Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“Central to her philosophical inheritance is the notion of recognition itself, a key concept that was developed in Hegel’s (1807) Phenomenology of Spirit and that has assumed new meanings in the work of Jürgen Habermas (1981) and Axel Honneth (1995) in recent years. In some ways, 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”“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 ref lection 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”-fascinating to consider all that goes into seeing another person, particularly when you consider recognition and what that truly entails“Recognition implies that we see the Other as separate, but as structured psychically in ways that are shared”“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.”-the non-verbals involved are fascinating; how dependent are these on culture and circumstance; what does that say about recognitions generalizability“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. This means 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 also 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 by which it is psychically represented. This struggle is characterized 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 ongoing process, one that also poses the psychic risk of destruction.”“Benjamin tells us that this vacillation or tension is what constitutes human psychic life fundamentally or inevitably. And yet it seems that we are also to operate under a norm that postulates the transformation of object relations into modes of recognition, whereby our relations to objects are subsumed, as it were, under our relation to the Other.”“whereas the tension between omnipotence and contact, as she puts it, is necessary in psychic life, there are ways of living and handling that tension that do not involve “splitting” but that keep the tension both alive and productive”“Aggression forms a break in the process of recognition, and we should expect such “breakdowns,” to use her word, but the task will be to work against them and to strive for the triumph of recognition over aggression.”-interesting to almost think of aggression and recognition of the aggression or tension as a spectrum of awareness“in the triangulation in which heterosexuality is transmuted into homosociality, the identifications proliferate with precisely the complexity that the usual Lacanian (1958) positions either rule out or describe as pathology. Where desire and identification are played out as mutually exclusive possibilities against the inescapable background of a (presumptively heterosexual) sexual difference, the actors in the scene I describe, warring with a symbolic that has already arranged in advance for their defeat, can be understood only as trying in vain to occupy positions.”“This becomes most clear when we think about transsexuals who are in transition, where identity is in the process of being achieved but is not yet accomplished.”-who is to say that identity is contingent on some “accomplishment” through transition?“when one recognizes that one is not at the center of the Other’s history, one is recognizing difference. And if one does not respond to that recognition with aggression, with omnipotent destruction, then one is in a position to recognize difference as such and to understand this distinguishing feature of the Other as a relation of negation (not-me) that does not resolve into destruction. Negation is destruction that is survived”“Difference casts it forth into an irreversible future. To be a self is, on these terms, to be at a distance from who one is, not to enjoy the prerogative of self-identity (what Hegel called selfcertainty), but to be cast, always, outside oneself, to be Other than oneself.”“. But it also means that the self is not its own, that it is given over to the Other in advance of any further relation, but in such a way that the Other does not own it either. And the ethical content of its relationship to the Other is to be found in this fundamental and reciprocal state of being “given over.”“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.”