Realism criticizes the idea, central to what may be called ‘the priority view’, that philosophy has the task of imposing from the outside general norms of morality or standards of reasonableness on politics understood as the domain of power. According to realism, political philosophy must reveal the specific standards internal to the political practice of handling power appropriately and as it develops in actual circumstances. Framed in those terms, the debate evokes the idea that political power itself is lacking normativity (...) until such time as norms are devised that govern its use. In contrast, this essay identifies a normative dimension internal to power. Power depends on recognition and support in the form of belief. This dependence explains how an interest in power introduces a responsiveness to normative considerations into the domain of politics. (shrink)

Recent works have recovered the ethical and political value of shame, suggesting that if shame is felt for the right reasons, toxic forms of shame may be alleviated. Rereading Hannah Arendt's biography of the “conscious pariah,” Rahel Varnhagen, Locke concludes that a politics of shame does not have the radical potential its proponents seek. Access to a public world, not shaming those who shame us, catapults the shamed pariah into the practices of democratic citizenship.

Over the last 30 years, the self-determination efforts and objectives of Indigenous peoples in Canada have increasingly been cast in the language of ‘recognition’ — recognition of cultural distinctiveness, recognition of an inherent right to self-government, recognition of state treaty obligations, and so on. In addition, the last 15 years have witnessed a proliferation of theoretical work aimed at fleshing out the ethical, legal and political significance of these types of claims. Subsequently, ‘recognition’ has now come to occupy a central (...) place in our efforts to comprehend what is at stake in contestations over identity and difference in colonial contexts more generally. In this paper, I employ Frantz Fanon's critique of Hegel's master–slave dialectic to challenge the now hegemonic assumption that the structure of domination that frames Indigenous–state relations in Canada can be undermined via a liberal politics of recognition. Against this assumption, I argue that instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the Hegelian ideal of reciprocity, the contemporary politics of recognition promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that Indigenous demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, the self-determination efforts and objectives of Indigenous peoples in Canada have increasingly been cast in the language of 'recognition' — recognition of cultural distinctiveness, recognition of an inherent right to self-government, recognition of state treaty obligations, and so on. In addition, the last 15 years have witnessed a proliferation of theoretical work aimed at fleshing out the ethical, legal and political significance of these types of claims. Subsequently, 'recognition' has now come to occupy a central (...) place in our efforts to comprehend what is at stake in contestations over identity and difference in colonial contexts more generally. In this paper, I employ Frantz Fanon's critique of Hegel's master–slave dialectic to challenge the now hegemonic assumption that the structure of domination that frames Indigenous–state relations in Canada can be undermined via a liberal politics of recognition. Against this assumption, I argue that instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the Hegelian ideal of reciprocity, the contemporary politics of recognition promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that Indigenous demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend. (shrink)

This essay examines Elizabeth Grosz's provocative claim that feminist and anti-racist theorists should reject a politics of recognition in favor of "a politics of imperceptibility." She criticizes any humanist politics centered upon a dialectic between self and other. I turn to Spinoza to develop and explore her alternative proposal. I claim that Spinoza offers resources for her promising politics of corporeality, proximity, power, and connection that includes all of nature, which feminists should explore.

This essay presents a new way of conceptualizing the problem of political obligation. On the traditional ‘normativist’ framing of the issue, the primary task for theory is to secure the content and justification of political obligations, providing practically applicable moral knowledge. This paper develops an alternative, ‘pragmatist’ framing of the issue, by rehabilitating a frequently misunderstood essay by Hanna Pitkin and by recasting her argument in terms of the ‘pragmatic turn’ in recent philosophy, as articulated by Robert Brandom. From this (...) perspective, the content and justification of political obligations cannot be determined in a way that is in principle separable from their application. This casts ‘political obligation’ not as a problem to be philosophically resolved, but as a political predicament that calls for a kind of practical engagement. The merit of this perspective is to draw our attention toward the conditions under which the problem appears as a lived predicament. (shrink)

This article focuses upon the disagreement between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth about how to characterize the relation between social suffering and recognition struggles. For Honneth, social and political conflicts have their source in the "moral" wounds that arise from the myriad ways in which the basic human need for recognition is disregarded in unequal societies. Fraser criticizes Honneth for the uncritical subjectivism of his account of social suffering that reduces social oppression to psychic harm. Fraser therefore redefines misrecognition not (...) as a psychological injury but as "status subordination" understood as institutionalized patterns of discrimination and value inequality. My central argument is that while Fraser's critique of Honneth's subjectivist construal of recognition is largely justified, she falls into a counterveiling objectivism that prevents her from developing some of the central insights of her own paradigm. Her "non-identarian" rendering of recognition leads her to abandon an experiential or interpretative perspective that is associated with the idea of identity and, as a result, she cannot explain certain crucial aspects of political agency. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus is used to indicate a way beyond the naturalization of the cluster of emotions associated with social suffering that seems to be the inevitable consequence of Honneth's "ontology" of recognition. At the same time, the experiential emphasis of habitus mitigates the objectivism of Fraser's dualist paradigm showing how some of its central insights can be taken further through a materialist redefinition of identity and agency. (shrink)

ABSTRACT According to Max Horkheimer, a critical theory of society has to fulfil two tasks: the elimination of social injustice and the critical reflection of its own conceptual means. Based on this definition, I argue that Axel Honneth’s critical theory of recognition is at risk of losing sight of the ambivalence of recognition which limits the scope of his analysis of social pathologies. By drawing on the concept of misrecognising recognition it can be shown that recognition itself is an ambivalent (...) concept which can not only serve the purpose of self-realisation but also the purpose of self-subjection. Following the lead of Jean-Paul Sartre in this article I will unfold the concept of misrecognising recognition and put it at work to show how a variety of social pathologies of self-subjection can only be addressed if the ambivalence of recognition is taken into account. (shrink)

In the last two decades, an ever-increasing number of scholars have challenged the conceptual borders of political philosophy and the supposed universalism of its normative pre-commitments. Surprisingly enough, the normative underpinnings of this debate have had very little impact on contemporary disputes about pluralism. This article asks how contemporary disputes about the conceptual borders of political theory can help in constructing a more plural theory of pluralism. It shows that such contributions inspire three ways of constructing a more plural political (...) theory of pluralism: a self-transformative approach, a dialogical approach and a pre-relational approach. While all three approaches progress towards less exclusionary theories of pluralism, I argue that a pre-relational approach can lead to a normative theory that is more plural than the alternatives. (shrink)

In this article, I distinguish two models of personal integrity. The first, wholeheartedness, regards harmonious unity of the self as psychologically healthy and volitional consistency as ethically ideal. I argue that it does so at the substantial cost of framing ambivalence and conflict as defects of character and action. To avoid these consequences, I propose an alternate ideal of humility that construes the self as multiple and precarious and celebrates experiences of loss and transformation through which learning, growth, innovation, and (...) dynamic relationship become possible. This ideal not only sustains prospects for integrity but is more suitable than wholeheartedness for recognizing practices of contestation, such as those involving potentially destabilizing encounters with difference that is common within pluralistic societies, as vital for rich, well-lived lives. (shrink)

In this article I explore a central paradox of contemporary identity politics: why do we look for recognition from the very institutions we reject as oppressive? I argue that neoliberalism’s continued assault on the bases for collectivity has led to a suspicion that ‘the collective’ is an essentialising concept. The assault on the collective coupled with the neoliberal imperative to create an ‘authentic’ self has led to trauma and victimhood becoming the only bases on which people can unite. This manifests (...) discursively and theoretically in the primary trope of contemporary activism: ‘intersectionality’. Mobilising around this analytical concept has led to an analysis of oppression that, even as it claims to be systemic, is totally dematerialised and relentlessly individualised. Instead of building collective power, we are left with a politics of individual demand coming from a coalition of dispersed subject positions. (shrink)

This article reconstructs J. G. A. Pocock's debt to Hannah Arendt's political philosophy in The Machiavellian Moment and argues that her presentation of classical politics in The Human Condition and her account of the secular nature of American foundation in On Revolution were important sources for Pocock's analysis of American liberal insecurity. However, a contextualization of The Machiavellian Moment within Pocock's immediate intellectual and professional milieu indicates that he placed himself in critical relation to Arendt's civic republican theory and located (...) her philosophy of history in the same spectrum as the American political tradition he sought to historicize. While they did share a similar perspective on the ethical and political value of locating oneself within a long historical durée, their different conceptions of the problem of continuity for secular political structures provides a crucial context for their disparate responses to the discourse of political crisis in the United States in the late 1960s and the 1970s. (shrink)

Amy Allen presents Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as a productive movement between a commitment to the project of reason and a sensitivity to the effects on reason of power and domination. Agreeing with the thrust of her paper, my response considers two questions that Allen’s paper opens up. The first asks how individuals might seek emancipation through reason, knowing that their reason cannot transcend contexts of power. The second asks how best to practise critical theory, given that its (...) analyses and categories cannot rid themselves of contexts of domination. To the first, I answer that Allen’s account of creative individual effort needs to be supplemented by the cultivation of an accommodating and welcoming culture, marked by the sorts of civic attitudes that Derrida and Habermas bring to their maturing relationship. Regarding the second, I extend Allen’s hopes for a post-Habermasian phase of critical theory, indicating four resources in contemporary French philosophy for its further development. (shrink)

What does it mean to practice a theory of recognition within the discipline of philosophy? Across an initially acrimonious French-German divide, Axel Honneth’s effort to recognise the value of contemporary French philosophy and social theory suggests that philosophy is a self-critical, outwardly oriented, and cooperative discipline. First, mobilising the idea of recognition in his own philosophical practise has permitted Honneth to notice non-deliberative aspects of social interaction that Habermas had overlooked, including the need for self-confidence (drawn from a “deconstructive” ethics (...) of care) and the need for self-esteem (informed by Sartre’s and Foucault’s attention to the existential damage caused by denigration, and the nefarious effects of reproductive power). Second, although Honneth’s ascription of value to contemporary French theory also involves mis-recognition, his practice of recognition has nonetheless prompted philosophical cooperation among theorists who would not otherwise have engaged, encouraging French-influenced critical theorists to extend Honneth’s theory in ways that he had not anticipated. What emerges is an interpretation of philosophy as an ongoing intersubjective pursuit that attempts to respond to its own limitations through cooperative critique. (shrink)

In his recent book, Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European ideas (2021), Honneth has explained how he understands the French concept of recognition. This article places Honneth's latest interpretation in the context of his long-standing and evolving engagement with French theory over several decades. Honneth acknowledges his significant debt to a French tendency to view recognition as a problem for self-realisation (and not an opportunity). Bourdieu's and Boltanski's account of how ambitions become limited by the availability of capital (...) and the internalisation of class was a major breakthrough in Honneth's intellectual development. Other formative French influences included the articulation of denigration in existentialist phenomenology, and the idea of regulative power in Foucault, with “deconstructive” asymmetrical care presented as productive but comparatively less important. The discussion also reveals why Honneth presents the “German” concept of recognition as having basic explanatory force (as an opportunity for self-realisation), and why he resists what he views as a French-influenced tendency (also present in some contemporary German critical theory) to depict recognition as ambivalent. The discussion reveals, on one hand, how working across perceived divides can be immensely productive, and, on the other hand, why a French-German divide remains entrenched in contemporary thinking. (shrink)

This paper examines Castoriadis’ concept of time as ontological creation in relation to the activation of the project of autonomy. We argue that since Castoriadis presents as a practitioner of the creation of time as radical autonomous thinking, this is the standpoint from which to assess his claims. Through an examination of Castoriadis’ claim that the practice of autonomy depends upon it being activated by a willing singularity who accepts the Chaos of society and of the world, we argue that (...) Castoriadis’ position presupposes an effective contrast between the autonomy of significance that he advocates and the heteronomy of insignificance that he laments. If, as we suggest, both these orientations accept the Groundlessness of the world, then Castoriadis’ appeal to the awareness of a willing singularity is not sufficient to distinguish the practice of radical autonomy. To this extent, his elucidation of the radical imaginary time of ontological creation remains incomplete. (shrink)

In this essay, I take on the problem of how to explain the socio-historical dimension of practical reason in Hegel. In contrast to many contemporary socio-historical readings of Hegel, I claim that a logical concept of spirit frames Hegel’s account of the historical process through which human beings have come to know their practical agency as actualized in institutional relations of mutual recognition. On my reading, Hegel conceptualizes each shape in the ‘Spirit’ chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit as syllogistically (...) working out, practically and institutionally, how to mediate the demands of individual self-determination with the universal laws and customs of the community. At the same time, logical form doesn’t determine historical development, because the content of individuality, universality, and their mediation is earned only through historical experience. (shrink)

Political respect for nature is an important part of cultivating a more emancipatory and ecologically sustainable politics. As a political principle, it can supplement respect for persons with institutional mechanisms that formally constrain how human power may be exercised over non-human beings and things and that require us to use our power in ways that are attentive to nature’s well-being along with our own. Moreover, when internalized by citizens as part of their shared political ethos and public culture, respect for (...) nature has the potential to protect against the abuse of power in our interpersonal relations with Earth’s non-human parts. Political respect for nature means acknowledging that non-human beings and things count, that they deserve to be treated according to standards of right and that there are principled limits to how human power may be exercised over them. It means formalizing these constraints in the basic structure of society and fostering a public culture of self-restraint and responsiveness. (shrink)

Throughout his work Hegel distinguishes between the notion of an act from the standpoint of the agent and that of all other standpoints. He terms the formerHandlung and the latterTat. This distinction should not be confused with the contemporary one between action andmerebodily movement. For one, bothHandlungandTatare aspects of conduct that results from the will,viz. Tun. Moreover, Hegel's taxonomy is motivated purely by concerns relating to modes of perception. So whereas theorists such as Donald Davidson assert thatallactions are events that (...) are intentional under some description, Hegel reserves the term ‘action’ for those aspects of behaviour that are highlighted by a specific set of agent-related descriptions. This is not an ontological category, since there are no such objects as actions-under-specific-descriptions.Sophocles'sTheban Trilogyreveals the central role that these notions must play in any Hegelian understanding of tragic drama. Indeed the contrasts that matter most to Hegel's general take on both epic and tragic poetry are more closely related to the study of action than the standard theory attributed to Hegel would seem to allow. It is more fruitful, then, to incorporate Hegel's insights into such tragedies to the model of action employed by him than it is to try to make them fit whatever ‘theory’ of tragedy might appear to be hinted at in hisAesthetics. (shrink)

In this article the author traces the limits of the philosophy and politics of recognition as manifest in colonial settler contexts. Forms of property ownership and ways of being, sutured by the racial body, are contained by a restricted economy of owning, knowing and being. Bringing the concept of plasticity to bear on the relationship between the body, property and the colonial, the author illuminates the ways in which practices of ownership that exceed the restricted economy of recognition exhibit a (...) temporal and spatial plasticity in the context of the Palestinian struggles over land in the West Bank. (shrink)

Liberal approaches to multiculturalism and cultural nationalism have met with severe criticism in recent years. This article makes the case for an alternative, Aristotelian approach developed in the work of the ‘founding father’ of culture, J. G. Herder. According to Herder, culture is worthy of political recognition because it contributes to the realization of our common but contradictory human telos. Only a plurality of cultures, each realizing a unique balance of our contradictory needs, can bring wholeness to our common nature. (...) In conclusion, I argue for the merits of this Aristotelian approach in resolving some recurring problems of multiculturalism. (shrink)

Generally we think it good to tolerate and to accord recognition. Yet both are complex phenomena and our teaching must acknowledge and cope with that complexity. We tolerate only what we object to, so our message to students cannot be simply, ‘promote the good and prevent the bad’. Much advocacy of toleration is not what it pretends to be. Nor is it entirely clear what sort of conduct should count as intolerant. Sometimes people are at fault for tolerating what they (...) should not, or for tolerating what they should find unexceptionable. So virtue does not always lie with toleration. Tolerance can also seem condescending; should we therefore replace it with recognition? But recognition may not be able to coexist with the disapproval that makes toleration necessary. However, not everything about toleration and recognition is controversial; there are fixed points from which students can grapple with the issues presented by both. (shrink)

The notion of transgenerational community is usually based on two diachronic interactions. The first interaction consists of present generations taking up the legacy (not only economic, but also institutional, artistic, cultural, and so forth) of past generations and giving it continuity, exercising a form of active agency. The second interaction occurs when present generations pass on their legacy to future generations. This is supposed to expand the boundaries of the community in a transgenerational sense (both backward- and forward-looking). In this (...) article we argue that the transgenerational community can be grounded on a different ontological insight: future generations play the role of fictional actors for present generations, i.e., present generations entertain a present-time interaction with future generations, insofar as future generations are functional for the realization of transgenerational actions. This lays the foundations for more solid community-based bonds of intergenerational justice. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 283-295, September 2022.

Critical theory must add to its agenda “disrupt[ing] the easy passage from critique [to] its neoliberal double”, Nancy Fraser recently argued. Emancipatory movements have not only been transformed by neoliberalism. They have, “unwittingly”, provided powerful “ingredients” for the transition to neoliberalism. This essay examines Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser’s assessment of and normative proposal for addressing the paradoxes of neoliberalism. The constraints of neoliberalism, I argue, bring into focus the structural challenge of immanent critique as understood within second and third (...) generation Critical Theory. Normative ambivalence within neoliberalism, I maintain, calls for a shift in the way that critical and justificatory practices are understood within the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

In this article, I rely both on Derrida's 1974 work Glas, as well as Derrida's 1971–72 lecture course, “La famille de Hegel,” to argue that the concept of the quasi-transcendental is central to Derrida's reading of Hegel and to trace its implications beyond the Hegelian system. I follow Derrida's analysis of the role of Antigone—or, as the lecture course has it, “Antigonanette”—in Hegel's thought to argue that the quasi-transcendental indicates a restriction of empirical difference into the transcendental, which is thereby (...) only ever provisionally transcendental. I then argue that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi-transcendental is neither a general economy, nor is it in each case singular, but rather it ambivalently oscillates between these two. Finally, I treat the temporality of the quasi-transcendental, arguing that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi-transcendental is not prior to the restriction of empirical difference, but is paradoxically produced by it by being retroactively constituted. I take up this analysis for the sake of describing what I contend is the quasi-transcendental structure of constitutive exclusion, a way of understanding the conceptual structure of political bodies, and the political structure of concepts. (shrink)

At this polarizing moment in American politics identifying with the experiences of others feels especially difficult, but it is vital for sharing a world in common. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have argued that narratives, and especially literary ones, can help us cultivate this capacity by soliciting sympathetic identification with particular characters. In doing so, narratives can help us to be more ethically and political responsive to other human beings. This is a limited view of the potential for narratives (...) to solicit sympathetic identification, and it prevents us from identifying and grappling with our resistances to identifying with others. In this article I propose a more expansive view – inspired by Elizabeth Costello, a character in JM Coetzee’s novel of the same name – that there are no bounds to our capacities for sympathetic identification. Through critical readings of Waiting for the Barbarians and Animal Farm I explore the possibility that we might identify with people who cause others to suffer, and perhaps even with animals too. Both sorts of identification engender fierce resistance. Identifying with those who cause suffering demands that we grapple with our own capacities for cruelty and violence. Identifying with animals demands that we confront what is animal in ourselves – the perilous instincts that, unmoderated, incline us to aggression. Acknowledging and working through – without rejecting or disavowing – our capacities for cruelty and our animal instincts is necessary for the practices of sympathetic identification upon which sharing a world depends. (shrink)

Ever since Freud introduced the idea of the death drive as a means of explaining the apparently inborn inclination towards aggression, psychoanalysis has been riven by the question of negativity. For social theorists who lean upon psychoanalysis, the question is even more acute: how should these theories interpret the persistence of misrecognition and violence within contemporary societies? Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition represents the most compelling attempt to address these questions within the so-called ‘third generation’ of critical theory, yet Honneth (...) sidesteps or sublimates the most troubling aspects of the psychoanalytic legacy, displaying a quasi-Hegelian ‘cunning of recognition’ that sees human destructiveness as a purposive, experimental force within the psyche and the social. By rooting his theory in the work of D.W. Winnicott, Honneth avoids the ambivalent account of psychic and social life offered by object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein and Wilfrid Bion. However, I argue that Klein’s concept of ‘integration’ offers a more compelling orientation for social theory, insofar as it countenances the fragility of recognition alongside a desire for misrecognition. The turn to Klein and those directly influenced by her, such as Bion and Hanna Segal, has both theoretical and practical implications for contemporary critical theory. Theoretically it makes the case for reconnecting mainline critical theory – with its overtures to liberalism and deliberative democracy – with agonistic approaches to social life. Practically speaking it directs attention to the social and political spaces by which destructive impulses can be effectively articulated, held, and to some extent worked through. In particular, it offers a psychological and political defense of recent experiments in local, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes. (shrink)

The social sciences often explain behavioral differences by appealing to membership in distinct cultural groups. This work uses the concepts of “cultures” and “cultural groups” like any other demographic category (e.g. “gender”, “socioeconomic status”). I call these joint conceptualizations of “cultures” and “cultural groups” _demographic cultures_. Such demographic cultures have long been subject to scrutiny. Here I isolate and respond to a set of arguments I call _demographic skepticism_. This skeptical position denies that the demographic cultures concept can support metaphysically (...) plausible and empirically principled research. I argue against the skeptic, showing that their position relies on a questionable alignment between the demographic cultures concept and what I call the _folk anthropological model_. While the commitments of that model are problematic—they are not necessary for comparative work in the social sciences. In addition to clarifying skeptical arguments, then, I provide four recommendations for the comparative social scientist that allow them to avoid demographic skepticism. (shrink)

Claude Lefort’s theory of democratic indeterminacy has been an influential source among democratic theorists to demonstrate that democratic times lack absolute and determinate grounds on which to base and justify collectivities in the name of society or the people. However, few readers have paid sustained attention to Lefort’s advice that we should read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological move from the idea of “body” to “flesh” to grasp the experience of indeterminacy. This article attends to this advice, and excavates how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological (...) discussion of indeterminacy guides Lefort’s idea of democratic indeterminacy. More importantly, however, the article reveals that Lefort’s appropriation of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh signals an ambiguity in Lefort’s democratic theory—an ambiguity that presents democratic indeterminacy either as the radical possibility of creating democratic collectivities, or as the impossibility of decisively achieving democratic collectivities. Challenging Lefort’s subject-centered interpretation of flesh, the article contends that Merleau-Ponty’s move from body to flesh is to emphasize indeterminacy as an intersubjective, worldly experience. This world-centered reading of flesh suggests that the promise of democratic indeterminacy lies not only in questioning the closure of collectivities but also in proliferating collective experiences in many areas of common life. (shrink)

This article brings into conversation two important literatures in contemporary political theory that have, for the most part, failed to engage one another: work spanning more than two decades on multiculturalism and identity politics, and neo-republican work on nondomination. The authors take as their starting-point two widely endorsed claims: that identities are constructs and that state actors play a crucial role in their construction. Their question is how democratic states should shape identity, and their central claim is that states should (...) do so in ways that promote what they call democratic nondomination. This ideal, they stress, is multifaceted. It has both an action-level and a system-level component. In addition, it has both an inter-agentive and an impersonal dimension. Attending to democratic nondomination in its complexity is crucial to the project of evaluating alternative possible forms of state identity construction. (shrink)

This paper contrasts three non-skeptical ways of explaining and reconciling political struggles: monologue, instrumental dialogue, and a comparative dialogical approach promoted by Charles Taylor and James Tully. It surveys the work of Taylor and Tully to show three particular family resemblances: their emphasis on practice, irreducible diversity, and periodic reconciliation. These resemblances are evident in the way they employ dialogical approaches to explain struggles over recognition and distribution. They describe these as dialogical actions, and suggest that a form of dialogical (...) comparison might reconcile their various contested demands. (shrink)

Current debates on recognition and domination tend to be characterized by two polarized positions. Where the “anti-recognition” camp views recognition as a tool for establishing and reproducing relations of power, the “pro-recognition” camp conceives it as a way for dominated individuals and social groups to lay stake to intersubjective relations that are more just. At first glance, Honneth’s normative theory of recognition and Bourdieu’s critical sociology of domination also divide along these lines. Honneth takes the pro-recognition stance, criticizing the French (...) sociologist for adopting a “fragmented” conception of the social world that ignores the “moral consensus” underlying each claim for mutual recognition. In contrast, Bourdieu accuses the German philosopher of endorsing an “enchanted” view of the social world that misrecognizes the way that recognition perpetuates symbolic domination. However, through a close and nuanced reading of their works, this article suggests that, in spite of this difference, Honneth’s and Bourdieu’s theories nonetheless converge on the idea that recognition is neither “good” nor “bad” per se, but “structurally ambiguous” in its relations to symbolic domination. (shrink)

Political encounters between settler governments and indigenous communities are freighted with the unresolved issues of indigenous independence asserted under ongoing conditions of colonial domination. Within political science, these encounters have been primarily theorised and analysed as struggles of indigenous communities for political recognition from settler states. Further, the politics of recognition is widely understood as colonising by indigenous scholars, with some arguing for an alternative politics of resurgence and refusal, a ‘turning away’ from the state. In this article, we argue (...) that in the case of Māori in Aotearoa ‘turning up’ is the ethical and correct practice of politics, a practice stemming from the relational ontology of the Māori world. Thus ‘turning up’ rather than ‘turning away’ can, for Māori, itself be a practice of refusal. We outline the centrality of the embodied, face-to-face encounter within Māori politics, and identify the ongoing presence of the sovereign’s body and embodiment more broadly within the Westminster tradition, as symbolised in the concept of the Crown. Building on these compatibilities within distinct political ontologies, we argue for the potential and productivity of face-to-face political encounters, and call on the New Zealand Crown to also prioritise ‘turning up’ in its engagement with indigenous communities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article contributes to current theoretical debates about the political significance of narrative imagination by drawing on Camus’s and Arendt’s existential aesthetic judging sensibility. It seeks to displace the prevalent tendency to probe literature for its moral-philosophical insights, and instead delves into the experiential reality of our engagement with literary works. It starts from Martha Nussbaum’s recognition of the literary ability to account for the fragility of human affairs, yet finds her reduction of narrative imagination to the role of furthering (...) moral lessons wanting politically. Against this background, the article reclaims Camus’s and Arendt’s dialogical-representative judging orientation and its insight into the narrative ability to respond to the intersubjective character of politics. As such, their aesthetic sensibility reveals the potential political significance of literary imagination in its capacity to open a public space where the contradictions of our situated existence can be confronted through politics between plural equals. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It used to be said that shame culture waned in early modernity, but there is a growing body of historiography on the vital role that recognition and the opinion of others continued to play. Honour mattered; for some it was the mark and the maker of your true self. While philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, and Rousseau disagreed in their evaluations of the phenomenon, they were united in thinking that the great engine of recognition whirred like furious (...) clockwork through human society. When one listens to voices from the margins of power, however, to formerly enslaved black women and men, and white women, one hears a different story – that the machine is broken. I argue that, albeit from incomparable positions, they articulate a theory of misrecognition in the face of systematic power. Sensitive to the entanglements of epistemology and naturalised inequality, they offer a politics of vision that deconstructs the punitive lenses of gender and race which render people invisible and misunderstood, and in so doing they try to write themselves into view. They offer an account of the mysterious intractability of hegemonic ways of seeing that poses a challenge to both the putatively laissez-faire economy of recognition of their enlightened contemporaries, and to the emancipatory teleology of modern recognition theorists. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What does it mean to practice a theory of recognition within the discipline of philosophy? Across an initially acrimonious French-German divide, Axel Honneth’s effort to recognise the value of contemporary French philosophy and social theory suggests that philosophy is a self-critical, outwardly oriented, and cooperative discipline. First, mobilising the idea of recognition in his own philosophical practise has permitted Honneth to notice non-deliberative aspects of social interaction that Habermas had overlooked, including the need for self-confidence and the need for (...) self-esteem. Second, although Honneth’s ascription of value to contemporary French theory also involves mis-recognition, his practice of recognition has nonetheless prompted philosophical cooperation among theorists who would not otherwise have engaged, encouraging French-influenced critical theorists to extend Honneth’s theory in ways that he had not anticipated. What emerges is an interpretation of philosophy as an ongoing intersubjective pursuit that attempts to respond to its own limitations through cooperative critique. (shrink)

Although Judith Butler regards recognition as the theme unifying her work, one finds a striking absence of dialogue between her and the authors of the normative theories of recognition – Honneth, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc. In the present article I seek to call into question this sentiment, shared by the two sides, of a radical theoretical heterogeneity. First I seek to show that the theory of performativity which Butler developed initially, contrary to all expectations, sets her relatively apart from the tradition (...) to which she conforms (the French reading of Hegel), and brings her closer to the proposition represented by the normative theories of recognition in general, and that of Honneth in particular. Then I highlight how the recent modulations in her theory, through the appearance of the idea of a constitutive vulnerability, which enables her to found an ethics, undermine for once and for all the claim of irreducibility maintained by each of the two theories in relation to the other. (shrink)

The observation that agents and structures are co-constituted is now commonplace, yet scholars continue to struggle to incorporate this insight. Rationalists tend to overemphasize actors’ agency in the constitution of social order while constructivists tend to overstate the degree to which structures determine action. This article uses The Gift to rethink the agent–structure debate, arguing that the model of social relations Mauss outlines in this work sheds new light on basic concepts in international relations theory such as reciprocity, hierarchy, and (...) obligation. Mauss’ social theory locates the generative structure of social order in diffuse exchange relations, what he terms gift exchange, and assumes that actors are both socially positioned within hierarchical relations of exchange and reflexive agents who are able to understand and strive to change those relations. In so doing, he avoids reducing social order to either deeply internalized social norms or instrumental interests, navigating between ag... (shrink)