Between women, love achieves exact reciprocity of subject and object.
Evidence
It is very important to emphasize this: the refusal to make oneself an object is not always what leads a woman to homosexuality; most lesbians, on the contrary, seek to claim the treasures of their femininity. Consenting to metamorphose oneself into a passive thing does not mean renouncing all claims to subjectivity: the woman thereby hopes to realize herself as the in-itself; but she will then seek to grasp herself in her alterity. Alone, she does not succeed in separating herself in reality; she might caress her breasts, but she does not know how they would seem to a foreign hand, nor how they would come to life under the foreign hand; a man can reveal to her the existence for itself of her flesh, but not what it is for an other. It is only when her fingers caress a woman’s body whose fingers in turn caress her body that the miracle of the mirror takes place. Between man and woman love is an act; each one torn from self becomes other: what delights the woman in love is that the passive listlessness of her flesh is reflected in the man’s ardor; but the narcissistic woman is clearly baffled by the charms of the erect sex. Between women, love is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than to re-create oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and object, sovereign and slave in exact reciprocity; this duality is complicity. … The close resemblance,” says Colette, “validates even sensual pleasure. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1054
Categorization
- DEFINE: Beauvoir’s core distinction — heterosexual love as act with self/other split, lesbian love as reciprocal contemplation with ‘duality as complicity’ — captures her immanence/transcendence apparatus in action.
- XREF: The mirror-miracle and ‘sovereign and slave in exact reciprocity’ speaks directly to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic (without sublation) and to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness on the look and the for-others. — connects to: Women were never a caste but the absolute Other without reciprocity — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 319; Being loved gives a woman justification for self-cherishing through the lover’s witness — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1851; Woman’s love-religion seeks possession while paradoxically preserving the lover’s freedom. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1882 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Reciprocal modern love presupposes each ego having secured a definite boundary
#qualifies(0.82) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 583 - Being loved gives a woman justification for self-cherishing through the lover’s witness
#expands(0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1851 - Woman’s love-religion seeks possession while paradoxically preserving the lover’s freedom.
#complicates(0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1882