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If our species is not actually hooked on domination, history shows that we repeatedly engage with its manifestations, weaving them into emotional textures at the deepest levels. Isaac Balbus's Mourning and Modernity asks what emotional hold domination might exercise over us. By exploring that hold, how might we weaken domination in its specifically modern forms?
As one of America's leading critical social and political theorists, over two decades Balbus has developed a neo-Kleinian, feminist account of sexual, political and technological domination. His views have elicited Marxist, non-psychoanalytic feminist and post-structural criticisms, and in the first half of this book, Balbus replies to them. The second half applies his psychoanalytically informed theory of cultural mourning to a number of salient topics, among them Marxism, the 1960s counterculture, reparations for racism and the contradictions of high technology. Mourning and Modernity is masterful, passionate, tightly argued, warily hopeful. It draws primarily on Melanie Klein's key concepts (splitting, integration, mourning, reparation), but beyond these, also on Balbus's original theorizing. The book thus renews the tradition of critical cultural psychoanalysis that includes Herbert Marcuse, Christopher Lasch, Dorothy Dinnerstein and Joel Whitebook.
Vital to Balbus's argument is a stunning and provocative hypothesis about the foundations of domination. It links infancy, parenting and splitting as a basic cognitive/emotional mental mechanism. The forms of domination that most bedevil us today, the writer contends, are “emotionally anchored in different forms of mother-dominated child rearing” (p xi). Elaborating this, Balbus critically deploys the insights of a landmark feminist text, The Mermaid and the Minotaur, published in 1976 by the feminist “mothering” theorist Dorothy Dinnerstein. Trained as a cognitive psychologist but profoundly influenced by Freud and Klein, Dinnerstein drew on universal, transhi