ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I take up the theme of the relational possibilities embedded in women’s aggressive energies. The main vehicle for this exploration is the apparently anti-relational phenomenon of women’s erotic rape fantasies. On close tracking, the connective telos of aggressive fantasy emerges through the ways in which such fantasies bring one unavoidably up against the Otherness of the Other. So the point of this chapter is to take an apparently masochistic and, according to some views, pathological element of ordinary women’s interiority and explore it so as to bring out the enlivening, relational possibilities of agency which reside within such fantasies This exploration leads into a discussion of the terror of helplessness which necessarily attends agency.
