Simone de Beauvoir and the Scene of Religion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Simone de Beauvoir, existential philosopher, avowed atheist and award-winning novelist, has received substantial analysis as a philosopher in her own right, but scant treatment of the theme of religion in the body of her work. This study demonstrates that not only is “religion” a persistent figure in her writing, but that her existential ethic is constituted by a relocation of faith, situating it firmly in her philosophy of ambiguity. I am arguing that the unavoidable presence of faith in her philosophy emerges from the fact of Beauvoir’s own social, intellectual and historical context, a context that I am introducing as a theoretical figure called the "scene of religion." Beauvoir's writings testify to her rejection of the vertical tradition of faith in an unattainable transcendent heavenly Other, and to her horizontal relocation of the coordinates of existence. The transcendent is now addressed between free persons, and faith is the condition of their response to one another. Drawing on the theoretical resources of Jacques Derrida and Michel de Certeau, I cultivate a description of “the scene of religion” that offers both a site and a play of forces at work in Beauvoir’s philosophy. In this scene, Beauvoir's philosophy operates as an agent of auto-immune resistance, and, at the same time, enjoins one to acts of religion in its call to originary faith. This study contributes to a hitherto neglected theme in Beauvoir studies. As well, it situates her thought within a viable, if marginalized, theoria for the study of religion, bringing together for perhaps the first time these three French intellectuals. This reading of the existential faith required in Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy provokes different thinking of the play of religion in the contemporary world, and offers renewed resources for the analysis of religion in the broader context of global capitalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".