ABSTRACT
Ethics cannot be based on the rights or reason of an autonomous subject if all subjects are inherently social in the constitution of their very subjectivity. Discussions of individual rights presume a self-contained virile subject who controls his body and actions. Culture and society need not be seen as the result of the repression of our hostile instincts, instincts directed originally against mothers and fathers. The subject born out of paternal and maternal love is not Oedipus unwittingly murdering his father and leading his mother to suicide. Ethics requires the possibility of a relationship between different people. Imaging human beings as monadic subjects struggling against each other makes relationships impossible. Ethics requires a notion of subjectivity that is neither opposed to, nor identified with, the other, a notion of social subjectivity. Ethics requires reconceiving of our primary relationships as loving social relationships, rather than hostile struggles.
