Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin by Judith Butler

"One of the distinctive contributions of her theory is to insist that intersubjectivity is not the same as object relations, and that 'intersubjectivity' adds to object relations the notion of an external Other, one who exceeds the psychic construction of the object in complementary terms. What this means is that whatever the psychic and fantasmatic relation to the object may be, it ought to be understood in terms of the larger dynamic of recognition. the relation to the object is not the same as the relation to the Other, but the relation to the Other provides a framework for understanding the relation to the object. The subject not only forms certain psychic relations to objects, but the subject is formed by and through those psychic relations. Moreover, these various forms are implicitly structured by a struggle for recognition in which the Other does and does not become dissociable from the object which is psychically represented. This struggle is represented by a desire to enter into a communicative practice with the Other in which recognition takes place neither as an event nor a set of events, but as an onging process, one that also poses the psychic risk of destruction. Whereas Hegel refers to a 'negation' as the risk that recognition always runs, Benjamin retains this term to describe the differentiated aspect of rationality: the other is not me, and from this distinction, certain psychic consequences follow....For Benjamin, humans form psychic relations with Others on the basis of a necessary negation, but not all of those relations must be destructive. Whereas the psychic response that seeks to master and dispel that negation is destructive, that destruction is precisely what needs to be worked through in the process of recognition".
Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin by Judith Butler

Reference:
Judith Butler (2010). Longing for Recognition. In Kimberly Hutchings & Tuija Pulkkinen (eds.), Hegel's Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? Palgrave Macmillan.

RT @ Trish Nowland

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