A short note on a question: Do domination and liberation have particular and identical subjects?

Are women truly the proper and natural subject of patriarchy who can and will bring it down (assuming it still rules, as I think it does not)? Consider: It was always among other things a protection racket for women. Women are supposed to be attractive as persons and specifically as beautiful bodies, and men are supposed to be strong and protect them. As I see it, what some call patriarchy is better called familialism, and we need to say adieu not just to the society that is In the Name of the Father but one that is also From the Body of the Mother. 

One more way in which theories of domination always shipwreck on the shores of notions of subjected subjects who in a counter-archeology (theory of origins of principle forces) are complementary origins not of domination but liberation, so that their own prise de conscience as autonomous (and self-managing? through what therapeutic Buildung or pedagogy? is not all liberation education, being led out (e-ducare)?) subject. Bad Marxists do this when they talk about the working class as if it is Messianic savior. There may or may not be a promised land or time; but no people, not "the Jews" or the Christians or Muslims who were supposed to take their place, nor any subjected race, gender, sexuality, or anything else is the privileged key to history's future unfolding as a roman à clef. Either that privileged subject is all of humanity or it is no one. 

Yes, that is the name Odysseus gives to Polyphemous the one-eyed monster who groans to the other Cyclops when his vision is castrated. Does the future then belong to Someone, No one, or Anybodys? The androgynous chick in West Side Story, I bet on her. Or as Brando puts it in Last Tango in Paris, "We don't need names.... here." Or we do, but not of persons. There are no proper persons, and proper names are arbitrary. We should all write novels and in them become Whitman-like, multiple personalities. And so then psychology too is for the birds.

William HeidbrederComment