Abstract

The left-Freudian voices of the 1960s are now silent. Their successors, psychoanalytic feminists, no longer want to theorize domination in terms of sexuality. They have replaced it with “object relations” and “the inter-subjective view.” For Benjamin especially, domination is not the repression of bodily desire and the transformation of the body into an instrument of alienated labor but men's denial of the subjectivity of women, the construction of a psychic structure in which “one person must play subject and the other must serve as his object” (7). The polarization of subjectivity and objectivity, masculinity and femininity, is the fundamental structure of domination.