Benjamin’s work relies on the presumption and argues for the proposition that recognition is possible and that it is the condition under which the human subject achieves psychic self-understanding and acceptance.There are several passages in almost any text of hers that gives one a sense of what recognition is about. It is not the simple presentation of a subject for another that facilitates the recognition of that self-presenting subject by the Other. It is, rather, a process that is engaged when subject and Other understand themselves to be reflected in one another, but where this reflection does not result in a collapse of the one into the Other (through an incorporative identification, for instance) or a projection that annihilates the alterity of the Other. In Benjamin’s appropriation of the Hegelian notion of recognition, “recognition” is a normative ideal, an aspiration that guides clinical practice. Recognition implies that we see the Other as separate, but as structured psychically in ways that are shared. Of utmost importance for Benjamin, following Habermas in some ways, is the notion that communication itself becomes both the vehicle and example of recognition. Recognition neither is an act that one performs nor is it literalized as the event in which we each “see” one another and are “seen.” It takes place through communication, primarily but not exclusively verbal, in which subjects are transformed by virtue of the communicative practice in which they are engaged. One can see how this model supplies a norm for both social theory and therapeutic practice. It is to Benjamin’s credit that she has elaborated a theory that spans both domains as productively as it does.One of the distinctive contributions of her theory is to insist that intersubjectivity is not the same as object relations, that intersubjectivity adds to object relations the idea of an external Other, one who exceeds the psychic construction of the object in complementary terms. (272)For Benjamin, humans form psychic relations with Others on the basis of a necessary negation, but not all those relations must be destructive. (273)I do think, however, that a) triangulation might be profitably rethought beyond oedipalization or, indeed, as part of the very postoedipal displacement of the oedipal; b) certain assumptions about the primacy of gender dimorphism limit the radicalism of Benjamin’s critique; and c) that the model of overinclusiveness cannot quite become the condition for recognizing difference, as Benjamin maintains, because it resists the notion of a self that is ek-statically1 involved in the other, decentered through its identifications, which neither exclude nor include the Other in question. (276–77)My question is whether intersubjective space, in its “authentic” mode, is really ever free of destruction. … If we accept that the problem in relationship is not just a function of complementarity, of projecting onto another what belongs to the self, of incorporating another who ought properly to be regarded as separate, it will be hard to sustain the model of recognition that remains finally dyadic in structure. But if we accept that desire for the Other might be desire for the Other’s desire, and accept as well the myriad equivocal formulations of that position, then it seems to me that recognizing the Other requires assuming that the dyad is seldom, if ever, what it seems. (284)It is precisely the movement beyond the logic of owning and disowning that takes the Other out of the narcissistic circuit of the subject. Indeed, for Laplanche, alterity emerges, one might say, beyond any question of owning.I suggest that the ek-static notion of the self in Hegel resonates in some ways with the notion of the self that invariably loses itself in the Other who secures that self’s existence. The self here is not the same as the subject, which is a conceit of autonomous self-determination. (287)The self does not take the Other in: it finds itself transported outside of itself in an irreversible relation of alterity. In a sense, the self is this relation to alterity. (288)
- like Felman’s narrative loop
It simply avows that “we” who are relational do not stand apart from those relations and that we cannot think of ourselves as outside the decentering effects that that relationality entails. Moreover, when we consider that the relations by which we are defined are not dyadic, but always refer to a historical legacy and futural horizon that is not contained by the Other but constitutes something like the Other of the Other, then it seems to follow that who we “are” fundamentally is a subject in a temporal chain of desire that only occasionally and provisionally assumes the form of the dyad. Again, displacing the binary model for thinking about relationality will also help us appreciate the triangulating echoes in heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual desire, and complicate our understanding of the relation between sexuality and gender. (289)