VVVILike Copjec and Lacan, who note the ethical nature of lawlessness and the imperative to reject the commands of the community, should they demand the sacrifice of desire, Young-Bruehl suggests that the ego, which is nourished by the affectionate and receptive current of love, acts as a bulwark against the rules of a sociality that denies the primacy of receptivity. Young-Bruehl suggests that the receptive ego, “this amae core is lost to a worldview that denies altogether that a need to be loved is the foundation of receptivity to love” (2003, 35). She claims that the imperative of modern civilization entails “a process of making living beings, in all their spontaneity, new beginnings, dynamism, growth, unpredictability, and proliferation, strictly predictable, useable, dominatable” (Young-Bruehl, 37). Thus she prescribes a rejection of the systematizing and dominating imposition of social law in favor of a strengthening of the “I” through love, cherishment, and receptivity.
VVVIYoung-Bruehl’s notion of the cherishing ego does differ from the account of autonomy proffered by Copjec and Lacan, in that Young-Bruehl does not explicitly refer to the rejection of law or suggest the ethical nature of the shattering of self-law. However, her account of the ego shares with Lacan and Copjec’s understanding of autonomy the rejection of social rule and a turn toward loving as a source of strength for an “I” who seeks to move away from the oppressive aspects of the community. The account of autonomy I wish to give here, read through Copjec and Lacan, as well as Young-Bruehl’s notion of the ego, shares with traditional understandings of autonomy the implication of autonomy’s critical capacity, manifest in distance from the social. The rehabilitation of this understanding of distance however, is not matched with a reiteration of autonomy as self-containment, isolation, or rigidity. To the contrary, the deployment of autonomy in its loving and receptive form depends upon openness, relationality, and resilience.
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