The Archaic Mind in the Second Sex: Feminism and Authenticity

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir’s ground breaking work, The Second Sex, is not just a key text for feminism but also a profound work in philosophical anthropology which explores  human consciousness in its rudimentary stages. Beauvoir derives her conclusions regarding feminism from these explorations into the archaic mind. Georges Bataille was another key French thinker whose abiding interests in religion and eroticism led him to investigate the primitive operations of the human mind. In this paper, Beauvoir’s foundational ideas in feminism are interpreted in light of Bataille’s views about the nature of primeval consciousness and the result is a bridging of certain gaps in The Second Sex.