from Hypatia Volume 14, Number 4

The Blood of Others: A Novel Approach to The Ethics of Ambiguity

Eleanore Holveck

Hypatia vol. 14 no. 4 (Fall 1999) © by Eleanore Holveck

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This article shows that the relationship between Simone de Beauvoir's novel, Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others), first published in 1945, and her essay, Pour une morale de l'ambiguité (The Ethics of Ambiguity), first published in 1947, illustrates her point in "Litterature et metaphysique" that an abstract philosophical theory is grounded in immediate metaphysical experience. An original ethical position emerges from Hélène Bertrand's lived experience in the novel, which anticipates feminist issues addressed in The Second Sex more directly than does Beauvoir's essay.

In her essay "Litterature et metaphysique" (Beauvoir 1946; 1963), Simone de Beauvoir wrote that at eighteen her love was split between the concrete temporal world of fiction and the rigor of abstract philosophical systems. She held that philosophers create "an intellectual reconstruction of their immediate experience," whereas novelists "recreate on an imaginary level . . . that very experience itself, just as it presents itself before all elucidation" (Beauvoir 1963, 91; my translation). Beauvoir's bridge between philosophy and fiction in this essay is the metaphysical novel, which gives first expression to prepredicative experience, to use Edmund Husserl's terminology. This expression in fiction is prior to, and necessary for, the creation of a philosophical system.

This paper shows that the relationship between Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others and her essay The Ethics of Ambiguity is a perfect illustration of her belief that a philosophical theory is an abstract explanation of what is first a concrete, lived metaphysical experience. As Elizabeth Fallaize points out in her recently edited collection of critical essays, academic commentators have tended to interpret Beauvoir's novels through the prism of various philosophical positions (Fallaize 1998, 13). Some early works tend to view Beauvoir as a Sartrian (see Barnes 1959), while more recent critics see Sartre lifting "his own" philosophy from Beauvoir's first novel (see Fullbrook and Fullbrook 1994). Other critics read L'invitée through psychoanalytic theory (see Moi 1994; Evans 1986).

Specific readings of The Blood of Others have emphasized its character Jean Blomart as a Resistance hero (see Rochester and Test 1993). Alex Hughes claims that moral issues are "centered primarily around Blomart" (Hughes 1995, 9). Fallaize holds that the novel is one "of a male character to whom the female character is literally sacrificed" (Fallaize 1988, 63). While I do not totally reject Fallaize's statement, my reading emphasizes the female character's positive philosophical contribution.

Even though Beauvoir wrote The Blood of Others before The Ethics of Ambiguity, I outline the major points of the essay first; then I show how Beauvoir originated some of her ethical positions as she recreated her own lived experience in the novel. By emphasizing Beauvoir's creative use of Husserlian concepts, such as phenomenological epoche and lived experience, I show that Beauvoir's original philosophy emerges from her description of the lived experience of her character Hélène Bertrand and that the novel anticipates feminist issues that Beauvoir addresses later in The Second Sex more directly than her essay on ethics.

The Ethics of Ambiguity

I emphasize five major philosophical themes in Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity. (1) There are no absolute values. Human freedom, pour soi in action, is the foundation of all values. (2) The concrete exercise of freedom in action can be a joyful experience. (3) Existential conversion reveals my possibility for free action; at the same time, it also reveals others who are similarly grounded. (4) My free choice to act is authentic when I accept full responsibility for my actions, because responsibility manifests my freedom, as well as the freedom of others. (5) My freedom can be in conflict with that of others; violence is always a possibility.

The first philosophical theme in Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity is her position that there are no universal values in any absolute objective sense. Freedom arises in human action; hence, freedom is always situated, placed, embodied. Beauvoir develops this position as a criticism of Immanuel Kant's ethics, which "is at the origin of all ethics of autonomy" (Beauvoir 1996, 33).

In the third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1963), Kant argues that the motivation for a human act is both completely free and completely determined at the same time. Kant gives a relevant example in his Critique of Practical Reason:

"Suppose some one asserts of his lustful appetite that, when the desired object and the opportunity are present, it is quite irresistible. [Ask him] if a gallows were erected before the house where he finds this opportunity, in order that he should be hanged thereon immediately after the gratification of his lust, whether he could not then control his passion; we need not be long in doubt what he would reply. Ask him, however, if his sovereign ordered him, on the pain of the same immediate execution, to bear false witness against an honourable man, whom the prince might wish to destroy under a plausible pretext, would he consider it possible in that case to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to affirm whether he would do so or not, but he would unhesitatingly admit that it is possible to do so. He judges, therefore, that he can do a certain thing because he is conscious that he ought, and he recognizes that he is free--a fact which but for the moral law he would never have known." (Kant 1963, 118-19)

Kant argues in this passage that human actions are often motivated by desire, which follows causal laws, for example, the laws of psychology or biochemistry. Civil laws make use of this natural causality by instituting a punishment that causes pain greater than the original pleasure. In Kant's example, perhaps based on the men who had sexual intercourse with Anne Boleyn before she became the wife of Henry VIII, a man's desire to live is stronger than his desire for sex, at least with this particular woman.

However, an example such as Thomas More, who refused to lie under oath even when threatened with execution, shows that a man can choose to act against his causally-determined desire to live; he is thus a free agent who can act according to laws that he gives himself from his own reason, in this case the universal value of always telling the truth. The grounding freedom of this motivation is his personality, his noumenal or free self. This noumenal freedom is real, but man knows it only as the ground of his possibility to obey the moral law for its own sake no matter what the consequences. Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative--"So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end . . . never as means only" (Kant 1963, 47)--mandates a respect for all human beings who have this same possibility of acting out of pure respect for the law. What is worthy of respect is our capacity to obey the formal universal law, completely apart from desire and without regard for any consequences.

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir takes Kant's empty moral intention and singularizes it into a choice to act to promote human freedom in the real world. In a few dazzling paragraphs she transforms Kant's freedom by means of Husserl, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The first step is "existentialist conversion," which Beauvoir compares to Husserlian epoche. As Husserl brackets all existence claims, "suspending all affirmation concerning the mode of reality of the external world" (Beauvoir 1996, 14), existentialist conversion cancels the grounding of values in any absolute, whether that absolute be a god, a church, a state, etc. By existentialist conversion, one sees that all values refer to choices made by some one who is finite and limited.

Beauvoir rejects Kierkegaard's belief that the singular has an absolute relation to the absolute. For her, following Husserl, values are not grounded in God as an absolute but in the free choices of human subjects. In the fifth Cartesian Meditation (Husserl 1960), Husserl argues that the other's consciousness is basic to the sense objective or external world, because external objects are, by definition, in intersubjective space and time. For Beauvoir objects are not pure Husserlian abstract individuals (vorhanden) in slices of space/time but rather concrete objects of existing conscious persons.

Beauvoir quotes from Sartre's Being and Nothingness: man is "un etre qui se fait manque d'etre, afin qu'il y ait de l'etre" (Beauvoir 1974, 15), emphasizing that man "makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being" (Beauvoir 1996, 11). Man's free choice, for-itself as nothingness, acts on being in the real world. The problem of objective values becomes the problem of how anything is valued by you, by me, by all of us who act. Being in-itself is bracketed and drops out of consideration for Beauvoir; she writes, "for existentialism, it is not impersonal universal man who is the source of values, but the plurality of concrete, particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and as irreducible as subjectivity itself" (Beauvoir 1996, 17-18).

The second philosophical theme in Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity is that for her, concrete freedom in action can be joyful. Here she distinguishes herself from Sartrian anguish at man's fruitless attempt to be God, the absolute combination of being in-itself for-itself. Beauvoir writes, "I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. . . . but I take delight in this very effort towards an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat. This means that man, in his vain attempt to be God, makes himself exist as man, and if he is satisfied with this existence, he coincides exactly with himself" (Beauvoir 1996, 12-13). Beauvoir's letters from the 1930s reveal her as experiencing skiing in just this way. One who loves to ski does not want to possess the snow; she has more fun sliding around on it.

Giving up the desire to be God or any source of absolute values, one establishes "a genuine freedom on the original upsurge of our existence" (Beauvoir 1996, 25). Beauvoir's word for upsurge is jaillissement (Beauvoir 1974, 35)--gushing, spurting. Existential conversion breaks the flow of my straightforward consciousness that moves out towards things and values, so that I now experience my stream of consciousness as a gushing fountain of freedom.

In Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity, the third philosophical theme centers on existential conversion; it reveals my freedom at the same time it reveals others who are as grounded in freedom as I am. Beauvoir's reinterpretation of Husserl is quite remarkable. The epoché is usually viewed as a method by which one might study the objects of different epistemic interests. For example, one could articulate a phenomenology of perception, of memory, of imagination, or of theoretical reason. Husserl argues in some manuscripts that fundamental to all consciousness is an abstract core, a stream of intentionality, an inner time. The origin of this living, streaming consciousness is a lebendige Gegenwart, a living present that flows together with a Mitgegenwart, a co-present.¹ Beauvoir traces this abstract core of consciousness back into the lived world. Let us follow this stream.

The first world a child encounters is one that others have created. She believes in the societal values given to her through her parents, whom she accepts as gods (Beauvoir 1996, 35). Beauvoir comments that African-American slaves in the eighteenth-century United States lived in this type of child-like situation, as might a woman in a harem. Forced to live in a situation defined by laws established by dominant whites or masters, slaves and women might not have even the possibility of self-liberation (Beauvoir 1996, 37-38).

The child in a less restrictive environment, however, begins to grow up and question. In adolescent rebellion, a teenager might negate the values of her parents and her culture, but in this negative act, she affirms her own freedom as well as that of others. When the young Beauvoir rejected bourgeois marriage and established a relationship with Sartre, she saw that other friends were making different choices. Her mother, too, had freely chosen to live in a bourgeois marriage, even if she held that this institution was created by God. Without a world constituted by others, a teenager would have no world at all. Somebody's free choice is at the basis of the entire meaningful world. Others are in my future, also. Other values will challenge and eventually overtake or overthrow mine. "To will that there be being is also to will that there be men by and for whom the world is endowed with human significations. One can reveal the world only on a basis revealed by other men. No project can be defined except by its interference with other projects. To make being 'be' is to communicate with others by means of being" (Beauvoir 1996, 71).

The fourth philosophical theme in Beauvoir's essay concerns free choice and responsibility. My free choice to act is authentic when I accept full responsibility for my actions; responsibility manifests my freedom as well as the freedom of others. Beauvoir describes authenticity as willing oneself free and assuming projects in a positive way. For her, all men act freely. Authentic freedom means that a man assumes responsibility for the value he is promoting, which includes his responsibility towards those who have acted on his world both in the past and future. This does not mean that it is possible to respect the freedom of all others at all times. I must accept the danger that others at any time might freely choose values that are in conflict with mine.

The final philosophical theme in Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity is that freedoms do conflict and violence is not only possible but at times is necessary. Beauvoir gives many examples of freedoms in conflict, most of them taken from World War II. First, Beauvoir believes that violence is justified in some situations of oppression, because if other men refuse to allow a man to exercise freedom, they change him into a thing. What about those who serve the purposes of oppression without being fully aware of what they are doing, for ex-ample, a sixteen-year-old who has been raised since childhood in the Nazi youth movement? Beauvoir remarks that the desirable thing would be to re-educate him, but if the situation requires immediate self-defense, violence is justified in this situation, too (1996, 98).

If a person is so oppressed that she cannot even conceive of the possibility of liberation, for example, a woman in a harem, others may have to rebel for her and furnish her with enough education for her revolt (Beauvoir 1996, 86). Thus, it is sometimes necessary to force someone to be free. Furthermore, because each of us is situated, we cannot exercise our freedom in all places at the same time. Most Frenchmen during World War II did not approve of the native revolts against the British Empire in India, some of which were supported by Fascist regimes. Yet the French could not condemn revolutionaries in India who considered their own liberation to be paramount (Beauvoir 1996, 98-99). Thus one might find oneself killing men who have a goal that one actually supports.

Finally, Beauvoir rejects the Marxist belief that it is acceptable to sacrifice present human beings for a future good. Her criticism of Marx is essentially the same as her criticism of Kant. The goal of human action ought to be the promotion of human freedom, and this is not an abstract, ideal or future freedom but the lived, concrete experience of freedom as the joy of existence (joie d'exister).

"[I]n order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness. If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy. The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play." (Beauvoir 1996, 135)

Beauvoir comments that festivals, theater, dance, music, and poetry attempt to embody this joie d'exister; these celebrations posit concrete human existence as the only value, while at the same time acknowledging its finite character.

In summary, Beauvoir asserts that concrete, lived freedom for all is the goal of moral action, even though one is likely to find oneself violating the freedom of others in the contexts we have mentioned. Beauvoir has transformed the abstract antinomy of Kant into a lived antinomy of human action. For Kant, a man like Thomas More transcends his psychological desire to live, which is determined in time, by his intention to follow, at the same time, the universal law of truth-telling. But More lost his head for his empty ideal truth, leaving the tyrant Henry VIII to flourish. For Beauvoir, I must act to promote real freedom in the world, even though my actions may often conflict with the freedom of others who are placed differently. Beauvoir emphasizes that each decision to violate freedom must be made separately in each situation. A new justification is demanded each time one acts.

The Blood of Others

Now that I have outlined Beauvoir's philosophical position in The Ethics of Ambiguity, I turn to her first expression of it in her earlier novel, The Blood of Others (1948). I begin with a look at the two major characters, Jean Blomart and Hélène Bertrand. Each one has difficulty coming to grips with the problem of acting freely and taking total responsibility for that free action. In short, each one has difficulty living authentically.

Jean, the son of a wealthy printer, is aware of being placed in a situation that is a barrier to the freedom of others. As a child, he smells the bourgeois guilt rising from the factory's workrooms to the family home on the upper floors. It is suitable that Beauvoir chose to emphasize the labor of printers, the group of the proletariat that she, as a writer and avid reader, exploited in a very personal way. Rebelling against his parents, Jean leaves home to work as a typographer for another printing company. Exemplifying the unhappy bourgeois consciousness, Jean is so uncomfortable in his privileged economic place, which he blames on the fact of his materiality, that he wishes to reduce his material existence to bare necessity. For example, he lives in a tiny apartment.

However, Jean finds that he cannot escape either materiality or his past. As his friend Marcel says to him, "your cultural background, your friends, your boyish, well-fed bourgeois health--you can't rid yourself of the past" (Beau-voir 1948, 28-29). Here is a recurring Beauvoirian theme that one's past is incarnated in one's body, and one must act on the basis of that past. Jean joins the Communist Party, but when a younger friend is killed as police break up a meeting, Jean stops his political activity. He joins the French trade union movement, which refuses political ties; he remains neutral in the Spanish civil war. Jean finds the burden of responsibility so crushing that he is paralyzed. He takes no political actions. Hélène Bertrand, on the other hand, believes that she is pure freedom; she ignores her situatedness, her body, her social place. She acts as if she has no responsibility. She claims never to think of others, "I need no one. I, exist, me, Hélène; isn't that enough?" (Beauvoir 1948, 47). Beauvoir implies that all adolescents are Cartesian-like solipsists who imagine themselves to be the only consciousness that exists. One might recall in this context that Husserl in The Crisis calls René Descartes's first meditation an "examination question for philosophical children" (Husserl 1970, 75). Bearing the name of Beauvoir's sister, Hélène is modeled on Natalie Sorokine and other young female students whom Beauvoir loved and admired for their élan vital, despite their naiveté.

Hélène disagrees with her childhood sweetheart, Paul, a Communist, who explains all persons in terms of economic class, because she believes that each individual is unique. Hélène takes great joy in existence; she is the very incarnation of the joie d'exister that Beauvoir discusses as the substance of the real in her Ethics (Beauvoir 1996, 135). Hélène plunges freely ahead, making choices, giving up Paul and openly chasing Jean, whom she loves.

Although Hélène claims to think only of herself, she actually lives through others. Ignoring her own body and the consequences of her actions, she goes out, picks up a man, gets drunk, and becomes pregnant when Jean refuses a relationship with her. As Jean, out of a sense of duty, helps Hélène through an illegal abortion and, out of guilt, pretends to love her, Hélène lives completely through him. She has no life at all apart from dedicating her life--she believes freely--to him. When Jean is drafted, Hélène uses her influence to get him a desk job in Paris. Jean is furious and breaks with her. As Paris is invaded, Hélène tries to remain a free, detached observer.

However, in a series of encounters with other women, Hélène slowly becomes aware of herself as situated with others and responsible for them. Several scenes constitute this maturation process. In the first scene, Hélène is trying to get back to Paris along with a large number of people who had fled in panic as the Germans occupied the city. Hélène gives up her seat in a car to a poor mother with a baby, because she imagines herself in her place: "she suddenly felt the weight of the child on her knees and the appeal of its reproachful eyes" (Beauvoir 1948, 243). Hélène, who has had an abortion, could easily have been in the mother's place.

Hélène then meets a young woman with her grandmother who, although in the same desperate situation as the starving Hélène, share their last bread with her. These three approach a German soldier to ask for a lift back to Paris.

"Nur zwei," said the German, lifting two fingers. . . . The girl clambered over the side of the truck and dragged Hélène up by the hand.
"She's my sister," she said to the soldier.
"Get in, do get in," Hélène hung onto the truck. The soldier laughed and held out his hand to her. (Beauvoir 1948, 246)

This scene bears comparison with a Sartrian example in Notebooks for an Ethics (Sartre 1992). Sartre explains that if I am on a bus platform and extend my hand to give a latecomer a boost up, "[i]n my very act of extending my hand, my intention of helping is manifested" (Sartre 1992, 285). Both parties make themselves passive to meet the freedom of the other. Sartre writes "The process of recognizing the other's freedom penetrates his facticity with freedom in penetrating my freedom with facticity" (1992, 286).

Notice that Beauvoir's scene is much richer, more complex, and written much earlier. One woman takes another woman by the hand. Neither is passive. One woman invites another to come with her as an equal, a sister. Here is a performative utterance where action and language coincide. You are my sister because I say that you are. The truth of the performative is grounded in the action of my making room for you as a sister, even though the spoken words are a lie told to a male oppressor. The soldier extends his hand only because he first accepts the statement of sisterhood as literal biologically. The ethical implication here is interesting. Women can create family bonds by lived intentional actions and performative utterances; men only understand family bonds if they are grounded in abstract, exterior, scientific categories such as biology or geography.

Beauvoir's reinterpretation of Kant in this scene is brilliant. Thomas More's refusal to tell a lie, indicating his empty intention to respect the universal law of truth-telling, is turned upside down. By lying to an oppressor, a woman affirms her real freedom to act in a caring way to another woman. While Thomas More lost his head for an empty noumenal freedom, leaving Henry VIII triumphant on the throne, Hélène and her friends, firmly grounded in the real world of sisterhood that they have just created, hitch a ride back to occupied Paris.

Note, also, a reference in this scene to Sartre's later contrast between serialization versus consciousness of the group in The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1982). Sartre argues that passengers lining up at a bus stop are serialized. Because seats are scarce, each person is isolated and sees the others as threats who could occupy a seat that he needs (Sartre 1982, 256). A group, on the other hand, is constituted by a spontaneous grasp of a common goal, for example, the Frenchmen who spontaneously stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789 (Sartre 1982, 351). Beauvoir's discussion is more sophisticated. Hélène and the two women are united as French against a German enemy, with the common goal of returning to Paris. However, they actively constitute their sisterhood as they speak their commitment to each other, and they act to affirm their mutual needs by sharing their last bread and making room for each other in the truck.

The second scene occurs as Hélène, now back in Paris, observes the rounding up of Jewish children prior to their deportation. Hélène watches a policeman take a little girl from her mother's arms and put her on a bus. "'No,' said the woman, 'No. . . . Ruth, my little Ruth'" (Beauvoir 1948, 278-79). As the woman runs after the bus filled with crying children, Hélène wants to shout that this ought not to be allowed; yet she stands silent, rooted to the sidewalk, as do all the others present.

Julia Kristeva has commented recently on the Old Testament story of Ruth, and a brief contrast between Kristeva's and Beauvoir's interpretation of the story is illuminating. Ruth, a Moabite, chooses to accompany her mother-in-law, Naomi, back to the latter's home in Bethlehem after the death of Ruth's husband. Ruth expresses her choice to live with Naomi's family in a beautiful performative utterance: "Do not press me to leave you and to turn back from your company, for, / wherever you go I will go / wherever you live I will live. / Your people shall be my people, / and your God, my God. / Wherever you die, I will die / and there I will be buried. / May Yahweh do this thing to me / and more also, / if even death should come between us" (Ruth 2:16-17, quoted in Kristeva 1991, 71). Kristeva contends that the story of Ruth, the great-grand-mother of David, reveals that the stranger, the foreign, and incest are at the very foundation of David's sovereignty. "If David is also Ruth, if the sovereign is also a Moabite, peace of mind will then never be his lot, but a constant quest for welcoming and going beyond the other in oneself" (Kristeva 1991, 76). Otherness lies at the very heart of the Jewish covenant.

In contrast, Beauvoir's story clearly refers back to the previous scene of women declaring themselves sisters. Perhaps women can create relationships based on promises and vows to recognize each other's freedom. However, French women look on passively as Beauvoir's Naomi stands in a Paris street, at the Pantheon, crying out to the high heavens that her Ruth has been taken away from her. The masculinist world, which reduces women and children to owned property, not only destroys the sister relationship created by vows, it even destroys the bonds between real biological families that the law ought to recognize if it is to be consistent. And the French women, terrorized by the inconsistent masculinist law, stand as mute, paralyzed, disinterested onlookers. A striking criticism of Husserl is here. One who views philosophy simply as a method for clarifying the structure of objects constituted by the methods of various sciences, might be walking home from the university one day and find himself a true disinterested onlooker, watching helplessly as his children are dragged away to a concentration camp.

Beauvoir's analysis focuses on a point that Kristeva mentions but passes over. Ruth disappears from history as soon as she gives birth to a son, Obed, whom Naomi raises. Did Naomi repay Ruth's loyalty by stealing her son? Kristeva does not even mention that this story is the tale of a male historian, who ultimately blots out the attempt of a woman to achieve a concrete recognition and respect for an Other. For Beauvoir, Ruth's problem is not exactly assimilation into the Jewish community as Kristeva holds. It is, rather, that masculinist obsessions with biology and geography obliterate female relationships based on authentic free choices, on vows and lived actions to care for each other as mother and sister.

It is interesting that Hélène sees her situatedness and takes responsibility for it in action when she is thrown into the same situation with other women. Husserl's theory of intersubjectivity contends that the time of each consciousness finds reciprocity with the time of others through space. I am here; you are there. We communicate our intentions through embodiment. Beauvoir's novel shows that this space is social, political, economic space. We are in the same place if we intend the same values in the same world. Our intentions are grounded in our words and in our actions.

Jean, the novel's other main character, gradually learns that he, too, must make choices and act, even when his free actions violate the freedom of others. It is noteworthy that Jean begins to accept real commitment to others when he helps Hélène through an abortion. As Jean is watching Hélène's suffering, he reflects that although he is not biologically the father, he is the responsible agent. Here is an affirmation of Beauvoir's basic position on intentional action in her major male character. Jean is the father of this baby not in the realm of biological causality but in terms of moral intention. Jean names himself the father by his actions of caring for Hélène and accepting responsibility for her and her fetus.

Eventually, Jean becomes a member of the Resistance and faces problems of violence which Beauvoir discusses in The Ethics of Ambiguity. Resistance acts of sabotage are countered by reprisals against hostages, that is, the Germans round up civilians at random and kill a certain number of them for every German soldier lost. Resistance leaders like Jean then have to make a decision. If they continue acts of sabotage, they will be responsible for innocent lives taken in reprisals. If they stop acting, they will be responsible for collaborating with the Nazis' oppression of Jews. In either case, they shed the blood of others. Here is a perfect example of the antinomy of human action.

When Jean chooses to continue violent acts of resistance, he is clear about what he is doing. "Those who will be shot tomorrow have not chosen; I am the rock that crushes them; I shall not escape the curse; forever I shall be to them another being, . . . forever separated from them" (Beauvoir 1948, 292). Although the reprisals actually place all Frenchmen in the situation of Jews, that is, innocent people torn from their homes and slaughtered without reason, Jean still bears the guilt of violating their freedom. Jean is willing to die in the place of others, but he is not in their place; he is in his own.

At the end of the novel, Hélène dies from a wound received during a mission to rescue her childhood sweetheart, Paul. When Jean tries to dissuade her from going on this mission because it is too dangerous, he asks her if she would go if it weren't Paul. Hélène replies, "It is Paul" (Beauvoir 1948, 284). Hélène has learned that acting freely in this world means taking responsibility for her past, her body, her situation. She makes it clear that she is not acting for Jean's sake. She chooses freely and accepts full responsibility.

The image here is worth emphasizing: Hélène drives a truck on a mission to rescue Paul to bring him back to Jean. Throughout the novel Jean, who has the first names of Baruzi, Wahl, and Sartre, is the intellectual who does not want to act, the unhappy consciousness who cannot unite his reason with his contingency. Paul, who bears the name of Nizan, as well as Sartre's second name, is a pragmatic Communist who reduces all persons to their economic class. Hélène's light illuminates these two positions. Performative utterances must evolve into political actions. Women might be able to trick oppressors into helping them momentarily by telling lies, but only a woman who tries to defeat oppression by driving her own truck has a chance to create a society of sisters and mothers.

Jean and Paul, united by Hélène in The Blood of Others, are comparable to Mathieu and Brunet in Sartre's Troubled Sleep (Sartre 1973). Mathieu is the ineffective intellectual who ends up trying to hold off the approaching Germans by shooting at them as long as he can in what is surely a futile, macho act. Brunet is the pragmatic Communist who begins organizing an "us" against "them" in a German concentration camp, ever vigilant for the day when "we" can take over leadership. No wonder Mathieu and Brunet never traveled together on the road to freedom. The distance between them is so vast that Hélène can drive a truck through it.

I once thought that Jean and Hélène represented two aspects of situated freedom, positive and negative. Hélène shows that being situated with others allows me to empathize with them, to act to alleviate their suffering, and to attempt to create a world where the freedom of all will be recognized. This is a positive aspect of situated human freedom. Jean considers himself and others as abstract individuals, objects like stones in slices of space/time that replace or become obstacles to each other. Paul views all present individuals as expendable in the light of a future socialist paradise. These are negative aspects of situated freedom.

The dying Hélène takes great pains to convince Jean that although she is one of the stones he has thrown as obstacles to others on the path to liberation, she alone had made the choice that allows him to use her. He must not shoulder any guilt about an action that was her free choice. The dying Hélène says "C'est moi qui ai voulu y aller" (Beauvoir 1945, 306). "It is I who chose to go" (Beauvoir 1948, 288). Hélène's position could be seen as compatible with Jean's. A revolt sometimes requires finite human beings to treat themselves as well as others as things. Women have to accept this characteristic of finitude as do men.

However, instead of considering Jean and Hélène to represent two sides of the same coin of human freedom, we might look at The Blood of Others from Linda Singer's point of view, with a nod to Carol Gilligan. Singer argues that while Beauvoir's discussion of freedom stems from a masculinist tradition, Beauvoir rewrites "the discourse of freedom from the position of the oppressed feminine" (Singer 1985, 232). According to Singer, Beauvoir shows freedom emerging from "a situation of relatedness and affinity. This sense of a freedom which realizes itself in engagement with and for others provides Beauvoir with the basis for the morality of commitment and concern" (Singer 1985, 232).

Singer concludes that an ethics of ambiguity is opposed to an ethics of autonomy, law, and obligation. An ethics of ambiguity posits freedom as a will to action and commitment, "moving freedom toward the maternal discourse of liberation aimed at freeing others toward their own possibilities through commitment and concern" (Singer 1985, 238). In this paper, I have argued that Beauvoir's The Blood of Others does indeed reveal women acting in quite different ways from male law enforcers.

Beauvoir's The Blood of Others reveals dramatically and more clearly than her The Ethics of Ambiguity the striking ambiguity of a woman's choice. It is not only the woman in a harem who must make her choices in a world controlled by men. In occupied Paris as in the land of Moab, women try to form relationships based on lived intentions. The relationships between mother and daughter, sister and sister, might be grounded not in genetic biological origins or social-political-economic alliances that solidify geographical boundaries, but in human promises of fidelity and commitment which are incarnated in real acts of caring. While I agree with Singer that Beauvoir advocates "a freedom which realizes itself in engagement with and for others," at the same time in this novel, Beauvoir underlines the major difficulties of this kind of action in a masculinist world. If women truly want to be sisters, they must act to break down the masculinist structures that keep them separated.

Hélène performs no violent actions herself, and at the end, like Jean Tarrou in Albert Camus's The Plague (1948), she is killed by the enemy. The final image of the novel could be viewed as ominous. Hélène reunites Jean and Paul, and then she dies. Her corpse is the cornerstone that Jean and Paul might use to recreate society in the old masculinist mold. Hélène, like Ruth, is swallowed up by masculinist law. But we must not forget the positive contributions of women. The novel begins and ends with Jean describing Hélène as his inspiration. In the end he states that he could not continue Resistance acts of sabotage without Hélène's example. I argue that Jean is quite right about this. Hélène is the only important example of authenticity in the novel. Without Hélène's joie d'exister and her positing of a brighter, future world in the light of her lived experience with other women, Jean would remain paralyzed by the burden of responsibility.

Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity is still a useful philosophical text, but The Blood of Others, recreating in imagination the drama of concrete free choice in the rich fullness of lived experience, reveals the necessity for the analyses of The Second Sex far more clearly than does The Ethics. Before women can create a world that recognizes and encourages the freedom of all, we have to deal with the problems created by masculinist obsessions with biology, geography, and social/political/economic divisions, all of which are connected with treating women and children as possessions. And we must live as mothers and sisters now. If Kant had seen the real problem grounding the scaffolds faced by Anne Boleyn's lovers, he might not have been so quick to admire Thomas More's headstrong, soon to be headless, pursuit of the truth. Beauvoir's novel contains more truth than was ever dreamed of by our philosophers.

Note

1. See, for example, Husserl (1973), especially No. 33. Beauvoir would have had secondhand access to material in Husserl's manuscripts at the Archives at Louvain through Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who visited there in 1938. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty quotes from Eugen Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Merleau-Ponty 1962, vii), which certainly refers to the Other as co-present. For a discussion of the influence of the Husserl Archives as well as several students of Husserl on Merleau-Ponty, see Herbert Spiegelberg (1965, 529-30).

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