The Philosopher’s Body: Simone de Beauvoir, the Algerian War, and the Sex of Violence

Simone de Beauvoir is known today mostly for her infamous 1949 Second Sex and her 1970s feminist involvement. For recent scholarship, she offers a distinctive philosophy, is an accomplished novelist, and wrote powerful texts the issues at the heart of postwar French politics. However, few read her hugely popular memoirs as literary and political texts. Yet, her 1962 memoir, La Force des Choses, published only a year after Algerian won its independence, reveals that Algeria obsessed Beauvoir like no other conflict did and, in fact, constituted her first public political involvement. This paper argues that Beauvoir’s 1963 memoir, in fact, maps a politics of “embodied empathy” that she offers as grounds for a universalist ethics. Through her dramatization of affective excess and bodily disorder in response to the horror of the violated bodies of tortured Algerians, Beauvoir poses the Algerian war as a political question against postwar normative (moral) discourses on the war. However, in doing so, this paper shows that Beauvoir’s “embodied empathy” remains haunted by her inability to address her and others’ complicity during the Vichy years, and is unable to resolve her ambivalence towards Jewishness. My paper thus suggests the need to revise the canon of our narrative of the postwar left’s discourse on the Algerian war. It interrogates the conventions that have governed historical narratives regarding French intellectuals’ encounter with the Holocaust and decolonization.