I soon realized that I would have to distinguish four kinds of behavior instead of two: subjection and domination on the one hand, dependence and providing on the other. Two diptychs instead of just one, and strongly linked to each other in such a way that they form a unit. [ . . . ]
The behavior of those who are dominated has a certain specificity with respect to the behavior of those who dominate and it has to be examined separately.
There is a tendency now to equate dependence with subjection, to the advantage of subjection. [ . . . ] Dependence and subjection are not equivalent; although the dependent person and the dominated person are both alienated, they’re not alienated in the same way. [ . . . ] The dependent person more or less consents to her alienation; the dominated person does not. The reason is clear: the dependent person gets something out of being alienated; the dominated person does not. [ . . . ] At a certain point in their journey through life, the colonized imitate and often admire those who have colonized them; but that does not mean that they consent to domination. Such behavior is even a sign of the contrary, of their refusal to give that approbation. [ . . . ]
Those who are dependent, however, are obviously not looking for ways to terminate their dependency relationships. [ . . . ] “I need you” means both “I’m dependent on you” and “I hope to get something from you.” To be under the domination of someone is to be subordinated to that person without any appreciable gain, unless the dominator is also a provider. [ . . . ] The cohesion that characterizes large social organizations like churches and armies is not based just on authority, hierarchy, and an apparatus of repression. It also comes from a profound allegiance on the part of the members, who benefit a great deal from adherence to such groups. [ . . . ]
I was painting a picture of oppression in order to condemn and combat it. Perhaps I had the impression, in spite of myself, that if I had introduced a third element into the opposition between dominance and subjection, I would have attenuated the responsibility of those who are dominant. [ . . . ]
It [i.e., dependence . . .] helps us to better account for one of the most surprising aspects of oppression—its amazing tenacity [ . . . ] Strength, fear, mystification, and illusions don’t explain everything. [ . . . ]
Two more examples: [ . . . ] the status of women and decolonization [ . . . ] In an amorous relationship, the dominant person isn’t always the least dependent one. [ . . . ]
We would expect to find all ties between such nations completely broken, but what we see are new ties being formed. This would be good news except that, all too often, the former colonial power has maintained its supremacy. [ . . . ]
Many nations [. . . remain] dependent economically, militarily, and even culturally. [ . . . ] If the end of colonization is the end of subjection, it is not always the end of dependence. As for the relationships between men and women, we may be making a transition from subjection to reciprocal and voluntary dependence. [ . . . ]
It is a clear case of two competing and complementary impulses serving the same purpose.
This business of dependence has become especially important to me as a way of understanding myself and my relationships with other people and as a way of understanding other people, both individuals and groups. [ . . . ] I try to uncover the tissue of dependencies that orients its sensitivity, its behavior, and its consciousness of itself. [ . . . ]
I am thoroughly persuaded that dependence is both a fact of life so common that it is almost a part of the individual and collective psyche and an operational concept so efficacious that it furnishes an invaluable key to the understanding of people and groups and of their various works, forms of expression, and patterns of behavior. I am so certain about this that I would find it very difficult if I had to decide which of the two combinations—subjection and dominance or dependence and providing—is more important. [ . . . ] The forms of dependence exhibit as much variety and originality as those of subjection or domination and [ . . . ] I consider it impossible to take an approach to the reality of human existence without systematically taking them into account.
Fanaticism is nothing but an extreme form of self-defense, which often turns into a preventive attack. When someone mentions fanaticism, we usually think of the religious variety, but religious fanaticism is still just a type of cultural fanaticism. [ . . . ] When I was an adolescent I played amid the ruins of Carthage and, later, when I fell in love for the first time, my lover and I used to take walks there. Among the secular stones of the Roman theater, which basked in the gentle light of a sky that was always blue, there was a marble plaque commemorating the heroic martyrdom of two young Christian women, St. Felicity and St. Perpetua, who, rather than deny their faith, chose to be thrown to the lions. At the time, we hardly noticed it; when I think back on it today, their behavior seems very strange indeed. It isn’t natural, after all, to sacrifice your life for the sake of convictions, religious or otherwise. It goes against the instinct for self-preservation, which is one of the most powerful instincts of all. How could anyone want to do such a thing? To answer this question by making comparisons with other kinds of behavior that can only be described as suicidal adds nothing to our understanding of the problem. And statements like “It’s always been that way” and “People have always sacrificed themselves for important causes” are nothing but admissions of our inability to furnish an explanation.
While it would be presumptuous to claim that dependence can completely explain this type of behavior, there is no denying that it makes it much more comprehensible. The passion for truth, which excludes everything else and lasts as long as life itself, is probably a symptom of a more profound and more primitive emotion: fear. Truth is a rampart that has to be defended at any price because if that protection is lost, some sort of monster will appear and swallow everything. This sort of temerity would be more understandable among troops about to go into combat: the consequences of a defeat under such circumstances would be terrible, unforeseeable.
All of this, as the official ideology of the group, is naturally internalized by individuals and becomes part of their conscience, their soul, their system of values. If this is not the case, why do intellectuals, members of the clergy, priests, and scholars—those who specialize in things of the mind—fight so bitterly among themselves? Why do they take simple disagreements about methodology so seriously? Because they believe that they are defending the truth and that the others are mired in error? Because they love truth? Undoubtedly. But what does it mean to love truth? What is most surprising about those who love truth is not that they love it but that, like those who love rabbit meat or oysters, they worry that others don’t. There is nothing wrong with loving truth; but why do people want to impose it on others? And why is it so much more important to them that anything else—so important that they will consent to sacrifice the lives of others and even their own lives for its sake? Isn’t it because, without it, they would somehow feel as if they were in danger? I sometimes wonder if even Spinoza’s Ethics might not ultimately be the product of its author’s emotions. People often point with satisfied assurance to the adage attributed to Aristotle: “Plato is dear to me, but truth is even dearer.” This is not only debatable, but hardly consistent with what people living today actually do. The average person will simply defend those who are close to him without bothering to find out if they are wrong, although he might, if he has a passion for justice, reproach them for what they’ve done. People spontaneously defend their way of life and the interests of their group: people before ideas. When Camus said, “My mother is more important to me than justice,” for which he was roundly condemned by all the intellectuals in Paris, he was expressing this common attitude.
The insistence in ethics on the universality of the moral law and on the protection of outsiders and those who are weak is instructive—but a contrario. That isn’t what people are instinctively inclined to do, and the truth is that it takes an effort. That is why people who do act that way seem fascinating and, at the same time, a bit less than human. Everyone knows about Thomas More, whose fate has inspired numerous writings. As lord chancellor of England, he refused to give King Henry VIII his approval for a divorce that was prohibited by the laws in force at the time. The king, after having tried to win him over, turned to threats, but in vain; nothing could make More change his mind; he preferred to die on the scaffold rather than give in. He left behind him the image of a hero with exemplary fortitude.
But, above and beyond strength of character, what does this extraordinary rigidity signify? Thomas More was no doubt defending a conception of society that was different from that of Henry VIII: a social order in which law, and not the will of the king, is the ultimate authority. It was a conception that would, in the future, give the citizens of the realm more guarantees, freeing them from subjection to the will of a single man. His stand on this issue has made Thomas More seem to be a precursor of modern democracy. He paid for that with his life: he is a hero. What is a hero? It is a person who is willing to sacrifice himself or risk his own life. For a just cause, it should be added. Although that point is not entirely clear, because someone can be a hero for one group and not for another, and what seems just to one group won’t necessarily seem just to another. But is it so natural to be a hero? We are so accustomed to certain ideas that we take them for granted. Isn’t it surprising that someone should consent to die on the scaffold for the sake of an idea? Not if we assume that such a hero is constrained by some other force and that More could hardly have done otherwise. He was defending an image of himself, without which he felt life would be intolerable. That does not in any way make what he did less meritorious because, by his actions, he performed a great service for his community. But what he did was definitely ethical fanaticism, which is very much like religious fanaticism. If More had been able to, he might have killed the king; being unable to do so (it would, later on, be considered permissible), he allowed himself to be put to death. This is another instance in which someone took his aggressions out on himself instead of on the person who was guilty of disturbing the established order. Next to the lives of other people, the most important thing to him, more important than his own life, was respect for a system of values that gave meaning to that life. That still seems illogical: to save what gives meaning to life, you sacrifice life itself. But it isn’t illogical when viewed from the perspective of dependence. Without that which gives meaning to life, the individual feels as if he or she can’t go on living.
It is not so surprising, therefore, that people should quarrel, and sometimes even come to blows, over a piece written for the theater. That is just what happened at the battle of Hernani, in which young romanticists in red vests planted bludgeons on the bald heads of their older adversaries, who were themselves armed with canes. Conflicts between generations get resolved in various ways. But above and beyond such customary conflicts, and Victor Hugo’s play, which aesthetically was only ordinary, each of the combatants in the theater that day was defending his own idea of the way things ought to be. The conservatives were defending an order to which they were accustomed and which allowed them to live in relative comfort. The young revolutionaries were defending a vision that would have allowed them to overthrow the established order, under which they were effectively excluded from any meaningful participation in society, and to create a new one under which they would have a better chance of realizing their dreams. When all the picturesque details are disregarded, what it comes down to is that each participant in the battle of Hernani was inspired by a different view of the world. For many people today, art has taken the place of religion because tradition has failed to provide answers to the new problems they have to face. As a consequence, and as a result of democratization, there has been a substantial increase in the number of people who take an interest in the arts. Such people talk of painting, music, or poetry with solemnity and are quick to take offense at anyone who doesn’t; they treat works of art like sacred, priceless objects; they organize exhibitions that are like masses and they react with righteous indignation against anything remotely resembling disrespect. This sort of behavior comes very close to being artistic fanaticism. [ . . . ]
On the other hand, anything that helps to bring people together, to establish or consolidate a dependency relationship, is considered good, legitimate, and desirable. Fidelity is unanimously praised because it is the sign of a firmly established dependency relationship.
Consequently, we are expected to go to any length to protect and strengthen our dependency relationships, whether they are real or ideal. [ . . . ] An expression Jewish people use is enlightening in this respect. They talk about “barriers around the law” and even of “barriers around the barriers,” and it is true that their survival as a distinct group is attributable to the persistence of their law. A hero is still someone who fights for our collective dependency relationships. His reward for that is universal gratitude—glory—and that internalized glory we call “the satisfaction that comes from doing your duty.”
An individual or group will continue to protect dependency relationships even if they interfere with other people’s dependency relationships. When I was in a labor camp I saw men fight each other, without any qualms at all, for a bowl of soup, a cigarette, or a place to sit—not just men without education, but men of all sorts, from every kind of background. This double thrust is an aspect of the most diverse types of behavior, types that seem to be opposites: racism or xenophobia, and dependencies that are considered to be noble. The new artistic schools are not content with making new kinds of films or writing new kinds of novels; they claim that films and novels created by other people are out of date: the others have to die for them to live. And if someone else creates something so original, so obviously fruitful that they can’t dismiss it, they will say that they are writing anti-novels, creating anti-theater or anti-art: better to deny art altogether than to admit that theirs isn’t absolutely superior.
We find it annoying to read a newspaper that doesn’t reflect our opinions; we feel full of hostility toward people we’ve never seen but whose way of life is different from ours. During periods of social crisis, we even support the idea that our adversaries should not be allowed to demonstrate, speak, write, or “disturb the peace.” Some people don’t hesitate to resort to open violence, punitive raids, or bombings. [ . . . ]
Dependence on reason strongly resembles dependence on irrationality. There is a rationalist fanaticism and an irrationalist fanaticism. Some rationalists claim that reason is infallible, and they will do anything within reason to defend it. Of course, things aren’t that simple. The struggle for the triumph of reason is often the symbol of a more complex battle. Jacobinism and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, like the Inquisition and the Crusades, also had economic and political significance. But, in fact, things are never simple. Rationalists have a need to believe in a transparent world that can be mastered with an all-purpose tool; if they don’t believe that, they will panic and go on the offensive. The Islamic war against the infidel, in which the Islamic peoples forced those they conquered to convert, giving them a choice of “conversion or death,” wasn’t just a reflection of their desire to gain power through expansion but also a reaction to the anguish they felt when they saw other people adoring other gods and observing other rites. If the gods worshipped by other people are good, if other people are righteous and their opinions valid, then what does that make our god and what is the value of our customs? The citizens of one country will speak derisively about the customs of another, but they find it intolerable when someone else does the same thing to them. They make light of the disasters that strike their neighbors, but they doctor their own history, omitting any mention of unpleasant or dishonorable events and transforming defeats into victories, retreats into brilliant tactical maneuvers, distinguished persons into superhumans, and heroes into saints. Legend takes up where history leaves off and presents the past in the best possible light for eternity. And if dissertations and the resources of the imagination aren’t enough, people will protect and consolidate collective dependency relationships with sword in hand. This tendency is responsible for a great deal of the aggressive behavior that human beings customarily exhibit. Every race of people has always, throughout its history, vigorously defended its symbols against those of others and its faith against other faiths, destroying, if necessary, the visible traces of foreign cultures and religious worship. After a war, those who have been victorious construct altars in the very same locations where the altars of the vanquished population formerly stood, as if it were imperative that no trace of the originals should be allowed to remain. In Morocco it used to be the custom for a new sovereign to immediately destroy his predecessor’s palace. Isn’t that just what modern political regimes do when they go to great lengths to mislead the public about previous regimes so that history will, from that point on, be written the way they want it to appear?
When the people of one nation destroy the temples, palaces, and gods of another or confuse their genealogies and rob them of their collective memory, which happens in colonization and in most domination, they don’t, of course, ask themselves how the other people feel. In high school we were taught to admire Polyeuctus, for his destruction of the pagan temples and the great achievements of the colonial army. At the entrance to the Arab quarter of Tunis, a statue of Cardinal Lavigerie stood as a reminder of the triumph of Christianity over Islam. We were never given any idea of the anguish and silent fury that those who worshipped in the ancient temples must have felt when they witnessed the destruction of their sanctuaries and protective gods; nor was it ever suggested that the colonial subjects of our own time, who were forced every day to pass by the representative of a foreign god or a statue of the conqueror, felt the same emotions. It is not surprising, then, that the first thing the citizens of a newly liberated nation do is to destroy the symbols of their subjection and reestablish their own objects provided.
This appendix contains just a few remarks on the four key words of this book, with particular reference to dependence and to the definition I propose to give it. [ . . . ] We have to make a clear distinction between domination as an activity and domination as something endured. I suggest that the word domination be used exclusively to refer to what emanates from those who dominate with respect to those who are dominated and never to refer to what those who are dominated endure. Domination is the totality of the constraints imposed by those who dominate on those who are dominated. [ . . . ]
With respect to subjection[,] I suggest that this term be applied exclusively to what is experienced by those who are dominated. [ . . . ] Subjection is the totality of the ways, both active and passive, in which those who are dominated can respond to the aggressive behavior of those who are dominating them.
If we now compare the two diptychs formed by dominance and subjection on the one hand and by dependence and providing on the other, it becomes clear that the equation involving dependents and their providers is not superimposable on the equation involving those who dominate and those who are dominated, even if this or that form of behavior closely approximates another. Providing is responding to the expectations of a dependent.
What is a dependent being and why this word dependence? [ . . . ]
Dependence [. . . . is ] a subtle form of subjection without a master [ . . . ]
Attachment does not account for one of the important characteristics of dependence: ambiguity. [ . . . ] Dependence, despite all its advantages, is confusion and anxiety, and it is almost always simultaneously sought after and condemned. [ . . . ]
What is a conflict but an involvement in contradictory dependencies? [ . . . ]
Dependence is a relationship with a real or ideal being, object, group, or institution that involves more or less accepted compulsion and that is connected with the satisfaction of a need.