The Master-slave Dialectic

Transcript

The ‘master–slave dialectic and the ‘‘sado-masochistic entity’’. Hegel’s famous descriptions of the ‘‘master–slave dialectic,’’ and the more general analysis of the struggle for recognition that it is a part of, have been remarkably influential throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dialectic has been very important to almost the entire Marxist tradition, Friedrich Nietzsche, psychoanalysis (especially Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek, and Donald Winnicott), existentialism (especially Jean-Paul Sartre), feminism (Simone de Beauvoir, Jessica Benjamin, and Judith Butler), the Frankfurt School, contemporary German theorists of recognition (especially Axel Honneth), and arguably also post-structuralism.