Nietzsche’s philosopher, this does not surprise us, is supposed to be a man, just as Bataille’s reader is supposed to be a man.

Women, if they are reading at all take all this and more in stride: making allowances for and reading and seeing from a man’s perspective. Women are, as de Beauvoir reminds us, uncannily good at this: an oppressed group dispersed among the oppressors, an oppressed group that takes the perspective of the oppressor and thus sidesteps any chance at the dialectic, subversion, revolution, and not at all coincidentally, excludes anything like consciousness or awareness.

women are not a minority, like the American Negroes or the Jews; there are as many women as men on earth. Again, the two groups concerned have often been originally independent; they may have been formerly unaware of each other’s existence, or perhaps they recognised each other’s autonomy. But a historical event has resulted in the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger. The scattering of the Jews, the introduction of slavery into America, the conquests of imperialism are examples in point. In these cases the oppressed retained at least the memory of former days; they possessed in common a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion or a culture. -- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Proletarians say ‘We’; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But women do not say ‘We’, except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say ‘women’, and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude.-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Perhaps the problem is, as Nietzsche complains with uncanny insight in his The Gay Science when he speaks of the tendency of women to play at being themselves, playing the role of the image of themselves, for men, even intimately, especially intimately. The problem, as Nietzsche sees it is that they play themselves as and for the subject that they do not opt themselves to be but instead Das sie sich hingeben, that they play-act at yielding or giving themselves, even when they “yield themselves.”

See for further discussion, Babich, “Nietzsche and Eros Between the Devil and God’s Deep Blue Sea: The Erotic Valence of Art and the Artist as Actor — Jew — Woman,” Continental Philosophy Review, 33 (2000): 159-188. Link here to ->->>Fulltext.

Voir aussi: « Nietzsche et Eros entre le gouffre de Charybde et l’écueil de Dieu: La valence érotique de l’art et l’artiste comme acteur — Juif — Femme. » Trad. De Isabelle Wienand. Revue Internationale de Philosophie. 211/1 (2000): 15-55.




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