Longing for Recognition Commentary on the Work or Jessica Benjamin

"For if it is the case that destructiveness can turn into recognition, then it follows that recognition can leave destructiveness behind. Is this true? Further, is the dyadic relationship assumed by recognition, given the qualification that the process of recognition now constitutes “the third,” itself based on a disavowal of other forms of triangulation? And is there a way to think of triangulation apart from oedipalization? Does the dyadicmodel for recognition, moreover, help us to understand the particular convergences of straight, bisexual, and gay desire that invariably referdesire outside the dyad in which it only apparently occurs?" Pp.274"The turn to the preoedipal has been, of course, to rethink desire in relation to the maternal, but such a turn engages us, unwittingly, in the resurrection of the dyad: not the phallus, but the maternal, for the two options available are “dad” and “mom.” But are there other kinds of descriptions that might complicate what happens at the level of desire and, indeed, at the level of gender and kinship? Benjamin (1998a) asks these questions, and her critique of the Lacanian feminist insistence on the primacy of the phallus is, in large part, a critique of both its presumptive heterosexuality and the mutually exclusive logic through which gender is thought." Pp.276