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Hutchings, 2003). As with TSS, but to an even greater extent, the text can be read not only
for its explicit analysis, in this case of the meaning of an ethics of freedom, but also for the
way it is itself symptomatic of the ambiguities it seeks to describe. In TEA the strain
between an account of the subject as pure transcendence and of the subject as dependent on
‘Other’ and ‘other’ is present for the reader in the powerful tension between Beauvoir’s
existentialist view of the subject and the kind of ethics of limitation and co-operation which
she is trying to put forward.
Common to both TEA and TSS is the claim that the ultimate wrong that can be done to
anyone is the violence of oppression. Oppression is violence because it is the reduction of a
person or persons to the status of a thing – a mere object or instrument. The obvious way to
understand this violence is in neo-Kantian terms as a violation of the subject’s autonomy.
This is a version of the categorical imperative that argues that to treat any person as a ‘mere
means’ is to violate the requirements of pure practical reason, which are grounded on the
unique value of the capacity to reason inherent in every human being (autonomy). There is
no question that in TEA, this is a plausible interpretation of many of Beauvoir’s comments,
oppression being presented as the denial of the subject as transcendence. However, at the
same time there is also a repeated insistence in her analysis on the relevance and
inescapability of the relation between transcendent subject and both object and other. This
suggests a different way of understanding the nature of the ‘wrong’ involved in oppression.
Here the wrong lies not in the reduction of the other to ‘thing’ as such, but in the denial of
the ‘ambiguity’ of both subject and other. Tyrants are defined not simply by the fact that
they instrumentalise others (this will also be something done by liberators, as Beauvoir
makes clear, TEA, 137). Tyrants are defined by their identification of themselves with pure
transcendence, a refusal to ‘assume’ their own ambiguity. In TSS, men are identified as
Convention