inference from the fact that people create and uphold states. She writes that‘‘this suggests that the people want them’’ (187). But all that follows is thatstates are not natural entities and are not divinely created. Without furtherinvestigation it is not possible to know who created a state, the military, elites,or the people, or whether a state was developed through conquest andimposition—she notes that warfare has been common but that such a storydoes not reveal the kind of state we should create—or through the invisiblehand of leadership conventions. Yet Hobbes was surely right when he says atthe conclusion of Leviathan, ‘‘there is scarce a Common-wealth in the world,whose beginning can in conscience be justified.’’

Hampton knows that ‘‘when people create a state, they create a monster’’(218). In her agent/principal discussion of subjects’ obedience to their rulers,she notes that rulers, who are always helped by some subjects, can be mastersand that even if widely disliked can maintain their position by preventing thedislike from becoming common knowledge. She comments in her concludingsection that, while the convention model has nothing to say about masters, it isin keeping with the assumption of contract theory that only an agencyrelationship with rulers can be justified. But the hands are far from invisible inthe classic texts. The problem with the dispensable contract of contemporaryphilosophy and the focus on moral reasoning is that it glosses over therelationships of subordination laid out in the pages of the classic texts, and hasnothing to say about actual contracts and the maintenance of power in everydaylife. But, very sadly, Hampton is no longer with us to discuss these issues.

Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. 2ndEd. By MICHELE LE D�UFF. Translated by TRISTA SELOUS. New York:Columbia University Press, 2007.

Marguerite La Caze

This new edition of Hipparchia’s Choice, first published in French in 1989 andin English in 1991, is very welcome and is as fresh as when it was first published.The book has been invaluable to courses and research in feminist philosophy,and the analyses of existentialism represent a major contribution to ourunderstanding of both Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s work. It comes with an epiloguereflecting on how the book has been received and on the importance ofunderstanding the involvement of women in philosophy and the imaginaryelements in philosophical texts.

Book Reviews 191

The book is written in a conversational style addressed directly to thereader. As Michele Le Dœuff notes, she will not ‘‘stick to the topic,’’ as shebelieves digressions are essential to a serious philosophical work, yet in facteach of the four notebooks into which the book is divided has a specific themethat is rigorously pursued in a sustained way. The first notebook considersthe relation among women, philosophy, and feminism. For Le Dœuff, there areintellectual obstacles to any such discussion, the first being the idea that there isradical discontinuity between the present and the past, which can lead toeither the view that philosophy is essentially masculine or the view thatphilosophical reason is impersonal and there are no issues raised by womenengaging in philosophy. The other obstacle is the view that women’s access tophilosophy is of minor importance (5–6). In both cases, Le Dœuff presents amore nuanced view that recognizes women’s role throughout the history ofphilosophy, while simultaneously considering the significance of the ways inwhich women have been and continue to be excluded or deflected from a fulland happily unself-conscious participation in philosophy. She characterizes afeminist as ‘‘someone who knows that something is still not right in therelations between a woman and everybody else, in other words men, otherwomen, the supposedly impersonal agents of institutions and anyone else: somehitch that is strictly potential, of course, simply liable to manifest itself, butwhich you must learn to identify in everyday situations and conversations’’(28). This work of identification is something Le Dœuff carries out in order tolead the way to a less exclusionary philosophy and approach to humanrelations. Her discussion of the need for a more open relation to philosophyand learning in general both develops from her earliest work and looks forwardto The Sex of Knowing (2003).

Although Le Dœuff is optimistic concerning the way feminism links womenand philosophy in a dialectic, she also worries about the difficulties inarticulating one’s thoughts when one is both a woman and a philosopher.Simone de Beauvoir’s life and work shed light on these difficulties, and theanalysis of these and her relation with Jean-Paul Sartre form the heart of thework. In the second notebook, Le Dœuff examines the philosophical relationbetween the two existentialist thinkers in order to answer the question, ‘‘inwhat respect, if any, is the choice of this or that philosophical frame ofreference a crucial one for feminist studies?’’ (56). She finds that existentialistethics enabled Beauvoir to expose women’s oppression in spite of Sartre’s lackof theorization of oppression and the horror of women’s bodies expressed in histexts.

A notable feature of Le Dœuff’s method here is showing the link betweenimages in a philosophical text, such as that of the ‘‘frigid woman’’ and thewoman on a date in Being and Nothingness (2003), and the fundamental viewsexpressed therein. She uses this method to great effect in The Philosophical

192 Hypatia

Imaginary (1989). Her analysis of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in Hipparchia’sChoice is especially significant as, while she details sexist elements in his work,she assesses it by his own standards of argumentation. This point—that in sexistand racist remarks philosophers fail by their own standards (12)—is acornerstone of Le Dœuff ’s work and an extremely fruitful way of thinkingabout the role of prejudice in philosophical texts. At the same time, imaginaryelements provide support for concepts in a philosophical system, such asSartre’s concept of bad faith. She argues that what women often find off-putting in philosophical texts is a masculinist or ‘‘macho’’ attitude of superiorityto women and other men and other discourses (78). It would be veryinteresting to examine the relation between imaginary elements and conceptsin Sartre’s later work in the light of this discussion.

In contrast to Sartre’s text, Beauvoir is able to transform existentialism froma closed system into an invaluable perspective for feminist inquiry. In TheSecond Sex (1983), she shows how oppression is built up from myriad symbolicand concrete injustices that constrain women’s lives and self-conceptions.The transformations of existentialist concepts that Le Dœuff elaborates includeBeauvoir’s introduction of the notion of reciprocity between consciousnesses,which reveals variety in our experience of otherness. Nevertheless, she alsonotes epistemological obstacles to Beauvoir’s thinking, derived from existenti-alism, that lead to an excessive focus on individual rather than collectiveliberation and a neglect of the exploitation of women, obstacles that Beauvoirlater overcame (123, 131).

Although she is critical of Beauvoir on these points, Le Dœuff constructs awonderful image to explain Beauvoir’s articulation of the relation betweenfreedom and bad faith, writing: ‘‘The Second Sex seems to be saying that once acrack has opened in the wall, it is the duty of the woman who benefits from it touse it to the maximum to establish herself at last as a subject condemned to befree’’ (131). This is an excellent summation of Beauvoir’s point of view;however, Le Dœuff suggests that an understanding of the way liberation strugglesare interconnected would be more useful to feminism. The method that she useshere to link the conceptual and imaginary elements in the texts is an extremelyproductive one that has and will continue to inspire other readings.1

In the third notebook, Le Dœuff shifts to the more personal relationsbetween Beauvoir and Sartre in order to explore issues around Beauvoir’snotable declaration that she is not a philosopher, in spite of her philosophicalproduction. She develops her view of the ‘‘Heloise complex’’ throughBeauvoir’s experience and clarifies how important it is for male philosophersnot only to be recognized by an admiring partner but also by an admiring world.In Sartre’s case, Le Dœuff argues, he also demanded to be accepted as ‘‘the onlyspeaking subject’’ (186), and controlled the interactions among their friendsand lovers.

Book Reviews 193

The fourth notebook is even more wide-ranging than the others, dealingwith such topics as education, debates over difference and equality in feminism,women and public employment, the need for sexual balance or mixite, thephenomenon of trans-subjectivity, laws concerning contraception and abor-tion, the nature of justice, clitoridectomy, and Tocqueville’s views on race.Nevertheless, Le Dœuff is still pursuing a theme. She argues that ‘‘whensomething damaging exists which only causes harm to women and little girls, itis never considered serious; the phenomenon can easily be minimized inunquestioned ethnographic categories: it’s their culture, and since womenalone suffer from it, it is certainly a symbolic way of marking sexual difference’’(293). There is much worth engaging with here in relation to the issue of theinteraction of sexism with racism and other forms of oppression.

The ‘‘freedom of thought’’ (317) Le Dœuff refers to in the epilogue isfundamental to all her work. This freedom is to follow philosophical ideaswherever they lead, for women to engage in the intellectual work that intereststhem, and in general not to be limited by boundaries, prejudices, orexclusionary imaginaries against thought. The title of the book refers to aquote from the ancient philosopher Hipparchia: ‘‘I have used for the getting ofknowledge all the time which, because of my sex, I was supposed to waste at theloom’’ (ix). Thus Hipparchia’s choice is between weaving and philosophy, andshe chooses the latter, a choice Michele Le Dœuff sees as one of throwing offthe shackles of an expected identity (205–06). This is not to suggest that wemust choose philosophy over traditional pursuits, but that we can choosephilosophy and enjoy it in our own way. Hipparchia’s Choice is a rare andinspiring work of philosophy in that it is scrupulous in argumentation and agreat pleasure to read.

NOTE

1. For discussions of Le Dœuff’s work, see Morris 1988, Grosz 1989, Paddle 1991,Arens 1995, Grimshaw 1996, David 1997, P. Deutscher 1997, Anderson 1998,Goulimari 1999, M. Deutscher 2000, Lloyd 2000, Kail 2002, La Caze 2002, Fornasieroand Sankey 2003, and Lehtinen 2007.

REFERENCES

Anderson, Pamela Sue. 1998. A feminist philosophy of religion: The rationality and myths ofreligious belief. Oxford: Blackwell.

Arens, Katherine. 1995. Between Hypatia and Beauvoir: Philosophy as discourse.Hypatia 10 (4): 46–75.

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1983. The second sex, Trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Penguin.(Le deuxieme sexe. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1949.)

194 Hypatia

David, Anthony. 1997. Le Dœuff and Irigaray on Descartes. Philosophy Today 41 (3–4):367–82.

Deutscher, Max, ed. 2000. Operative philosophy and imaginary practice: Michele Le Dœuff.Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books.

Deutscher, Penelope. 1997. French feminist philosophers on law and public policy: MicheleLe Dœuff and Luce Irigaray. Australian Journal of French Studies 34 (1): 24–44.

Fornasiero, Jean and Margaret Sankey eds. 2003. Autour de Michele Le Dœuff.Australian Journal of French Studies 40 (3).

Goulimari, Pelagia. 1999. A minoritarian feminism? Things to do with Deleuze andGuattari. Hypatia 14 (2): 97–120.

Grimshaw, Jean. 1996. Philosophy, feminism, and universalism. Radical Philosophy76: 19–28.

Grosz, Elizabeth. 1989. Sexual subversions: Three French feminists. Sydney: Allen &Unwin.

Kail, Michel. 2002. Michele Le Dœuff: Une philosophie a l’œuvre. Les Temps modernes619: 144–162.

La Caze, Marguerite. 2002. The analytic imaginary. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UniversityPress.

Le Dœuff, Michele. 1989. The philosophical imaginary. Trans. Colin Gordon. London:Athlone Press. (Recherches sur l’imaginaire philosophique, Paris: Payot, 1980.)

———. 1991. Hipparchia’s choice: An essay concerning women, philosophy, etc. Trans.Trista Selous. Oxford: Blackwell. (L’Etude et le rouet, Paris: Les Editions du Seuil,1989.)

———. 2003. The sex of knowing. Trans. Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code. London:Routledge. (Le sexe du savoir, Paris: Aubier, 1998.)

Lehtinen, Virpi. 2007. On philosophical style: Michele Le Dœuff and Luce Irigaray.European Journal of Women’s Studies 14 (2): 109–125.

Lloyd, Genevieve. 2000. Feminism in history of philosophy: Appropriating the past. InThe Cambridge companion to feminism in philosophy, ed. Miranda Fricker and JenniferHornsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 245–263.

Morris, Meaghan. 1988. Operative reasoning: Reading Michele Le Dœuff. In Thepirate’s fiancee: Feminism, reading, postmodernism. London: Verso, 71–102.

Paddle, Sarah. 1991. Ideology and culture: Towards feminist cultural history. Hecate 17(1): 7–14.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2003. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology.Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge. (L’Etre et le neant, Paris: Gallimard,1943.)

Book Reviews 195