from Hypatia Volume 13, Number 1Generosity: Between Love and Desire
ROSALYN DIPROSE
Hypatia vol. 13, no. 1 (Winter 1998) © by Rosalyn Diprose
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''Safe sex'' discourse attempts to protect women from dangers assumed inherent in erotic life, such as domination, submissiveness, and loss of freedom and self-control. However, Beauvoir's and Merleau-Ponty's revision of Sartre's ontology suggests that erotic life involves a kind of generosity that transforms existence; sex neither liberates personal existence nor poses a necessary threat to women's freedom. I also reconsider the conditions under which sex is assumed to involve a violation of being.
Over the past ten years, an alliance has developed between so-called radical feminism and the emerging discourse of safe sex. The discourse of safe sex advocates protection against the dangers of disease thought to be inherent in abandoning oneself to the body of a stranger. Protection is possible, it is claimed, through the familiarity and security of monogamy or by erecting a physical barrier against the body of the other. Radical feminism is also concerned with the dangers of sex, in particular the ''dis-ease'' experienced by women through our sexual objectification and subordination within patriarchy. Protection from the harm sex seems to pose to our physical, psychic and social well-being can be secured, it is said, through the promotion of more egalitarian love relations and by erecting a legislative barrier against practices, such as pornography, that eroticize the domination and subordination of women. My concern here is not so much with the discourse of safe sex as it pertains to AIDS as with the way this discourse has rekindled a broader ideal of women's safety from the perceived dangers of erotic life.
Concern about the sexual objectification of women is, of course, as old as feminism itself. What is relatively new is an anxiety among radical feminists about the way some women, and worse, some women who call themselves feminists, valorize the objectification of women in the name of women's sexual liberation. This anxiety is well documented in the 1990 anthology The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism (Leidholdt and Raymond 1990). Here Catharine MacKinnon, for example, equates the opposition to her own antipornography campaign by groups such as FACT (Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force) with the death of feminism as she knows it (MacKinnon 1990, 9). Such groups, she argues, in thinking that sexual liberation can be achieved for women by appropriating rather than opposing the ''visual violation'' of women, fail to recognize that ''misogyny is sexual and that sexuality, socially organized, is deeply misogynist'' (13). Sheila Jeffreys defends her ideal of safe sex by mounting a similar argument, not just against feminist defense of pornography but also against practices, such as lesbian sadomasochism and butch femme role playing, which she says eroticize domination and submission (Jeffreys 1990, 25, 133). Unlike MacKinnon, Jeffreys does not think all socially organized sexuality is deeply misogynist; but she does suggest that insofar as women derive pleasure from sexual practices that rely on a power imbalance, this marks the degree to which we have internalized our oppression (133). Thus, ''keeping women and children safe'' (25) is not just a matter of erecting a protective barrier through legislation; it also requires working toward a more egalitarian sexuality in lesbian as well as heterosexual relations. This can be achieved, Jeffreys says, by women's exorcising from ourselves any negative sexual feelings (those associated with submissiveness in sex) (26) in favor of positive sexual feelings (134), although the origin of these remains unclear. Wendy Stock is also concerned with eradicating any power imbalance from sexual relations without abandoning sex altogether. Her formula for safe sex involves therapeutic measures, which, by helping a woman ''experience and believe in her own body integrity,'' would bring her sexual pleasure under her control rather than her partner's and so thereby achieve a ''sexuality based not on a submission/domination dynamic but on mutual exchange between equals'' (Stock 1990, 152-53).
It is not my intention to repeat the well-rehearsed argument that radical feminism tends to rely on a simplistic and essentialist model of male sexuality as inherently aggressive and women's sexuality as universally positive.1 In any case, the positions just outlined add a complication to the radical feminism of the 1970s. Safe sex for women, if it can be achieved at all, seems to require protection not only from men but also from other women and even from ourselves. But perhaps more problematic is that these radical feminist ideals of safety and mutual exchange are shared by the new liberation discourses they are designed to oppose. Berkeley Kaite (1987), for example, in supporting pornography as a means of transgressing restrictive categories of gender identity, relies on the surprising claim that pornography involves a mutual exchange of looks between the consumer and the pornographic model. While more sensitive to the relationship between sex and power, Chantal Nadeau (1995), in a critical appropriation of Deleuze's analysis of masochism, bases her qualified support for lesbian sadomasochism on the claim that it involves a contract giving women freedom and control over their sexuality. Rather than assuming that sexual liberation for women can be achieved by appropriating the images of women's sexual subordination, and without dismissing the labor of feminism in exposing and opposing sexual violence against women, as some of the new sexual liberation discourses tend to do, I want to take advantage of that labor to question the current discourse of safe sex in both its liberatory and prohibitive forms. I want to question the ideals of self-control and a mutual exchange apparent in both, while still accounting for the feminist concern that sex can be violent and a violation of being.
There are at least two aspects of the modified radical feminist position I find disturbing. First, insofar as it is anti-sex (MacKinnon) or posits a genuine love against a sexual desire contaminated by patriarchal representations, it is thoroughly entrenched in an anti-sex tradition that begins with Western philosophy itself. Plato, it is well known, based his epistemology on privileging spiritual love over physical desire, and a similar valorization of love over sex can be found in the tradition of egalitarian political philosophies from the eighteenth century to today. This tradition is anti-sex insofar as it is anti-body, promoting a politics of immunization, through egalitarian love and friendship, against the threat the body seems to pose to freedom and autonomy. As I will go on to argue with reference to Sartre, however, for all their talk of freedom and autonomy, these anti-sex discourses are no less anti-women than the sexual libertarianism set up against them. Second, insofar as radical feminism proposes the possibility of safe sex, through self-control and body integrity or by erecting a barrier between women and others, it lacks a certain generosity. Not a generosity that would ignore sexual violence or endorse women's giving themselves to others at any cost, but a generosity foreshadowed in Beauvoir's anti-individualism, although it remains underdeveloped in her work. A generosity of mind and body, love and desire, which undermines those distinctions and which, by assuming the ambiguity of existence, views the erotic encounter as one means of extending a woman's own existence through others without entrapment.2
I begin with Sartre because, perhaps surprisingly, his philosophy of love, desire, and freedom in Being and Nothingness shares all the sentiments of the radical feminism I have outlined. 3 It therefore allows me not only to indicate the extent to which the contemporary discourses of safe sex repeat an older logic, but to point to what may be problematic about that logic and its privileging of love over sex. More positively, the revision of Sartre's ontology by others in the existential phenomenological tradition, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty in particular, provides a way through some of these difficulties.
Sartre's discussion of love and sexual desire is framed by his concern with the maintenance of individual freedom. Freedom refers to the human capacity to constitute existence through practical consciousness, or the for-itself. Through our conscious embodied projects we not only constitute existence outside us by introducing form, meaning, and our purposes to being-in-itself, but we also transcend what we are (our being-in-itself) toward future possibilities. This freedom of self-realization is possible because no essence grounds our existence. But absolute freedom is impossible: we can only choose to be; we cannot be the foundation of our own existence.
If, in considering the relation between freedom and sexuality, we focus on Sartre's comments about holes and the slimy toward the end of Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1989, 600-615), as has often been the case in feminist scholarship on Sartre,4 we will encounter the kind of misogyny about which MacKinnon is concerned. Sartre equates ''slime'' (that which threatens to engulf the for-itself) with feminine passivity, and he likens ''holes'' (that which appeals to our freedom to fill up existence) with the ''obscenity of the feminine sex'' (613). For Sartre, it would seem, women's sexed bodies both ground and threaten man's freedom. If we take these comments in the context of Sartre's earlier, more considered discussion of the body and sexual desire, however, we find something less misogynistic and more consistent with the ideals of radical feminism. There we find that sexual relations are a problem for Sartre insofar as they compromise the freedom of both the self and the other, whatever their sex. It is also on the basis of this concern for freedom that Sartre condemns both sadism and masochism, and that love shines through as the most likely means by which the freedom of both the self and the other can be preserved within concrete relations. However, this privileging of love is supported by an ontology which, while not blatantly anti-women, is somewhat misanthropic, an ontology where the freedom of the for-itself seeks protection from the apparent danger of both the freedom of others and the weight of one's own body. It is in this ontology, which is both individualistic and anti-body, that a logic of safe sex is grounded.
Sartre's ontology is not obviously individualistic in that while the self is for-itself it is also always for-others: others have the freedom to make of us what they will. However, our being-for-others is exclusively in the mode of objectification: ''my being-as-object is the only possible relation between me and the Other'' (Sartre 1989, 365). While I cannot know or, therefore, capture the other's view of me, their look nevertheless has the affect of transforming my project from being-for-itself to being-for-itself through the eyes of the other. My freedom is alienated in concrete encounters with others, and this claim, combined with the assumption that interpersonal relations are based on objectification, implies an original separation between two objectifying consciousnesses. So while Sartre is not individualistic insofar as he claims, by way of occasional qualification, that it is not the case that I first exist, then move toward the other (363, for example), he is individualistic in the sense that all concrete relations with others are hostile relations of objectification between centers of an impossible freedom. It is within this conflict between competing looks that desire and love arise.
Desire--and by desire Sartre means sexual desire--belongs to one of two general modes of response to the alienation of my freedom in the other's look. Through desire, I defend myself from the other's freedom by objectifying them in return (Sartre 1989, 363). This desire is of a body for a body. And just as Sartre is not obviously individualistic he is not obviously anti-body. Indeed, he devotes a significant portion of Being and Nothingness to rescuing the body from its secondary status and givenness in Cartesian dualism and biological determinism (303-60). In his general discussion of the body for-itself and for-others, Sartre establishes a model of the body as a socially situated structure variously lived by oneself and variously understood by others depending on the situation and the project at hand. This has positive consequences for Sartre's model of sexual desire, to a point. It allows him to claim that sexuality is an ontological rather than a biological question (384). This means, first, that sexual desire is not determined by the body's facticity (383): it does not originate in an instinct, a sex organ, or an aim set by the sex of the body. Rather, desire is an embodied project of a body in situation. Therefore my desire does not depend on any essential masculine or feminine aim but on how I live my embodied projects. Second, sexuality is an ontological rather than a biological question in the sense that sexual desire does not arise in a single body that seeks the satisfaction of pleasure for its own sake (384) but by virtue of being a body for others. I have already said that desire arises in the wake of the other's objectification of me. The point here is that if desire is my response, what I desire is a body, and I desire a particular body not because of its facticity (its sex or what it wears, for example). Rather, I desire a particular body as a body in situation where its significance for me is given by its attitude toward the world (386) (which would include objectification of me) and my interpretation of that attitude. For Sartre, I have no sexuality outside of this ontological structure of a lived body-for-itself-for-others. In this way, Sartre gives the body its due in desire without resorting to a biological determinism, which would either privilege heterosexuality or consign men to sexual domination and women to sexual submission.
In the end, however, Sartre's model of sexual desire does betray an anti-body logic: we find that what is wrong with desire is that it is too embodied. While desire may begin as a body-in-situation for another body-in-situation, it also begins and ends in trouble. According to Sartre, in desire, and unlike in any other project, consciousness is troubled, clogged, or overtaken by one's body; and the for-itself, and hence one's freedom, is compromised (Sartre 1989, 387-89). The motive of desire is to protect one's freedom by possessing the freedom of the other. Desire attempts to do this by reducing the other's body, by means of the caress, from a body-in-situation to flesh (390-91). The caress strips the other's body of its situation, its meaning, its projects, its future; in short, its social dimension and its freedom. And the other's body is reduced to flesh not just for me but, more important, for the other. If I am to possess the other's freedom and so protect my own, what matters is that, as the result of my caress, the other lives the body as flesh, as inert matter, which is no longer transcended toward possibilities. The problem with all this, according to Sartre, is that in the process of eliminating the other's freedom I sacrifice my own. I can only compel the other to feel the passivity of fleshness if I imply my own fleshness; if my caress also incarnates my own consciousness, reduces me to flesh, and deadens my possibilities (390, 395).
Sartre's purpose in describing desire is to show how it fails as a project of the for-itself to be its own foundation. But as this failure is inherent in all concrete relations with others, it is not my interest here. What is interesting, and problematic, about Sartre's view of desire is that in its consummation in the sexual encounter it fails to achieve anything at all. Desire paralyzes, and we are left with mere flesh enjoying flesh, a state of the human body that Sartre, in his discussion of the body-for-others in general, reserves for the corpse (Sartre 1989, 344). In comparison to any other body state, including hunger, desire is deadly: all freedom is lost in favor of a double submissiveness and passivity. And it is not the case that Sartre would prefer that one party's freedom remain alive in the face of the other's sexual submissiveness. Such a situation would be either sadistic or masochistic.
Sadism is the attempt to possess the other as flesh without returning the favor (399).5 Sartre is contemptuous of sadism for its violence, its nonreciprocity, and the sadist's self-delusion in assuming a freedom that in reality is enslaved. Masochism is where I give up my freedom entirely, allowing the other to make me exist as flesh (377-79). For Sartre, masochism is the ultimate vice: it is a kind of submission saturated with guilt for the way the masochist consents to absolute alienation in the other, allows the other to dominate, is fascinated by their own objectness for others, and loves the failure even to achieve these limited aims.
While sadism and masochism are embodied projects that should be avoided for the domination and submission they promote, desire, because it is too embodied, is not a project at all. Sartre may have personal grounds for this belief, but he has no ontological grounds. In the context of his general account of the body-for-itself-for-others, the only grounds for assuming that sexual desire is any more embodied or any less open to possibilities than any other project directed toward the world of others would be if Sartre himself privileges a kind of disembodied consciousness. And this would appear to be what he does. Despite all his work in arguing that the body is always lived as a body in situation open to possibilities, his reservations about desire rest on certain assumptions. The first is that to the extent that desire is a project directed toward the other's body and one's own body becoming flesh, this is not a project of self-realization that opens possibilities. The second is that the freedom of every other project depends on a body that, while it is a center of reference for my project, is only a contingency that consciousness transcends. Or, as Sartre puts it,
In desire the body, instead of being only the contingency which the For-itself flees toward possibilities which are peculiar to it, becomes at the same time the most immediate possible of the For-itself. Desire is not only desire of the Other's body; it is--within the unity of a single act--the non-thetically lived project of being swallowed up in the body. Thus the final state of sexual desire can be swooning. (Sartre 1989, 389)Insofar as Sartre is anti-sex, this proposition rests on the assumption that the body is inherently passive and the locus of submission, and that freedom is won only if I avoid the other's touch so that my own body stays in the background as that which consciousness transcends.
This fear of one's own body and the proximity of the other's body is doubled by Sartre's privileging of love over desire. Love belongs to a second mode of response to my alienation in the other's look. While desire seeks to protect the self by negating the other's freedom, love accepts the other's freedom but attempts to take it over (Sartre 1989, 364). In love therefore, I do not objectify the other, but turn myself into an object for the other's fascination. Not a fleshy object that would absorb the other's body, but a center of freedom that would absorb the other's subjectivity intact. So, as the other's object, I must be freely chosen: as it is the other's freedom I am after, this must be preserved (367). And while I am the other's object, I am not just any object among others: I demand to be the privileged occasion of the other's love, the goal toward which all the other's transcending, meaning-giving activity is ultimately directed (367-68).
While love fails to assimilate the other in this way (for reasons I do not have the space to pursue) it does not necessarily fail to preserve freedom per se, if the other, in discovering the freedom inherent in my demand to be loved, demands to be loved by me in return (Sartre 1989, 374). In this mutual demand to be loved, each gives the self to the other (and hence alienates their own freedom), but only in order to found the other's existence (376). Hence the meaning-giving activity, the freedom, and the otherness of each is preserved. This for Sartre is the basis of the joy of love (371): one's own existence is given meaning and value by the other while the other's otherness and my own otherness are spared. Indicating Sartre's anti-body logic, however, this mutual love of two subjectivities is only possible if the other, in demanding to be loved in return, presents the self as a subject rather than a body-object (374-75). As there must be nothing in the demand to be loved that invites possession, the body (which by definition invites possession as flesh) must not become an explicit theme. Sartre privileges a kind of disembodied love. Just as, in desire, both subjects fail to become their own foundation, in love ''at least each one has succeeded in escaping the danger of the Other's freedom'' by experiencing the other's subjectivity (376).
Sartre's ontology would seem to provide all the ingredients for a radical feminism and its ideal of safety in erotic relations. It offers condemnation of both domination and submission in relations with others; a distaste for the sexual encounter insofar as this implies passivity, possession, and a loss of freedom; and a valorization of love as a reciprocal relation in which freedom is preserved. All of this comes, however, at the cost of appreciating the subtleties and complexities of our erotic life and of our relations with others in general. Sartre (and, one suspects, radical feminism) begins with the problematic assumption that relations with others are based on objectification and that through our objectification of others and ourselves, either the body reigns as flesh--in which case domination or submission follow--or consciousness puts its body and that of others at a distance and freedoms are preserved. But this love and its freedom are fraudulent, however egalitarian they may appear, and not just because they are based on a dubious individualism and mind-body dualism. To the extent that Sartre's model of sexual desire can be considered misogynistic when he associates the passivity of flesh with the female body and women's sexuality, his model of love is also misogynistic. Any egalitarian project based on accepting the tradition that associates the body with passivity, submission, and femininity and that seeks to distance itself from this body and its associations entrenches rather than challenges those assumptions. As Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of love suggests, an ideal of love that follows this logic does not even succeed in its aim of protecting women from domination.
Although she never confronts Sartre directly and although her own analysis is not without contradiction, Beauvoir challenges the individualism of Sartre's ontology, its anti-body logic, and the ideal of protection it implies. First, however, her most obvious departure from Sartre's existentialism, as others have elaborated in detail, is the way she adds consideration of women's social and economic situation to her analyses of relations between the sexes. And this is no less true of her accounts of love and desire. In contrast to a radical feminist position that includes the same considerations, however, Beauvoir's position is that love, far from the answer to a woman's problems, may actually be her undoing.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir suggests that to the extent that women do not enjoy the same social and economic freedoms as men (or in ontological terms, because Man is the Subject and Woman the Other), women's subjectivity or freedom is socially frustrated or forbidden (Beauvoir 1972, 16, 641). If denied the possibility of self-realization in projects directed toward a world, a woman may seek this in love: either through narcissism, where her subjectivity is directed toward herself, the one self who won't deny it (641), or through a man, whose subjectivity already finds expression in the world. Hence, says Beauvoir, under conditions of social and economic inequality and insofar as love means preserving freedom in the wake of the other's look, women and men approach love differently (652-53). A man demands to be loved in order to take possession of a woman, and in this he gives up nothing for her. But a woman, who thinks she has little freedom to relinquish, will give herself entirely to a man in the faith that he, through his projects, his freedom, will justify her existence. This is a tyrannical gift in which the woman abandons herself to bodily immanence (or flesh, in Sartre's terms) and the stagnation this implies, and demands that her lover save her through his power and freedom (666-68). Women's love, under such conditions, is a generosity born of desperation, and the resulting love relation merely compounds the inequality from which it springs.
I can find two paths out of this destructive generosity in Beauvoir's work. The first is the obvious one, consistent with radical feminism and with Sartre's account of love, although borrowing something from Hegel's ontology. Beauvoir posits a ''genuine love'' based on mutual recognition of two freedoms, in which the existence of both is justified through giving the self to the other while remaining transcendent (Beauvoir 1972, 677). But she adds that if this genuine love is to be realized between men and women, it requires women's economic independence (678) and men's learning to give of themselves. Although adding these considerations to Sartre's ideal of love is important for casting suspicion on the egalitarian aspirations of his account, Beauvoir's account is no less empty and no less idealistic. ''Genuine love'' would be the profit at the end of what seems to be an endless struggle. Not only is love not part of the struggle but, as Beauvoir herself admits in her discussion of the independent woman, it is not necessarily won in the end (695-99). Nor is it clear how one would distinguish between what is genuine and what is bad faith in love--bad faith being a woman's deluding herself into taking for love what is really a man's desire (669). Finally, taken by itself and grounded as it is in the ideal of transcending bodily immanence, Beauvoir's genuine love is based on the same kind of anti-body logic and distancing from the other as Sartre's, and thus comes with all the difficulties that distancing involves.
There is, however, a second, more interesting path out of woman's overly generous love that is woven through Beauvoir's analysis. Against the generosity of women's subordination and the ideal of authentic love, she proposes a generosity born of flesh. What Beauvoir consistently objects to about ideals of love (including Sartre's, one presumes, and perhaps even her own) is the way they separate consciousness from flesh and seek to protect the self from the other. Love at a distance is a fantasy, she says; it becomes passionate only when carnally realized (Beauvoir 1972, 654). The problem with man's approach to desire is that in his effort to maintain self-control, he asks woman to make an object of herself while he hesitates to become flesh (413, 423). Woman, on the other hand, being more often positioned as the body-object as a consequence of man's assuming his autonomous subject position at her expense, is more sensitive to the fraudulence of separating subject and object, consciousness and body, spirit and flesh (697). Woman, therefore, has less trouble becoming flesh (or woman is more ''psychosomatic,'' as Beauvoir sometimes puts it).
While it is questionable whether we can confidently distinguish between men and women on these grounds, at least in any essential sense, it is reasonable to suggest that insofar as ideals of love, such as Sartre's, deny the body and that of the other, the denial has no ontological foundation. On the basis of the impossibility of denying the body, Beauvoir moves to a more general formula for the possibility of erotic generosity. By virtue of a mutual generosity of body and soul, I can become flesh through the other's body and achieve a dynamic, ecstatic unity in which I move beyond myself without negating the other's alterity (Beauvoir 1972, 422). By flesh, Beauvoir cannot mean the corpse like flesh that Sartre distinguishes from the body in situation. She does not seem to hold to this distinction. Becoming flesh does not abolish the situation, nor, therefore, the social, as it does for Sartre. Rather, it creates the situation by, as Beauvoir puts it, abolishing the singularity of the moment, of oneself and the other (417).6 For Beauvoir, the erotic encounter and its ''freedom'' are not about self-control or body integrity. On the contrary, they are about the ''body at risk'' as Debra Bergoffen puts it (1997, 158).7 Taking this risk through eroticism is generous because it involves opening the lived body to the other and because it is, by virtue of this, creative in transforming the other's embodied situation and hence existence through a self-metamorphosis which, if we set aside Beauvoir's motif of unity, does not reduce the other to the self. Becoming flesh is a project directed toward and beyond the other, a giving without calculation, which nevertheless gets something in return through the future possibilities it opens.
In finding something generous in the erotic encounter, Beauvoir is gesturing toward an ontology that, while indebted to Sartre's, challenges his individualism and anti-body logic. She puts this ontology most succinctly as follows:
The erotic experience is one that most poignantly discloses to human beings the ambiguity of their condition; in that they are aware of themselves as flesh and as spirit, as other and as subject. (Beauvoir 1972, 423)While Sartre insists, with little justification, that in my concrete relations with others I am either flesh, without any possibilities at all, or transcendent consciousness, which leaves its old body behind, Beauvoir, at least here, questions this distinction. And because, for Sartre, relations with others are based on objectification, I am only aware of being either an independent subject or a dependent object. While, strictly speaking, I am always both subject and object, Sartre's descriptions of concrete relations suggest that, for him, I cannot live both at the same time, nor can I tolerate a threat to my independent subjectivity. Beauvoir, on the other hand, from her discussion of freedom in The Ethics of Ambiguity, suggests that the posture of independent subjectivity is not only a pretense ived at the expense of others on whom, in reality, I depend, it is also a perversion of freedom (Beauvoir 1994, 63).8 For Beauvoir, I am for-myself as a consequence of being-for-others, rather than the converse. Hence the freedom of self-realization through projects depends on the freedom of others and must be directed toward that end (60, 70-72). Therefore a generous passion does not belong to someone who seeks to protect her subject position; nor can it be directed toward one who claims absolute independence (66-67). Generosity belongs to those who would open themselves to others without viewing the other's alterity, hence their capacity to transform my own existence, as necessarily having ''hostile implications'' (Beauvoir 1972, 422).
On the basis of the ambiguity of the human condition, rather than some as-yet unrealized egalitarian ideal, Beauvoir also questions the assumption that I am either simply dominant or submissive in an erotic encounter and, therefore, that I can separate ''positive'' from ''negative'' feelings in a way that Jeffreys would like. In her discussion of the way masochism is usually equated with femininity, Beauvoir suggests that attributing erotic value to pain does not necessarily imply submission or a masochistic acceptance of absolute alienation and servitude (Beauvoir 1972, 418-20). Nor is inflicting pain exclusively masculine; nor is it a sadistic attempt to destroy the other by possessing them as inert flesh. Rather, she argues, pain always accompanies ''bodies that delight to be bodies for the joy they give each other'' (418). This is the pain of transfiguration inherent in the erotic encounter: the pain of tearing away from self, as Beauvoir puts it; of moving beyond self through the other and the ''bending'' (rather than destruction) of the other that this movement involves. Sex is not safe; not, as Sartre would have it, because sex necessitates the subordination of the self to the other, and not because it shuts down possibilities in the passivity of flesh. On the contrary, sex is not safe precisely insofar as it opens the self to indeterminate possibilities by exploiting the ambiguity of being a body-for-itself-for-others.
None of this abandons the consideration of women's social and economic subordination to men. Beauvoir is aware, for example, that insofar as our social situation promotes man as the subject and woman the other, a woman is in danger of feeling positioned as object in an erotic encounter with a man at the expense of her subjectivity (Beauvoir 1972, 423). However, ''passivity is an equivocal concept'' and, provided the relation is consensual, a woman always has the power of retaining the ambiguity of being both subject and object, however submissive she may appear (419). Beauvoir's second important qualification about the social objectification of women is the suggestion that ''the very difficulty of [the woman's] position protects her from the traps into which the male readily falls; he is an easy dupe of the deceptive privileges accorded him by his aggressive role'' (423). That is, because a woman, as a consequence of the social situation, is only too aware that she is for-herself only by virtue of being for-others, then she is less likely to be deceived into assuming absolute independence from others. Such absolute independence denies the ambiguity of existence, and in doing so, not only denies the other's possibilities but cuts off one's own. Beauvoir thinks that just as it would be a mistake for women to affirm images of absolute subordination, so would it be an error to aspire toward this deceptive autonomy. While becoming flesh through the other's body may be unsafe for the possibilities of moving beyond oneself that it opens, feigning independence, whether through a fantastic love or through self-control and body integrity in sex, would be counterproductive for the possibilities it closes off.
In presenting the possibility of erotic generosity in this way, I have skirted the contradictions and difficulties in Beauvoir's account. Her account is plagued by an ambivalence toward the body, particularly women's bodies, which, as I have indicated, is present in her idea of ''genuine love'' and which, as others have argued, pervades her whole philosophy.9 However, to the extent that she does point to a generosity of flesh, this indicates an ontology that departs from Sartre's individualism and from a Hegelian ideal of unity and moves beyond the anti-body logic of both.10 Insofar as she has a different understanding of alienation and of the role of the body in sexuality and other relations, Beauvoir does not so much betray a debt to Lacanian psychoanalysis, as Toril Moi argues, but some common ground with Merleau-Ponty.11 While her generosity toward Sartre seems to have no bounds, suggesting as she does that everything she says is already in his work, her generosity toward Merleau-Ponty is of the less desperate kind. Both lend to and borrow from the work of the other in raising the possibility of a generosity of flesh.
For Merleau-Ponty, this lending to and borrowing from the bodies of others is a generosity lying not just at the core of the erotic encounter but at the heart of existence itself (Merleau-Ponty 1962).12 Merleau-Ponty shares Sartre's idea that we encounter others as a lived body in situation for-itself-for-others.13 But contrary to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty holds that we do not exist as a singular body that has its world by the objectifying activities of a transcendent consciousness. I am not a singular body because I am for-myself by virtue of being first of all with and for other lived bodies. And rather than consciously transcending my body by objectifying the other, the relation between these bodies is one of prereflective projection of body schemas. It is in this intertwining of flesh that Merleau-Ponty finds the kind of ambiguity of existence on which Beauvoir's erotic generosity seems to rely.14
The other is my mirror in the sense that its through the other's body that I am conscious of my difference: through the tilt of their head, the touch of their hand, the look in their eye. But the same mirror confuses my body and the other's: by mimesis and transitivism, I tilt my head, touch my hand, and look at myself and cannot easily tell the difference between what I live and what the other lives (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 145-48). So, for Merleau-Ponty, I live my body outside of myself through the mirror space of the other's body. But, in contrast to Beauvoir's ideal of unity with the other and without resorting to Sartre's individualism, Merleau-Ponty holds that, in this intertwining, neither body is reducible to the other.15 It is by virtue of this ambiguity of body intersubjectivity, where alterity is produced through ''syncretic sociability,'' that I affect and am affected by others, that I engage in projects and am open to possibilities (118). It is why I cry at the movies when I sit apart from the action, why the other gasps when I jump, why I pick up the gestures of those with whom I dwell without ever becoming exactly the same. It is also on the basis of this ambiguity of body intersubjectivity that we fall in love and that existence is given its erotic dimension.
Merleau-Ponty, therefore, unlike Sartre and perhaps Beauvoir, does not think love or sexual desire are any different in structure to personal existence in general (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 169). The kind of indeterminate self-transformation through the other's body that Beauvoir seems to reserve for becoming flesh in the erotic encounter is, for Merleau-Ponty, common to all projects.16 You cannot exist otherwise than by risking your body integrity in an ambiguous situation and freedom is nothing more or less than this (439-40, 455-56). The pleasure and pain of both love and the sexual encounter lie in the way this risk becomes explicit. While sex may involve being more absorbed in the experience of one's body than in other projects, this does not imply a state of objectness that severs ties with the world, the other, or future possibilities.17 On the contrary, the body subject is opened to a different future through love and sex because of the ambiguity of being both subject and object, autonomous and dependent simultaneously in relation to the other. Or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, both love and the sexual experience play such an important role in human life because they provide an ''opportunity, vouchsafed to all and always available,'' to acquaint oneself with the ambiguity of existence (167). Hence, neither love nor the sexual encounter pose a necessary threat to our freedom to constitute existence and the generosity of both rests on maintaining the ambiguity of being caught within and opened to the body of the other without the aim or achievement of unity, entrapment, or self-possession.18 As generosity maintains alterity and ambiguity in the possibilities it opens, it is not based on an ideal of mutual exchange between equals. There is a reciprocity of giving but not reciprocity in the content of what is given, and generosity is possible only if neither sameness nor unity is assumed as either the basis or the goal of an encounter with another. In sum, conceiving of erotic generosity requires abandoning the anti-body logic, the individualism, and the ideal of mutual exchange between equals (if this implies either unity or sameness) that ground safe sex discourse.
While sex can transform existence, I am not suggesting that it can liberate us from ourselves or from social representations of sexual difference and sexuality. Nor am I denying that sex can be violent or a violation of being. Taken by itself, Merleau-Ponty's description of ''The Body in its Sexual Being'' does not consider feminist concerns about nonconsensual sex or the effects of the social objectification of women on the sexual encounter. Taken by itself, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of sexuality could be viewed as reproducing rather than accounting for the relation between the socially based differential treatment of the sexes and the body in its sexual being.19 However, elsewhere Merleau-Ponty, in his account of the social genesis of the body subject, does find fault with the way the ambiguity of existence is reduced through the social representation of sexual difference: through the treatment of women as absolutely Other in relation to men (an idea he attributes to Beauvoir) or through the assumption that all individuals are the same (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 103-6). Such ''intellectual rigidity'' closes off the other's possibilities in direct proportion to the reduction of ambiguity involved. Through this suggestion, combined with Merleau-Ponty's critique of Sartre's model of freedom, it is possible to account for the effects of sociality on sexuality, for why the sexual encounter may transform but not liberate existence and for the circumstances under which sex would be a violation of being.
For Merleau-Ponty, the body subject is constituted in relation to others who are already social beings (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 141-55) and the kind of body conducts we develop undergo a process of ''sedimentation'' (1962, 441). Hence, each of us develops a habitual way of patterning existence, including its erotic dimension; and the character of this patterning depends on the social and institutional setting in which our embodiment, and hence our world, is constituted. Insofar as sexual difference is a body performance and to the extent that women are socially objectified more than men, this will be reflected in differences in body comportment and sexuality.20 But given that, in the constitution of the body subject, alterity is maintained in the synchronic relation to the other, women's erotic styles will be multivarious despite any apparent patterns in comportment along the lines of sexual difference. And even though women may be sexually objectified more than men, this does not necessarily destine women to sexual passivity or submissiveness. The most we can conclude about the relation between social representations of sexual difference and personal erotic existence is that, while freedom is the indeterminate self-transformation through an ambiguous relation to the world of the other's body, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world, my freedom to be open to a particular project, including a particular sexual encounter, is limited by my social history and, in the wake of this, my bodily tolerance to the present situation (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 455-56). This history is what I am in the process of what I become as I plunge into the present.
There are at least two points to make from this account of the relation between sociality and sexuality. The first is that, contrary to what I have called new liberation discourses, sex does not liberate existence. While any particular situation we find ourselves in is ambiguous and open, it will tend to call up ''specially favored modes of resolution'' (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 441-42). We cannot escape what we have been altogether because, for Merleau-Ponty at least, we never leave our old body behind. Second, a sexual encounter can involve a violation of being if it overruns the field of the other's freedom. Sex is never safe if safety means securing one's body integrity. But then neither is any project involving a generosity of flesh, the opening onto the other's body that provides the foundation of human existence. Nor does sexual violation rest on the degree of domination or submission involved. As Beauvoir's discussion of erotic generosity suggests, these are equivocal concepts in consensual erotic relations. Nor does violation rest on the implied ratio of becoming flesh. If becoming flesh were equivalent to violation, we would, on the basis of Merleau-Ponty's ontology, violate the other and ourselves in every encounter. Whether, how, and with whom we are generous depends, instead, on the tolerance of our embodied style to the situation and to the body we encounter (454). What you can tolerate, what you find erotic, the field of your freedom, is stamped with the social history of your existence and may not be to another's taste.
This history, this indeterminate field, marks what you are; and if another disregards it, that other violates your being. Granting limits to erotic generosity in this way effectively extends the concepts of violation and nonconsent beyond domination and submission in sex and particularizes the same concepts in terms of the specificity of a person's history. This is a necessary move, and not just because domination and submission can be consensual and hence without violation. It helps to account for why a person can feel violated to the core of her being (through verbal abuse or physical intimidation, for example) in situations that an outside observer may not consider sexual or serious.
By questioning the anti-body logic and individualism of safe sex discourse, it is possible to resurrect the sexual encounter from its negative philosophical associations without resorting to the rhetoric of liberation or ignoring the problem of sexual violence. While saying yes to sex does not liberate one's existence, the discourse of safe sex as I have outlined it via radical feminism and Sartre's existentialism is inherently conservative. For just as violation amounts to reducing the ambiguity of existence and hence the other's possibilities, so does an ideal of absolute independence, mutual exchange, self-control, and body integrity.
NOTES
Research for this paper was undertaken with the support of an Australian Research Council Small Grant while I was a visiting fellow in the philosophy department at Warwick University in 1995. I am grateful to both and to Christine Battersby for making my stay at Warwick an easy one. An earlier version was presented at the Women in Philosophy Conference, Edinburgh University, November 1995. I appreciate the feedback I received at that forum and would like particularly to thank Genevieve Lloyd, Nikki Sullivan, and the Hypatia editors and anonymous readers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
1. For critiques of radical feminism along these lines see, e.g., Ferguson (1984) and Sawicki (1988).
2.Understanding generosity as a giving that enhances the self through the other goes beyond the English meaning of generosity defined as nobility, magnanimity, or liberal giving. There is a precedent for this extended meaning in French philosophy. Descartes, for example, in The Passions of the Soul, defines generosity as a virtue based on the knowledge that nothing truly belongs to me and on the will to do what I judge to be best, a virtue that is the cause of rightful self-esteem and that prevents feeling contempt for others (Descartes 1985, 384). I am grateful to Genevieve Lloyd for directing me to this passage. That generosity involves a transformation of the self and the other without self-possession or entrapment of the other is reminiscent of the revision in French philosophy, from Marcel Mauss to Jacques Derrida, of the concept of the gift. For a more detailed discussion of the gift and giving, so understood, see Diprose (1994a, 65-72).
3. Thomas Martin's paper ''Sartre, Sadism and Female Beauty Ideals'' (1996), by using Sartre's model of sadism to argue against the objectification of women through beauty ideals, has alerted me to a possible connection between Sartre's discussion of love and desire and a radical feminist position. Although I depart from Martin on the question of how useful Sartre's ontology might be for resolving the issue of the objectification of women, I am grateful for the way our discussions have renewed my interest in Sartre's work in the area of love and sexuality.
4. See, for example, Collins and Pierce (1980).
5. For a more detailed analysis of Sartre's model of sadism see Martin (1996). While Martin does not make this point, Sartre's condemnation of sadism, like his model of desire, relies on the problematic distinction between the body-in-situation (which in his analysis of sadism he calls the ''graceful body'') and the body as flesh (or the ''obscene body'').
6. My view that this is a positive move in Beauvoir's radical revision of Sartre's existentialism is not shared by many commentators. Jo-Ann Pilardi, for example, in an informative analysis of Beauvoir's account of female eroticism, cites this passage as evidence of how Beauvoir remains entrenched in the stereotypical view of female sexuality as a passive mindlessness that pervades the self (Pilardi 1989, 26). While Pilardi, in her reading of this passage, seems to equate ''abolishing singularity'' with passivity, I argue that this abolition of singularity (and of the mind-body distinction) is neither essentially passive nor peculiar to women but is a feature of the ambiguity of existence. Beauvoir's point is that it is this ambiguity that men often deny at women's expense. Debra Bergoffen (1995), in her exceptional account of Beauvoir's philosophy of the erotic, makes this equation between the ambiguity of existence and becoming flesh. Also see Kruks (1990) for a positive interpretation of this point.
7. Bergoffen's recent book, The philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered phenomenologies, erotic generosities (1997), provides a thorough and interesting analysis of the relation between generosity and eroticism in Beauvoir's work that intersects with aspects of my own. Unfortunately, due to the timing of her publication, I have not been able to give it full consideration here.
8. Beauvoir bases this claim on the argument that the ambiguity of existence rests not only on the idea that ''between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he [sic] exists is nothing'' but also on the premise that as ''an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends'' (Beauvoir 1994, 7). She also uses the figure of the ''adventurer'' to illustrate how independence is a ruse that denies one's dependence on others (58-63). For more detailed comparisons of Beauvoir's and Sartre's models of freedom see Kruks (1991) and Langer (1994).
9. For detailed analyses of Beauvoir's ambivalence toward the body see Mackenzie (1986) and Gatens (1991, ch. 3).
10. For critical accounts of Beauvoir's appropriation of Hegel's philosophy in her revision of Sartre's existentialism see Lloyd (1993) and Chanter (1995, ch. 2).
11. Moi argues, with reference to Beauvoir's discussions of female sexuality, that Beauvoir departs from Sartre on the structure of alienation of one's freedom in the other because of her ''elaboration on Lacan's notion of the alienation of the ego in the other in the mirror stage'' (Moi 1992, 102). While Lacan's model of the mirror stage undoubtedly influences Beauvoir's understanding of female eroticism, this is more along the lines of Merleau-Ponty's elaboration of the model and the understanding of the self-other, mind-body relations belonging to the phenomenological tradition. Hence Beauvoir's understanding of erotic generosity carries traces of Merleau-Ponty's focus on body intentionality and the ambiguity (of being both mind and body, subject and object) this involves. I therefore depart from Moi's claim that ''by giving her own theory a slightly more Lacanian twist on this point [about alienation, Beauvoir] would have managed, at least in my view, to produce a better account of the relationship between the biological and the psychological'' (111). I do agree with Moi, however, that one problem underlying the difficulties in Beauvoir's account of female sexuality is her emphasis on unity with the other (or recuperation of one's alienated image, as Moi puts it, 105).
12. Merleau-Ponty deals specifically with sexuality and the erotic encounter in a chapter titled ''The Body in its Sexual Being'' in Phenomenology of Perception (1962). As he argues there, however, the structure of the erotic encounter is no different from that of personal existence in general, which he accounts for in the rest of the book.
13. For Merleau-Ponty's version of the body in situation for-itself-for-others see Phenomenology of Perception, part 1, esp. ch. 3. For a more detailed reading of this as well as Merleau-Ponty's model of intersubjectivity and freedom, see Diprose (1994a, ch. 6).
14. For his account of the genesis of the lived body with reference to Lacan's model of the ''mirror stage'' see Merleau-Ponty (1964).
15. ''There is thus a system (my visual body [as it appears to others], my introceptive body [as I live it], the other [as I perceive them]) which establishes itself in the child, never so completely as in the animal but imperfectly, with gaps'' (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 135). ''Syncretic sociability'' is what Merleau-Ponty calls this system of body-inter-subjectivity ''with gaps'' (141). For a more detailed account of how this can be read as a model of the social constitution of the body-subject where alterity is maintained without assuming original or final separation from the other, see Diprose (1994a, 120-21).
16. Beauvoir is inconsistent on this point. Her ''genuine love'' for example, involves consciousness transcending the body while erotic generosity does not. However, Beauvoir implies elsewhere that the structure of the two are the same by claiming that sexuality ''can be said to pervade life throughout'' (Beauvoir 1972, 77). Merleau-Ponty explicitly and consistently holds the latter view, along with the view that living one's body involves self-transformation rather than objectification. He claims, for example, that in the case of '' 'sight,' 'motility,' 'sexuality'... the body is not an object.... Whether it is a question of another's body or my own, I have no means of knowing the human body other than living it, which means taking up on my own account the drama which is being played out in it, and losing myself in it'' (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 198).
17. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty claims, in direct opposition to Sartre and to aspects of Beauvoir's account, that, while you are always embodied rather than consciousness transcending a body, you can never be reduced to a thing. For example, ''Even if I become absorbed in the experience of my body and in the solitude of sensations, I do not succeed in abolishing all reference of my life to a world'' (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 165).
18. Given this suggestion, I am departing from Judith Butler's claim that Merleau-Ponty bases his model of heterosexuality on a master-slave, domination-submission dynamic (Butler 1989, 91, 95-97). While it is true that Merleau-Ponty, in his chapter on ''The Body in its Sexual Being,'' does pass through the master-slave model of sexuality, he revises it (as he does the psychoanalytic model) in favor of his own notion of ambiguity (of being autonomous and dependent rather than master or slave) (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 167). Merleau-Ponty also consistently and explicitly refutes the assumptions on which the master-slave model depends: that the other is an object for consciousness or absolutely other (e.g., 1964, 103; and 1962, 346-65). Despite my departures from Butler, her paper is worth noting for taking seriously this aspect of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. For another, more recent account of Merleau-Ponty's model of body-inter-subjectivity that also takes his views on sexuality seriously, see Grosz (1994, ch. 4).
19. Judith Butler suggests, for example, that to the extent that Merleau-Ponty does refer to sexual difference in this chapter, he tends to betray a heterosexual bias and, within this, an assumption that women are objects rather than subjects of desire. This heterosexual, ''masculinist'' bias is particularly true in Merleau-Ponty's use of the case of Schneider, whose deficient ''asexuality'' rests, for Merleau-Ponty, on his inability to find anonymous women desirable (Butler 1989, 92-94). However, I think Butler's conclusion, that Merleau-Ponty's ''normal'' masculine subject is a ''disembodied voyeur'' (faced with an essentially unchanging female body), is a little hasty, given that what Merleau-Ponty thinks is wrong with Schneider (as the previous chapter on ''motility'' reveals in detail) is not that he cannot visually objectify the other but that his ''body intentionality'' (''syncretic sociability'' or the preconscious projection of a body I have been describing) has been reduced. This means he can only objectify if faced with an unfamiliar situation (of, say, an unknown woman's body) rather than what Merleau-Ponty considers ''normal'' to sexual desire and personal existence in general: being a body immersed in an ambiguous situation of the other's body and the world. Merleau-Ponty may privilege vision within his account of body intentionality, but as Vasseleu argues (1997), this is not in the order of objectification by a disembodied voyeur.
20. For an account of sexual difference as a body performance see Judith Butler (1990); and for an account of how sexual difference is a body performance with reference to Merleau-Ponty see Diprose (1994b). Iris Marion Young argues, for example, with reference to Merleau-Ponty's ontology, that the social objectification of women manifests in a restricted body comportment, in, for example, the way women throw objects (1990). As Young herself admits, though, it would be wrong to generalize about the relation between gender identity and comportment, for such restrictions would vary with differences in race and class. I would also suggest that, as alterity is maintained within the synchronic relation to the other and as social backgrounds vary in other ways besides race and class, women's body comportments would be more multivarious and open to change than Young's analysis implies.
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