But I was troubled by her flat-out pronouncement early in The coming of Age that the biological face of old age, “in as far as it is summed up by the words decrepitude, ugliness and ailing-well being,” provokes “instant repulsion” (40). Why, if decline and precarity are to be our future, are we indifferent at finest and cruel at worst to the destiny of the elderly, a fate that we ourselves are destined to experience if we stay into old age? Self-protection is the principal reply Beauvoir gives to this elementary question. I additionally find it much more peculiar than I remembered. As a lady and academic who lives within the anti-intellectual United States, I additionally find it inspiring that Beauvoir meant The approaching of Age for an informed public viewers, not one strictly tutorial. And for her as a person, outdated age was to not be an experience of abject solitude. It’s gratifying to me that Beauvoir’s method is profoundly humanistic, emphasizing what aging feels prefer to those that inhabit the temporality of outdated age, particularly in capitalist economies; deemed not productive and ejected from the labor market, they are stripped of status and the means to pursue a livelihood precisely in the intervening time they are experiencing what she straightforwardly identifies as biological decline.
Thirty-5 years in the past I read The coming of Age, along with Beauvoir’s novels and memoirs, predominantly when it comes to her intensely dark personal view of aging as a dreaded decline and diminishment. Beauvoir writes as a moral philosopher, relentlessly intent on exposing the precarity of aging. As had no different girl earlier than her, Beauvoir succeeded as a public mental, writer, and activist, devoting herself, on behalf of both ladies and the elderly, to the research of egregious unequal energy relations and to advocacy. For The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s groundbreaking 1949 feminist research of the subordination of ladies under patriarchy, there was no established methodology or mannequin. But bolstered by nostalgia, I mentioned yes, remembering the pleasure of being on the enchanting Camargo Foundation in Cassis with my husband and our two-year-outdated daughter in 1984. My topic for the Camargo fellowship was Beauvoir’s work on aging. What accounted for such a punishing view of her own aging? In the early 1980s I used to be a comparatively younger educational and judged, somewhat impatiently, The coming of Age as an undisciplined, additive, and infrequently numbingly encyclopedic view of aging from too many perspectives. Similarly, there was no established method or model for the study of aging.
I agreed then, and i do now, that a protecting reflex to shield ourselves from decline and demise may contribute to producing an individual’s willful blindness toward their own aging in addition to neglect on the part of society as a whole. Today I regard in awe Beauvoir’s clear-eyed understanding of the entanglements, to use Karen Barad’s time period, of the multiple elements that contribute to producing the experience of aging-economic, biological, social, statistical, historical, and cultural, amongst them, in addition to gender and, importantly, private temperament. La professora Pilar Godayol, coordinadora del Grup d’Estudis de Gènere: Traducció, Literatura, Història i Comunicació (GETLIHC) de la UVic-UCC, ha participat en el llibre Translating Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, que és el primer volum dedicat a la recepció internacional de l’obra clàssica de Simone de Beauvoir Le deuxième sexe (El segon sexe). Es narra una història que revela el fracàs editorial de l’intent d’importar la traducció argentina del llibre el 1955, així com els obstacles, tant de censura com de burocràcia, que van haver de superar per aconseguir la traducció al català de Le Deuxième Sexe. L’escriptora Marta Pessarrodona explica, en el context de la presentació d’aquesta obra, que El segon sexe va ser un llibre fonamental per a les dones de l’època: “De santes ja en teníem: buscàvem una altra cosa i la vam trobar en ella i la seva obra” (Avui, 18.01.2008). Afegia que a la Universitat de Barcelona les dones es dividien en dos bàndols “les que havíem llegit El segon sexe i les que no, i pràcticament anàvem a bufetades”.
El capítol “Le Deuxième Sexe Censored underneath Francoism” (“El Segon Sexe censurat durant el franquisme”), escrit per la professora Godayol, analitza la censura institucional aplicada a l’obra de Beauvoir sota el règim franquista, a Espanya. Beauvoir needed to invent a solution to pursue this enormous topic. Would, too, that extra folks had been aware of The approaching of Age and would take up the subject of previous age. Unable to leap ahead to my underlinings and notes within the margins, I literally reread The approaching of Age without skipping total swaths of it. I think about her in the previous Bibliothèque nationale de France on the rue de Richelieu in central Paris, sitting at a long picket desk, taking notes by hand, participating on this far-reaching research from so many angles, studying and requesting extra books, pondering and writing, after which writing extra. She tells us, over and over, that she was aging, she had crossed the road, she was outdated. For it stays the case today that aging, as compared with research on sexual and racial distinction, has been just about ignored in the humanities. I will learn my underlinings, I decided, and went to look for my copy-first among my books on aging, then my books on autobiography and, now a bit desperately, my books under “B.” Nothing.