Pregnancy collapses the subject-object opposition that normally drives transcendence

Evidence

But pregnancy is above all a drama playing itself out in the woman between her and herself. She experiences it both as an enrichment and a mutilation; the fetus is part of her body, and it is a parasite exploiting her; she possesses it, and she is possessed by it; it encapsulates the whole future, and in carrying it, she feels as vast as the world; but this very richness annihilates her, she has the impression of not being anything else. A new existence is going to manifest itself and justify her own existence, she is proud of it; but she also feels like the plaything of obscure forces, she is tossed about, assaulted. What is unique about the pregnant woman is that at the very moment her body transcends itself, it is grasped as immanent: it withdraws into itself in nausea and discomfort; it no longer exists for itself alone and then becomes bigger than it has ever been. The transcendence of an artisan or a man of action is driven by a subjectivity, but for the future mother the opposition between subject and object disappears; she and this child who swells in her form an ambivalent couple that life submerges; snared by nature, she is plant and animal, a collection of colloids, an incubator, an egg; she frightens children who are concerned with their own bodies and provokes sniggers from young men because she is a human being, consciousness and freedom, who has become a passive instrument of life. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1449

Categorization

• DEFINE: The core existentialist pair transcendence/immanence is operationalized here: pregnancy uniquely makes the body transcend while being grasped as immanent.
• XREF: Connects to the Sartrean for-itself/in-itself distinction and to the immanence/transcendence framework Beauvoir establishes in the introduction to The Second Sex itself. — connects to: Causes require nihilation and transcendence toward a not-yet-existing potentiality — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1089; Male transcendence is fleeting while the female is chronically alienated by gestation — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 94; The end of the subject-object gap reveals a more originary mode of becoming — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1081 (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The dense paradox that gestation collapses the very subject-object distinction that existentialism takes as foundational — a paradigm-level observation about embodiment.

Broader Connections

• The end of the subject-object gap reveals a more originary mode of becoming #qualifies (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1081