Exceprt from “Bonds of Love - Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination”
Pantheon Books, 1998

By Jessica Benjamin

From Chapter 5 - GENDER AND DOMINATION (pp. 188-191)

Submerged beneath the universal claims of [the] individual… is not only his historic and cultural specificity, but also his gender. Whilemost modern theory has considered the masculine identity too self-evident to be mentioned (the patriarchy of gender would compromise his individuality), it is, nevertheless, retained as an “option”: when necessary, it can always be mobilized to exclude or devalue women. It has uncovered the masculine identity of the seemingly neutral universal individual of modern thought and society; indeed, it has shown that neutrality itself is the sign of masculinity, its alliance with rationality and objectivity. The feminist critique has rejected the assumption in modern thought that individuality and rationality are universals while gender is particular, secondary, not essential to their constitution.

Let us be clear about the stakes of this critique: it is not a matter merely of exposing bias, or of the exclusion of women from a world they wish to enter. If the rational, autonomous individual’s claim to neutrality is compromised, then so is his claim to universality. If his way of being in the world is not simply human, but specifically masculine, then it is not universal. And thismeans that his way is not the only or inevitable way of doing things. Furthermore, if this subject establishes his identity by splitting off certain human capabilities, called feminine, and by refusing to recognize the subjectivity of this feminine other, then his claim to stand for equality, liberty, free thought, and recognition of the other is also invalidated. And this means thathis way cannot be the best way of doing things.

OBJECTIVITY AND AUTONOMY

In her book, “Reflections on Gender and Science,” Evelyn Keller makes a convincing case for the masculine character of modern scientific objectivity. Her work adds the missing piece — gender — to the well-known critique of modern science as fundamentally inspired by the prject of control and domination of nature. She argues that the relationship between the subject of knowledge and his object may be represented in terms of the relationship between the subject and his love object. Contrasting Plato’s metaphor of knowledge as homoerotic union (knowledge = eros) with Bacon’s metaphor of heterosexual conquest (knowledge = power), she shows how gender frames the relationship between mind and nature. She ocntends that as the character of male domination over woman has changed, so has the metaphor of scientific knowledge. Beginning with Bacon, modern science adopted themetaphor of subduing nature and wresting her secrets from her. “Instead of banishing the Furies underground, out of sight, as did the Greeks, modern science has sought to expose female interiority, to bring it into the light, and thus to dissolve its threat entirely.”

Yet while denying invisibiliyt to nature, the contemporary scientist maintains the invisibility of his personal authorship, protecting his autonomy behind a screen of objectivity. Thisimpersonality of modern science, Keller argues, is actually the signature of its masculine identity. We may note that this image of the scientist as impersonal knower who “tears the veil” from nature’s body is reminscent of the master in the fantasy of erotic domination, and his quest for knowledge parallels the rational violation in which the subject is always in control.

Indeed, Keller proposes that modern scientific detachment from the object derives from the relation to the mother that I have called one-sided differentiation. Because men originally define themselves through separation from and opposition to the mother, Keller argues, they reject experiences of merging and identification that blur the boudnary between subject and object. Thus the masculine stance toward difference accords with the cultural dominance of a “science that has been premised on a radical dichtomy between subject and object.” The world outside, the other, is always object. As the first other, the mother, becomes an object, Keller explains, her object status infuses the world and the natural environment.

In the radical separation of subject and object we perceive again the inability to grasp thealiveness of the other; we hear the echo of the unmovable, unmoving character of the master. And yet again the denial of recognition leaves the ominpotent self imprisoned in his mind, reflecting the world from behind a wall of glass.

This is the impasse of rationalism, analogous to the impasse of ominpotence,, in which the subject completely assimilates the outside. it is not a problem exclusive to modern science; it runs throughout Western thought. Lukacs and the Franfurt theorists identified this tendency in the history of philosophy: as the rational subject of thougth became increasingly separated from the object, he internalized the qualities of the lost object, and attributed to himself all that was once part of the objective world. In Kant, for example, space and time, the basic categories of sensuous knowledge, do not exist objectively in reality, which we can never know, but are rather part of the mind of the knower. The transcendental subject “ets up” the reality of the world, claiming that everything perceived is in the eye of the beholder. Thus for the Frankfurt theorists the thinking subject has sucked the life out of the social and natural world, and now, like a swollen tick, is stuck, embedded, in this lifeless world. Of course its lifelessness does not prevent the host-world from suffocating the subject with its dead weight.

Despite this critique of how the radically separate mind dominates and so destroys objective reality, the Frankfurt theorists could find no other antidote than an even greater self-awareness. In order to break with the rationalist tradition of theindividual as “windowless monad,” to release the mind from its narcissistic bubble, they looked for some other principle that would limit the absolute self by restoring its connection to the world. In Freud, they found a perspective that challenged the ind’’s disconnection from the body, and saw omnipotence for the danger it is; but Freud did not address the gap between the self and other selves. The Frankfurt theorists lacked a model of the psyche in which the self truly seeks to know the outside world and longs for contact with the other. Their difficulty was precisely their lack of an intersubjective theory. They could only envision connectionas a return to oneness, as differentiation and irrationality — a romantic and ultimately dangerous reunion with nature. The only “solution” to the impasse of the rational mind, then, was constant reflection on its tendency toward domination.