Domination

Dominus (our dominate, dominant) is the lord, the master, the possessor, and Roman slaves called their master dominus as slaves in Greece called their master despotes… we believe that agency, to do, to act, involves bossing, dominion, lording it over

Hillman argues that domination is etymologically and culturally embedded in the Western concept of agency itself, making every act of doing structurally implicated in lordship over others.

Hillman, James, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis

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One is to make others dependent on oneself and to have absolute and unrestricted power over them, so as to make of them nothing but instruments, ‘clay in the potter’s hand.’

Fromm identifies the first sadistic tendency as the impulse to dominate absolutely — reducing the other to a mere instrument — a dynamic inseparable from the sadomasochistic character structure.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis

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on the basis of this gap between domination and power, constitutive of the political as such, we can define the political as the set of organized practices relating to the distribution of political power, better termed domination.

Ricoeur, drawing on Weber and Arendt, defines the political domain as constituted precisely by the gap between shared power and domination, identifying domination as the vertical relation between governing and governed.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis

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a felicitous manner of emphasizing the ethical primacy of living together over constraints related to judicial systems and to political organization is to mark, following Hannah Arendt, the gap separating power in common and domination.

Ricoeur invokes Arendt to argue that the ethical primacy of communal life requires distinguishing power-in-common from domination, the latter being tied to institutional violence and the split between governing and governed.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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The sadist wants to dominate his object and therefore suffers a loss if his object disappears. Sadism, as we have used the word, can also be relatively free from destructiveness and blended with a friendly attitude towards its object.

Fromm distinguishes domination from destruction: the sadist requires the continued existence of the dominated object, revealing domination as a relational structure of control rather than annihilation.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting

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rituals of domination and submission are a subversive way to put one over on a society that glorifies control, belittles dependency, and demands equality.

Perel argues that the eroticization of domination and submission operates as a collective cultural counter-fantasy to egalitarian norms, inverting rather than affirming social power structures.

Perel, Esther, Mating in captivity sex, lies and domestic bliss, 2007supporting

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The system we live in gives no honor to the male mode of feeling nor to the female mode of feeling. The system of industrial domination determines how things go with us in the world of resources, values, and allegiances.

Bly distinguishes a soulless ‘industrial domination’ from genuine patriarchy or matriarchy, arguing that modern systems of domination evacuate archetypal masculine and feminine values alike.

Bly, Robert, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting

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reciprocity rather than domination frames the interchanges… the recognition of suffering as abundance is one pillar of a charity that is not domination but reciprocity.

Frank, drawing on Mairs, positions domination as the pathological form of care — charity turned coercive — and reciprocity as its ethical alternative grounded in mutual recognition of need.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting

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No longer exercising the kind of domination that conquered people, but breaking down its established institutions and thus not obviously engaging in domination… producing a new kind of people who were flexible, uncertain, mobile.

Alexander identifies a covert post-modern form of domination operating through institutional dissolution rather than overt conquest, producing the dislocation that underlies contemporary addiction.

Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting

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the terms ‘centrality,’ ‘similarity,’ and ‘absence of domination’ found in Anaximander’s cosmology… clearly linked together there in the same way as they were in political thought.

Vernant demonstrates that the absence of domination was a cosmological ideal in Anaximander, mirroring the political self-image of the Greek city-state, linking cosmic order with political equality.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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Feminist thought properly criticizes the oppression of women on the part of long-standing male domination, but that political patriarchy is not the patriarchy of the soul.

Moore distinguishes political-historical male domination from archetypal fatherhood, arguing that conflating the two prevents access to the soul’s genuine need for paternal principle.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting

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feminine domination that is of critical importance for the development of culture, namely, the storing of food… The ‘stores’ belonged beyond any question to the women, whose domination was thus enhanced.

Neumann traces an archaic form of feminine domination rooted in the material control of food and property, positioning it as a foundational stage in the cultural development of the matriarchal phase.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting

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The very dynamics of power and control that can be challenging in an emotional relationship can, when eroticized, become highly desirable.

Perel argues that erotic fantasy transforms the threatening dynamics of domination and control into sources of pleasure, illustrating the psyche’s capacity to metabolize power asymmetries through desire.

Perel, Esther, Mating in captivity sex, lies and domestic bliss, 2007supporting

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disobedience and the law’s just curse dominated the era of the Mosaic law… life under the Mosaic law with slavery probably means that when the Mosaic covenant was in effect, people were under the domination of sin and the penalty of death.

Thielman reads Pauline theology as framing the Mosaic era as a period of domination — by sin, law, and death — from which redemption constitutes a structural liberation.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting

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The feature common to all authoritarian thinking is the conviction that life is determined by forces outside of man’s own self… The powerlessness of man is the leitmotif of masochistic philosophy.

Fromm frames authoritarian and masochistic submission as the psychic complement to domination — each pole of the sadomasochistic structure requiring the other for its maintenance.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941aside

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dominus, a social term. For us, domus and dominus are different words, but the Romans felt them as closely linked… the dominus is in no way responsible for the construction of the house.

Benveniste establishes the etymology of dominus as a social rather than architectural term, grounding the concept of domination in the household’s social hierarchy rather than its physical structure.

Benveniste, Émile, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside

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