Longing for Recognition

"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" (272)"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" (272)"Whereas Hegel (1807) referred to "negation" as the risk that recognition always runs, Benjamin (1988b) retains this term to describe the differentiated aspect of relationality: the Other is not me, and from this distinction certain psychic consequences follow" (273)"Recognition is at once the norm toward which we invariably strive - the norm that ought to govern therapeutic practice - and the ideal form that communication takes when it becomes a transformative process" (273)"In her view, we must be prepared to overcome modes of splitting that entail disavowal, where we either disparage the object to shore ourselves up or project our own aggression onto the object to avoid the psychically unlivable consequences that follow when that aggression is recognized as our own" (274)"For if it is the case that destructiveness can turn into recognition, then it follows that recognition can leave destructiveness behind" (274)"It is not that the dyad is tacitly and finally structured in relation to a third, understood as the tabooed parental object of love. The third emerges, however, in a different way for Benjamin (1998b), indeed, in a way that focuses not on prohibition and its consequences but on "both partners [in a] pattern of excitement." This pattern is the third, and it is "cocreated... outside the mental control of either partner we find a site of mediation, the music of the third to which both attune" (p. 28)" (275)"I believe that Benjamin is working toward a nonheterosexist psychoanalysis" (276)"desire redoubles itself; it seeks its own renewal. But in order to achieve its own renewal, it must reduplicate itself and so become something other than what it has been. It does not stay in place as a single desire, but becomes other to itself, taking a form that is outside itself. Moreover, what desire wants is the Other, where the Other is understood as its generalized object. Desire also wants the Other's desire, where the Other is conceived as a subject of desire" (277)"Indeed, other readings of this formulation, including the oedipal one: I desire what hte Other desires (a third object), but that object belongs to the Other and not to me; this lack, instituted through prohibition, is the foundation of my desire" (277)"Lacan's way of formulating this position is, of course, derived in part from Levi-Strauss's theory of the exchange of women. Male clan members exchange women in order to establish symbolic relation with other male clan members. The women are "wanted" precisely because they are wanted by the Other... Queer theorist Eve Sedgwick (1985) asked who is, in fact, desiring whom in such a scene. Her point was to show that what first appears to be a relation of a man who desires a woman turns out to be implicitly a homosocial bond between two men" (278)"For the point is not that the phallus is had by one and not by another, but that it is circulated along a heterosexual and homosexual circuit at once, thus confounding the identificatory positions for every "actor" int he scene" (278)"For instance, to what extent is heterosexual jealousy often compounded by an inability to avow same-sex desire (Freud, 1922). A man's woman lover wants another man, and even "has" him, and this is experienced by the first man to be at his own expense" (278)"If it is his receptivity that he finds relocated there at the heart of his own jealous fantasy, then perhaps it is more appropriate to claim that he imagines her in a position of passive male homosexual. Is it, finally, really possible to distinguish in such a case between a heterosexual and a homosexual passion? After all, he has lost her, and that enrages him; and she has enacted the aim he cannot or will not act, and that enrages him" (279)"It becomes difficult to say whether the sexuality of the transgendered person is homosexual or heterosexual. The term queer gained currency a decade ago precisely to address such moments of productive indecision, but we have not yet seen a psychoanalytic attempt to take account of these cultural formations of which certain vacillating notions of sexual orientation are constitutive" (281)"This is not a simple denial of anatomy, but the erotic deployment of the body; its covering, its prosthetic extension for the purposes of a reciprocal erotic fantasy" (282)"Gender, however, has its own pleasures for Brandon and serves its own purposes. These pleasures of identification exceed those of desire, and, in that sense, Brandon is not only or easily a lesbian" (282)"As I hope is clear, I do not have a problem with the norm of recognition as its functions in Benjamin's work. I think that it is, in fact, an appropriate norm for psychoanalysis. But I do wonder whether an untenable hopefulness has entered into her most recent descriptions of what is possible under the rubric of recognition. Moreover, as I have indicated, I question specifically whether overinclusiveness as she describes it can become the condition for the recognition of a separate Other, neither repudiated nor incorporated" (283)"If the third is redefined as the music or harmony of dialogic encounter, what happens to the other thirds - the child who interrupts the encounter, the former lover at the door or on the phone, the past that cannot be reversed, the future that cannot be contained, teh unconscious itself as it rides the emergence of unanticipated circumstance? Surely, these are all negativities, even sources of destruction that cannot be fully overcome, sublated, resolved in the harmonious music of dialogue. What discord does that music drown out? What does it disavow in order to be?" (284)"The dyad is an achievement, not a presupposition. Part of the difficulty of making it work is precisely that it is achieved within a psychic horizon that is fundamentally indifferent to it. And if negation is destruction that is survived, of what does survival consist?" (285)"We do not need to accept a drive theory that claims that aggression is there for all time, and is constitutive of who we are, in order to accept that destructiveness poses itself continually as a risk. And that the risk is a perennial and irresolvable aspect of human psychic life" (285)"He is suggesting that whatever consciousness is, whatever the self is, it will find itself only through a reflection of itself in another. To be itself, it must pass through self-loss, but when it passes through, it will never be "returned" to what it was. To be reflected in or as another has a double significance for consciousness, however, since consciousness will, through the reflection, regain itself in some way. but it will, by virtue of the external status of the reflection, regain itself as external to itself and hence continue to lose itself. Thus, the relationship to the Other will be, invariably, ambivalent. The price of self-knowledge will be self-loss, and the Other poses the possibility of both securing and undermining self-knowledge" (286)"The moment in "Lordship and Bondage" when the two self-consciousnesses come to recognize one another is, accordingly, in the "life and death struggle," the moment in which they each see the shared power they have to annihilate the Other and, thereby, to destroy the condition of their own self-reflection. Thus, it is at a moment of fundamental vulnerability that recognition becomes possible and need becomes self-conscious" (287)"the self as I am outlining it here is beyond itself from the start and is defined by this ontological ek-stasis, this fundamental relation to the Other in which it finds itself ambiguously installed outside itself" (288)"For, yes, it make good sense to talk about a self, but are we sure it is intact prior to the act of splitting, and what does it mean to insist on a subject who "performs" its splitting? Is there nothing from which a subject is spit off at the outset that occasions the formation of the subject itself?" (288)"For if the subject is both split and splitting, it is necessary to know what kind of split was inaugurative, what kind is undergone as a contingent psychic event, and, moreover, how those different levels of splitting relate to one another, if at all" (288-289)"It simply avows that "we" who are relational do not stand apart form those relations and that we cannot think of ourselves as outside the decentering effects that the relationality entails. Moreover, when we consider that the rlations 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 occassionally 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)"Let us now begin to think again on what it might mean to recognize one another when it is a question of so much more than the two of us" (289)