Simone de Beauvoir - Becoming in a World Already Made - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Becoming in a World Already Made

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

This episode traces the life and philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, whose thought remains a discipline of staying with contradiction. We explore how her theory of gender as a process of becoming disrupts essentialist myths, how ambiguity becomes an ethical commitment, and why lived experience—its difficulty, its dailiness—must remain central to any philosophy that hopes to mean something. This is not an essay about clarity, but about holding pressure: between freedom and limit, subject and other, intimacy and asymmetry.

We follow Beauvoir’s dismantling of the eternal feminine, her critique of woman as the constructed Other, and her insistence—via her own life and writing—that philosophy must begin from within the unresolved. Drawing lines through the work of thinkers like Sara Ahmed and Gloria Anzaldúa, we examine how Beauvoir’s legacy isn’t purity or conclusion—but a recursive method of attention. A refusal to resolve what is still becoming.

There is no clean end to Beauvoir’s thought. Instead, it loops, doubles back, and insists that we reenter the field of questions we hoped to escape. To listen is to stay close to tension, to contradiction, and to the possibility that becoming isn’t a path—but a structure we continue to live inside.

Why Listen?

• Explore Beauvoir’s five key theories with philosophical and narrative depth
• Understand why ambiguity, not certainty, was her ethical starting point
• See how freedom must be lived within limits, not outside them
• Reframe philosophy as rooted in experience—not escape from it

Further Reading

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• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir — A foundational critique of woman as Other and the myth of femininity. Amazon link
• The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir — On freedom, ambiguity, and responsibility in existential life. Amazon link
• Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed — On orientation, institutional memory, and inherited structure. Amazon link
• Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa — A landmark on identity, hybridity, and epistemic dissonance. Amazon link

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Bibliography

• Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
  Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press, 1976.
  Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
  Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
  Simons, Margaret A. Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
  Moi, Toril. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.