Autonomy, equality and ‘the smallest possible difference’ in Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism

Framed as a critique of the neoliberal dream of autonomy and a re-evaluation of the meaning of equality, this article will explore Mitchell’s account of ‘the smallest of differences which is necessary to inaugurate society’. At the social level, this minimal difference is the interaction between kinship relations and reproductive processes. Yet Mitchell argues that ‘the establishment of difference is also that which is absolutely crucial at an individual level’: an orchestration of life and death drives into the movement of the human infant within and beyond narcissism, establishing a self and discovering difference and the world.