contrast to traditional understandings of autonomy as self-contained disconnectedness. Significantly however, both Copjec and Young-Bruehl’s version of autonomy and self-cultivation, respectively, retain a fundamental aspect of traditional notions of autonomy. Their accounts preserve and expand upon the notion that autonomy entails a critical capacity to disregard, reject, and resist potentially unethical and oppressive dictates of the community. The feminist psychoanalytic understanding of autonomy delineated here, actually amplifies this critical capacity by suggesting a notion of autonomy that can stand against and even dismantle the laws of the community internalised as the superego.
Freud’s turn to define affection as aim-inhibited sexuality also serves to establish his notorious theory concerning the inherent antagonism between the individual and civilization. Freud argues that for aim-inhibited sexual affection to exist, which it must in order for friendships and social bonds to occur, civilization must impose restrictions and taboos upon sexual love. Social bonding through aim-inhibited libido is thus only possible in a civilization that demands the repression and redirection of the sexual instincts (Freud, 2010). Young-Bruehl finds that Freud’s rather myopic focus on sexual instincts in Civilization and its Discontents obscures the potentially reparative relationship between sociality and the ego instincts. She suggests that had Freud maintained the trajectory established by his early theory of the instincts, he may have realised “that the ego instincts might not be antagonistic to civilization as the sexual instincts are” (Young-Bruehl, 27). In effect, Young-Bruehl claims that Freud’s move away from love as an ego instinct and towards love as a libidinal instinct disavows the complimentary coexistence between a resilient ego and sociality.ed, Lacan describes this drawing close to satisfaction, this “near coincidence, of the drive with its object” as love, or “the illusion of love” (Copjec, 41). The autonomy in this account of love derives from the indifference of the lover towards the loved object. The sublimation inherent in loving, the “satisfaction of the drive by sublimation,” “testifies to the autonomy of the subject, her independence from the Other” (Copjec, 44). However, this independence or indifference is not directed towards the loved object as beheld in the lover’s eyes, but as the object is defined by external criteria. Antigone’s love for her brother epitomizes this specific form of indifference towards external law and active receptivity towards the loved object. Copjec describes Antigone’s indifference as directed towards what is defined as possible within the community. She states “whereas Hegel focuses on the merits of Antigone’s act of installing Polynices as ‘a member of the community…which sought to destroy him,’ Lacan views the act of the loving sister as a definitive break with her community.” In other words, the deed Antigone undertakes traces the path of the criminal drive, away from the possibilities the community prescribes…”(Copjec, 38). In her actions, Antigone is autonomous; she “is indifferent to external criteria, such as the good opinion of others” (Copjec, 40). While Antigone is indeed indifferent and autonomous with respect to moral laws, she is not apathetic or closed off from the capacity to love.
71