically present in the corporeal proximity of the face to face relationship” (Reference SchroederSchroeder 1996, 111). These paradoxes preserve an infinitude that both precedes ontology but also must pass through a temporal and embodied face. Language as discourse enacts a relation that preserves their radical differences, which must be presupposed for Irigaray to write a critical essay of Levinas's work, for example. Irigaray entered Levinas's discourse in philosophy to challenge its stubbornly entrenched tradition, earning the respect of many feminist writers thereafter. The difficulty is not lost on her, however, of developing a language, losing the ability to speak and be heard, as that which “has a place, has taken a place, but has no language. The felt, which expresses itself for the first time. Declares itself to the other in silence. One must remember this and hope that the other remembers” (Reference Irigaray and ChanterIrigaray 1993/2001, 143). A language that is developed through the body is performed in Irigaray's text, which manages to make demands on her other who is man and the philosophical tradition as a whole. In addition to language, the face is also offered as an embodied individuated infinitude. Traditionally cast to a transcendent reality, the infinitude of radical exteriority and transcendence does not aim toward nothingness outside being, nor is it a product of transcendental imagination, a mystical God, ideal ego, or radically free self. Radical exteriority means preserving the embodied other in whom the self is found, and which Irigaray's text illustrates is possible (Reference LevinasLevinas 1974/2009, 117). Preserving the other, as such, however must be an ethical obligation as much or more than the preservation of the individuated self.

Both thinkers agree that finding general and universal moral principles cannot be the goal of ethics. The effect that particular, embodied, and situational contexts have on the quality of one's moral life is most significant. Beauvoir rightly criticizes Levinas's language, which, at times, is laden with terminology associated with violent concepts, such as the transcendence of infinity. This abstract language seems to expose his ethic as another repetition of the very philosophical history that he critiques. Although this is an apt criticism because of his earlier uses of the feminine and continued use of abstracting phenomenological terms, Levinas also refused to prioritize transcendence or immanence. Instead he maintained the importance for any subjectivity of both the empirical particular, situational, and vulnerable body and its capacity to welcome an infinite alterity of the particular embodied other. Also, and this is not meant to excuse the negligent use of language that has real exclusionary consequences, is it not an infinite demand to pay attention to the nuance of the particularities of the other that shapes moral life? Irigaray's language in the article “The Fecundity of the Caress” (Reference Irigaray and ChanterIrigaray 1993/2001), for example, shows how Beauvoir's thinking about woman's embodiment is also still quite abstract.

Whereas embodiment for Beauvoir is the ambiguous grounds for a transcendent free subject to struggle with its own facticity, for Levinas it is the grounds to struggle both with one's own facticity and its proximity to the other for whom one is most responsible. He reassigns the significance of an infinite transcendence back toward the embodied face when it is seen otherwise. Irigaray, too, resorts to using the language of mystery and the demand to guard it in a regressive nurturing of the other, if any communication between man and woman is to be possible (141). Infinite transcendence can only occur in particular relations, which should make violence and oppressing the other in the name of one personal worldview and transcendent values difficult or, more accurately, impossible.

These paradoxes seen through the notion of alterity in Levinas help us to understand where Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity stops, but can be jump‐started using the embodied experience of ambivalence in the alterity of subjectivity. At times in her work, Beauvoir seems to articulate the potential of a transhistorical alterity that is available only in contextual relations, over and above the one appropriated by a gendered history. Similar to Levinas, a transhistorical freedom would not be external to history, but persist through history across the various constellations and configurations as time itself. In the final section, I show how Beauvoir's prioritization of individual freedom in its ambiguous possibilities and moral ambivalence in interpersonal relations comes close to Levinas's use of alterity for dismantling the traditional violence of ethics. This may help gear us toward new ethical orientations, in which any other is just as ambiguous as the self and any morality is capable of becoming either violent or forming a bridge of attunement between two, illustrated by the ethical debate of punching a Nazi sympathizer who is only an abstraction. Switching to consider their personal history in relation to another liberal‐minded individual opens the possibility for a more particular and viable moral response.

Ambiguity and Ambivalence

At the beginning of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir shows the tragically ambivalent human condition where paradoxes commence in reason. One wedge she uses for understanding these paradoxes is the ambiguous line between self and other. Each individual identity can act at times as a freely deliberating conscious subject, and at other times as an object of perception as if it were like any other determinate natural body. Human and moral actions that are derived from an ambiguous predisposition should not excuse gratuitous evils, but shed light on the condition of unknowability for the situational, yet ethical, subject. One is neither capable of knowing all choices available in a given situation, nor the psychological forces at work that often lead to moral failure. Used wisely, however, the ambiguity of knowledge and the experience of ambivalence from conflicting desires can impel more thoughtful action.

Beauvoir continues on her first page that consciousness seems to afford an experience of “pure internality against which no external power can take hold,” while also feeling the experience of being crushed by “the dark weight of other things” (Reference BeauvoirBeauvoir, 1948/1976, 7) that always threatens to return. Whether by choosing finite acts for perceived absolute goals, or finding oneself at the center of significance, but never capable of fulfilling oneself, conflicting choices are constantly made through a fog of ambiguity. Even if each desires the irrefutability of their unique and sovereign position as a subject, the thought cannot help but follow that each and every other also feels and desires this uniqueness and sovereignty that is irrefutable.

Beauvoir's language, however, quickly switches from calling these thoughts and desires paradoxical and ambivalent, to the “tragic ambiguity” of the human condition. The examples of thoughts, desires, and actions at first indicated a tragic ambivalence, rather than a “tragic ambiguity” as she continues to call the predicament. She writes that the human condition is clearly perceptible, “this ambiguity of their condition, which is the most fundamental of all: that every living movement is a sliding toward death. But if they are willing to look it in the face they also discover that every movement toward death is life” (127). The condition is not ambiguous, but more a struggle with the ambivalence of a life that always moves with its opposite in its purview, and a form of death that is only known by the living.

The Latin ambiguitas refers to the obscure, the dark, wavering, changeable, doubtful, uncertain, disputed, unreliable, and untrustworthy (Reference Langer and CardLanger 2003, 87–89). To waver is to lack mastery, self‐control, or certainty, which since Plato has been traditionally viewed as a moral weakness. Descartes's Meditations in the modern era was also intended to put an end to the ills of ambiguous knowledge, in the rational pursuit of what is indubitably certain. Traditionally, uncertainty and epistemic error are not considered valuable tools of discovery for an inquisitive mind, but the mark of a lazy and immoral one. At best, uncertainty is the messy epistemic tool that is necessary for achieving decisive knowledge, rather than valuing uncertainty as a necessary knowledge while pursuing its more decisive forms.

By contrast, for Beauvoir the resolve for action strengthens by assuming ambiguity as the genuine condition of life. She writes, “In order for the return to the positive to be genuine it must involve negativity, it must not conceal the antinomies between means and end, present and future; they must be lived in a permanent tension; one must retreat from neither the outrage of violence nor deny it, or, which amounts to the same thing, assume it lightly” (Reference BeauvoirBeauvoir 1948/1976, 133). Morality is the deliberation between moral goods that are individually valued and will necessarily exclude some to preserve others, often using violent means for attaining certain ends. Instead of avoiding the knowledge of ambiguity in all claims, acknowledgment of the antinomies that are usually concealed from us can lead to more careful deliberations on the amounts of violence likely to occur with each action. A clear view of the inherent ambivalence held in each value keeps one from resting in a tyrannical certainty about one's chosen side of any moral claim.

Monika Langer wrote about Beauvoir's use of ambiguity and argues that she avoided writing on paradoxical ambiguity, or ambivalence, to differentiate herself from Sartre (Reference Langer and CardLanger 2003, 90). For him, ambivalence causes an existential nausea from contending with an individual will that in lonely isolation aims at others. In Beauvoir, however, there is also a positive value in affirming one's relation with others. It is here that Beauvoir's value of ambivalence moves more toward a relational alterity, bringing her closer to Levinas than to Sartre. In addition to Langer's position that Beauvoir switched from speaking of ambivalence to speaking of ambiguity to distinguish herself from Sartre, I want to suggest that her switch in terms may also stem from a traditional suspicion of psychological and moral ambivalence.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the term ambivalence was used to describe an experience that arose from schizoid pathologies of mind. Schizophrenia, melancholia, and obsessional neurosis result in apparent conflicting desires. In his “Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis,” Freud finds that compulsive repetitions occur when there is a “conflict between two opposing impulses of approximately equal strength: and hitherto I have invariably found that this opposition has been between love and hate” (Reference Freud and StracheyFreud 1909, 192). The opposition between libidinal love and aggressive hate is at the root of all psychic life for Freud, but compulsive behaviors make the tension apparent when ambivalence reaches increasing levels. These symptoms are the expressions of a mind that is attempting to control unacceptable desires and repress its ambivalence. For example, one cleans obsessively when one desires dirt, but also desires to abolish the dirt. The association among paranoiac doubt, compulsions, and the difficulties of deciphering reality are some of the reasons why psychic ambivalence is viewed so negatively.

More than confusion among one's individual desires, moral ambivalence sheds light on how a normative good can also reach its opposite in action. Take for example, a police agent who desires the sex worker, but desires to abolish the sex worker. Not to be confused with victims of sex trafficking, for those whose sexuality is their labor this occupation can be a means of gaining economic independence or stability. Some sex workers also refuse a moral standard that deems their sexuality inherently immoral, and actively rebel against a moral standard for which they are beholden by a male population that historically transgresses it in private. A policing agent desires to abolish “the dirt,” namely those deemed immoral by his standard. Acting to stop the victimization of under‐age persons or anyone holding others against their will to forcefully engage in sex work is morally praiseworthy, but not when exercised in blinding moral excess. A policing agent has a moral obligation to clarify who are victims of this trade and who are willingly engaging in it, even if the difference is empirically difficult to discern. Sex workers supply a demand in a society that values economic stability. At the same time, however, these bodies are pushed into the margins of society by those policing agents who desire those who engage in “immoral” pursuits. These workers expose the hypocrisy that covers over an ambivalence in those who condemn these women as abject whores, using Chanter's operative sense of the word abject, while also desiring them (Reference Chanter and ChanterChanter 2001). These women are playing with the ambiguous status of a social norm that is clearly projected on woman by man in the name of his moral ideal.

Real cases, such as the former governor of New York, Elliot Spitzer, urge us to understand the limits of actions taken for any moral ideal. Spitzer was named “Crusader of the Year” by Time magazine in 2002 for his vigilant work against prostitution. He was later exposed as excessively soliciting their services (Reference WeinerWeiner 2008). Spitzer's case illustrates that while he desired these women and created a demand for their work, he also waged a crusade against them. Without reflecting on the ambivalence inherent in his moral standards, however, more sex workers like thirty‐eight‐year‐old Yang Song of Queens, New York will prefer any option, such as jumping from a window during a police raid, over facing law enforcement agents who too often ignore the reasons why some engage in this work (Reference Whitford and GrantWhitford and Grant 2017).

Ambiguity describes the situation of obscurity, whereas ambivalence includes valere, which means to have a strong desire aimed at contradictory options. In On Ambivalence, Kenneth Weisbrode writes that even before modern literature denounced psychological ambivalence, it was associated with moral vice, such as hypocrisy. Confusing ambivalence with indecision is one reason why ambivalence has been considered a character flaw, Weisbrode finds. He writes, “Indecision comes from a flaw in character; ambivalence is a spiritual condition. Ambivalence is more paralyzing because it combines the inability to choose with the refusal to admit the necessity of choice. It compels more, not less, responsibility, for optimal results. An ambivalent person seeks to overstep moral limitations; an indecisive person is simply unfree” (Reference WeisbrodeWeisbrode 2012, 18). Weisbrode recognizes the inescapable condition of ambivalence that comes from a divided nature that deliberates between ambivalent desires that also conflict with moral ideals. Contending with implicit, conflicting desires in the face of a choice is not to delay the decision because of a quietism or weakness of will. On the contrary, to deliberate on the ambivalent nature of every choice is to recognize the responsibility of every option and its full range of implications for oneself and others. If Spitzer had taken the time to reflect on his own desire and the desire to crusade against sex workers, he may have questioned the need for a “crusade” at all and discovered other ways of acting, or ideally might have questioned the ambiguous status of a moral norm that caused him so much conflict.

While finding one's way between conflicting desires is usually not felt as a pleasurable experience, it may also be the most pleasurable. It delays the objects we desire even more, to realize a final decision that may be a compromise in action. Additionally, a difficult freedom develops from questioning norms that seem to hold the fabric of social life together. The benefits of understanding the ambivalence that results from a subjectivity conflicted between its own desires and prioritizing the other's interests, however, begin a process of liberation that shakes one free of what may be overly restricting or antiquated moral norms. Still, it seems to me that Beauvoir would rather that each feel impelled to deliberate freely on conflicting options before making a choice, rather than value the act of making a choice simply because it is chosen freely.

A final reason why this ambivalence may not have been fully articulated in Beauvoir's texts is the dependence of one on the other, man on woman, and woman on man. Beauvoir worked hard to show the oppressive history woman has endured from its beginning in mythology to the modern state. Her phenomenology of the embodied lives and experiences of women worked toward their liberation from patriarchal ideals. In her lifetime and still today, woman needs to be made equal to man. Beauvoir's efforts were admirable, as much as returning that power to man is terrifying. For woman, however, the alterity of her other can also be found in the interior of each man, according to Beauvoir's claims. Located at a similar place and time, and experiencing persecution for being Jewish, Levinas's relational ethics first locates personal responsibility in the alterity of the other's liberty. It seems that Beauvoir hesitated acknowledging this relation of dependency, while Levinas took a full bite from the apple.

My argument has been that Beauvoir's feminist critique that “woman” being defined as the mysterious other was used to injure the female body through history is one way, but not the only way, in which she uses the notions of the mysterious and of alterity. As a quality that appears, or more correctly “stammers” between two, her second use of these terms is not so different from Levinas's generative uses and critique of their historical abuses. Understanding how his term mystery comes closer in meaning to alterity in light of an ethics of ambivalence brings their thought into closer proximity. Levinas was careful to devise a language of alterity that recognized the asymmetries of power in every face‐to‐face encounter, with an alterity that obligates each to and for the other with no guarantee of reciprocity.

For this reason, it would have benefited Beauvoir's ethic of action to push ambiguity toward ethical ambivalence for a fuller view of conflicting desires in the ambiguous array of options. Reflecting on how everyone acts to achieve their moral ends, whose freedoms they must oppress, at the cost of each desired option, the ambiguity of moral freedom helps attune them to the particularities of their others. New breakthroughs in these precarious relationships, and concepts of self, become possible when one values modesty in any knowledge for attuning to the alterity of the other. If every moral action comes with the possibility of imposing violence on the other, then preserving the space of alterity between two can help evaluate opposing desires that arise from complex social contexts. Both Levinas and Beauvoir illustrate how these encounters with our others, which in significant ways define us, can prevent the exclusionary practices that are all too often repeated. The same cycles of violence that are perpetually repeated, only for us later to ask “how did I not see that coming?”, can be broken.