2.1 Encroachment

The philosophical concept of “empiètement,” often translated into English as ‘encroachment,’ signals the inescapable mutual influence between one’s own freedom and that of others. Encroachment designates the constitutive relationality of interiority and exteriority, self and other, and the individual and her social and historical context; it is a stepping on (an entwined step), a giving up of oneself, a gradual transgression of boundaries. Understood in this sense, encroachment is a theme that touches all of Beauvoir’s writings, from her novels and memoirs to her philosophical essays, and from her early diaries to the last interviews of the 1980s. However, this concept has not been named as such by Beauvoir scholars, nor has this term been associated with Beauvoir’s texts themselves. This gap in the literature is surprising given Beauvoir’s use of the term in The Blood of Others, and in light of its potential to serve as a true hallmark of Beauvoir’s philosophy.²⁰

Emmanuel de Saint Aubert’s chapter, “Le Sang des autres : Merleau-Ponty et Simone de Beauvoir,” first published in 2004 in his book Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l’ être. Merleau-Ponty au tournant des années 1945–1951, has been chosen as the Simone de Beauvoir Studies Featured Translation / Traduction annuelle of 2019 in virtue of its importance to the field and its potential to incite interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogues. It is published here in English translation and serves as the lead article of this special issue. De Saint Aubert argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of encroachment is in fact “properly Beauvoirian.” With reference to a number of Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished manuscripts, including the Mexico Lectures of 1949 and the preparatory notes for The Visible and the Invisible, de Saint Aubert traces Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of encroachment to Beauvoir’s second novel, The Blood of Others. His analysis reveals that Merleau-Ponty makes fourteen references to Beauvoir’s text in his unpublished working notes from 1945 to 1949, even though he does not mention The Blood of Others in his published works.²¹ Moreover, de Saint Aubert maintains that Merleau-Ponty “borrows” a number of other philosophical insights from Beauvoir, including his notions of “pensée du survol” (high-altitude thinking) and projection, as well as a certain critique of the French rationalist tradition that is first presented in Pyrrhus and Cineas.²² He also exposes a tension or “ambivalence” present in Beauvoir’s earliest philosophical works: the inevitability of the encroachment of freedoms that Beauvoir describes in The Blood of Others is at odds with the idea of a freedom that could sufficiently protect itself from encroachment found in Pyrrhus and Cineas, an essay that Beauvoir wrote after the novel and that de Saint Aubert believes reflects the new influence of Sartre’s conception of freedom from Being and Nothingness.

Despite the field-shaping insights of de Saint Aubert’s research and despite the fact that his article was first published fifteen years ago, his work has scarcely been referenced in Beauvoir studies until recently.²³ One possible explanation for this oversight is that historically, on both sides of the Atlantic, Beauvoir has not for the most part been read as a philosopher. The failure to recognize and translate technical phenomenological terms and phrases that Beauvoir employs such as “conscience,” “expérience vécue,” “réalité humaine,” “chair,” “se faire être,” and “empiètement” into English in ways consistent with their English usages in canonical philosophical texts tends to distort and obscure Beauvoir’s philosophical contributions as well as her intellectual lineages and legacies.²⁴ As Beauvoir emphasizes in her September 1985 interview with Margaret A. Simons, “I’ve studied a lot of philosophy, I have a degree in philosophy, I’ve taught philosophy, I’m infused with philosophy […].”²⁵ At the same time that it is problematic not to frame Beauvoir as a philosopher, the fact that Beauvoir’s oeuvre evades clear categorization into institutionally-sanctioned disciplinary categories is part of what is distinctive about it.²⁶ Beauvoir’s engagement with and relevance to a range of disciplines, themes, genres, and bodies of scholarship, and her widespread yet variable reception within a number of fields—not to mention her significant popularity outside of academia and her differential place in Francophone and Anglophone literatures—means that not all Beauvoir enthusiasts are reading the same sources at the same time. This is how gaps and pockets in the literature can occur, how the majority of Beauvoir scholars would miss de Saint Aubert’s chapter on Beauvoir’s notion of encroachment.

The idea to publish a translation of an article of crucial importance that warrants a wider, international readership each year and bestow it with the title of the Simone de Beauvoir Studies Featured Translation/Traduction annuelle was inspired by de Saint Aubert’s work on Beauvoir.²⁷ It is thus only fitting that Emmanuel de Saint Aubert be the first recipient of this honor. Because of the length and import of de Saint Aubert’s article, we have decided to publish it in two installments. Part I, “I Exist, Therefore I Encroach,” is presented in this issue. Part II, “Between Birth and Death: Freedom Struggling with Existential Divinities,” will be published in SdBS 30.2, a special issue titled “Dialogues avec Beauvoir/Beauvoir in Conversation.” It considers the origins of existentialism and their relation to myth with reference to the multidirectional personal relationships among Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Zaza (Élisabeth Lacoin), and Sartre.

2.2 The Twenty-First Century Self

Due to its capacity to evoke the inevitable permeability of borders, encroachment is a twenty-first century concept if ever there was one. Encroachment is not intersubjectivity; in encroachment there is real danger that the self will be infected or subsumed by the other, that the very ontology of the self will be changed. In the third millennium, minds are always at risk of intellectual infections and other encroachments since they are wired to continuous streams of information that come through appendages like phones, screens, watches, and television. More than three hundred years after it was formulated, John Locke’s classic theory of personal identity has never-imagined implications because “the reach of consciousness” now extends beyond the body into data sets and information. Human memories are presently stored in clouds and on-line caches rather than in the head or under the skin.²⁸ Separating one’s own fate from the fates of others is also difficult in a context where economies, politics, environmental damages, and imperialisms are globalized.

Technologies of genetic enhancement, genetic modification, medical advancement, sex change operations, and artificial intelligence open us to new ontologies of cyborgs, transhumanism, organ transplants, sex-reassignment, and panpsychism. An entire political and philosophical literature has recently been built around the notion of nonhuman agencies; it includes those discourses that have been variably labeled “new materialisms,” “speculative realisms,” “neo-vitalisms,” and “object-oriented ontologies.”²⁹ Traditional philosophical problems concerning the relationships between mind and body, consciousness and nature, human and machine, self and world are not only being reconfigured, but shaken to their very core.³⁰

Fear about either the loss of self or irreversible transformations of self within ontologies of the twenty-first century may be partly responsible for mounting interest in the genres of autobiography and memoir, and other kinds of writing about the self.³¹ For example, Margaretta Jolly explains the current rise of “life writing” as follows: “As the individualism unleashed by capitalism cracks and reshapes in the fire of globalization and the communications revolution, a literature that foregrounds the shape of a single life and its span seems to focus the anxieties of the age.”³² In our contemporary contexts, the questions Beauvoir asks in Pyrrhus and Cineas are as relevant as ever: “ ‘We must cultivate our garden,’ says Candide. This advice will not be much help to us because what is my garden? […] So how to know what is mine?”³³ So too, perhaps, are the answers she gives throughout her oeuvre, and especially those discussed and demonstrated in her memoirs.

Jean-Louis Jeannelle’s article, “Simone de Beauvoir et l’ autobiographie existentialiste : une réévaluation,” enters this conversation by arguing that we have largely underestimated the weight of Beauvoir’s contribution to “les écrits de soi.” Jeannelle observes that we are just beginning to realize the enormous scope and complexity of Beauvoir’s project of writing the self, which crosses literary forms and spans her correspondences with Sartre and Nelson Algren, her novels, and her political commitments, as well as her explicitly autobiographical writings.³⁴ He maintains that Beauvoir’s practice of writing the self is unique, even within the constellation of existentialist writings on the self including those of Sartre, Michel Leiris, Jean Genet, André Gorz, Violette Leduc, and others. Traditional conceptions of autobiography emphasize the interiority of the subject; the psychological development of the self as an individual; and the literary identity of the author, narrator, and main character of the text, a promise to readers known as “the autobiographical pact.”³⁵ As Alex Zwerdling explains, “[life stories] focus on the author’s inner life rather than place in the world.”³⁶ These standard accounts miss many of the innovations of Beauvoir’s memoirs, and especially the genius of her first attempt in the genre, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, which not only blurs the lines between memoir and novel, but also foregrounds the external (that is, social and historical) aspects of the protagonist’s life. Beauvoir’s text thus inverts the presumed ideal of the genre by tracking the protagonist’s development away from interiority and into relationships, and specifically into the bond between Simone and her best friend, Zaza.

Whereas Jean-Louis Jeannelle argues that the individualist frame of the autobiographical pact prevents us from appreciating the significance of Beauvoir’s autobiographical project, Anne Strasser finds Philippe Lejeune’s notion useful for thinking the relationship between Beauvoir and her readers. In “Simone de Beauvoir et ses lecteurs : de personne à personne,” Strasser assumes a radical approach to reading Beauvoir by attending to the “presence” of Beauvoir’s readers across the six volumes of her memoirs. Notably, Strasser uses digital versions of Beauvoir’s books to map her use of certain terms and show how Beauvoir’s readers have influenced her writing in real time. Strasser’s focus is the reader “à l’ intérieur du texte” who is already in relationship with the author/narrator/character, rather than an imagined future reader who is presumed to watch the text from without. She argues that Beauvoir’s concern with correcting misunderstandings of her life and her works, and her desire to speak to her readership are practices that mark her memoir project as an “institution de soi.”³⁷ In correcting and clarifying the image that her readers have of her, Beauvoir shapes her self—she makes herself loved (se faire aimer) and makes herself exist (se faire exister)—in the text and in reality.³⁸ At the same time that Beauvoir is writing herself, however, her practice of writing works to involve the reader; to develop an authentic relationship with the reader that sees the reader as an active freedom who crafts a text together with its author in an act of collective enterprise. In Strasser’s words, Beauvoir aims in her autobiography to “engager le lecteur, l’ inciter à une prise de conscience, impliquer sa liberté dans l’ acte de lecteur.” In so doing, Beauvoir is embodying a rich and dynamic theory of literature.

If Beauvoir’s descriptions of the self as a relational freedom who is situated historically and positioned socially is especially useful for making sense of twenty-first century existence, then perhaps this is because the unique demands of our era feminize all of us in the Deleuzian sense.³⁹ Globalized capitalism and technological mediation push us to “become women” by emphasizing the absence, withholding, and disunity of the subject, along with the inevitability of (our) encroachment. Beauvoir’s early criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s masculine notion of subjectivity may resonate with millennials too: “Woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself.”⁴⁰ In an era where enticements to conformity, immanence, and mechanism are legion—where we are consistently asked to sacrifice our autonomy for connection, where resistance to oppression is often in tension with participation in a global economy, it is no wonder that we would be nostalgic for an earlier time when the boundaries of self, agency, and body were clearer. It is no wonder that we would seek out artistic genres such as memoir, biography, auto-fiction, and confession.

2.3 Race and the Reach of Beauvoir’s “Woman”

Though the feminization of subjectivity may be pervasive in the twenty-first century, we are not all sexed in the same ways, nor do we experience the harms of sexism and misogyny equally. As the concept of “intersectionality” was designed to show, other classifications such as race, class, nationality, sexuality, and ability structure the ways that our sexes are lived first-personally and perceived in the third-person; forgetting these constitutive relationships in theory and practice enables the invisibility and erasure of women of color and of Black women, in particular.⁴¹ In a neo-colonial, global world organized by lines of imperialism and colonial legacies that proliferate as much through popular culture and the internet as they do through formal economic policies and national agendas, we are all racialized to some degree, albeit in different ways and according to different cultural contexts and meanings.

A unique text in Beauvoir’s corpus for many reasons, America Day by Day includes Beauvoir’s most direct discussions of race and racism. Here Beauvoir observes that white Americans often approach “the race question” in bad faith; they either deny that racism exists or that it is a problem, and they cultivate ignorance about the conditions of Black people’s lives and the ways that white people benefit concretely from perpetuating discrimination against Black people.⁴² Even talking about race fuels guilt in white audiences; “it provokes discomfort in everyone.”⁴³ Beauvoir also notices that white Americans who enjoy frequenting Black dance halls and jazz clubs, and who openly reject racism, often erect racist imaginaries through attitudes of exoticism:

These whites define blacks as the antithesis of American civilization. Magnificently gifted in music and dance, full of animal instincts (including an extraordinary sensuality), carefree, thoughtless, dreamers, poets, given to religious feeling, undisciplined, childish—that’s the conventional image of blacks that these whites readily construct. And they “are drawn to” blacks because they have projected onto them what they would like to be but are not.⁴⁴

In philosophical terms, the concept of Blackness plays a fundamental role in the formation and maintenance of white identity and subjectivity.

Confining ourselves to the text of America Day by Day, it is somewhat unclear where Beauvoir locates herself in her analysis of white peoples’ relationships with “the race question.” Does thinking about race create discomfort for her as a white woman? Is she drawn to Black people because she imagines them as the “antithesis of civilization,” antidotes to the bourgeois values and etiquette that she has fought to reject? Alternatively, perhaps she feels that her friendship with Richard Wright and her openly anti-racist and anti-colonial politics position her outside of the group of white people who would feel guilty about racism or exotify Black people? Perhaps her status as a French woman protects her from such responses since France does not have the same historical relationship with slavery as the United States does?

Beauvoir has been criticized, especially by American scholars, for upholding a view of woman that is grounded in the experiences of bourgeois, white women and excludes or ignores the experiences of Black women, Latina women, Asian women, Muslim women, poor women, women from developing nations and the Global South, as well as queer women and trans women.⁴⁵ Beauvoir’s use of “the race–gender analogy” in the introduction to The Second Sex has also been identified as a mechanism that perpetuates the actual and theoretical invisibility of Black women.⁴⁶ That women of color are engaging Beauvoir’s ideas in their writing—whether critically, affirmatively, or creatively—and that they are doing so with increased frequency is significant in itself because it suggests that there is something about Beauvoir’s work that opens conversations about race, even if this opening is still too narrow. Such conversations hold much promise for exposing truths of our time and resisting multiple oppressions.

Janine Jones’s article “When Black Female Presence in L’ Invitée Is (Seemingly) Not Invited to The Second Sex,” provides a different way to engage Beauvoir’s oeuvre on the question of race. Jones’s method is less oriented toward criticizing Beauvoir’s conception of “woman” for being too narrow or exclusionary than it is about making explicit the role of race in Beauvoir’s theory of sexed subjectivity. Like Strasser, Jones employs a reading strategy that looks for “presences” in Beauvoir’s texts. In both cases, “presences” are evocations of beings that inhabit the background of the narrative, plot, or theory but are nonetheless central to its development. Jones focuses on Beauvoir’s first novel, L’ Invitée (She Came to Stay), and identifies a “character” of sorts that has not yet been noted or discussed in the relevant scholarship: “Black female presences.” These presences include the Black dancers at the Bal Colonial, the pretty créole man who lives in Xavière’s apartment building, and Lise Malan, whom Françoise and Xavière perceive to be of mixed race. Jones calls these characters “presences” for they are decidedly not women or people according to their place in the text itself: they provide the sensuous and object-like elements of the plot—sounds, smells, colors, and textures—and they are not subject to the same ontology of humanity or sexual difference that white women are.⁴⁷ Although Beauvoir may not have intended this consequence, this notion of “Black female presences” is one way of fleshing out her claim in The Second Sex that “not every female human being is necessarily a woman.”⁴⁸ According to Jones, Black female presence “does the work of philosophy” in Beauvoir’s metaphysical novel; it provides a fixed point of “the timeless, absolute, objective world of Blackness” that illuminates the particular complexities and ambiguities of white women’s anxieties, subjectivities, and pathways to transcendence.

In America Day by Day, Beauvoir claims that the most important element of racial and racist thinking is the idea that “the white race must maintain its purity.”⁴⁹ Jones’s analysis reveals that She Came to Stay is rife with imagery of (racial) purity and (racial) contamination. Immediately after Xavière suggests that she and Françoise go to “le bal nègre”, Françoise voices her desire for a thin, translucent candy that she admires for being “so dry and pure.”⁵⁰ In response, and with an implication not lost on Françoise, Xavière says, “But I loathe purity.”⁵¹ Curiously, de Saint Aubert’s discussion of The Blood of Others emphasizes a parallel passage. Jean Blomart’s childhood is described as follows: “translucent and pure [blanc] in front of the white page, he smiled at a beautiful, rational future.”⁵² Later in life, after experiencing the war and the Occupation, Jean realizes that the moral purity that he aspired to in his youth is not only unattainable in the real world—a world of ambiguity, encroachment, love, and violence—but it is often appealed to by pacifists as a means to mask their moral culpability and responsibilities. Evocations of blood disrupt aspirations to purity (whether racial or moral) in both texts. To use Jones’s phrase, the threat of “consanguineous contamination” that follows from encroachment destabilizes conventional values, subjectivities, and ontologies. Jeannelle’s reference to Frantz Fanon’s descriptions of the concept “sale nègre” as catalyst to an “affective tetanization” offers another example of ideological connections between race, pollution, infection, and the foundations of white civilization.⁵³

At the same time that Beauvoir’s ideas invite contemporary conversations about race and racism, we should not expect the racisms of today to look the same as they did in the 1940s when Beauvoir wrote She Came to Stay and America Day by Day. Social, legal, and political power differentials that accompany different forms of racialization motivate denial and concealment of the problem(s); racist systems are continually transforming themselves so that they can perpetuate themselves into the next era. Contemporary racisms often function covertly without any mention of the term “race”; they can operate through restrictions on immigration or trade, derogatory attitudes toward nationalities or geographic regions that have high proportions of people of color, state prohibitions of certain cultural or religious practices, and the fortification of borders between neighborhoods and among nations.

2.4 Metareflections and Paratexts

More than ninety years after Beauvoir’s penned one of her earliest published writings—the August 6, 1926 entry of her diary—we have now entered a late phase of Beauvoir scholarship.⁵⁴ Early encounters with a thinker’s work often aim at understanding the meaning of a text in isolation or in the context of one genre, discipline, or theme.⁵⁵ In subsequent stages, scholars’ views start to broaden and they begin to interpret the writer’s ideas within the frame of her entire oeuvre, noting repetitions, contradictions, and thematic developments throughout the author’s writing as a whole.⁵⁶ They also look at the historical context of a writer’s corpus and invoke comparisons with other writers.⁵⁷ Applications of the writer’s ideas to contemporary issues also appear later in the progression of engagement.⁵⁸ Scholarly editions of the writer’s works, along with anthologies and journal issues, turn up around this time.⁵⁹ Very advanced stages exhibit metareflections; for example, they include considerations of the reception and evolution of a writer’s ideas as they travel through different academic, cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts.⁶⁰ They also attend to the interplay of a writer’s life, texts, and theories, and they look to unpublished and lesser-known manuscripts and correspondence. At this point, scholars sometimes speculate about the personal and psychological motivations behind a writer’s views.⁶¹ Famous male authors are frequently the recipients of this full cycle of scholarly approaches, while scholarship about famous women is often truncated at one of the earlier stages. That Simone de Beauvoir Studies is one of the few journals in the world devoted to the vision and legacy of a woman author attests to this difference.⁶²

The phases of encounter with a writer are not necessarily linear, nor are they always distinct from one another. However, the current emphasis on metareflections and paratexts in Beauvoir studies is indicative of the depth of engagement that readers of Beauvoir have collectively achieved over time. “Metareflections” ask how and why Beauvoir’s work has been studied, interpreted, and received in the ways that it has, and they consider her texts and ideas from multiple cultural and social angles. They include reflections on Beauvoir’s own metareflections—her descriptions of herself and her writings. “Paratexts” are elements such as the title, author’s name, preface, cover design, and footnotes that accompany a text and that facilitate the relationship between author and reader.⁶³ Paratexts also encompass what Gérard Gennette has called “epitexts”; statements about the text that are external to the text itself such as those made by the author in interviews, lectures, journals, letters, and autobiographies.⁶⁴

New practices of reading and writing in the twenty-first century problematize any clean distinction between reflection and metareflection, and text and paratext. Where ideas come from, who receives them, which demographics are most likely to resonate with them, and how they are suppressed or spread are metareflective questions that accompany the use of online media and new technologies of data collection and tracking. State investments in cyber security and digital marketing, policies of censorship and net neutrality, and the prevalence of hacking and leaking show just how important the apparatus that situates and distributes a text is. In a digital world where stimulating and trivial pieces of information are likely to go “viral,” spreading through millions of readers in just days or hours, reflection is already metareflection, and the paratext may have outpaced the text itself. We are all concerned about being contaminated with propaganda; current reading trends employed in Beauvoir studies are also a habit of our time.

In “Beauvoir and The Second Sex: The Turning Point,” Margaret A. Simons asks what is perhaps one of the most burning metaquestions of all in Beauvoir studies: What led Beauvoir to write The Second Sex? Simons first notes that Beauvoir has said remarkably little about how she came to create her magnum opus and suggests that this absence may be as telling as what is positively said about the book’s origins, indicating causes that Beauvoir may not have wanted to discuss publically. The standard explanation holds that Beauvoir came to the question of women because she wanted to understand herself better.⁶⁵ Both Simons and Jeannelle evoke the following passage in support of this account: “Last night I spoke to Sartre for a long time about a point that specifically interests me about myself: my ‘femininity,’ and how I’m of my sex and in what way I’m not.”⁶⁶ But Simons assumes a different attitude to Beauvoir’s memoirs than Jeannelle; she is skeptical of the accuracy of some of their descriptions and even goes so far as to characterize memoir as a kind of “barrier” that may have prevented Beauvoir from expressing the truth. She explains that “writing her memoirs would be a problem [for Beauvoir]” because the genre would have her choose between “tell[ing] the full story of her philosophical achievements” and protecting Sartre. Simons pores over the paratextual evidence for answers, referencing diary entries, letters, and interviews by both Beauvoir and Sartre, and reveals tensions between claims from different genres. She concludes that Beauvoir likely encountered not one obstacle but a “series of obstacles” that helped her realize what it means to be a woman in a sexist society and inspired her to write about it.⁶⁷

The final article in this issue, “The Past Is an Appeal: Simone de Beauvoir Studies 1983–2014” by Meryl Altman, takes metareflection in Beauvoir studies to another level, marking the beginning of still a new phase in Beauvoir scholarship that attends to the movement of this scholarship over time. Altman’s essay is a retrospective analysis of the first thirty years of Simone de Beauvoir Studies that describes the genesis of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society and its journal, the evolution of thematic and disciplinary contributions across the first twenty-nine volumes of the Studies, and major events and intellectual contributions that occurred within these pages during this time. In this sense, Altman offers metareflections upon metareflections that are grounded by a down-to-earth style. She reflects on the character and proportions of articles from different disciplines, the debates that have animated this publication from “the question of influence” between Beauvoir and Sartre to the controversy over the extent of Beauvoir’s resistance to the Occupation, and prominent trends toward addressing “complexities of genre” and “intertextuality.” Altman reminds us that Beauvoir was alive when the first two issues of Simone de Beauvoir Studies appeared and that SdBS 3, the memorial issue published in 1986, features a color insert of reprints of work from Hélène de Beauvoir’s art exhibition at Stanford University in California, which was organized by the journal’s Editor in Chief, Yolanda Patterson, at whose home Hélène was staying when she learned of her sister’s death.⁶⁸ Altman’s retrospective provides an invaluable record of those concrete relationships on and off the page that have led the Society and the Studies to this particular point in time. Hers is not only a study of an archive, but an archive in itself, one that is motivated by feminist methods and that emphasizes “the social dimensions of remembering.”⁶⁹ In reflecting on the first thirty years of Simone de Beauvoir Studies, we find that Beauvoir’s memoirs are not really confined to the six volumes of her autobiography; they extend beyond books to the lives that she touched in person and in writing, and then to the lives that those people have touched with their writing in turn. This journal is a repository for these kinds of serendipitous connections and, insofar as “the past is an appeal to the future,” an inspiration for many more to come.

As we celebrate the rebirth of Simone de Beauvoir Studies, it seems especially important to thank those who have made this moment possible. Our debt to Yolanda Patterson for cultivating this international and multi-disciplinary network of authors could only be paid by a future that deepens and expands the dynamic connections that she set in motion so many years ago. Sadly, Liliane Lazar, who was the Society’s secretary-treasurer for more than thirty years, passed away while we were working to transition the journal to its current format. Together with Yolanda, Liliane shaped the very possibilities that we are now realizing and she is remembered with feelings of profound gratitude. In addition, a large number of individuals from all over the world have played crucial roles during the five-year interim between the publication of SdBS 29 and SdBS 30 to ensure that the Studies would not only continue after Yolanda’s retirement, but also thrive in its new format. The five-person Editorial Committee has worked tirelessly to establish editorial and production structures that can accommodate a digital world, while also fostering the kinds of diverse content and styles of expression that make the Studies a distinctive venue for publication. The thirty members of the journal’s Editorial Board have consistently offered their support, time, and sage advice that led to this rebirth. Several anonymous reviewers provided evaluations of the many submissions that have been received to date and their comments helped to develop the journal’s content and orientation. Appreciation is also due to the authors themselves who entrusted their work to the Studies at a time of change and who spur us to new thoughts with their writings and creations. President Tove Pettersen, Secretary-Treasurer Meryl Altman, and the other members of the Society’s Board of Directors and Steering Committee have devoted long hours and creative energy to instituting an organizational structure that would persist through future editorial transitions so as to prevent interruptions in the journal’s publication schedule. Special thanks are also due to Margaret A. Simons, Barbara Klaw, and Megan Burke for their roles in helping to digitize the first twenty-nine volumes of the Studies. Finally, the excitement and dedication displayed by the current membership of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society undoubtedly motivated the relaunch project through to this inaugural moment.

The vibrant web of relationships that surround and constitute Beauvoir studies past, present, and future reminds us that lineages are not necessarily linear. As feminist-physicist Karen Barad remarks, “Some of the greatest debts we have are to those who live in different times and spaces.”⁷⁰ Time circles. Philosophies come in and out of prominence depending on the epoch and milieu. Existence returns again and again to the same places even if it never repeats itself exactly or inhabits these places in the same way twice. In 2019, we find ourselves faced with many of the same questions that Beauvoir faced in the first half of the twentieth-century. It is thus no surprise that Beauvoir’s ideas speak to us now, perhaps more loudly than they ever have. Beauvoir describes existentialism as “a practical and living attitude toward the problems posed by the world today” that “strives to hold both ends of the chain at the same time, surpassing [dépassant] the interior-exterior, subjective-objective opposition.”⁷¹ The porous borders, infectious encroachments, hybrid ontologies, and digital texts that characterize twenty-first century life call out for a neo-existentialism, a philosophy of ambiguity and an expressive method that moves among disciplines, genres, and perspectives, and attends to the multidimensionality of modern.

The many new faces/nouveaux regards of Simone de Beauvoir Studies discussed here—from the journal’s new design and digital format to the latest themes in Beauvoir studies and the changing groups of people who are engaging them—point to a final sense of the title of this special issue: What will the future face/regard futur of Beauvoir studies be? Where will the distinctive possibilities afforded by this multidisciplinary, multigenre, and multicultural venue lead? What new strategies will we develop for “rejecting oppression at any cost”?⁷² What conceptual and political landscapes will we “hunters of meaning” traverse next?⁷³ Like Athena’s emergence from the head of Zeus, we face our epoch born for a second time, seeking out its unique features and challenges, sketching and sculpting meaning, actively crafting an interconnected future.