If, as Axel Honneth has recently argued, critical theory needs psychoanalysis for meta-normative and explanatory reasons, this does not settle the question of which version of psychoanalysis critical theorists should embrace. In this paper, I argue against Honneth's favoured version – an intersubjectivist interpretation of Winnicott's object-relations theory – and in favour of an alternative based on the drive-theoretical work of Melanie Klein. Klein's work, I argue, provides critical theorists with a more realistic conception of the person and a richer (...) explanatory account of human aggression and destructiveness than does Honneth's intersubjectivist view. As such, it better serves the ends for which Honneth claims that critical theory should turn to psychoanalysis in the first place. (shrink)

In this essay I offer a qualified defence of Axel Honneth's recognition-theoretical critique of reification. This defence begins by engaging with a cross-section of the recent critical responses to Honneth's theory. In response to these criticisms I develop a reading of the recognition-theoretical critique of reification which illuminates both the intentional structure and pre-ethical nature of affective recognition whilst also reconstructing the existential contours of reification, understood as the “forgetfulness of recognition.” The paper concludes by taking the problem of “forgetfulness” (...) in a novel direction by drawing on the theory of double reflection expounded by Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In this final discussion I argue that the recognition-theoretical application of the theory of double reflection provides a conceptual model which allows one to think through the social, cultural and political mediations which inhibit, or wholly.. (shrink)