Autonomy Re-Imagined

I would 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 de