The hetaera’s career, like the adventurer’s, remains immanent despite its apparent glamour

Evidence

The Moloch to whom the hetaera sacrifices pleasure, love, and freedom is her career. The matron’s ideal is static happiness that envelops her relations with her husband and children. Her “career” stretches across time, but it is nonetheless an immanent object that is summed up in a name. The name gets bigger on billboards and on people’s lips as the steps mounted up the social ladder get higher. According to her temperament, the woman administers her enterprise prudently or boldly. One woman will find satisfaction in housekeeping, folding laundry in her closet, the other in the headiness of adventure. Sometimes the woman limits herself to perpetually balancing a perpetually threatened situation that sometimes breaks down; or sometimes she endlessly builds—like a Tower of Babel aiming in vain for the sky—her renown. Some of them, mixing amorous commerce with other activities, are true adventurers: they are spies, like Mata Hari, or secret agents; they generally are not the ones who initiate the projects, they are rather instruments in men’s hands. But overall, the hetaera’s attitude is similar to that of the adventurer; like him, she is often halfway between the serious and the adventure as such; she seeks ready-made values—money and glory—but she attaches as much value to winning them as to possessing them; and finally, the supreme value in her eyes is subjective success. She, too, justifies this individualism by a more or less systematic nihilism, but experienced with all the more conviction as she is hostile to men and sees enemies in other women. If she is intelligent enough to feel the need for moral justification, she will invoke a more or less well assimilated Nietzscheism; she will affirm the right of the elite being over the vulgar. Her person belongs to her like a treasure whose mere existence is a gift: so much so that in being dedicated to herself, she will claim to serve the group. The destiny of the woman devoted to man is haunted by love: she who exploits the male fulfills herself in the cult of self-adoration. If she attaches such a price to her glory, it is not only for economic interest: she seeks there the apotheosis of her narcissism. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1694

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how even a ‘career’ that stretches across time can be an immanent object summed up in a name — extending the immanence/transcendence apparatus to the hetaera.
• XREF: The hetaera’s Nietzschean self-justification as elite being over the vulgar prefigures the ‘practices of self’ that later care-of-the-self philosophies (Foucault) recover from Greek hetaeras.