We Have Always Been Materialists

This essay revolves around a basic question: What is the relationship between twentieth- century French feminism and materialist politics? More precisely, what is the place of materialism in the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, or in what sense are the philosophies of Beauvoir and Irigaray “materialist” ones? I take up this set of questions vis-à-vis the “new” materialism of Marx—a materialism that destroys the classical philosophical opposition of idealism and materialism in order to think the subject of politics. I seek to show that it is precisely this subject that we find in its nascent form vis-à-vis the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray in twentieth-century French feminism—the subject of materialist–feminist politics.