One of the most important concepts in Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist and phenomenological ethics is the concept of freedom. In this article, I would like to argue that Beauvoir’s concept of freedom is problematic in being strongly constrained by its essentially active character. This constraint contradicts some of Beauvoir’s major ideas, such as the one that considers the body as a situation, as a source of activity and of freedom in itself, as well as the idea of eroticism as one (...) of the most important expressions of authenticity. I will show that Beauvoir’s concept of freedom can appear to be less constrained by the necessity to be inherently active if we look at it through the ‘crack’ provided by her conception of the erotic body as already embodying freedom. Using this ‘crack’, I will attempt to shed new light on the aspects of Beauvoir’s idea of the erotic that are productive for her conceptions of ethics and of freedom. (shrink)

The French existentialists Simone de Beauvoir and Jean‐Paul Sartre are renowned philosophers of freedom. But what “existentialist freedom” is is a matter of disagreement amongst their interpreters and, some argue, between Beauvoir and Sartre themselves. Since the late 1980s several scholars have argued that a Sartrean conception of freedom cannot justify the ethics of existentialism, adequately account for situations of oppression, or serve feminist ends. On these readings, Beauvoir disagreed with Sartre about freedom—making existentialist ethics, resistance to oppression, and feminism (...) coherently defensible. This article identifies four conceptions of freedom in order to clarify the questions of whether and how they disagreed, arguing that some incompatibilist readings of Sartre and Beauvoir conflate or confuse these conceptions in ways that render their conclusions unconvincing. However, there are stronger grounds on which to claim that Beauvoir disagreed with Sartre about morality—and the conditions of its possibility. (shrink)