Hegel's theory of the modern family and its relation to gender: Nature, culture and the anthropology of power relations

This thesis interprets an Hegelian theory of the modern bourgeois family and traces its impact on the social psychology of the Frankfurt School and on a radical Hegelian reading given to Freud by Jacques Lacan. Rather than re-establish Hegelian concepts such as Logic and the Absolute, the act of reading Hegel for or against the grain has opened up new lines of argument that have been taken up most recently by French feminists. Reading Hegel against the grain allows us to examine language as the external embodiment of consciousness. The ability of a rational human organism to transcend natural necessity is predicated on the notion that language is the only universal mediating category which allows for the sublimation of nature into culture.; Language is privileged over against the historical fact that the anaclitic relationship between so-called natural feminine passivity and cultural masculine activity represents the foundation of Western political thought. The interrelated concepts of language and gender are crucial to a study of the symbolic economies that legitimize the Hegelian speculative enterprise. In Hegel's paradoxical theory of the family, the feminine is situated both inside and outside of discursive reason. Thus a comprehensive knowledge of nature and culture, and the manner in which they interact through symbolic economies, is crucial to an interpretation of Hegel's theory of the family.; At a descriptive level, symbolic economies refer to social and cultural customs. At a metaphysical level, they express social and political realities. If a transhistorical, ideological theory of the family concludes that entry into the Symbolic is possible only through the universal law of the father, the success of an historicized, critical theory of the family must shift away from the structure of language and move towards the structuring, pre-verbal principles of the social Imaginary.; As such, Chapter I examines how interactions between natural and cultural subsystems within Western social and economic institutions reify the natural spirit of the modern Hegelian family and how these unique interactions lead to an historically specific set of gendered power relations between the sexes and between the parental agency and children. Chapter II examines the teleological aspects of law, love and language in relation to the necessary moment of the modern heterosexual family. Chapter III examines whether the critical capacity of analytical depth-psychology can properly articulate feminine psychic-sexual development and effectively lead to communicative action, given its belief that the modern family is the psychological agency of society. Chapter IV makes a psychoanalytic distinction between reason and rationality to examine how the latter leads to an ideological argument in favour of the bourgeois nuclear family as an ideal social formation that is based on a metaphysics of nature.