Did the Patriarchy take something from women, or did women's lack give rise to the feminist concept of the Patriarchy?
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the subject (our sense of self) is shaped by lack—an unavoidable sense of something missing, a gap that defines who we are and what we desire. There is no fully formed, complete self to start with. The self is this gap or negativity (alienation, frustration, doubt, and thus desire). What feminists call the Patriarchy is just one narrative to make sense of this, to give it structure and meaning. In other words, it is a symptom of feminism.
Hegel argued that we only discover the essence of something through its contradictions and failures. So the Patriarchy isn’t some original force oppressing women but an incomplete, myth-like story to explain why certain deadlocks, like dissatisfaction and conflict between the sexes, appear and persist.
Via Žižek, who reads Hegel avec Lacan, feminism’s struggle against patriarchy is a death drive, a …