Sovereign play with weaker beings lets man feel godlike without risking reciprocity

Evidence

The apologue of the caterpillars provides the key to this attitude: whatever his hidden intention, it is significant in itself. Pissing on caterpillars, Montherlant takes pleasure in sparing some and exterminating others; he takes a laughing pity on those that are determined to live and generally lets them off; he is delighted by this game. Without the caterpillars, the urinary stream would have been just an excretion; it becomes an instrument of life and death; in front of the crawling insect, man relieves himself and experiences God’s despotic solitude, without running the risk of reciprocity. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 481

Categorization

• XREF: The sovereignty-through-debasement dynamic echoes the master-slave dialectic in Hegel and anticipates later power-analysis themes in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. — connects to: Deifying an actually present man guarantees torment because he is not God — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1866
• DEEPTHINKING: The caterpillar urination apologue neatly crystallizes the book’s whole thesis about sovereignty as the refusal of reciprocity — a dense image that carries the existentialist concept of the Other in one gesture.
• QUESTION: Does the Louisiana/Georgia Negroes analogy and the concentration camp comparison genuinely parallel woman’s condition, or does Beauvoir strain the comparison by conflating class, race, and sex subordination?

Broader Connections

• Deifying an actually present man guarantees torment because he is not God #complicates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1866