The Other Without and the Other Within: The Alterity of Aging and the Aged in Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

The focal point of Simone de Beauvoir’s celebrated and
ground-breaking investigation of women’s oppression in The
Second Sex is the development of the concept of woman as the
Other. In The Coming of Age, her seminal study on aging and the
aged, Beauvoir reprises her analysis of otherness in an extended
examination of the alterity of old age, and its manifestations in
the often miserable and deplorable lived situation of many elderly
people. While bearing many similarities to the earlier analysis of
otherness – indeed, there are numerous parallels between these
two texts – the alterity of old age also has a distinctive character.
Now the marginalized and abjected Other is the aged person: a
person, and an Other, who I am ineluctably becoming, entailing
multiple modes of otherness to myself; the Other is within, I become
Other to myself. In my paper I discuss the otherness of old
age in its relation to difference, embodied temporality, metamorphosis,
and identity. In so doing I also analyze the roots of this
alterity, and of our fear of aging, and explore whether old age is a
unique or even the best exemplar of such alterity.