Since Eva Lundgren-Gothlin’s "Sex and Existence" and Nancy Bauer’s "Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism", several philosophical interpreters of "The Second Sex" have shared the assumption that "The Second Sex" is Hegelian and that “the Hegel question” — namely, the debate about whether and to what extent Beauvoir’s account of woman as the Other is indebted to Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic — is best answered by reading Beauvoir through “French Hegel”, and especially through the reading of Alexandre Kojève.

This lecture argues on textual, conceptual, and historical grounds that Beauvoir’s political project in "The Second Sex" is anti-Hegelian, sharing methodological and political commitments with the immanent critique of religion in Feuerbach and Marx and the interwar 'turn to the concrete'. As such, it presents Beauvoir as a ‘Mistress of Suspicion’, who turned to myth to unveil the values myths impose.

Kate Kirkpatrick is Fellow in Philosophy at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses primarily on French phenomenology and existentialism, feminism, and philosophical and religious ethics. She is the author of Sartre on Sin (OUP, 2017), Sartre and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Mystical Sources of Existentialist Thought (with George Pattison, Routledge, 2018), and the internationally acclaimed biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming Beauvoir: A Life, which has been translated into over a dozen languages. 

The lecture is organised within the framework of the project Beyond Truth and Lies. Conspiracy Theories, Post-truth, and the Conditions of Public Debate with financial support from the Krookska Foundation.