Your Simone: Eros, Ethics and the Other Scene of Writing in Simone de Beauvoir

The years of letter writing between Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren correspond to the period of Simone de Beauvoir's perhaps most important intellectual production. During these years she wrote The Second Sex, The Mandarins, and her important essay on de Sade, besides numerous essays for Les Temps Modernes. In this essay I will argue that the relationship between the daily activity of letter writing in a foreign language in which de Beauvoir is able to invent herself and hear herself in a sustained fashion in a different tongue, syntax and fantasy space, allows for the emergence of Simone de Beauvoir's most challenging philosophical work. The article hopes to contribute a reading of what has come to be classified as simply "a transatlantic affair," as a writing constellation that tells us more about the relationship between critical thought, self-constitution, and philosophical production in modernity than previously considered.