A two-person conception of freedom: The significance of Jessica Benjamin’s idea of intersubjectivity

Abstract

Jessica Benjamin offers a two-person, relational account of freedom understood in terms of intersubjectivity. She sees the conditions of possibility of this account as arising out of the historical process of challenge to the established patriarchal one-person account of freedom that is led by the feminist insistence on the feminine/maternal other as a subject in her own right. Where the patriarchal conception of freedom operates in terms of one will prevailing over the other, a relationship of domination that is structured as a subject–object dualism, the two-person account of freedom works with a subject-to-subject relationship where the tension between one subject’s will and the other’s is not resolved, but kept in play. Benjamin offers a historically contextualized phenomenological account of the reconfiguration of relationships (most particularly, those of ‘mothering’ and psychoanalysis) in terms of intersubjectivity. This is not a historicist account for there is nothing that suggests that the contest between the one-person and two-person conceptions of freedom will be resolved. Benjamin specifies intersubjectivity in terms of a two-subject interaction where both self-assertion and mutual recognition are dynamically entwined. A two-person conception of freedom enables a both/and understanding of the relationship between creativity and limit, self and other, freedom and law, and autonomy and dependency. The significance of Benjamin’s work is that she offers an excellent start for the reconstruction of our idea of freedom as a two-person rather than a one-person conception.