The Lived Body is not One's Own Body: Beauvoir or the Appearance of the Body in "The Second Sex"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15691/0718-5448Vol6Iss2a425Keywords:
Lived body, Corps propre, Simone de Beauvoir, Post-Kantians, PhenomenologyAbstract
Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, claims that “woman is her body as man is his, but [that] her body is something other than her”. Arises in this sentence – as well as in the history of philosophy – a scission within the lived body. To be my body does not mean anymore that this body that I am is entirely mine— and the lived body is a corps propre. Hence the question that one will raise here : is this alienation within the lived body not the very condition of its manifestation as a material body? This article will first go back to the sources of the concept of “lived body” (Leib) in Post-Kantian philosophers, in order to claim that the body only appears as “mine”, in the history of philosophy, insofar as it disappears as “body”. This will lead us to question the (re)-apparition of the body in The Second Sex, and more precisely in Beauvoir’s description of the menstrual cycle.
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