Receptive Autonomy: A Psychoanalytic Ethics of Creative Discontent
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Date
2017-02-09
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
In contemporary political theory, the concept of autonomy generally signifies a liberal notion of rational choice and non-dependence. Theorists critical of liberalism often conceive of autonomy as inherently bound to a liberal vision of the subject, and, accordingly, they largely dismiss autonomy as a concept worthy of interrogation. I contend, however, that autonomy exceeds the confines of its liberal representation and retains political value when figured as a mode of being conducive to the development of practices potentially opposed to an ethos of liberalism. To contest critical political theory’s dismissal of autonomy and to counter the dominance of liberal theories of autonomy, I return to the concept from the perspective of psychoanalysis to develop a notion of “receptive autonomy,” an ethical comportment productive of capacities of critique, creativity, and self-direction.
I turn to psychoanalysis and feminist psychoanalysis to conceptualize receptive autonomy because both strains of thought work to undermine fundamental liberal attributes of subject-hood and agency: subjectivity as implicitly masculine, abstract, and rational, and agency as willful, non-dependent, and self-contained. In opposition to liberal theory, psychoanalytic and feminist theories look to questions of freedom and personal autonomy while assuming a relational and emotive subject. Through the work of feminist psychoanalytic theorists Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Jessica Benjamin, and Joan Copjec, among others, I specify how autonomy does not require detachment from others and otherness, as assumed in liberal theory, but rather an openness to the interdependencies and uncertainties that accompany relationality.
In chapter one, I provide a general sketch of the relationship between liberalism and autonomy and show how liberal theorist John Rawls has played a significant role in establishing the ostensibly natural link between Kantian autonomy and liberal ideals. Against Rawls’s reading of Kant, I suggest that autonomy entails not the self’s capacity to follow rationally chosen morals but the self’s capacity to break with the morality of the phenomenal world, the morality of the collectively given. I turn to Lacanian interpretations of Kant’s moral theory to explain how autonomy involves a critical stance toward common ways of reasoning, normative values, and accepted ways of being. This initial psychoanalytic interpretation of Kantian autonomy provides a basis for my subsequent engagement with the work of various schools of psychoanalysis as a means to develop my theory of an ethics of receptive autonomy.
Chapter two looks to the work of Jacques Lacan to show how the subject acquires the ability to act in defiance of accustomed ways of being by remaining attentive to that which appears outside of normative discourse and might seem shocking and “other.” Joan Copjec’s theory of love as linked to an ethics of social refusal specifies how, in opening to the uncertainty of proximity to otherness, the self grows more aware of its contours and its potential to engage critically and creatively with the social world in which it exists. I give shape to my theory of receptive autonomy as an ethical comportment of openness to the inarticulable aspects of being that become more apparent in loving encounters, encounters which intensify the subject’s desire for something beyond the merely socially possible.
In chapter three, I draw from Freud, Jessica Benjamin, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl to survey the reciprocal currents of affection conducive to a comportment of receptive autonomy. I look to the work of Freud and his followers to clarify how a socialized denial of conditions of vulnerability and dependency, in favor of a defensive approach to these conditions, shrinks the self’s capacity to inhabit a critical position with respect to possibly detrimental social norms. Examining liberal notions of autonomy as part of an American cultural resistance to dependency, I explore the ways in which liberal modes of thought produce social norms that encourage resistance to the openness necessary for critical and creative self-direction. This chapter elucidates the paradoxical nature of liberal autonomy—that the very ideals associated with autonomy in its liberal form work against the social realization of autonomy defined as a capacity for self-direction.
I elaborate further on the pathways that lead to receptive autonomy and expand upon the facets of this ethical comportment in chapter four. I look to the 2015 uprising in West Baltimore, following the death of Freddie Gray, as an exemplar of an ethics of receptive autonomy. Turning to Martin Luther King Jr.’s address to the American Psychological Association in 1967, I extend his notion of “creative maladjustment” to describe the aspects of refusal and creativity implied in receptive autonomy as an ethics of creative discontent. Through King’s notion of creative maladjustment and Freud’s understanding of social discontent as well as Alenka Zupančič’s portrayal of the subversive effects of the psychoanalytic encounter, I present a reading of the Baltimore uprising as an enactment of productive social refusal allied with the imaginative and disruptive facets of psychoanalysis.
My theorization of autonomy challenges the theoretical depiction of political autonomy as either a state of non-dependence, as in liberalism, or as an illusion of non-dependence, as in much critical and feminist theory. In opposition to these portrayals of autonomy as related to non-dependence, this dissertation looks to psychoanalysis to advance a notion of autonomy as a particularly relational ethos of social critique and creative intervention. I maintain the worth of thinking through what it might mean to inhabit a comportment of autonomy by attending to valuable aspects of autonomy, the capacity for self-direction, critical evaluation, and creativity. As exemplified in my reading of the Baltimore uprising, the value of these aspects of autonomy lies in how they enable the possibility of radical social-political change. In presenting an account of an ethics of receptive autonomy and its positive political implications, this dissertation offers an alternative to the normative liberal vision of autonomy while affirming the crucial political value of an ethical capacity for self-direction.
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autonomy, psychoanalysis, lacan, freud, feminism