Bondless Love

Abstract

Given this opportunity to reflect on The Bonds of Love (Benjamin, 1988) 25 years later, I read Benjamin's text as a bridge between political theory and psychoanalytic practice. In so doing, I hope to recognize Benjamin's profound influence on my thinking about recognition and destruction in collective erotic experience. I suggest that Benjamin opens the door to the investigation of eros in a collective unconscious. Yet, perhaps because The Bonds of Love predates the rise of the Internet, aspects of recognition that connote libidinization by an erotic collective are sequestered from intrapsychic phenomena and housed in a protointersubjective realm, the ideal, sustaining a long held psychoanalytic priority on loss and narcissistic injury in subject formation. I champion opening the intrapsychic realm to the fantasmatic collective by discussing Grindr, an iPhone app that provides public space for homoerotic desire.

Notes

¹I've wrestled with what to call Jessica because she is my teacher and friend. Should I retain the familiarity of Jessica or defer to the scholarly surname? I've decided to use both names in a way that, I hope, recognizes Jessica as my object and Benjamin as the subject of this article.

²Similar to the Japanese principle of amae (Taniguchi, 2012).

³The similarity to psychology's zeal for empirically validated treatments and the identification of “medical necessity” by insurance company “treatment managers” is strikingly evident.

⁴The signature educational policy initiative of Bush 43.

⁵The 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that granted corporations the same subject status as individuals.

⁶For a discussion of a distinction that I make between groups and collectives, the latter being a more emergent, anticipatory, and energetic form of identification that, as I elaborate here, does not have a temporal structure, see Hartman (2012).

⁷In an ongoing project, I illustrate how cyberspace and online time present a challenge to our traditional understanding of reality. I argue that a paradigmatic shift is taking place from a reality grounded in lost and limit to one delimited by searching. As a consequence, I argue, the object among other psychoanalytic objects has new contours that amass in the bricolage of subjectification (Lévi-Strauss, 1966; Derrida, 1978). Here, I propose a collective form of erotic recognition as in earlier work interembodiment (Hartman, 2010b) and heterotopic spaces of phantasmatic erotic bonding (Hartman, 2009). If my tribute to Jessica reads too much my own intellectual history, I hope that in my search for self, I demonstrate Benjamin's likeness too.