Images of vulnerability have populated the philosophical landscape from Hobbes to Hegel, Levinas to Foucault, often designating a sense of corporeal susceptibility to injury, or of being threatened or wounded and therefore have been predominantly associated with violence, finitude, or mortality. More recently, feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero have begun to rethink corporeal vulnerability as a critical or ethical category, one based on our primary interdependence and intercorporeality. However, many contemporary theorists continue to associate vulnerability with (...) violence and finitude rather than providing an account of the normative theory that might underpin vulnerability as a critical category. In this article, I explore an alternative notion of vulnerability in relation to both a theory of power and a normative account that draws on recognition theory. My aim in this article is twofold: first, to examine the complexity of vulnerability and how it relates to forms of recognition; second, to outline how the notion of vulnerability can operate as the basis for critiquing objectionable forms of vulnerability. This is to consider vulnerability not only as an ethical or ontological question but as a political one, and shifts arguments about its abuse and entanglement with power and violence to the public political sphere. (shrink)

This paper explores the ambivalent effects of recognition through a critical examination of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition. I argue that his underlying perfectionist account and his focus on the psychic effects of recognition lead him to overlook important connections between recognition and power. These claims are substantiated through Butler’s theory of gender performativity and recognition; and issues connected to the socio-institutional recognition of transgender identities. I conclude by suggesting that certain problems with Butler’s own position can corrected by drawing (...) more from the Foucauldian aspects of her work. I argue that this is the most promising way to conceptualise recognition and its complex, ambivalent effects. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to clarify the relation between genealogy and history and to suggest a methodological reading of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I try to determine genealogy's specific range of objects, specific mode of explication, and specific textual form. Genealogies in general can be thought of as drastic narratives of the emergence and transformations of forms of subjectivity related to power, told with the intention to induce doubt and self-reflection in exactly those readers whose (collective) history is (...) narrated. The main interest in understanding the concept of genealogy and revisiting Nietzsche's introduction of it into philosophy lies in understanding how a certain way of writing and a certain textual practice function that successfully call into question current judgments, institutions and practices. Nietzsche's example, I argue, can provide a paradigm for a critical practice that accounts for historical processes of subject formation in terms of power and turns them against given forms of subjectivity. (shrink)

Judith Butler's recent work expands the Foucaultian notion of subjection to encompass an analysis of the ways in which subordinated individuals becomes passionately attached to, and thus come to be psychically invested in, their own subordination. I argue that Butler's psychoanalytically grounded account of subjection offers a compelling diagnosis of how and why an attachment to oppressive norms – of femininity, for example – can persist in the face of rational critique of those norms. However, I also argue that her (...) account of individual and collective resistance to subjection is plagued by familiar problems concerning the normative criteria and motivation for resistance that emerge in her recent work in new and arguably more intractable forms, and by new concerns about her conceptions of dependency, subordination and recognition. (shrink)

Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” An Essay by Charles Taylor with commentary by Amy Gutmann, editor, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf.

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)

Judith Butler’s recent work is exemplary of the trend in contemporary theory to consider ethics. Her deliberation over ethical questions, and the place of ethics in intellectual work, has undeniably intensified since September 11. This article will demonstrate, however, that this is a rendering explicit of what has always been implicit in her work. Rather than perceiving the ethical dimension of Butler’s writings in her increasing interest in thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, I contend that it is (...) in her sustained interest in Hegel, and specifically in Hegelian recognition, that her work can be read as engaged with ethical concerns. This article highlights the growing critical concern with the prevalence of recognition in ethical theory and questions the possibility of theorising ethics outside of the recognition-paradigm. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an understanding of recognition in terms of individuals’ capacity for conflict. Our goal is to overcome various shortcomings that can be found in both the positive and negative conceptions of recognition. We start by analyzing paradigmatic instances of such conceptions—namely, those put forward by Axel Honneth and Judith Butler. We do so in order to show how both positions are inadequate in their elaborations of recognition in an analogous way: Both fail to make intelligible the (...) fundamental nexus between relations of recognition and individuals’ capacity for conflict. We then move on to reconsider aspects of Hegel's view of recognition—ones that, from our viewpoint, have been unjustly neglected in the debate about recognition: his focus on the constitution of relations of recognition in conflict and on the status of being an author of acts of recognition. On this basis, we then spell out in a more systematic way what we take to be a more convincing conception of recognition. This puts us in the position to gesture at some consequences of this conception in practical contexts, above all with regard to the justification, role and structure of political institutions. (shrink)

All theories of critique rely on a – often implicit – description of the activity that doing critique is supposed to consist in. These “pictures of critique” frame all further distinctions and justifications in the debate about critique and critique’s normativity. After distinguishing three pictures of critique – measuring, disrupting and emancipating critique – I ask whether the theoretical reflection in which a certain conception of critique is elaborated is itself accurately captured by the picture of critique it employs. In (...) other words: Is the theoretical reflection of critique a critical activity according to its own picture of critique? I propose to call only those theories of critique critical theories the theoretical activity of which is a critical activity on their own picture of critique - which are surprisingly few. Most critical theories are thereby revealed to be rather traditional when it comes their own theorizing of critique. (shrink)