Social Subjectivity in Beauvoir: Elements for a Phenomenology of Domination
摘要
If Beauvoir has done a phenomenology of political life, it is partly by providing, in The Second Sex, theoretical elements for a phenomenology of domination. Beauvoir indeed redefines subjectivity and subjective life as implying—in themselves—relations with others that are relations of domination, working as an objectification. This reevaluation of subjective life occurs through a twofold movement specific to Beauvoir’s methodology. A first movement goes from subjectivity to objectivity, explaining how the dominated subject can find himself fixed in the objective position, lost in objectivity. A second movement returns from objectivity to subjectivity, describing how the dominated subject still lives this objective situation. In this sense, Beauvoir’s phenomenology of domination has both a theoretical interest—opening phenomenological method and concepts to social and political themes—and a political one—struggling against the way lived experiences of dominated subjects are structurally silenced by their objectification and contributing to their (re)-subjectivation.