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The Paradoxical Displacement: Beauvoir and Irigaray on Hegels Antigone

ELAINE P. MILLER Miami University

Near the beginning of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir writes, Hegel tells us in the last part of the Phenomenology of Spirit that moral consciousness can exist only to the extent that there is disagreement between nature and morality. It [moral consciousness] would disappear if the ethical law became the natural law (Beauvoir 1948, 10).1 In this passage and in a few brief remarks in The Second Sex, Beauvoir refers to the section Spirit of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which Hegel discusses Sophocles tragedy Antigone (Hegel 1977, 26768). This section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled Human and Divine Law: Man and Woman, affords Hegels only explicit description of the relationship between masculine and feminine within the course of the world-historical dialectic that he describes in this work. Beauvoir here engages with the passage, not to comment on the historical and symbolic relationship between men and women that aligns man with culture and woman with nature, an alignment she will make much of in The Second Sex, but rather to illustrate a particular ethical stance. As many commentators have already remarked,2 when Beauvoir later uses Hegel to discuss the philosophical conceptualization of the historical relationship between men and women, particularly in The Second Sex, she emphasizes Hegels famous master/slave dialectic, which occurs much earlier in the Phenomenology of Spirit as part of the dialectic of Consciousness. The use of the master/slave dialectic, and its eventual sublation into a stoic agent characterized primarily by self-control and self-determination, both parallels the later movement from ethical life into legal status and seems to imply that an end to a master/slave prototype of struggle between humans would be accomThe Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2000. Copyright 2000 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 121

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plished through an understanding of intersubjectivity that is initially conflictual but eventually subdued by law and gender neutral. I will argue in this paper, however, that by looking at The Ethics of Ambiguity in conjunction with The Second Sex, we can cull from Beauvoirs work both a nonconflictual model of human intersubjectivity and a conception of human existence and, more specifically, of the feminine that cannot simply be understood as assimilation into a preexisting, atomistic, purportedly neutral and yet implicitly masculine conception of subjectivity. Indeed, one of the recurring themes of The Ethics of Ambiguity is a resistance to the Hegelian sublation of particularity into the universality and neutrality of the ethical. If particularity can be aligned with the private sphere against the ethical understood as the public realm, as I contend it can, then Beauvoir would agree with Luce Irigaray (1985a) that the role of the feminine in Hegels brief discussion of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit holds the key to a much more important facet of the politics of subjectivity in the history of Western philosophy, namely, the need, if the feminine is to be understood as even capable of eluding dialectical subsumption, for the creation of specifically feminine values and even a feminine subjectivity. Irigaray criticizes Beauvoir for focusing predominantly on the quest for equal rights for women, rather than the search for a sexuate identity that will allow them to find some value in being women and thus rethink and transform historical socio-cultural values (Irigaray 1991, 31). In addition, Irigaray critiques the use of the master/slave paradigm to characterize male/female relationships because she questions whether such a struggle can even be said to take place given historical and current masculine and feminine roles, and because she descries a danger in that such a characterization implies advocacy of a simple reversal of the terms of subjugation. Irigaray writes that Antigone is neither master nor slave (1993b, 119), and this neither-nor structure complicates the place of the feminine in the history of philosophy. However, by examining Beauvoirs often overlooked comments on Hegels Antigone, I contend that there is evidence that Beauvoir, too, recognizes that the feminine cannot be understood to be in the position of the slave because she is the means to the attainment of subjectivity rather than the one who herself becomes self-conscious and thus truly free. By identifying the feminine, not with the slave, but with the work of the slave in the master/slave dialectic, we can see more clearly the parallel structure of the two passages in Hegel and in the critiques of Beauvoir and Irigaray. Womans work, as conceptualized in Hegels account of Antigone, consists in the activities of giving birth and burying the dead. These activities are linked both to the immediacy of life and to the spiritualizing power inherent in transcending natural death through funeral rites. Both Irigaray and Beauvoir argue that in Hegel the particularity of human existence has been domesticated and harnessed for the sake of the ethical and the universal, and in so doing any notion of subjectivity that incorporates a genuine sense of freedom is lost. Whereas for Irigaray this particularity can be identified with the feminine,3 Beauvoir discusses it initially with reference to human freedom in general.

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In his discussion of ethical life with reference to Sophocles Antigone, Hegel aligns the masculine with subjectivity, the polis, and freedom and the feminine with nature, the family, the private sphere, blind adherence to the divine law, and the repetition of the cyclical time of reproduction. Beauvoir uses her brief discussion of Hegels Antigone, or, more specifically, of the tension between the law of nature and the law of the state, not to comment upon questions of an explicitly feminist orientation, but as support for her contention that existentialism must take the most optimistic ethics, that is, Hegels ethics, to its natural conclusion by showing that by a paradoxical displacement, if moral action is the absolute goal, the absolute goal is also that moral action may not be present (Beauvoir 1948, 1011). By this puzzling statement, Beauvoir means that even for Hegel himself morality only has significance by means of its opposition to nature. If morality coincided with nature, it would make no sense to say that one acts morally, for to act morally would not be a choice, but an instinct.4 This would imply a complete lack of freedom, and, indeed, Hegel repeatedly insists that woman is a threat to the ethical community because she unconsciously, that is, unquestioningly, asserts the law of family, which is also the law of nature, against that of the community.5 Womans eternal irony, then, is that she becomes this paradoxical displacement; she (without knowing what she does) asserts her unreasoned existence so that the ethical may come into being. Without her, the diremption of forces necessary for the progression of the dialectic would be missing. Another way of expressing this Hegelian alignment of the feminine with necessity would be to say that women, unlike men, are not free to go against nature, or, even more strongly, that women cannot in principle act ethically; at most, their actions can coincide with ethical action. Beauvoir does not note this implication here, but concentrates instead on the paradoxical nature of the absolute goal that must simultaneously be both ethical and absolved of contradiction. Beauvoir sees that an absolute goal could not be characterized as ethical at all according to the above definition, which presupposes at least a potential opposition between desire and duty. And yet, paradoxically, it would seem that ethical action must be the ultimate goal, if Spirit is achieving itself. One implication of this interpretation (though not one Beauvoir herself draws) is that the feminine embodies and symbolizes, in the history of morality and of metaphysics, both the flaw that motivates any ethical or ontological theory and simultaneously that which is disqualified from the realm of the ethical and from any authentic sense of human being because it lacks within itself the division that it provides. Because the history of metaphysics aligns the feminine with the natural, she is in principle incapable of comprehending the freedom that implies acting in a way that transcends blind adherence to duty. Her actions, whatever they may be, are devoid of the meaning that arises out of reasoned decision, and thus can be described as neither ethical nor unethical, since they are not the product of freedom in its full sense.

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For Beauvoir, all ethics is predicated on a fundamental flaw in human nature. As she puts it, One does not offer an ethics to a God (1948, 10). What distinguishes Beauvoirs conception of an existentialist ethics from any other ethics, and particularly from a Hegelian ethics, according to her own articulation, is that an existentialist ethics does not aim to surmount this fundamental flaw or failure. At the same time, however, this failure does not imply that an existentialist ethics condemns the human without recourse (11). Rather, in negating or nullifying itself as fulfilled, in rejecting plenitude, human existence creates itself. This self-creation is not a self-overcoming in the communal identity of the atomistic subject subsumed under a universal law, however:
[R]ather than being a Hegelian act of surpassing, it is a matter of a conversion. For in Hegel the surpassed terms are preserved only as abstract moments, whereas we consider that existence still remains a negativity in the positive affirmation of itself. And it does not appear, in its turn, as the term of a further synthesis. The failure is not surpassed, but assumed. Existence asserts itself as an absolute which must seek its justification within itself and not suppress itself, even though it may be lost by preserving itself. To attain his truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it. He rejoins himself only to the extent that he agrees to remain at a distance from himself. (13)

This understanding of a nondialectical notion of conversion, one that cannot be refigured as the term of a further synthesis, resembles Irigarays insistence on an ethics of sexual difference that cannot be conceptualized as simple negation, and that cannot ultimately be sublated into a neutral concept of subjectivity. Irigaray argues against several ways of misappropriating the feminine. The first, which she ascribes to Beauvoir, is the understanding of woman as slave in the master/slave dialectic, as the simple negative of man who, through the discourse of equality, ultimately is subsumed under the universal into a purportedly neutral but actually masculine subject. The second way of misappropriating the feminine is to claim that it has simply been excluded from the historical dialectic. Hegels more powerful misappropriation comes through calling woman the eternal irony of the community because she is not the negative, but, rather, the negating force of the private itself. This identity as the force of the negative makes her both the source of and a continual threat to the community, insofar as she transforms [the states] universal activity into a work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the Family (Hegel 1977, 288). The broader argument I support through this reading of Beauvoir and Irigarays Hegel is that, for Hegel, the feminine is the driving negativity of the dialectic, that which provides for the continual restlessness of the unfolding of Spirit. Both Beauvoir and Irigaray allude to this metaphysical function of particularity

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or the feminine. Against Kelly Oliver (1996), who argues that Hegels discussion of woman in Spirit undermines the entire movement of Hegels project, I would argue that although, as Oliver shows, the feminine cannot be sublated (i.e., brought to consciousness as feminine), this is not, as she claims, because woman is simply excluded from the dialectic. Rather, and I would suggest more insidiously, the feminine is not merely excluded or even repressed, but is domesticated and incorporated as, like Antigone (or the law of the family), the one who provides for the impulsive progress of Spirit; she is eternally present without ever truly entering into the realm of the community. The power involved in the masculine utilization of the feminine is not merely oppressive or repressive; it is productive. Even Hegel, in thus making the oppressor the most complicit in its own oppression, acknowledges the tension between these two opposing roles. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir has not yet embraced a specifically feminist existentialist ethics, though she makes remarks that foreshadow her later concern. Nevertheless, these early passages are illuminating for Beauvoirs appropriation of Hegel in The Second Sex. I contend that in every place that Beauvoir makes reference to Hegel there is an implied imbrication of the conflict illustrated in Hegels discussion of the master/slave dialectic and that between Antigone and Creon in Human and Divine Law. This overlap complicates any reading of Beauvoirs use of the master/slave paradigm. Although Beauvoir does not make the parallel between the master/slave dialectic and the conflict between man and woman explicit, Hegel does, and it is not farfetched to understand her as assuming the parallels Hegel draws. It is the terms of the parallel that are easily confused and thus misleading. Despite the proclaimed differences between Beauvoir and Irigaray6 and the disparity between their readings of the same passages in Hegel, then, Beauvoirs interpretation of Hegel can be illuminated by reading the works of the two thinkers in conjunction with each other.

Against Stoicism
Beauvoir further distinguishes her conception of an ethics of ambiguity from Hegels understanding of the progression of human relations by contrasting her articulation of a conversion to a stoic ethics, perhaps more explicitly to the Stoic stage of Hegels dialectic. Beauvoir calls the practice of stoic indifference in reaction to lifes disappointments a condemnation of that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort to accomplish something. In such a reluctance to make oneself vulnerable, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom . . . emptied of all content and all truth (1948, 29). The phrase emptied of all content and all truth echoes Beauvoirs claim that, for Hegel, particularity is always vacated in favor of universality, ambiguity in favor of conclusiveness.

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Recall that stoicism is the form of consciousness that resolves Hegels master/slave confrontation in the section Self-Consciousness of the Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel, stoicism results from the internalization of the conflict between master and slave, the reconciliation of these two opposing modes of consciousness in the inwardly oriented person of reflection who is master of his or her own desire and who can rise above suffering and despair. An existentialist ethics, by contrast, retains a sense of particularity that refuses to be absorbed into a higher moment: This conversion is sharply distinguished from the Stoic conversion in that it does not claim to oppose to the sensible universe a formal freedom which is without content. To exist genuinely is not to deny this spontaneous movement of my transcendence but only to refuse to lose myself in it (Beauvoir 1948, 1314). Nevertheless, Beauvoir maintains, this retention of particularity or separation does not necessarily imply a social ontology of discrete self-interested individuals whose primary concern is self-preservation. Rather, an ethics of ambiguity will be one which will refuse to deny a priori that separate existants can, at the same time, be bound to each other, that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all (18). She insists:
Contrary to the formal strictness of Kantianism for whom the more abstract the act is the more virtuous it is, generosity seems to us to be better grounded and therefore more valid the less distinction there is between the other and ourself and the more we fulfill ourself in taking the other as an end. That is what happens if I am engaged in relation to others. The Stoics impugned the ties of family, friendship, and nationality so that they recognized only the universal form of man. But man is man only through situations whose particularity is precisely a universal fact. (144)

This passage seems to directly confront and reject Hegels description of legal status as the stage of consciousness that follows the discussion of ethical action symbolized by the Antigone story, a transition Hegel explicitly links to the move from the master/slave dialectic to Stoic consciousness:
Just as [Stoical self-consciousness] proceeded from lordship and bondage, as the immediate existence of self-consciousness, so personality has proceeded from the immediate life of Spirit, which is the universal dominating will of all, and equally their service of obedience. What was for Stoicism only the abstraction of an intrinsic reality is now an actual world. Stoicism is nothing else but the consciousness which reduces to its abstract form the principle of legal status, an independence that lacks the life of Spirit. By its flight from the actual world it attained only to the thought of independence. (1977, 29091)

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Stoic consciousness resolves the master/slave confrontation, just as an egalitarian politics emphasizing the subsumption of atomistic subjects under a universal law succeeds the description of the tension

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between private lives and the polis, divine and state law in ancient Greece. Interestingly, Hegels own critique of Stoic ethics, namely, that this kind of freedom is only an idea of freedom, an abstract essence, rather than the living reality of freedom itself (1977, 122), is very close to Beauvoirs. Beauvoir draws out a parallelism in these two salient moments of confrontation, so that the denial of a Stoic ethics seems to coincide with a refusal to understand community as a collective agreement to relinquish individual freedoms in the name of a greater peace and more long-term rewards (i.e., as atomistic individuals engaged a social contract form of government). Furthermore, Beauvoirs rejection of such an understanding of social relationality has implications for her legacy as a feminist theorist.

Antigone at Work
Beauvoirs interpretation of Hegel can be complicated by examining what aspect of the master/slave dialectic can be most compellingly compared to the conflict between the law of the family (woman) and the law of the state (man). As Irigaray shows, it is impossible to directly associate the master/slave dialectic with the historically determined relationship between men and women because both master and slave are men and because both share the activity of production (albeit one directly, the other indirectly) as opposed to reproduction. This activity of production is what makes men part of political life. If, as Beauvoir correctly perceives in Hegels text, the master/slave conflict parallels the conflict between the law of the state and the law of the family, the feminine must somehow be concealed in the master/slave dialectic in a term that is neither master nor slave. The master/slave dialectic is resolved by a subsumption into first Stoicism (the pure abstraction of the I) and then skepticism, just as the tension between the law of the state and the law of the family is sublated into a stoic or atomistic conception of personhood subsumed under a universal law, which in turn is inverted into the skeptical condition of military tyranny.7 If woman, famously, is the eternal irony of the community, in that she is both the condition of possibility of the perpetuation of the polis and its continual threat, that is, she both provides the driving negativity necessary for the progress of political life and simultaneously jeopardizes its very movement, then she must have been present all along, in a way that is hidden, yet nevertheless essential. I would argue that the feminine can consistently be identified within the master/slave dialectic with the work (die Arbeit, which coincidentally is gendered feminine in German) of the slave, the work that is described as desire held in check (gehemmte Begierde). This work allows the slave to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence (Hegel 1977, 118). Just as Antigone provides the labor of burial that will ensure her brother Polynices a place in the collective memory of the polis, the slaves labor is the negativity

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that forms his self-consciousness. Both moments are parallel in being self-effacing and yet crucial. The labor, thus, plays essentially the same role as Antigone does in the name of the family, only on a prereflective level. Hegel says of the slaves work sie bildet, which Miller has misleadingly translated the work forms and shapes the thing (Hegel 1977, 118). A more accurately creative translation might read she (the work) produces, she constitutes, she provides for culture, much in the same way that the feminine provides the spiritualizing force in the dialectic of man and woman. The parallel irony in this movement of self-consciousness is that it is only through fear that the slave can ultimately see himself as having a mind of his own. Hegels subsequent account bears out this interpretation:
In fashioning the thing, the slaves own negativity, his being-for-self, becomes an object for him only through his setting at nought the existing shape confronting him. But this objective negative moment is none other than the alien being before which it has trembled. Now, however, he destroys this alien negative moment, posits himself as a negative in the permanent order of things, and thereby becomes for himself, someone existing on his own account. (1977, 118)

Thus, the work of the slave, like the feminine, both drives and threatens to destroy the progress of this self-realization. Irigaray often refers to this work of the feminine as a mirroring activity whose presence provides the means for the emergence of masculine self-consciousness. In The Eternal Irony of the Community, Irigaray characterizes Antigones role as the living mirror, the source reflecting the growing autonomy of the self-same (1985a, 221). As mirror, woman cannot even be understood as being engaged in any kind of active relationship with man, at least not a struggle that she can conceptualize as a challenge to his hegemony. In addition to criticizing any conceptualization of man/woman relations in terms of master/slave confrontation, because such a description implies the exigency of a reversal in the terms of subjugation, Irigaray recognizes the identification of the feminine with the work of the slave by calling her a medium of exchange:
There remains, however, the condition of underdevelopment arising from womens submission by and to a culture that oppresses them, uses them, makes of them a medium of exchange with very little profit to them. Except in the quasi monopolies of masochistic pleasure, the domestic labor force, and reproduction. The powers of slaves? Which are not negligible powers, moreover, For where pleasure is concerned, the master is not necessarily well served. Thus to reverse the relation, especially in the economy of sexuality, does not seem a desirable objective. (1985b, 32; emphasis added)

In addition, as Tina Chanter notes, Irigaray is not ready to negate the alterity imposed upon women by the Western philosophical tradition without first acknowledging its unplumbed resources (1995, 81).

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Beyond the Master/Slave Paradigm

It is this alterity that Beauvoir seems to want to negate, and that seems to lend credence to the claim that Beauvoir conceptualizes the feminine as historically in the position of the slave. She writes in The Second Sex, [W]oman is not pure alterity; she is subject in her own right (1989, 247). Just as humans, or man, as she puts it, must negate the temptation to seek plenitude in the universality of the ethical, woman must negate her tendency toward infantility and must grasp for herself the ambiguity of freedom. Beauvoir cautions, however, that in doing so, women too often remain unaware of their deep complicity with power relations as defined by men, for when they gain success, they become as harsh and cruel as their heretofore masters. In a telling, somewhat offhand remark in The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir demonstrates that she is not at all unaware of the dangers involved in characterizing the historical relationship between men and women in the terms of a master/slave dialectic. She notes a deep complicity with the world of men on the part of women who seem to be contesting that very world (1948, 38); she continues, [I]t is a mistake to be astonished, once the structure which shelters them seems to be in danger, to see sensitive, ingenuous, and light-minded women show themselves harder, more bitter, and even more furious or cruel than their masters (38). This statement clearly implies that a reversal in power is not what Beauvoir is calling for. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir reiterates this sentiment:
Whereas in serving the species, the human male also remodels the face of the earth, he creates new instruments, he invents, he shapes the future. In setting himself up as sovereign, he is supported by the complicity of woman herself. For she, too, is an existent, she feels the urge to surpass, and her project is not mere repetition but transcendence toward a different futurein her heart of hearts she finds confirmation of the masculine pretensions. (1989, 64; emphasis added)

Irigaray makes a similar remark in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, but with an important twist. She writes that the creation of a new symbolic order that would respect feminine values in their own right would involve a movement on the part of both men and women, a recognition that conflict and appropriation must give way to coexistence in difference. This may give rise to anxiety and fear, however:
[F]or fear of leaving her a subject-life of her own which would entail his sometimes being her locus and her thing, in a dynamic inter-subjective process, [because he fails to leave her a subjective life, and to be on occasion her place and her thing in an intersubjective dynamic], man remains within a master/ slave dialectic. He is ultimately the slave of a God on whom he bestows the qualities of an absolute master. He is secretly a slave to the power of the mother woman, which he subdues or destroys. (1993b, 10)

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Here, in a more complex reading of the Hegelian master/slave structure, Irigaray goes beyond refusing to identify the slave with the feminine in implying that, by conceptualizing human relationships as fundamentally conflictual, the masculine itself (along with the feminine, which follows its lead) is put into the position of the slave. He is a slave, not to a current social order, but to the imperative that drives him to create that order, an imperative that issues from the God that he creates and from the imaginary feminine that he fears he must subdue in order to attain the political. Again, it is Beauvoirs interpretation of Hegels discussion of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit, this time in The Second Sex, to which we must turn to understand Beauvoirs proximity to Irigaray on this point. Initially, Beauvoir states that Hegel is correct in identifying transcendent subjectivity with masculinity and pure biological repetition with the feminine, insofar as their physiological roles are concerned. The males of almost every natural species, Beauvoir writes, manifest the power of life that bursts forth from them in the act of coitus in an indirect sexuality. The female experiences direct sexuality by virtue of her passivity whereas the male is involved in a cycle of the deferral of immediate satisfaction through the assertion of dominance over her. For this reason, Hegel is right in seeing the subjective element in the male, while the female remains wrapped up in the species (Beauvoir 1989, 23).8 Beauvoir goes on to say, Subjectivity and separateness immediately signify conflict (23). Here is another problem associated with claiming that Beauvoir simply identified the role of women, insofar as she referred to it in Hegelian terms, as that of the slave in the master/slave paradigm. The slave, subservient as he may be, is engaged in conflict to the death. He cannot afford to be passive, for his very life is at stake (Hegel 1977, 114). Indeed, Beauvoir seems to contradict her own statement that [c]ertain passages in the argument employed by Hegel in defining the relation of master to slave apply much better to the relation of man to woman (1989, 64) in the sentences that immediately follow it. Referring, again, to Hegels analysis of Antigone, she writes,
[W]oman is basically an existent who gives Life and does not risk her life; between her and the male there has been no combat. . . . But this relation is to be distinguished from the relation of subjugation because woman also aspires to and recognizes the values that are concretely attained by the male. He it is who opens up the future to which she also reaches out. In truth women have never set up female values in opposition to male values; it is man who, desirous of maintaining masculine prerogatives, has invented that divergence. Men have presumed to create a feminine domainthe kingdom of life, of immanenceonly in order to lock up women therein. But it is regardless of sex that the existent seeks self-justification through transcendencethe very submis-

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sion of women is proof of that statement. What they demand today is to be recognized as existents by the same right as men and not to subordinate existence to life, the human being to its animality. (1989, 6465; emphasis added)

This passage is closer to Irigaray than one might have expected. Although Beauvoir articulates her argument in the language of equal rights, she nonetheless notes that what would be needed for women to be understood as the slaves in the master/slave conflict would be an assertion of distinctively feminine values in opposition to masculine values. Only this kind of creation of values could put women in a relationship of conflict with men such as that presupposed by the master/slave dialectic. As we have already seen, Beauvoir favors a nondialectical ethics. In this passage, Beauvoir is clearly not advocating, as Irigaray has (e.g., 1993a, 1993c, 1996), the creation of a double universal, two subjectivities, masculine and feminine, that would not be in dialectical opposition, that could never eventually be subsumed into a higher synthesis. At the same time, however, Beauvoir demonstrates awareness that, in demanding to be recognized as existents by the same right as men, women cannot currently be understood to be the disadvantaged party within a master/slave paradigm. She thus anticipates Irigaray, though with different motivation and goals, in putting forth the seeds of a non-oppositional model of human relationships and a nondialectical conception of sexual difference and subjectivity. This model is made explicit in Beauvoirs discussion of reciprocity in sexuality:
The dissimilarity that exists between the eroticism of the male and that of the female creates indissoluble problems as long as there is a battle of the sexes; they can easily be solved when woman finds in the male both desire and respect; if he lusts after her flesh while recognizing her freedom, she feels herself to be the essential, her integrity remains unimpaired the while she makes herself object; she remains free in the submission to which she consents. Under such conditions the lovers can enjoy a common pleasure, in the fashion suitable for each, the partners each feeling the pleasure as being his or her own but as having its source in the other. The verbs to give and to receive exchange meanings; joy is gratitude, pleasure is affection. Under a concrete and carnal form there is mutual recognition of the ego and of the other in the keenest awareness of the other and of the ego. (1989, 401)

Beauvoir does not limit her insistence on the irreducibility of sexual difference to the carnal realm, however. At the conclusion of The Second Sex, she writes of a true relationship of recognition between men and women: The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miraclesdesire, possession, love, dream, adventureworked by the division of human beings into two separate categories (731).

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Toward a Nonconflictual Paradigm of Sexual Difference and Intersubjectivity

As Chanter has already demonstrated in great detail, Irigaray turns away from Hegels master/slave dialectic as a means of analyzing the relationship between the masculine and the feminine for the reasons discussed above and instead examines Hegels discussion of Antigone at much greater length than does Beauvoir. Chanter declares (to a certain degree mistakenly, as I have tried to show) that, by taking the Hegelian master/slave dialectic as her paradigm for the male/female relationship . . . Beauvoir assumes, rather than demonstrates, that human relationships are fundamentally conflictual and that they must be thought in terms of an oppressor and an oppressed (1995, 13). I say to a certain degree mistakenly because it is certainly true that Beauvoir assumes, as we have seen above, that men have created a feminine domain in which to confine women, and this presupposes a kind of opposition. However, Beauvoir recognizes that, in order for a paradigm of male/female relationships to be characterized as conflictual, there must exist an equal capacity to conflict on each side. Though she seems to characterize human relationships as fundamentally antagonistic, Beauvoir does recognize that terms upon which equal conflict could take place do not at present exist, at least between the sexes. As Debra Bergoffen puts it, In calling woman the inessential other . . . Beauvoir is making a more radical point. She is not saying that woman has lost the struggle for recognition. She is insisting that woman has been barred from entering the dialectic of reciprocity. One cannot lose a contest if the right to compete is blocked (1997, 176). If anything, it might be easier to argue that such a polemical relationship between men and women is Beauvoirs goal and not her point of departure. She hints that she would have approved of Hegel more had he made the master/slave dialectic a masculine-feminine conflict, by calling the capacity to do so a temptation that he overcame: Test, reward, judge, friend woman truly is in Stendhal what Hegel was for a moment tempted to make of her: that other consciousness which in reciprocal recognition gives to the other subject the same truth that she receives from him (Beauvoir 1989, 247). Margaret Simons explains the difficulty for Beauvoir of conceptualizing male/ female relationships in terms of the master/slave paradigm by pointing to the fact that master and slave, engaged in human activities, are, in Beauvoirs view, essentially similar and yet radically dissimilar to woman, who is confined to a lower, animal-like life (1999, 24; see Beauvoir 1989, 7071, 73, 8388). This lower, animal-like life coincides with what Hegel refers to as the unconscious adherence to the divine law and the law of the family on the part of the woman.9 Her call to duty is to perpetuate the laws of birth and death. In Hegelian terms, she allows man to transcend nature through the spiritualizing funeral rites that earn him a place in the collective memory of the polis.10 She provides what is necessary for man to take his proper place in the polis, whether as a citizen (in

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life) or as a respected memory (in death), without herself ever reaching the requisite kind of consciousness, that is, the ability to render reasons for ones actions, for participation in political life. Bergoffen points out Beauvoirs use of the Heideggerean term Mitsein for intersubjectivity, a usage that is in clear tension with the master/slave paradigm (1997, 163ff.; see Beauvoir 1989, xxiixxiii). The use of Mitsein clearly distinguishes Beauvoir from Sartre, who, in Being and Nothingness, admits of a communal consciousness prior to any self-asserting individuality only in very particular cases, such as the experience of spectators at a theatrical performance, and even then in the very non-Heideggerian vocabulary of a we-subject (Sartre 1956, 534ff.). Whereas Sartre definitively states that this experience could not be the foundation of our consciousness of the Other (536), Beauvoir, by contrast, writes, we is legion and not individual; each one depends upon others, and what happens to me by means of others depends upon me as regards its meaning (Beauvoir 1948, 82). Though Beauvoirs dual allegianceto an at least initially conflictual model of intersubjectivity and a being-with-others in particular (albeit much broader than those Sartre describes) situationsdoes not allow us to classify her as a Heideggerian in terms of her social ontology, the use of Mitsein complicates any reading of Beauvoirs allegiance to Hegel (Bergoffen 1997, 163ff.). Most likely, Beauvoir would have approved this ambiguous reading of her understanding of human existence. As she writes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, distancing herself from the existentialists, to declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won (1948, 129). Bergoffen points out multiple passages from The Ethics of Ambiguity that can be read as supporting a proto-Heideggerian understanding of Mitsein (16678). In striking contrast to Sartres circular movement between the equally untenable poles of sadism and masochism, for example, Beauvoir writes, I concern others and others concern me. There we have an irreducible truth. The me-other relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relation (1948, 72).

Conclusion
As we have seen, Beauvoirs reading of Hegels discussion of Antigone sheds a new light on the assumption that Beauvoirs appropriation of Hegel is limited to an adoption of the master/slave paradigm for human relationships and a critique of the abstraction of his method. Beauvoirs discussion of Hegels Antigone supplements what otherwise might be seen as a superficial employment of Hegelian vocabulary. The same parallels can also be drawn between Irigarays various discussions of the master/slave struggle and her analysis of Hegels Antigone. Irigaray implicitly identifies the feminine, not with the slave, but with the work with which the slave preoccupies himself, work that eventually allows

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him to both overcome the master who is external to himself and to become his own master through a process of necessary sublation.11 Furthermore, she (again implicitly) identifies the work of the master/slave dialectic with what she refers to as the spiritualizing capacity of the feminine. In the Antigone story, it is the law of the family, or the feminine, that both engenders subjects for the polis through birth and ensures their public memory through proper burial at death. In a passage that parallels the role of work in the master/slave dialectic, Hegel writes of the function of the feminine in overcoming the pure natural quality of death, through the conscious action of burial rites:
This universality which the individual as such attains is pure being, death; it is a state which has been reached immediately, in the course of Nature, not the result of an action consciously done. The duty of the member of a Family is on that account to add this aspect, in order that the individuals ultimate being, too, shall not belong solely to Nature and remain something irrational, but shall be something done, and the right of consciousness be asserted in it. (1977, 270)

Because she performs her actions merely in response to duty, however, the woman cannot achieve a moment of self-realization analogous to that of the slave. In performing these rites, the woman becomes not for herself, but only for her masculine other. As Irigaray expresses it, Un pas de plus (one step more/no more) and we see that it is the task of womankind, guardian of the blood tie, to gather man into his final figuration, beyond the turmoil of contingent life and the scattered moments of his Being-there (1985a, 214). Womankind, in turn, lacks the operation of affirming its singular and universalizable link to one as self (224). Hegels slave ultimately is the victor in the struggle for recognition, and this neither is historically true for women nor, as much recent feminist work has argued, is such a reversal necessarily desirable. Nevertheless, both Irigaray and Beauvoir provide a fundamental insight into the reason why the feminine is never simply excluded from the movement of the dialectic. By situating the feminine on the side of the slave, Beauvoir seems to use the analogy to illustrate the way in which woman has traditionally been rendered completely dependent upon man. However, as Hegel shows, the slave through his work ultimately gains recognition in a way that the master can never achieve. Although Beauvoir does not explicitly recognize this aspect of Hegels dialectic, she nonetheless understands that the feminine is not that which has simply been excluded. Rather, the feminine, like the concrete particular human existence whose disappearance Beauvoir is concerned with obviating in The Ethics of Ambiguity, becomes, in Hegel, that silent negating force that propels the dialectic ever forward, the flaw that is the condition of possibility of morality as such, resulting in the restlessness that allows it to count as moral action. To remain consistent with this position, Beauvoir could not, in The Second Sex, be advocating a conception of subjectivity that is the result of a dialectical assimilation of the feminine and the masculine into a neutrality.

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Beauvoir is thus not simply guilty of an unreflective feminist spirit that advocates the dialectical sublation or assimilation of woman into an already existing masculine conception of subjectivity. In spite of the many places where Beauvoir seems to advocate mere inclusion of women with men in a preexisting concept of subjectivity that she would define as the freedom of human existence, it is clear from The Ethics of Ambiguity that Beauvoir does not support a Hegelian notion of dialectical progress. Beauvoirs project in The Ethics of Ambiguity might even best be described as an attempt to undermine the Hegelian delineation of ethical life and its progress into subjectivity. The question that remains is, given the seemingly ineluctable triumph of Hegels dialectical method, such that, as Foucault puts it, we have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us (1972, 235), what political action could be most productive of a positive feminist stance that does not simply get swallowed up in sublation? It seems that two gestures toward answers present themselves: (1) attempting to negotiate the feminine within the dialectic, such that womans position becomes more than just a negating force, and (2) endeavoring to articulate a feminine subjectivity that cannot be reduced to oppositionality (if this is at all possible), namely, a sexual difference that is not articulated solely in terms of conflict and resolution. Beauvoir at least suggests this possibility to which Irigaray explicitly points us. Although the conclusion of The Second Sex ends with the thought of abolish[ing] the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, Beauvoir contends, nonetheless, that sexual difference will continue to generate the contradictions that give rise to meaningful human existence. These contradictions are not conflicts; rather, they put the flesh in opposition to the spirit, the instant to time, the swoon of immanence to the challenge of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of forgetting . . . in sexuality will always be materialized the tension, the anguish, the joy, the frustration, and the triumph of existence (Beauvoir 1989, 731). In other words, oppositionality arises not out of one-on-one human relations, but out of the dimensions and discords of human existence itself, characterized primarily as the tension between immanence and transcendence. In a generous reading, one can interpret Beauvoir, like Irigaray, as understanding sexual difference to be indispensable to a theory of intersubjectivity. Indeed, the final sentence of The Second Sex affirms brotherhood between men and women by and through their natural differentiation (1989, 732). Notes
1. I have rendered the title of Hegels Phnomenologie des Geistes, which Frechtman translates as Phenomenology of Mind, as Phenomenology of Spirit for the sake of consistency with the rest of this paper. 2. See, for example, Chanter (1995, 5573), Lloyd (1986, 8793), and Mackenzie (1986, 146f.).

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3. She has to enable man to sublate a universality that smacks too much of the natural, or so it would seem, by affirmingfor this is pure truth restoredthat death is merely the peace of/and universality of the conscious essence of self. Man is still subject to (natural) death, of course, but what matters is to make a movement of the mind out of this accident that befalls the single individual and, in its raw state, drives consciousness out of its own country, cutting off that return into the self which allows it to become self-consciousness. Just as man must strive to make this negativity into an ethical action by sacrificing his life for the cityin war for exampleso woman must be that external and effective mediation that reconciles the dead man with himself by taking upon herself the operation of destruction that the becoming of spirit cannot manage without (Irigaray 1985a, 215). 4. [The ethical essence] spontaneously splits itself into two. By this act it gives up the specific quality . . . of being the simple certainty of immediate truth, and initiates the division of itself into itself as the active principle, and into the reality over against it, a reality which, for it, is negative. By the deed, therefore, it becomes guilt. . . . Innocence, therefore, is merely non-action, like the mere being of a stone, not even that of a child. As regards content, however, the ethical action contains the moment of crime (Hegel 1977, 282). 5. On the formal side it is the conflict of the ethical order and self-consciousness with unconscious Nature and the contingency stemming from Nature. On the side of content, it is the clash between divine and human law (Hegel 1977, 285). Womankind . . . changes by intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end . . . and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the family (288). 6. See Irigaray (1991, 3033). See also Chanter (1995) for an excellent elucidation of Irigarays reading of Hegels Antigone, with contrast to Beauvoirs appropriation of Hegel. This paper seeks not to add to Chanters thorough and excellent analysis of Irigarays reading of Hegel, but to enrich her reading of Beauvoirs Hegel (which is not the primary focus of her work) and to show how Beauvoir and Irigaray may be brought in greater proximity than has been heretofore thought possible. 7. For more on this parallel, see Harris (1997, 230ff.). 8. Taking statements like these out of context is problematic, however. In Gendering the Body: Beauvoirs Philosophical Contribution, Judith Butler convincingly shows that for Beauvoir the body is always a historical idea rather than a natural fact; that is, for the body to appear within a field of intelligibility, it must first be signified within an historically specific discourse of meaning (1992, 254). Beauvoir is repeating the culturally and historically specific discourse of early biology. As Thomas Laqueur shows in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, [S]ometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented whereby the reproductive organs of men and women were judged to be the foundation of incommensurable difference (1990, 149). One of the manifestations of the newly created female sex (as opposed to classifying woman as a lesser man) was the association of femininity with passivity (150). Laqueurs argument for an epistemological and broadly political explanation for this development is compelling. As Beauvoir writes in Destiny: The Data of Biology, human beings become self-conscious through embodiment, and specifically it is as a body subject to taboos, to laws, that the subject is conscious of himself and attains fulfilment (1989, 36). She categorically rejects any comparative system that assumes the existence of a natural hierarchy or scale of values (33). 9. Irigaray writes: And the fact that, ideally, each is both unconscious and conscious does not in practice prevent the conscious from being identified as masculine, whereas the unconscious remains fixed on the female side, repressed as a result of the impossibility of differentiating the maternal (1985a, 224). 10. This universality which the individual as such attains is pure being, death; it is a state which has been reached immediately, in the course of Nature, not the result of an action consciously done. The duty of the member of a Family is on that account to add this aspect, in order that the individuals ultimate being, too, shall not belong solely to Nature and remain something irrational, but shall be something done, and the right of consciousness be asserted in it (Hegel 1977, 270). 11. Antigone is silenced in her action. Locked upparalyzed, on the edge of the city. Because she is neither master nor slave (Irigaray 1993b, 119).

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