Autonomy Re-Imagined

Abstract

Iwould like to extend the concept of dignity, a term usually understood with regard to individuals, to family and kinship relationships. At stake in this extension is our freedom not to fall prey to drives that prevent us from being able to express our desire, pursue it, and rationally evaluate it. This understanding of dignity is a re-interpretation of its meaning that can only be made with the help of psychoanalytic theory, and more especially, the interventions that have been made in that body of theory by feminist analysts and theorists. Psychoanalysis defends dignity as the moral mandate in which all of us are viewed as subjects who, in principle, can articulate their desire as well as morally evaluate their ends. The articulation of desire has always been assumed as necessary for moral freedom and responsibility. Indeed, much political philosophy takes it for granted that we act as actively desiring subjects who simply shape our own lives.1 Of course, some of the earliest critiques of canonical political theory offered by feminists argued that it was easy to make this assumption because the subjects in the purview of the theory were not all human beings, but straight white men of a certain class background.2 As I have defined it within the legal sphere (Cornell, Imaginary), the imaginary domain is the moral and psychic right to represent and articulate the meaning of our desire and our sexuality within the ethical framework of respect for the dignity of all others. This domain is imaginary in the sense that it is irreducible to actual space. But it is also imaginary in a psychoanalytic sense: our assumed identities have an imaginary dimension since they are shaped through our identification with primordial others. Without these identities, we cannot envision who we are. Our identifications with others as they have imagined and continue to imagine us thus form our self-image. These identifications color the way in which we envision ourselves, but they do not determine the reach of our imagination in dreaming up who else we might be. We must thus distinguish the imaginary from the radical imagination in which we envision new worlds and configure what has otherwise remained invisible. The radical imagination demands some degree of psychic separation. Otherwise our dreams of who we might become, both individually and collectively, would be captured by unconscious claims on us. Another reason for my psychoanalytic conception of the imaginary is that I defend feminism as an ego ideal. We form ego ideals by envisioning ourselves either through real or imagined others. Since ego ideals are formed through our primordial, pre-oedipal identifications, they carry with them unconscious material that we cannot fully elucidate. Indeed, we can never exactly know how these ideals are formed out of our identifications. Because we are not conscious of how our identifications have shaped these ideals, it is thus futile to think there is an easily accessible genealogical path that, if followed, will return us to the psychic origins of our identifications. What this means, interestingly enough, is that we cannot simply debunk ego ideals without at the same time appealing to some other ideal, even if that ideal is that we should ideally be suspicious of all ego ideals. Such suspicion is undoubtedly an ego ideal of how we should be. We imagine either that we reach an ideal or that we can become what the ideal holds out for us as a possibility. Feminism envisions how we might be as free and equal persons in our day-to-day lives. As an ego ideal, it cannot be imposed. Nor can we say that one must act or be a certain way in order to be a feminist. To make such impositions undermines the power of feminism as an ego ideal. To understand feminism psychically is to defend its spirit of generosity because each woman or man will internalize it as an ideal in her or his own way. This