Beautiful Images: Thinking Intermedially with Simone de Beauvoir

This article examines the relationship between perception and imagination in Beauvoir’s work by highlighting a crucial yet under-explored theme in her writings: the relationship between thinking and the mediated image. If Beauvoir is critical of the mass media’s recourse to noxious visual clichés, it is because they offer a yield of pleasure and the reassuring security of immanence, over and against the greater reflexive challenge of transcendent projects. Beauvoir contrasts these cognitive shortcuts, characteristic of what she calls ‘bourgeois thinking’ or ‘right-wing thinking’, with a free thinking, or thinking as freedom, that rejects immanence and questions the fundamental ambiguity of our human situation. These distinctions are concretised through a reading of Beauvoir’s formative encounter with the consumerist culture of the United States in America Day by Day, a text which abounds with commentary on mass domestic tourism, the film industry, advertising, and the role of the racialised image in perpetuating the static social structures of 1940s America. Beauvoir’s reflections in this text, this article argues, culminate in her later 1966 novel, Les Belles Images, which it reads as a meditation both on the social impact of a globalizing mass media apparatus and as a vigorous defence of the vital place of literary writing—and the reflexivity it can generate—in this wider media ecology.