The connections between psychoanalysis and critical theory: the intersubjective theory of Jessica Benjamin in the analysis of contemporary authoritarianism

Abstract

One does not need to be an intersubjective theorist to acknowledge that one's work is never the merit of oneself alone. However, especially considering the deep imbrications between the subjects from an intersubjective perspective, these Acknowledgments may have an even stronger meaning while never being enough. Like a Winnicottian child playing, for me, while thinking through, talking about, and writing the following pages, sometimes the boundaries between creativity and discovery seemed agreeably blurred.First of all, I need to thank the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), which financed this project. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior -Brasil (CAPES) -Finance Code 001.I thank my advisor Rúrion Melo for the guidance, solicitude, and freedom to initiate my journey in critical theory and to pursue my ideas. I also thank Britta Weiffen, who was extremely important for the great assistance, friendship, and liberty provided at the very beginning of my academic career.My gratitude also to my colleagues at the Department of Political Science for sharing their friendship, knowledge, doubts, and anxieties so as to create a more welcoming environment of shared vulnerability. I wish to thank also the staff of the Department who was immensely helpful, especially in the navigation of all the bureaucratic requirements of the university, always with good humor and friendly solicitude, besides technical competence. I am also deeply grateful for the friends I met in Atlanta, who provided me rides, bikes, coffee supplies, English lessons, delicious homemade pizza (PB&J), deep conversations, and a friendship of a lifetime. I am especially grateful for my everytime-friends in São Paulo who, throughout the years, were present in all and every situationbars, travels, volleyball matches, carnival trips, rather absurd conversations, home moving, and car robberies (yes, in plural). Thank you for giving me family in the big city. To work and live here would not have been so nice and adventurous without you.To my sister, thank you for the necessary and deep realistic reflections, for the heads-up on many issues of life, for always encouraging me, and for the older-sister love that accompanies me wherever I go.To my parents, no words can thank you enough. In this particular context, thank you for always diving with me into the many adventures that life presents. Mami, thank you for your deepness, for the academic inspiration, and, most of all, for your love that teaches me the insurmountable mystery that is motherhood. Papi, thanks for your light presence as a dad, for being so open to our (frequently feminine) questions, and for caring so much about the world. Thank you both for allowing me to be a subject with you subjects, thus presenting me with the first possibility of truly intersubjective relationships, despite asymmetry.My special thanks go to Lucas for your s...