S2E2: Christine Daigle: Can Beauvoir's Existentialism Be a Posthumanism?

In this Q&A with feminist philosopher Christine Daigle, we discuss how Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy represents a first major step towards a rejection of the humanist subject. Christine argues that Beauvoir's work is influential for the development of contemporary posthumanist material feminism. Specifically, she argues, Beauvoir's unprecedented attention to embodiment and biology, in The Second Sex and other works, as well as her notion of ambiguity, serve to challenge the humanist subject. While Christine is not claiming that Beauvoir was a posthumanist or material feminist thinker avant la lettre, she shows that Beauvoir is an important precursor to some of their key ideas. Indeed, her thinking about the body, sex, gender, and the importance of embodiment and situation constitutes a challenge to the subject of humanism, thereby opening up a path for thinkers that follow to push Beauvoir’s critique and articulate a posthumanism that does away with the subject of humanism.