Beauvoir saw Benny Lévy as her rival for Sartre’s intellectual ear

Evidence

With Hope Now, she was confounded by the fact that this role had been taken by a young Jewish man, Benny Lévy, whom she saw as her rival. And so she could not fathom the full portent of Sartre’s new think- Th e Question of Reciprocal Self-Abandon to the Other 61 ing and viewed it, as Toril Moi notes, as “a lack of loyalty, during their fi nal years, and his betrayal of what she took to be their common ideals.” — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 152