The Dominant and its Constitutive Other: Feminist Theorizations of Love, Power and Gendered Selves

Abstract

In this article I explore love's relation to gendered power asymmetries by comparing Anna Jónasdóttir's, Jessica Benjamin's and Teresa Brennan's respective theorizations of this theme. Despite the considerable differences between these feminist frameworks, they can all be read in terms of what I call the figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other. This refers to the contradictory relation whereby the powerful and ‘independent’ existence of the one is premised on that which is other to it, as well as on the denial and obscuring of this constitutive dependence. Via a dialogue with critical realist and metaReal themes I move from a concern with how the feminine ‘Other’ tacitly constitutes the masculine Dominant through practices of love, to thematizing the basic stratum of being as the constitutive Other of the oppressive economy of love. The structure of the self emerges as a central organizing principle in the oppressive relations considered, and the article explores what might be a non-violent mode of self that does not depend on suppressing the existence of that on which it depends.

Keywords:

• Jessica Benjamin
• Roy Bhaskar
• Teresa Brennan
• feminist theory
• gender
• Anna G. Jónasdóttir
• love
• metaReality

Contra prevalent views of love as the opposite of oppression, feminist theorists have pointed out that gendered power asymmetries are in fact intimately connected to love as currently organized.¹ Indeed, given that for an increasing number of women love is today the only thing that binds them to men, it is probably more crucial than ever to understand how love relates to oppression.

In this article I explore love's relation to gendered power asymmetries by comparing Anna Jónasdóttir's, Jessica Benjamin's and Teresa Brennan's respective theorizations of this theme. They are all feminist theorists who have conceptualized the ontology of gendered power in terms of its association with love. This commonality aside, they work within widely different theoretical paradigms. While Jónasdóttir is a political theorist positioned in a broad historical materialist paradigm, Benjamin and Brennan both have their bases in psychoanalytical theory yet draw on this field in quite different ways and in dialogue with disparate conceptual vocabularies imported from other fields.

Apart from their common concern with gendered power and love, the theoretical frameworks of these authors share a structural similarity in that they can all be read in terms of what I call the figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other. This refers to the contradictory relation whereby the powerful and ‘independent’ existence of the one (Man in this case) is premised on that which is other to it (Woman), as well as on the denial and obscuring of this constitutive dependence.² This figure will serve as the organizing centre of this article.

In critical theory the figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other has been most explicitly present in the antirealist deconstructionist tradition, although here the privileged term seems to be ‘the constitutive outside’.³ In this school of thought the idea that the supposed outside or other of something is in fact constitutive of, hence internal to, this very something is understood mainly in terms of intelligibility: ‘To say or establish anything — any position, any presence, any meaning — one has to attend to what is outside the field of meaning and what cannot be expressed — its constitutive outside’, as Stuart Hall says.⁴ In feminist theory the most influential proponent of this line of reasoning is Judith Butler, who theorizes the gendered subject in terms of its conditions of intelligibility as structured by the discursive ‘heterosexual matrix’.⁵ While positing a ‘domain of intelligible bodies’ and a ‘domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies’, Butler states that

[t]his latter domain is not opposite to the former, for oppositions are, after all, part of intelligibility; the latter is the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility, its constitutive outside.⁶

In this poststructuralist paradigm of thought, inspired above all by Jacques Derrida but more broadly also by Lacanian and Deleuzian perspectives, the human subject as such has been put under significant deconstructive pressure. Butler argues that the subject comes into being only via a range of exclusions and constraints. However, they leave unclear where to draw the line between existentially inevitable ‘constitutive constraints’⁷ and those oppressive constraints that can be politically challenged.⁸ This lack of clarity stems from the antirealist convictions of deconstructionism: if there is no structure of needs and powers beyond discursively constituted subject positions, there is no way of consistently judging the latter as oppressive and thus undesirable. Also, without a notion of an extra-discursive realm with a structure and causality of its own it is impossible to make sense of from where oppressive power structures ultimately derive their force⁹ and to specify what would be realistic and responsible strategies for change.¹⁰

An important backdrop to my interest in the work of Jónasdóttir, Benjamin and Brennan is my theoretical position that in order for us to judge a social order to be violent or oppressive, we need to contrast it with the structures and dynamics underpinning human life as such, on which any oppressive order necessarily draws at the same time as it denegates them. Jónasdóttir, Benjamin and Brennan all depart from the antirealist deconstructionist paradigm that has dominated feminist theory in the last two decades. They align, explicitly (Jónasdóttir) or implicitly (Benjamin and Brennan), with a realist tradition of thought in the sense that they posit certain natural necessities built into the human situation. These assumed necessities ‘the necessary ways of acting possessed by things [in this case humans and human relatedness] in virtue of their essential structure’¹¹ — not only work as a normative yardstick against which certain ways of organizing human relations are judged undesirable or desirable; they are also part of the theorists’ respective explanations of why current gendered relations look the way they do. Moreover, by postulating a structured (as opposed to the deconstructionist-poststructuralist indeterminate) realm of possibility, which is, in the non-absolute sense of the term, outside or beyond the logic identified as problematic or oppressive, Jónasdóttir's, Benjamin's and Brennan's frameworks provide opportunities for coherently theorizing change. By reading these feminist theories via the figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other, I hope to be able to loosen this crucial conceptual figure from its antirealist grip, bolstering it with stratified complexity, materiality and dynamism.

In the following I summarize and comparatively assess Jónasdóttir's, Benjamin's and Brennan's different ways of addressing gendered power asymmetries and their relation to love through the lens of the figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other. Via a dialogue with critical realist and metaReal themes I move from a concern with how the feminine ‘Other’ tacitly constitutes the masculine Dominant to thematizing the basic stratum of being as the constitutive other of the oppressive economy of love. As will be clear, the structure of the self emerges as a central organizing principle in the oppressive relations considered, making it a crucial task to discern what might be a non-violent way of constituting the self that does not depend on suppressing the existence of that on which we really depend.

Jónasdóttir: men's exploitation of women's love

Anna G. Jónasdóttir develops her conceptualization of love as part of her historical materialist—as radically interpreted by her—theory of patriarchy.¹² The hub of the Marxian view of oppressive power structures is the idea of exploitation. Without engaging in the debate about how precisely to understand the concept of exploitation, the core idea is that the exploiter extracts something of value from the exploited, by means of (structurally) controlling the productive practices of the exploited. Hence, in the exploitation view of dominance the dominant does not dominate because he wants power as such, but because his control is the means by which he can access important values. The ground of such values is objective in the sense that they stem from the natural necessities constraining and enabling human life. There is an interest in exploiting labour power because it is what ultimately meets the human need for material sustenance, for food, shelter and so forth.

Jónasdóttir suggests, however, that there is another, qualitatively different category of human needs, which also underpins the interest in exploiting the energies of others. Humans also have a need to love and be loved, both in its caring and its erotic-ecstatic aspects, and this need must also be met if they are to flourish as persons.¹³ For Jónasdóttir this basic sociosexual need structure forms the basis of men's exploitation of women's erotic and caring powers, their ‘love power’. Whereas ‘men can continually appropriate significantly more of women's life force and capacity than they give back to women’,¹⁴ for most women the consequence of the exploitative process is ‘a continuous struggle on the boundaries of “poverty” in terms of their possibilities to operate in society as self-assured and self-evidently worthy people exerting their capacities effectively and legitimately’.¹⁵

The notion of exploitation aligns with the figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other in the sense that the labour or, in this case, love of the exploited Other is the constitutive though denied ground of the Dominant. The Dominant is what it is because of what its Other is and does.¹⁶ However, the Dominant's being what it is is also premised on the obscuring of the Other's ontological importance. The possibilities and abilities of the Dominant must appear to be based in the Dominant himself rather than being the result of exploitation and the subordination of the Other that it entails. The authority acquired by men via their structural position as men, hence, ‘has the appearance of being not male but generally human and generated from individually achieved merits exclusively’.¹⁷ This also means that the structurally produced inabilities of the feminine Other are naturalized; the powers and values that Woman de facto possesses are not only extracted by Man, they are also made to appear as if they originated from him so that he emerges as naturally valuable, worthy and capable, while Woman comes out as invaluable, unworthy and incapable. This, in turn, creates a moral order that legitimizes and thus helps reproduce the gendered power asymmetries.¹⁸

Contradictions around in/dependence here emerge as the hub of the figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other, in that the alienated or demi-real¹⁹ independence associated with power is premised on a denial of real dependence which I have elsewhere referred to as ‘de-actualization’.²⁰ On one level we can think of the masculine Dominant in terms of his more or less unrestricted independence and freedom, directly correlated with the unfree and dependent position of the Other. As Jónasdóttir states, the ‘surplus worthiness’²¹ collectively accumulated by men through their exploitation of women's love, coupled with women's sociosexual ‘poverty’,

means that men, in a different way than women, can act independently in particular sociosexual meetings. Men are not, in the way that women are, circumstantially ‘forced’ to award their sexual capacity to the other sex, if they dislike the conditions offered. Men can stand off temporarily; they are less dependent on a particular woman than women are on a particular man.²²

Although all humans are ultimately constrained by relations of dependence on nature and other people, those in a dominant position are in a sense freed even from some of these most basic constraints, since these are carried, in accumulated form, by the subordinated.²³ In my view, structural oppression can be thought of largely in terms of how the contradictions inherent in the structure that places the Dominant in a powerful position are ‘pushed down’ to the subordinated, in a way that forces the latter to choose between courses of actions that will in different ways be to the detriment of her needs. In the capitalist economy, for instance, the worker finds herself in a dialectical contradiction in that, as I put it elsewhere,

the possible ways for her to satisfy her basic needs are simultaneously to the detriment of these needs … If she abstains from selling her labour power, in order not to be exploited, it is likely that she will not be able to satisfy her basic needs for food and shelter. If she does sell her labour in order to have these needs met, she will be exploited of the life forces that the selling of her labour was meant to secure.²⁴

Women find themselves in similar contradictory knots in patriarchy in that ‘the sociosexual relations through which women are compelled to satisfy their need for love are structured in a way that deprives them of the personal power and worthiness that their loving and love-seeking is about’.²⁵

While men enjoy an alienated kind of independence within this structure, women's basic need for other people tends to be accentuated so that it forms a more acute kind of dependence that makes them ready to accept exploitative conditions. However, the fact that men's patriarchal independence is ultimately dependent on women destabilizes its realness. Just as a workers’ strike actualizes or makes palpable the capitalist's dependence on his subordinates, if women were to withdraw some of their erotic and caring energies from men this would actualize men's ultimate dependence, need and vulnerability.²⁶

Whereas the deconstructionist understanding of the Other's constitutivity operates primarily on the level of intelligibility, the exploitation paradigm focuses on how the Other's practical mode of existence underpins the Dominant's existence. This is not to say that the notion of exploitation is necessarily materially reductionist. In my understanding of exploitation there is a dialectic between the ideational and the material going on here, as everywhere. The love energy that is exploited in the Jónasdóttirean framework is indeed material as well as materializing, but it also has essential moral, psychic and ideational components. If we think of exploitation in terms of the appropriation of value or worth, in the basic sense of the terms, we can note that value/worth has a dual meaning, referring both to how something meets a materially-objectively existing need and to a moral judgment and subjective experience. The struggle over worth(iness), which is at the centre of Jónasdóttir's exploitative system, could in fact be said to revolve around the contradiction between who is accorded value/worth(iness) and who is really valuable by doing the work of meeting human needs.

Following Jónasdóttir, in my earlier work I have emphasized, against idealist and discursive accounts, that the surplus worthiness accorded to men in the ‘economy of love’²⁷ goes beyond the ideational level; it is anchored in men's structural control over women's conditions for realizing their capacities for love, comprising a complex constellation of psycho-organic forces that tend to place women in relatively powerless and unworthy positions and men in relatively powerful and worthy positions. At the same time, the meaningfulness and political-ethical import of this feminist analysis hinges on the notion that the (demi-)reality in which men are more able and worthy than women is in a sense false, since it contradicts a more fundamental reality where women and men are equally able and worthy.²⁸ This ontological tension is at the heart of the feminist project and cannot coherently be made sense of without a notion of natural necessity, of a ‘natural ontological order’²⁹ on which any society must base itself and whose inherent structure and constraints will cause human suffering and unfreedom unless accommodated. As we shall see, this theme is at the forefront of Jessica Benjamin's theorization of love and dominance.

Benjamin: splitting existential tensions along gendered lines

While the in/dependence paradox is in my view a crucial structuring element in exploitation theory, its presence is mostly implicit. In feminist psychoanalytical thought, by contrast, the contradiction of masculine in/dependence figures more prominently and it is here that one central bridge between Marxian and psychoanalytical thought can be built in relation to the figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other. In my earlier work³⁰ I develop the Jónasdóttirean line of thought by drawing on the work by Jessica Benjamin, a feminist psychoanalytical theorist theorizing the psychological roots of male domination by reading Hegel's master–slave dialectic through the lenses of Winnicottian object-relational theory and Frankfurt school theories of recognition.³¹

Benjamin analyses male domination as an alienated mode of differentiation, based on efforts to circumvent existential tensions that are really uncircumventable. For her, the production of masculine doer subject and feminine done-to object is ultimately the result of the breaking down of the basic existential tension that is produced by the ‘Hegelian’ paradox that our existence as independent selves is dependent on the other's recognition of us as such; ‘at the very moment of realizing our own independence, we are dependent on another to recognize it’.³² This paradox creates a tension in the process of becoming and being a self, between the two impulses of ‘asserting the self and recognizing the other’,³³ impulses that appear contradictory to one another but that are in fact co-constitutive poles in the same processual totality. While this constitutive tension is inexorable, it is a crucial claim of Benjamin's that its breaking down is not necessary, and it is in this tension between the necessary and the contingent that the promise of change is located.

Benjamin argues that in the patriarchal gender regime the ultimately unsurpassable tension between self-assertion and recognition, and independence and dependence, is denied and evaded by both women and men, independence and self-assertion being one-sidedly delegated to the masculine subject while dependence and other-centredness take a feminine form. For the masculine subject to emerge as independent and self-contained in this absolutist way, however, it is dependent on women playing the dependent role, obliging the latter to construct their selves as derivative from masculine subjectivity.³⁴ Hence, although real in the sense of causally efficacious, this kind of masculine independence is ultimately illusory. Its reality is premised on denying that other which in fact constitutes it, and Benjamin aptly demonstrates how this fact makes gendered identities and meetings based on this kind of ‘split complementarity’ bound to repeated breakdown.³⁵

Whereas Jónasdóttir does not address the issue of why the groups of women and men have come to occupy their different positions in exploitative sociosexuality in the first place, similar to other psychoanalytical feminist theorists³⁶ Benjamin explains the feminization of the dependent position and the masculinization of the independent one in terms of the gendered structure of the parenting institution. When in the recognition dialectic between mother and child the child begins to experience a conflict between ‘the fear of separation and the desire to be independent’,³⁷ for the boy the father is normally available as an identificatory resource through which he can be recognized as an independent and powerful subject in a way that compensates for the loss implied by the separation from the mother. By identifying with the masculine, which in our society relies on disidentification with the feminine, the boy's identity tends to be structured in terms of separation from the feminine and the dependence that it is associated with. Due to the father's disidentification with the feminine, such identification with the father is less available for the daughter, though. This means that girls tend to be ‘forced back to their mother’³⁸ in a way that makes their sense of self more bound up with the dependency that this primary relationship represents.

Benjamin does not make any explicit interventions in meta-theoretical debates. One reason I find her work so compelling, however, is the way she implicitly departs from radical-constructionist perspectives by building her theory on ontological assumptions about certain basic features of human existence. Her theory of the contingent, unnecessary reality of gendered domination draws its explanatory force only in connection with her assumptions about necessities universally structuring human existence. These necessities involve the paradox that we are both distinct from and constitutive of one another, leading to a tension between the need to assert ourselves as independent and the need to recognize the other as independent hence capable of recognizing us as independent.

In order to exist for oneself, one has to exist for an other … If I destroy the other, there is no one to recognize me, for if I allow him no independent consciousness, I become enmeshed with a dead, not-conscious being.³⁹

If these constitutive tensions, on which our very lives depend, are denied or evaded rather than accepted and harboured, they will continue to shape our lives, although in diverted or alienated form. This is what happens in the current order of gendered selves; when the tension is denied and its mutually constitutive poles of independence and dependence are split off from one another along a gendered scheme, this only means that the cut-off pole will return in a more violent form. Masculine independence in its alienated form is heavily dependent on female recognition and when this is continually threatened with exposure, further splits and repressions are needed in order to sustain the initial construction.⁴⁰

For Benjamin, the denial of dependence is at the root of domination, for when dependence is not reconciled with one's sense of self one must continuously control that on which one depends, in order to fend off its power. ‘The primary consequence of the inability to reconcile dependence with independence’, hence, ‘is the transformation of the need for the other into domination of him[/her]’.⁴¹ The ‘problem’, however, is that domination does not work in the long run even for the dominator himself, since the recognition that he ultimately needs from his subordinate cannot be bestowed by her if she is an ‘object’ under his control. This means that whereas the continuous re-emergence of the fact of dependence is likely to be managed by means of further attempts at control, this also has to be complemented with false modes of differentiation — distance, idealization, objectification — which recreate tension between self and other. Such attempts at re-establishing necessary tension are bound to break down again and again, however, ‘unless and until the other makes a difference’, as a person in her own right rather than an extension of the dominator's needs.⁴²

Benjamin is concerned to challenge common assumptions about the inevitability of this alienated mode of subject–object relating, where ‘it is necessary that whatever one side gains the other must lose’.⁴³ The crucial strength of her theory, premised on her implicit distinction between the necessary and the contingent, is the way she explains the manner in which domination is emergent from dilemmas at the root of human existence, while showing that these dilemmas are not bound to result in domination. This kind of sorting out of ontological connections and distinctions, necessities and contingencies, is precisely what feminist theory needs more of, so that we can intervene where intervention is possible.

As opposed to the deconstructionist mode of critiquing the subject as such, Benjamin takes seriously the necessity of selfhood and sketches the ontological foundations for another kind of subject, whose existence does not happen at the cost of its other. For Benjamin, the condition of such a self is the ability to harbour and sustain, instead of evading, the tension at the heart of any self's existence, between the impulses of asserting the self and recognizing the other. Such a self is in touch with the truth that its own existence is premised on and meaningful only in relation to the irreducible existence of other selves, and is able to appreciate rather than fear ‘the externality and aliveness of encountering uncontrollable otherness’.⁴⁴ Only such a self is genuinely independent, since its independence is in accord with the necessity of dependence and will thus not be threatened by its own constitutive reality.

Where deconstructionists tacitly work with a notion of a subject constituted at the expense of some unbounded flow of life, for Benjamin there is another structure beyond the oppressive one, pivoting around the dialectic between independence and dependence. In line with Bhaskar's understanding of the ‘reality principle’,⁴⁵ liberation is not achieved through liberation from all kinds of constraints; instead, the task is to accommodate the necessary constraints and tensions of existence, so that they can carry us through life with the energy and support that they provide when respected. The acceptance of tension, of ‘being-one with the tensed process of life’, as I put it elsewhere, paradoxically cancels tension.⁴⁶

In my review of Benjamin's work I have focused more on the notion of recognition than on love, but in line with what I take to be Benjamin's position I include the concept of recognition in a wider notion of love.⁴⁷ What I have in mind when using the term ‘love’ are relations, practices and energies which serve life, which cohere, heal and make flourish. Although Jónasdóttir's and Benjamin's work differ significantly from one another, they both explore the paradox whereby this good side of human co-existence co-mingles with rather than being a simple opposite to the bad side of human interrelations: domination and exploitation. This theme is central in the work of Teresa Brennan too, which provides an alternative yet equally innovative and compelling view on the matter of love and gendered power.

Brennan: masculine projections versus life

Of the feminist theorists dealt with in this article philosopher and psychoanalytical theorist Teresa Brennan offers the most comprehensive and multidimensional theorization of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other and its relation to gender and love, constructed, as Alice Jardine highlights, in ‘utter disregard for disciplinary boundaries’.⁴⁸ It seems impossible to summarize her work in a complete way within the confines of this article, due to the originality of all the interlinked components of her theoretical system, but I will do my best to do justice to the features that are most relevant for the purposes of this article.

Although Brennan's work has its primary basis in psychoanalytical theory, it ties in in exciting ways with Jónasdóttir's work, and the exploitation paradigm more generally, in that it revolves around the issue of affectively driven energy transfers between people. Brennan argues that the powerful masculine ego is premised on projecting its negative affects outside of itself, paradigmatically onto women and other feminized subjects. While this is quite a commonplace idea among psychoanalytical feminists, Brennan breaks new ground by theoretically elaborating on the energetic underpinnings of such projective processes. She takes some steps into the territory of the natural sciences, emphasizing the role of hormones and other chemical processes, and centres affects as the mediator between the chemical and the psychic-social. In her view, projections are the means of ‘dumping’⁴⁹ onto others those negative affects that would otherwise deplete oneself of agency as it is constituted within the current ego economy of selves.⁵⁰

The basic causal power in Brennan's theory is what she variously terms living attention, the life drive or love. In line with Bhaskar's philosophy of metaReality,⁵¹ for her ‘all energy is derivative of the life drive or love, in whatever combination these things existed before they were split into the sexual-aggressive and affectionate streams of that drive’.⁵² This basic life drive is what ultimately lends force to affects — which are always negative and distinct from ‘real feeling’ ⁵³— and to projective modes of relating. When the masculine self projects his image onto woman, this projection is energetically underpinned by the force of the drive, but the life energy it imprints on the feminine Other is fixating, binding women's energy in a way that disempowers them. However, the reason why the majority of women accept the image — which they must do, stresses Brennan, for it to affect them — is because it gives them an identity, energized by masculine attention. Whereas identity ‘by feminine means’⁵⁴ diverts living energy away from its creative channelling, the masculine ego, by contrast, is constituted in a way that makes its energy flow outwards in agency. This agency is enabled by its projecting onto women those de-agential negative affects that in Brennan's view are the residue of a set of deeply gendered ontological splits, pitting activity against passivity, mind against body, logic against matter.⁵⁵

Although exploitation is not a central term in Brennan's work, it has a continuous implicit presence that affiliates her work with Jónasdóttir's.⁵⁶ She talks about men ‘extracting’ women's living attentive energy and, as in Jónasdóttir's account, the masculine agential self is premised on this energy transfer. However, Brennan's main focus when it comes to the gendered affective-energetic economy is not so much on the practice of extracting something from the other, thereby depleting her of energy, but on the practice of dumping something onto the other, thereby diverting her energy along disenabling routes. The precise relation between the extracting and dumping modes is not totally clear, which is part of a general vagueness in Brennan's work as to the nature of what she terms ‘the transmission of affect’.⁵⁷

A strength in Brennan's framework compared with Jónasdóttir is that, as opposed to the latter, she does not take the ego self and its alienated, largely zero-sum mode of relating to others as a point of departure, but problematizes it and explains its emergence. As I have elaborated on extensively elsewhere,⁵⁸ Jónasdóttir's account operates on what Bhaskar terms the demi-real level of ego selves⁵⁹ and does not deal with the basic issue of what would be needed for love to be practiced in a non-alienated way that defies categories of exchange and where the empowerment of one does not happen at the cost of the other. Similarly to Benjamin, Brennan offers an alternative to this exploitative economy of selves and carefully traces the psychological-ontological roots of the latter. For her, as for Benjamin, the split between selves is associated with a set of splits on other levels of reality, the acknowledgement of which presumes an original-natural unity. At the centre here is what Brennan calls the foundational fantasy, the infant's — and later on the adult's — splitting off of itself from the mother in a way that makes it believe that the mother's powers, on which it depends and which are therefore threatening since the mother is not controlled by the infant, are in fact the infant's own powers. This original split⁶⁰ forms the basis of the illusion of self-containment, premised on denial of interdependence and of the fact — and this is Brennan's most famous contribution — that affects and energies migrate between selves.⁶¹ Here we see a clear link between Benjamin's and Brennan's interventions: at the root of oppression is the denial of intrinsic dependence. As in Jónasdóttir's Marxian account this comes to effect an inversion, whereby the powers of the (feminine) Other are not only thought to belong to the (masculine) Dominant but are to some extent also actually appropriated by the latter.

We saw that Benjamin theorized the psychological roots of gendered domination in terms of the inability to reconcile constitutive dependence with independence. Brennan elaborates on how this split is connected with causally efficacious splits⁶² between activity/passivity, mind/body and logic/matter. The foundational fantasy constitutes a subject that wrongly sees its agential powers as detached from the agency of others (originally the mother) and its ability to reason as independent from matter. To construct its subjectivity, agency and rationality in such absolutist terms, objectivity, passivity, affectivity and irrationality must be delegated to its outside, to the mother and by extension the feminine and nature. Similar to Benjamin's theory, the particular role played by the female parent in a child's emergence as a distinct person largely accounts for why splitting is gendered the way it is.⁶³

Whereas many feminists have pointed to the interconnections between binaries of subject/object, mind/body, reason/emotion, and so forth, Brennan takes this project a step further by pinpointing more precisely how these splits materially support one another. Criticizing splits and binaries presumes some notion of a reality where the things dichotomized are in fact interfoliated. As opposed to most other feminist theorists who are eager to challenge binaries, Brennan is explicit about this underlying presumption, arguing that at the basic stratum of life logic and matter are one. The current delegation of irrationality and lack of agency to the emotional-bodily (feminine) realm and the assignment of rationality and agency to the ideational (masculine) realm detached from matter constitutes for Brennan an alienation from life's own structure and intelligence. The materialization of these gendered splits can happen only at the price of an intense production of de-agential affects (anger, anxiety, depression), which Brennan regards as ‘slower-motion residues of the original connection between thought and substance’.⁶⁴ Due to their energy-diverting character, these affects must be dumped onto someone else for them not to disturb one's own agency and logical thinking as constituted within this split system.

Tying in with the theme of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other, Brennan highlights that although the person who projects is freed from the de-energizing effects of the affects, ‘he or she is dependent on the other carrying that projected affect, just as the master depends on the slave’.⁶⁵ Here we can locate a deeper interest in organizing one's self in ways that are not premised on projections that deplete others of their energy. Although like Jónasdóttir Brennan highlights the energetic gains of embodying a masculine ego, she relativizes this claim by elaborating on the inevitably life-depleting effects of its constitution in the long run.

When [a subject] strives to preserve its own life at the expense of the perpetuation of the life around it, it contributes to the anxiety that corrodes living pathways within itself as well as in others. It draws to itself more of the same, and more of the same leads to more drastic moves of self-preservation, although these moves cost its life in the long run.⁶⁶

In her later work Brennan elaborates extensively on the contours of an alternative mode of self-containment, which serves life instead of turning its power against itself. Such a self is based on reclaiming what she terms ‘the language of the flesh’, or ‘living logic’, defined as those ‘structured systems of intelligent communication whose matter is intrinsic to their form’.⁶⁷ Whereas the inherently oppressive and life-depleting subject based on the foundational fantasy, which Brennan explicitly refers to as the ego, knows and acts via its projection outward of images, ‘objectif[ying] the means for connecting and communicating affects and feelings’,⁶⁸ this other mode of self-containment and knowing deprivileges the objectifying, distanciating visual senses and bases itself in the more relational and sensual modes of knowing that are marginalized in modernity. This mode of relating is inward in the sense that it listens to the body, as the vehicle of life's intrinsic intelligence, but inasmuch as the body is part of a larger, energetically interconnected system it is also connected with its ‘outside’. Brennan employs the term discernment to characterize this way of being in the world.

Projecting is the opposite of discernment because projection directs affects outward without consciously (as a rule) acknowledging that it is doing so; discernment consciously examines them. Boundaries may depend on projecting, but this is only one route to self-containment. There is another, based on discernment.⁶⁹

By relying on our bodily-sensual access to a basic ‘living logic’, which has an ineffable, natural existence irreducible to its current diversions into the ego logic, we can resist both impulses to project and tendencies to unconsciously accept or receive the other's projections of negative affects onto us. Despite Brennan's claims about energetic-affective connections as challenging self-containment, this distinction between one's own and others’ affects tacitly depends on a notion that people have an interiority that is relatively autonomous from the relational totality of which it is part. While in her earlier work she seems to regard the subjective standpoint as such as at odds with the life principle,⁷⁰ Brennan changes track in her subsequent work, arguing that

the ability to dissect the ego is indicative of another organizational center in the mind. The nature of that center (and whether it is anything other than the life drive's organizational impulse) remains to be discussed, together with the relation (if any) between the organism's distinctive path and that of living nature overall.⁷¹

Brennan did not get to develop her thoughts on this ‘organizing soul or “other I” consciousness’⁷² before she was killed in a hit-and-run accident just after completing her last book. She did conclude, though, that the standpoint of narrow self-interest constituting the ego self leads us to act in ways that threaten others as well as nature and that, hence, if we want to foster sustainable and non-oppressive modes of being we need to detach from the self-interested standpoint and get in touch with the broader principles of life, on which our self-interest also ultimately depends.⁷³ Love, or ‘living attention’ in its disinterested, non-fixating form, provides the means for discerning affects from those real feelings which help us align with ‘the informational channels of the flesh’.⁷⁴

To return to the Dominant and its Constitutive Other, Brennan's exhaustively innovative work thematizes this figure in terms of the undue transmission of life-depleting negative affects from the Dominant onto the Other. In order to challenge rather than just reverse this logic, one has to target the energetic underpinnings of the ego self as such. Hence, while starting off her work with an analysis of the asymmetrically interdependent energetic constitution of femininity and masculinity, Brennan's focus subsequently shifts to a critical analysis of the more basic issue of what kind of self it is that sustains this order.

Necessity and the self

As already mentioned, one important reason why Jónasdóttir's, Benjamin's and Brennan's work stands out as compelling to me in a general antirealist, social-constructionist feminist context is the realist underpinnings, broadly understood, of their frameworks. Here, by ‘realist’ I do not refer to the basic realist idea that reality is independent from our knowledge of it, but to the reliance on and centring of assumptions about natural necessity that is strongly connected to realist perspectives. Jónasdóttir, Benjamin and Brennan all build their claims on certain explicit ontological assumptions about the basic forces and structures constraining and enabling interhuman encounters. In Jónasdóttir's account there is the basic human need and capacity for love; for Benjamin there is the existential tension between the impulses of self-assertion and recognition, based on the dialectic between dependence and independence; and for Brennan the living logic of nature as well as foundational tendencies to betray it. Oppressive modes of organizing human relations can be explained as well as criticized only with reference to necessities of this kind. Also, when we seek to figure out alternative modes of organizing social relations, we are necessarily guided by assumptions about the basic ‘laws’ of the human situation, which determine what is possible as well as desirable.

Despite crucial differences, what unifies the ontologies of the three frameworks dealt with here is (1) the claim about the basic interdependence of selves and (2) the depiction of the economy of gendered selves as one characterized by a causally efficacious masculine transference of dependence onto the feminine self. Inasmuch as the masculine self is inescapably and ultimately dependent, this demi-real construction of masculine independence (Dominant) and feminine dependency (Constitutive Other) is bound to be permeated by internal contradictions. Even if constitutive dependence is suppressed and de-actualized, it will continue to make itself heard in some way or another, and more violently so than if dependence were embraced at its root and integrated with the whole. As put by psychoanalytical feminist theorist Lynne Layton:

[W]hen splitting occurs, each side of the polarity becomes a monstrous version of whatever it once was: when autonomy and dependence are split (and gendered, or raced, or classed), for example, we find that autonomy is lived as omnipotence and dependence as helplessness, clingy and hostile. We also know that whatever is split off continues to haunt the psyche; although the split polarities may seem independent of one another — and are constituted to seem so — they, in fact, live off each other alternately as host and as parasite. The form taken by the interdependence of the poles is thus as monstrous as each pole itself, monstrous because it is a form built on the repudiation of the actual interdependence of the sets of human attributes that were artificially divided in the first place.⁷⁵

If independence cannot cope with dependence, every sign of need and dependence must be dealt with in violent ways that attempt to control that on which one depends. The dialectic of control is bound to intensify since, inasmuch as suppressing one's dependence means suppressing part of one's own wholeness, the self based on such suppressions is, paradoxically, more acutely dependent on its ‘outside’ for being whole than the self that reconciles independence with dependence.⁷⁶

The self is crucial in all the three accounts above and I would argue that this is intimately linked to the central place of love in the frameworks. Jónasdóttir defines love in terms of its capacity to produce persons, ‘individuated and personified existences’ endowed with the worthiness needed to act efficaciously in the social world.⁷⁷ Despite the centrality of personhood in her theory, Jónasdóttir does not elaborate on the ontology of personhood itself, though. By contrast, Benjamin and Brennan foreground the issue of the basic structure of the self and how it is related to interpersonal asymmetries. Both highlight that there are tendencies in the human situation that make us liable to construct selves that are unfit for coping with basic existential tensions between self and other, independence and dependence. This is the kind of self whose ontological security happens at the cost of other selves, the self that exploits, projects, controls. In line with Bhaskar's argument that the ills of demi-reality cannot be fought on demi-reality's own terrain,⁷⁸ Benjamin and Brennan make it clear that in order to get to the root of the problem of domination we need to interrogate the very structure of the self mediating interhuman relations. In line with Bhaskar's stratified view of personhood,⁷⁹ they are convinced that the current dominant mode of self-constitution is not the only one; there are other modes of self-cohesion that are not caught up in master–slave dialectics.

In their assumption about the possibility of another kind of selfhood Benjamin and Brennan also differ from deconstructionist modes of interrogating the self. In deconstructionist thinking there is no positive alternative to the self premised on projections, suppressions and violent exclusions, unless we take unbounded chaos to constitute such an alternative. Brennan explicitly takes issue with the Deleuzian wish to replace Spinoza's God-as-Nature with ‘a dice-throwing, desiring chaos which has no logic’.⁸⁰ In her view, logic, in its broadest sense, is bound up neither with human language nor with oppressive subject/object dualisms.

One can have an inherent order of connection which is not linear; this is the order found in nature's logic which perpetuates the living: a logic of multitudinous paths that intersect, which works through living things rather than imposing itself upon them from outside or above.⁸¹

Brennan locates the conditions of the discerning ‘other self’ in the order of life itself, which cannot be objectified but sensed. In a different way, Benjamin also grounds her alternative, sustainable, non-oppressive self in what she identifies as a basic structure to human existence. Due to the self's dependence on recognition, its relatively autonomous existence must be reconciled with the fact of ongoing dependence on that which it does not control, if it is to be sustainable. This existential tension can be thought of in terms of the more general dialectical coincidence of connections and distinctions, presences and absences, that are generative of the very pulse of life.⁸²

Brennan emphasizes the making of connections as primarily constitutive of living logic or love, thus aligning with Bhaskar's view of love as ‘the totalizing, unifying, healing force’ basic to being.⁸³ Connections are however premised on differentiations of some kind, and terms such as ‘order’ and ‘logic’ presume both connections and distinctions, as well as positivity and negativity. Hence, if we think of the natural ontological order as posited by Benjamin and Brennan in terms of a certain dialectic of connections and distinctions, it seems that the sustainable and ethical life is that which aligns with and draws on the regulating and releasing force of these co-enfolded connections and distinctions rather than denying or working against them. Brennan addresses this theme when stating that ‘[f]eelings’, which she sees as aligned with the living logic, ‘connect logically (consistently with the information provided by the flesh)’, whereas ‘[t]he negative affects’, which are constitutive of the ego, ‘divide one person from another and then remake connections inaccurately from the subjective standpoint’.⁸⁴

Fixity is a central theme for both Benjamin and Brennan. It is when the self is unable or unwilling to be in the continually moving interfoliation of dependence and independence, instead seeking to reach pure independence, that it betrays the pulse of life on which it depends. As Brennan puts it:

Life operates according to a certain logical sequence. It arranges matter in systems that release energy through their sequencing. It does not release this energy, or release as much of it, when it is diverted to the service of the repressions and fixations that maintain images, beginning with self-image.⁸⁵

This theme of the ego's inefficient diversion of life energy is central also in Bhaskar's philosophy of metaReality, where he states that we can either ‘maximize the energy at our disposal by being and doing things only which are consistent with our ground-state’ or we can ‘drain or block or interfere with it by utilizing that energy in ways which drain and dissipate it’.⁸⁶ Bhaskar's ‘ground-state’ is arguably the counterpart of Brennan's ‘organizing soul or “other I” consciousness’.

Brennan's theoretical system is immensely interesting in that it infuses innovatively casted spiritual as well as realist themes into psychoanalytical feminist theory. This makes her come very close to Bhaskar's philosophical system, in particular its metaRealist moment, despite very different conceptual and argumentative routes into the topics of love, power and the grounds of existence. While Jónasdóttir's framework does not offer much hope, since it tends to take the struggle for power as an unexplained given, both Brennan's and Benjamin's works have a spiritual dimension in that they identify, in line with Bhaskar, a basic ontological structure that makes genuinely loving, that is, non-oppressive, relations the only sustainable alternative, for all parties, in the long run. Simply put, not loving ultimately hits back upon yourself, for ‘by denying or hurting another person one will necessarily deny or hurt the fundamental part of oneself that is part of her’, as I put it elsewhere.⁸⁷

Conclusion

The figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other hinges on a stratified ontology. It serves as a route to revealing a different order of reality beneath the demi-real twin appearances of masculine power and feminine powerlessness, a realm in which men depend on women's powers. Such demystificatory endeavours of ‘elucidating one reality by disclosing its foundation in and determination by another’⁸⁸ are a crucial part of emancipatory critique, whose dialectical dynamic is rooted in the acknowledgement of the simultaneous realness and falsity of the surface appearances of demi-reality.⁸⁹

Apart from denoting the way that the alienated practices and identities of the feminine Other tacitly constitute the masculine Dominant's ostensibly independent existence, the figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other can thus be put to work also in a ‘vertical’ sense. As Bhaskar thematizes most elaborately in the philosophy of metaReality, the master–slave relations of demi-reality draw their energy from a more basic substratum of love and trust.⁹⁰ This ultimate dependence of destructive practices on constructive forces is why their denegation of the latter is bound to make them ridden with internal contradictions, hence ultimately self-defeating. Being genuinely liberated and empowered is thus premised on surrendering to this ultimate reality, which can be accessed by shedding the defensive-projective modes of the ego and, instead, rooting one's ontological security in the Bhaskarian ground-state or the Brennanian organizing soul. At this level independence and dependence are dialectically co-enfolded in one another, meaning neither of them will threaten the other and their natural interplay can be let free. Love's cohering logic is relentless and inescapable and it is ultimately the only thing we have, so one might as well align with it at its root rather than waiting for it to hit back upon us in distorted guise.

A colleague recently challenged my way of equating love with the life principle, highlighting that the life of many organisms is based on killing other life.⁹¹ This comment compelled me to push my thought further and I realized again how central is the Benjaminian foregrounding of the need for balancing life's constitutive tensions. The dialectically interdependent impulses inherent in life processes need to be kept in check so that they do not become fatal in the long run, but serve life as a totality. Humans have monstrously fatal capacities, but our access to Brennan's ‘living logic’ also provides us with the holistic intelligence involved in the balancing endeavour needed to stop life from turning against itself.

Acknowledgements

This article is in memory of Roy Bhaskar, 1944–2014.

Funding

The research is part of the project Feminist Theorizations of Intersectionality, Transversal Dialogues and New Synergies, supported by the Swedish Research Council.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lena Gunnarsson

Lena Gunnarsson is a researcher in School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Gender Studies at Örebro University, Sweden.

Notes

1 E.g. Beauvoir 1989; Firestone 1979; Gunnarsson 2011, 2014a, 2014b, 2015b; Haavind 1984; Langford 1994, 1999.

2 Gunnarsson 2014a; 2015a.

3 Butler 1993; Mouffe 1994.

4 Hall cited in Chambers 2008, 100, emphasis added.

5 Butler 1993, 11.

6 Butler 1993, xi.

7 Butler 1993, 94.

8 Cf. Jónasdóttir and Jones 2009.

9 Cf. Sayer 1997.

10 Gunnarsson 2013; 2014a; 2015b.

11 Hartwig 2007, 316.

12 Jónasdóttir 1994, 2009, 2011; Gunnarsson 2011, 2014a.

13 Cf. Ferguson 1989; 1991.

14 Jónasdóttir 1994, 26.

15 Jónasdóttir 1994, 225.

16 By this I do not mean that his Other is the only condition of his existence, only a necessary condition.

17 Jónasdóttir 1994, 227.

18 Gunnarsson 2014a.

19 ‘Demi-reality’ is Bhaskar's term for that emergent level of reality, characterized by master/slave relations, that is illusory or false yet real in the sense of causally efficacious (Bhaskar 2002; Gunnarsson 2011, 2014a).

20 See Gunnarsson 2014a, 54.

21 Jónasdóttir 1994, 227.

22 Jónasdóttir 1994, 224.

23 Gunnarsson 2014a; 2015b.

24 Gunnarsson 2014a, 132.

25 Gunnarsson 2014a, 132.

26 Gunnarsson 2014a; 2015b.

27 Langford 1994, 94.

28 Elsewhere I develop an argument about different levels and degrees of reality to make detailed sense of this (Gunnarsson 2014a; cf. Arthur 2009; Dussel 2001).

29 Collier 2002, 166.

30 Gunnarsson 2014a.

31 Benjamin 1988; 2013.

32 Benjamin 1988, 33.

33 Benjamin 1988, 53.

34 Cf. Beauvoir 1989; Gunnarsson forthcoming.

35 Benjamin 1998, 29; 1988.

36 E.g. Chodorow 1978.

37 Benjamin 1991, 282.

38 Kvarnhall forthcoming.

39 Benjamin 1988, 53.

40 Cf. Bhaskar's notion of TINA compromise formations ([1993] 2008, 116; Gunnarsson 2014a).

41 Benjamin 1988, 54.

42 Benjamin 1988, 68.

43 Benjamin 1998, 40.

44 Benjamin 2006, 118.

45 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 230.

46 Gunnarsson forthcoming.

47 Here my view seems to differ from that of Mervyn Hartwig (2015, 207), who takes the concept of recognition to differ radically from love: according to him, ‘Recognition is competed for, agonistically, and a deficit in reciprocity issues in debt’, whereas ‘love sets aside relations of equivalence’. Although I do agree that unconditionality is the ground quality of love, in its alienated forms love can indeed be compatible with exchange relations and conditionality, as Bhaskar (2002) also himself emphasizes. As for the notion of recognition, Alex Honneth (2002) posits love as one of three modes of recognition, along with rights and solidarity.

48 Jardine 2007, 2.

49 Brennan 2004, 6; 1992; 2000.

50 Brennan 1992; 2004.

51 Bhaskar 2002; Gunnarsson 2011, 2014a; Hartwig 2015.

52 Brennan 2004, 108.

53 Brennan 2004, 23.

54 Brennan 1992, 35.

55 Brennan 1992; 2000; 2004.

56 Some of Brennan's work (in particular 2000; 2003) deals extensively with capitalism and the exploitation of nature, so the theme can indeed be said to be central to her oeuvre.

57 Brennan 2004, 1.

58 Gunnarsson 2011; 2014a.

59 See note 19.

60 Brennan seems to see, owing to her Lacanian legacy, this original split as at least to some degree inevitable. This can be contrasted with Bhaskar's view of the primordial split as a potential whose realization is not necessary yet supported by current social structures. It is clearly the case, though, that Brennan sees current capitalist forms as significantly bolstering the foundational fantasy.

61 Brennan 2000; 2004.

62 They ‘seem real because at one level they are real, made of matter and twisted energy’ (Brennan 2004, 95).

63 Brennan 2000; 2004.

64 Brennan 2000, 67.

65 Brennan 2004, 111.

66 Brennan 2004, 151.

67 Brennan 2004, 141.

68 Brennan 2004, 141.

69 Brennan 2004, 11.

70 Brennan 1992.

71 Brennan 2004, 162–3.

72 Brennan 2004, 163.

73 See Brennan 2004, 162.

74 Brennan 2004, 140.

75 Layton 2009, 2.

76 Gunnarsson forthcoming.

77 Jónasdóttir 1994, 221.

78 Bhaskar 2002.

79 E.g. Bhaskar 2002.

80 Brennan 2000, 48.

81 Brennan 2000, 49.

82 Bhaskar [1993] 2008.

83 Bhaskar 2002, 175.

84 Brennan 2004, 94.

85 Brennan 2004, 148.

86 Bhaskar 2002, 57.

87 Gunnarsson forthcoming.

88 Geras 1971, 77.

89 Gunnarsson 2014a.

90 Bhaskar 2002.

91 Personal conversation with Ann Ferguson 2014, Oct 27.