Recognition AND Ambivalence
Recognition AND Ambivalence
Recognition AND Ambivalence
AND
A M B I VA L E N C E
Judith Butler,
Axel Honneth,
Amy Allen, Robin Celikates,
Jean-Philippe Deranty, Heikki Ikäheimo,
Kristina Lepold, Lois McNay,
David Owen, Titus Stahl
EDITED BY
Heikki Ikäheimo, Kristina Lepold, and Titus Stahl
RECOGNITION
AND
AMBIVALENCE
N EW D I R E C T I O N S I N C R I T I C A L T H E O RY
NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY
JUDITH BUTLER,
AXEL HONNETH,
AMY ALLEN,
ROBIN CELIKATES,
JEAN-PHILIPPE DERANTY,
HEIKKI IKÄHEIMO,
KRISTINA LEPOLD,
LOIS M C NAY,
DAVID OWEN,
TITUS STAHL
EDITED BY
HEIKKI IKÄHEIMO,
KRISTINA LEPOLD, AND
TITUS STAHL
Introduction 1
Heikk i Ik ä heimo, Kr istina Lepold, a nd Titus Sta hl
5 Historicizing Recognition:
From Ontology to Teleology 69
L ois McNay
vi Y Contents
Contributors 321
Index 325
RECOGNITION
AND
AMBIVALENCE
INTRODUCTION
Heikki Ikäheimo, Kristina Lepold,
and Titus Stahl
F
ew concepts in contemporary social and political
thought have attracted as widespread an interest as the
concept of recognition. Much of its appeal seems to stem
from the fact that it builds on an experience with which virtu-
ally everyone is familiar, namely the experience of depending on
others in one’s relation to oneself, for better or for worse. This
experience takes many forms. Being ignored by a friend at a party
hurts when we find out that she was aware of our presence all
along. Receiving praise from a colleague for work we invested
time and effort in makes us feel proud and happy. Being sub-
jected to extended background checks at an airport makes us
question how welcome we are in the country in question. Exam-
ples such as these illustrate that others are involved in shaping
our lives and self-perceptions through the way they see and treat
us. It is precisely this connection between self and other that the
concept of recognition promises to shed light on.
The current interest in recognition— a concept that can be
found in the works of a variety of thinkers, but which is, at least
in the tradition of European philosophy, most commonly asso-
ciated with Hegel—is largely thanks to the theoretical interven-
tions of Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth at the beginning of
2 Y Heikki Ikäheimo, Kristina Lepold, and Titus Stahl
the 1990s.1 When Taylor coined the phrase “the politics of rec-
ognition” in the context of debates on multiculturalism to draw
attention to struggles for the recognition or valorization of cul-
tural difference,2 and when Axel Honneth introduced the idea
of the struggle for recognition as a central concept in Frankfurt
School critical theory as a tool for making sense of moral moti-
vations for social struggle (a theme he has built on and refined
ever since), they struck a nerve.3The concept of recognition
quickly gained prominence in social and political philosophy, to
which an ever-growing body of literature bears witness. Impor-
tantly, within these recent discourses, recognition has generally
been considered a positive force in people’s lives. If others are
involved in shaping our lives through the way they see and treat
us, recognition designates those forms of this process that are
successful. More specifically, recognition in this context is taken
to refer to the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of others that affirm
an individual in an aspect of her self-conception, which is said
to allow the individual to realize herself and to live a fulfilling
life. When recognition occurs, according to this view, the self
and the other are in harmony. The self does not experience fric-
tion, alienation, or pain, and is able to see the world that sur-
rounds her as encouraging her to be the person she is or wants
to be. Recognition, understood as affirmation, hence contrasts
with sets of beliefs, attitudes, and actions of others that do not
affirm an aspect of an individual’s being. As both Taylor and
Honneth (as well as those who follow them) highlight, in expe-
riencing this kind of disrespect, the individual finds herself
bound to others, often inescapably and to her detriment. In the
face of disinterest, neglect, misrecognition, public degradation,
or outright hate, she has difficulties relating positively to herself
and to her own life goals, and the social world appears as a source
of constant frustration and suffering instead of a space of
Introduction Z 3
that in her more recent work Butler has been moving toward
the latter account, with a Levinasian flavor.
Honneth’s opening piece prompts Butler to embark on a fas-
cinating journey through the main elements of her theorizing,
and their history. The role of the Hegelian trope of recognition
in her work is clarified to a thus far unprecedented extent in her
response. One of the points that Butler makes is that her under-
standing of recognition emphasizes the role of performativity in
the creation of individual psyches, thus freeing up space for resis-
tance to Althusserian interpellation into given social roles. But-
ler also criticizes the Nietzschean view that all recognition is
enslavement, for its ignoring of the necessary mutuality of rela-
tions of recognition, and the constitutive interdependence of
human beings. According to Butler, this interdependence implies
an “ethico-political mandate to live together without destruc-
tion.” On the whole, Butler’s view of recognition turns out to be
far from merely pessimistic and better characterized as ambiva-
lent, as it acknowledges both the necessary, constitutive role of
recognition in the lives of humans as interdependent, needy
beings, and the potential for aggression and destruction in psy-
chic and social life. Toward the end of her piece, Butler chal-
lenges Honneth to reflect on the role of “negativity” in his work,
proposing that, unlike in her work, “negativity is conceptually
separated from recognition” in Honneth’s thought. Butler
thereby suggests that Honneth’s take on recognition may be
overly optimistic.
In his second piece, Honneth prompts Butler to further clar-
ify the difference between what he sees as two different concep-
tualizations of recognition that have not been sufficiently
distinguished by Butler: “the institutional ascription of social
identities by the public use of identifying categories within
social discourses” on the one hand, and “the recognitive
Introduction Z 11
NOTES
The editors would like to thank Amy Allen and Wendy Lochner for
their patience and unwavering support during this journey, and
Introduction Z 17
REFERENCES
Allen, Amy. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of
Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays, 127–86. New York: Monthly Review,
2001.
Brandom, Robert. Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 2009.
Introduction Z 19
van den Brink, Bert, and David Owen. Recognition and Power. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Butler, Judith. “Longing for Recognition.” In Undoing Gender. New York:
Routledge, 2004.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997.
Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-
Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Butler, Judith. “Taking Another’s View: Ambivalent Implications.” In Rei-
fication: A New Look at an Old Idea, edited by M. Jay. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008.
Fraser, Nancy. “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution,
Recognition and Participation.” In Redistribution or Recognition? A
Political-Philosophical Exchange, edited by N. Fraser and A. Honneth.
London: Verso, 2003.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by
A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. First published in
1807.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Phi-
losophy of Spirit (Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy
1803/4). Edited and translated by H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1979.
Honneth, Axel. Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social
Conflicts. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. First published in 1992.
Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Edited by Allan
Bloom. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1980.
Markell, Patchen. Bound by Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2003.
McBride, Cillian. Recognition. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
McNay, Lois. Against Recognition. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.
Neuhouser, Frederick. Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and
the Drive for Recognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001.
20 Y Heikki Ikäheimo, Kristina Lepold, and Titus Stahl
Dear Judith,
one, not only exclude each other but are both unsatisfactory in
themselves. I know that this sounds like a very harsh objection,
but I will try my best to explain my reservations.
I will start with what I take to be your initial view on recog-
nition. Already, in Gender Trouble, you followed, to a certain
degree— albeit without using the term explicitly—Althusser’s
appropriation of Hegel’s idea of recognition, by claiming a close
connection between “recognizing” a singular person or a group
of persons and the ideological reproduction of a given social
order; as a result of the attribution of specific, namely function-
ally required, role characteristics to certain individuals or groups,
they start to become convinced that they actually possess these
properties, and so become “happy slaves”—willingly perform-
ing the tasks or obligations required of them by the prevailing
regime of power. Whereas Althusser’s prime example was
famously the police practice of hailing somebody (“Hey, you
there”),1 identifying him or her by this interpellation as a
presumptive criminal, your central theme was the cultural
reproduction of the existing gender order via the “normalizing”
fixation of only two gender identities, by which people were
unconsciously forced to adopt either the one or the other—and
if they did not so adapt, as you laid out very illuminatingly, it
came at the price of becoming “unintelligible” to the social pub-
lic, therefore having no legitimate status within society and being
liable to all kinds of punishment.2 I’m not aiming to criticize this
approach as such; on the contrary, I believe it was one of the most
important contributions to the advancement of critical theory
over the last few decades, elaborating a theme that, while pres-
ent in this tradition, was never sufficiently articulated.3 How-
ever, I have some reservations about the treatment of the idea of
recognition in that earlier work which, even though it was not
explicitly present, conceptually preconfigures its usage in your
Recognition Between Power and Normativity Z 23
later works of the same period. First of all, you seem to conceive
of such an attribution of fixed gender identities as a medium or
cultural instrument that members of society have to adopt for
reasons of social “survival”—not accepting the dominant schemes
of gender identity would be disadvantageous, if not fatal, within
the “compulsory system” of societal reproduction;4 secondly, you
presuppose that such attributions must necessarily have a “sub-
stantializing” effect, making those concerned believe that it is
their “nature” or “substantive being” that is articulated by the
respective attribution.5 Taking both premises together, the con-
clusion is that the hegemonic attribution of certain properties
(in this case fixed gender identities) to people functions as an
ideological tool by inviting or priming them to adopt the (ritu-
ally repeated) characteristics in such a way that the origin of such
identification becomes unknown. In your later book, The Psychic
Life of Power,6 another highly innovative and trailblazing work,
it seems to me that you kept these two presumptions about the
ideological functioning of power regimes, but started to frame
them by approaching the Hegelian notion of recognition: by rec-
ognizing individuals who are in need of a social existence and
assuring them continuity over time, social visibility, and a place
to be, “regulatory power” ascribes certain forms of behavior
to these individuals. Due to their “desire,” individuals are pre-
pared to adopt these behaviors, which then in turn once again
makes them “happy slaves” of the existing order. I think I’m not
wrong in supposing that the theoretical core of this approach
was the result of an original attempt to synthesize elements of
Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis and Althusser’s explanation of
ideological reproduction: by being recognized as such and such
an individual, having such and such typical, socially stereo-
typed properties, one at the same time becomes subjected to a
given power regime, is “thrown” into it, and becomes a socially
24 Y Axel Honneth
Yours,
Axel Honneth
NOTES
1. Louis Althusser, “On Ideology,” in Ideology and Ideological State Appa-
ratuses (London: Verso, 2014), 190– 91.
2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), chapter 1.
3. Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves. Power, Autonomy, and Gender in
Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008).
4. Butler, Gender Trouble, 190.
5. Butler, Gender Trouble, 22– 34.
6. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997).
7. Axel Honneth, “Recognition as Ideology: The Connection Between
Morality and Power,” in The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition
(Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 75– 97.
30 Y Axel Honneth
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Amy. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Con-
temporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Althusser, Louis. “On Ideology.” In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,
171– 207. London: Verso, 2014.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997.
Honneth, Axel. “Recognition as Ideology: The Connection Between Moral-
ity and Power.” In The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition, 75– 97.
Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
2
RECOGNITION AND
THE SOCIAL BOND
A Response to Axel Honneth
Judith Butler
Dear Axel,
embody them, and that can change the way we think about
embodiment, norms, and social transformation.
It is, of course, true that Althusser becomes important in The
Psychic Life of Power, but only because I am interested there in
how guilt is mobilized as a psychic disposition that can keep the
regulation of the subject in place. Whereas Althusser seeks to
reinterpret Lacan for his own purposes, I move in another direc-
tion, returning to Freud. The return to Freud is a better route for
those who wish to understand the mechanism of subjectivation.
The problem is not that there are “typical” or even “stereotypi-
cal” ways of attributing gender. It is about subject formations
within a field of power. It is true that some feminists have been
concerned with criticizing typically masculine or feminine
attributes in order to expand the possible ways of life for both
genders. That is surely laudable. But mine is a different project
concerned with subjectivation.
What do I mean by this term? Human beings come into the
world through a gender matrix, such that that being called a girl
or boy is a mandatory gateway for becoming human. In this way,
gender is there as a matrix of subject formation— and so not
merely a set of characteristics attributed to an already existing
subject.
You write that
relations. In Hegel, the life and death struggle ends with the rec-
ognition that my life is bound up with the life of the other, that
a social organization for our lives must be found that reflects and
honors this insuperable interdependency. And though we can
and do destroy one another, we are also at such moments destroy-
ing ourselves, not only making ourselves eligible for destruction
as well, exposing ourselves to a reciprocal act of destruction, but
because as social creatures, we are to some extent defined by our
social bonds: any attack on that bond is an attack on the self.
This is the “social” moment of psychoanalysis that both Klein
and Winnicott surely both understood.
But this point cannot be reduced to the Hobbesian wager that
if I seek to destroy the other, the other may decide it is better to
destroy me first. The reason that Hegel gives us is that my life is
bound up with the life of the other, that we are both bound to
the earth and to the material objects that we consume and that
support our common needs, and whose continuation depends
upon our ethical stewardship. From this premise it follows that
there is an ethical demand not to destroy the other and to build
a social world in common that honors the social bonds that are
the presupposition of our common life together, a common life
necessarily marked by difference and conflict. So I seek to
derive an ethical position from the interdiction against vio-
lence and destruction, or, rather, I base a politics of nonviolence
on the postulate that the social bond is a necessary feature of
who the subject is. I further argue that Hegel demonstrates this
through his discussion of the “life and death struggle” in the
Phenomenology.
You raise the question of whether there is an important dif-
ference between the cognitive and normative accounts of recog-
nition. I would like to suggest that it might prove clarifying
to consider this distinction differently. When I ask after the
46 Y Judith Butler
register the insult. I take it that the insult would not do its job if
it were not registered by the addressee as insulting. Of course, if
the other is assumed to be someone who is susceptible to hurtful
language of that kind, that truth implies that the one who hurls
the insult bears that same susceptibility. Perhaps we have to think
about this linguistic vulnerability or susceptibility to the other
as a precondition of recognition, one that has moral implications
of its own. It helps to elaborate the exposure of one subject to
another as an aspect of social ontology, if not ethical relational-
ity. So what the scene of address implies about mutual exposure
already bears moral implications, quite regardless of whether the
content of the speech act bears on soccer or citizenship.
At the most basic level, recognition reveals something about
who we are as social beings. The one who grants recognition is
in need of being granted recognition, so that “one” is never
exclusively active; it seeks to grant moral value at the same time
that its own moral value has to be granted. “Granting” is nei-
ther a punctual nor a unilateral act. Perhaps I take my cue from
a different Hegel. As already mentioned in the beginning, in
the Phenomenology of Spirit, he tells us that we are each “outside
ourselves” (außer sich), lost to the other, or lost “in” the other,
which means that our first idea of individual autonomy turns
out to be limited and false. If and when we recover a better idea
of autonomy, it is one that accepts the fact that who we are is
constituted in the course of our social exchanges, and that
without becoming lost in the other, we stand no chance of
knowing ourselves or achieving autonomy. This ek-static
dimension of the subject means that we are given over from the
start to another on whom we depend for our lives, and who has
the capacity to destroy us, to let us live, to support us, to help
us flourish. When we find a way to live among one another
with a full understanding of our interdependency, and with a
52 Y Judith Butler
All best,
Judith Butler
NOTES
1. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-
Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
2. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso,
2009).
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie Des Geistes, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and
Karl Markus Michel, vol. 3, Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 146;
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 111.
4. Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
5. See chapter 1, p. 24 in this volume.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso,
2009.
Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century
France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Recognition and the Social Bond Z 53
Dear Judith,
Thank you very much for your elaborate reply. It has helped me
better understand the aims you are pursuing with your notion
of recognition. However, although I see more clearly now that I
might have been a bit too hasty in ascribing to your writings a
split between two phases— of which the first in my interpreta-
tion has an Althusserian flavor, whereas the second leans more
toward Levinas’s account—I’m still not completely convinced
with regard to the way in which you are now attempting to
defend the unity of your own account. Let me try to develop the
doubts I still have in two steps: in (1) I will try to show that your
own account seems to connect two very different understand-
ings of the “function” of recognition which, however, do not eas-
ily fit together; it may be, as I will indicate, that these two rival
notions stem from the different phases of your own philosophi-
cal development that I had earlier tried to differentiate. In (2) I
will attempt to show that, in following the Hegelian account of
recognition as the mutual granting of some kind of normative
status, one is required to distinguish different modes of recogni-
tion from the outset; it is precisely the advantage of Hegel over
56 Y Axel Honneth
Yours,
Axel Honneth
NOTE
1. See chapter 2, p. 46.
4
RECOGNITION AND MEDIATION
A Second Reply to Axel Honneth
Judith Butler
Dear Axel,
My best,
Judith Butler
NOTES
1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986).
2. Axel Honneth, The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 2012).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto, 1986.
Honneth, Axel. The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition. Cambridge:
Polity, 2012.
5
HISTORICIZING RECOGNITION
From Ontology to Teleology
Lois McNay
1.
2.
3.
4.
NOTES
1. Marc Stears “The Vocation of Political Theory: Principles, Empirical
Inquiry and the Politics of Opportunity,” European Journal of Political
Theory 4, no. 4 (2005): 326.
92 Y Lois McNay
36. E.g., Alison Jaggar, Gender and Global Justice (Cambridge: Polity,
2014).
37. Jaggar, Gender and Global Justice, 225.
38. Young, “Gendered Cycle of Vulnerability,” 228.
39. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contem-
porary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 120.
40. E.g., Beate Roessler, “Work, Recognition, Emancipation,” in Recog-
nition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social The-
ory, ed. B. van den Brink and David Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 135– 63.
41. E.g., Eva Feder Kittay, “The Moral Harm of Migrant Carework: Real-
ising a Global Right to Care,” in Gender and Global Justice, ed. Alison
Jaggar (Cambridge: Polity, 2014); Kathleen Lynch, John Baker, and
Maureen Lyons, Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice (Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Joan Tronto, “Democratic Care
Politics in an Age of Limits,” in Global Variations in the Political and
Social Economy of Care: Worlds Apart, ed. S. Razavi and S. Staab (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2012).
42. Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Founda-
tions of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press,
2016).
43. Allen, End of Progress, 9.
44. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader,
ed. P. Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 317.
45. Honneth, “A Social Pathology of Reason,” 338ff.
46. Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 48.
47. Judith Butler, “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity,” Critical Inquiry 35,
no. 4 (2009): 792.
48. Fabian Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3–4.
49. E.g., Albena Azmanova, The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory
of Political Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012),
131.
50. Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political
Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1997), 5.
Historicizing Recognition Z 95
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Amy. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of
Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Anderson, Joel and Axel Honneth. “Autonomy, Vulnerability, Recognition,
and Justice.” In Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays,
edited by J. Christman and J. Anderson, 127–49. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Azmanova, Albena. The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judg-
ment. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
van den Brink, Bert, and David Owen. Recognition and Power: Axel Hon-
neth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Butler, Judith. “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4
(2009): 773– 97.
Cudd, Ann. Analyzing Oppression. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Violence Against Women:
An EU-Wide Survey. 2014.
Feder Kittay, Eva. “The Moral Harm of Migrant Carework: Realising a
Global Right to Care.” In Gender and Global Justice, edited by Alison
Jaggar. Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
Ferguson, Ann. “On Conceiving Motherhood and Sexuality: A Feminist
Materialist Approach.” In Feminist Social Thought: A Reader, edited by
Diana Tietjens Meyers, 39– 63. London: Routledge, 1997.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited
by P. Rabinow. London: Penguin, 1984.
Fraser, Nancy. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contempo-
rary Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.
Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-
Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso, 2003.
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lations 13, no. 1 (2006): 41–58.
96 Y Lois McNay
I
n her response to Axel Honneth’s 2005 Tanner Lectures,
Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Judith Butler
criticized Honneth for having an overly optimistic philo-
sophical anthropology.1 In Reification, Honneth had argued
for an antecedent form of recognition that is a necessary pre-
condition not only for the three forms of recognition delineated
in his previous work—love, rights, and solidarity—but also for
the cognition of objects. This antecedent form of recognition
consists in a primordial acknowledgment of another human as
a human, rather than as an object. In his defense of this account
of antecedent recognition, Honneth drew on the work of devel-
opmental psychologists and attachment theorists to support
his underlying claim about ontogenesis: the developing child
becomes able to perceive the world of objects as a meaningful
world only on the basis of stable attachments to a primary
caregiver. 2 Butler aimed her critique of Honneth, in part, at this
use of attachment theory, which she characterized as a selective
reading of psychology and psychoanalysis.3 As Butler saw it,
Honneth’s claim about primary attachment amounted to the
positing of an “Arcadian myth” of a “genuine bond” between
parent and infant that precedes and serves as the foundation of
100 Y Amy Allen
LOVE
RECOGNITION
MARRIAGE
NOTES
Thanks to the coeditors of this volume and to Robin Celikates for help-
ful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay, and to
Nicole Yokum for research assistance.
1. As Honneth himself notes, this criticism was echoed in the responses
of the other two commentators on the Tanner Lectures, Raymond
Geuss and Jonathan Lear. See Axel Honneth, “Rejoinder,” in Reifica-
tion: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 147ff. For a more recent version of this argu-
ment, see Danielle Petherbridge, The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth
(Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2013).
2. See Honneth, Reification, 41–46.
3. Judith Butler, “Taking Another’s View: Ambivalent Implications,” in
Reification, 106.
4. Butler, “Taking Another’s View,” 108.
5. Butler, “Taking Another’s View,” 106.
6. Butler, “Taking Another’s View,” 108.
7. Honneth, “Rejoinder,” 148.
8. Christopher Zurn, Axel Honneth: A Critical Theory of the Social
(Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 47.
9. Zurn, Axel Honneth, 47.
10. In his early work, Honneth refers to the primary caregiver as the
“mother,” even as he acknowledges that the person who fulfills this
function for the infant need not be the biological mother, and need
not be female. Hence, he places “mother” in scare quotes. See Axel
Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social
Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995),
192n12. For ease of understanding, I will follow Honneth’s locution.
Butler rightly takes Honneth to task for his assumption that the parent–
infant relationship is always a dyadic one, and suggests that this sort
of parenting practice is socially and culturally contingent. See Butler,
“Taking Another’s View,” 107–8.
11. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 99.
12. At stake here are complex methodological debates about the status of
clinical versus empirical research methods in psychoanalysis. By cit-
ing Stern, I don’t mean to be taking his side in those debates. Rather,
122 Y Amy Allen
“mother”ing, but I’m going to set this issue aside. For a compelling dis-
cussion of the complexities of maternal ambivalences, see Sarah
LaChance Adams, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good”
Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2014).
38. Jonathan Lear, “The Slippery Middle,” in Honneth, Reification.
39. Indeed, Honneth reiterates this connection in his debate with
Whitebook: “the social patterns of recognition, those forms of
institutionalized recognition in which we grow up, are always
something which we, in certain moments of life, can’t experience as
fully satisfying. They all equally fall short of that quality of fusion.
All patterns of recognition are patterns of relationships between
independent subjects, and therefore there is probably a certain drive
from rebellion against the existing forms of recognition, which also
can explain why we are never fully content with even the highly-
developed forms of differentiated patterns of recognition” (Hon-
neth in Honneth and Whitebook, “Omnipotence or Fusion?,” 176.)
Thanks for Robin Celikates for drawing my attention to this
passage.
40. See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, chapter 9.
41. On this point, see Zurn, “Anthropology and Normativity: A Critique
of Axel Honneth’s ‘Formal Conception of Ethical Life,’ ” Philosophy
and Social Criticism 26, no. 1 (2000): 115– 24.
42. See, for example, Axel Honneth, “The Normativity of Ethical Life,”
Philosophy and Social Criticism 40, no. 8 (2014): 817– 26.
43. See Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 184–86.
44. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 175.
45. See Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, chapter 5. It isn’t clear to me that
Honneth can employ these criteria of inclusion and individualization
while remaining faithful to his conception of immanent critique and
without running afoul of his own critique of Kantian constructivism,
but I set these issues aside. I discuss the issue of Honneth’s strategy for
grounding normativity at length in Allen, The End of Progress: Decolo-
nizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2016), chapter 3.
46. Butler, “Taking Another’s View,” 109.
Recognizing Ambivalence Z 125
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Amy. Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
Allen, Amy. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of
Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Allen, Amy. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Con-
temporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Allen, Amy. “Recognizing Domination: Recognition and Power in Hon-
neth’s Critical Theory.” Journal of Power 3, no. 1 (2010): 21– 32.
Allen, Amy, and Mari Ruti. Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan: A Dia-
logue. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Butler, Judith. “Introduction,” in Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2015.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997.
Butler, Judith. “Taking Another’s View: Ambivalent Implications.” In Rei-
fication: A New Look at an Old Idea, edited by Martin Jay. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008.
Butler, Judith. "To Preserve the Life of the Other." In The Force of Non-
violence: An Ethico-Political Bind. London: Verso, 2020.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Duggan, Lisa. “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neolib-
eralism.” In Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Poli-
tics, edited by Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002.
Green, André, and Daniel Stern. Clinical and Observational Psychoanalytic
Research: Roots of a Controversy, edited by Joseph Sandler, Anne-Marie
Sandler, and Rosemary Davies. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Honneth, Axel. “Facets of the Presocial Self: Rejoinder to Joel Whitebook.”
In The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition, translated by Joseph
Ganahl. Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
Recognizing Ambivalence Z 127
T
he claim that recognition is ambivalent has featured
prominently in debates on recognition in recent years.1
As key sources for this claim, defenders and critics alike
often cite the works of Louis Althusser and Judith Butler. In
particular, Althusser and Butler are interpreted as making a
connection between recognition and subjection. The claim is
that, on Althusser’s and Butler’s accounts, recognition some-
how goes hand in hand with subjection, and this connection is
supposed to explain Althusser’s and Butler’s ambivalent view
of recognition.
In the literature, the link between recognition and subjec-
tion in Althusser and Butler has mainly been construed in two
ways, each of which involves a slightly different understanding
of subjection. One interpretation holds that, according to
Althusser and Butler, recognition by others is ontologically
constitutive of subjects and is therefore a form of subjection
that harms individuals in their capacity to choose themselves. 2
130 Y Kristina Lepold
what one already is, but to have the very term conferred by
which the recognition of existence becomes possible.”13
Admittedly, these are just two remarks quoted with little sur-
rounding context. Nevertheless, I think that they provide a
first indication that for Butler interpellation and recognition
are two different things. More specifically, it appears that for
Butler, just as for Althusser, interpellation is something that
precedes recognition.
Regarding Butler’s understanding of recognition, I want to
suggest that, like Althusser, she understands recognition as
identification, although unlike Althusser she is primarily inter-
ested in processes of interpersonal recognition. According to
Butler, person A successfully recognizes person B if A is able
to identify or cognize B as X. In her work, recognition is related
to the notion of intelligibility. As she writes, “intelligibility
is . . . that which is produced as a consequence of recognition
according to prevailing social norms.”14 Thus, a person is intel-
ligible if she can be recognized or identified as X. For instance,
a person is intelligible if she or he can be recognized or identi-
fied as unambiguously female or male in the light of dominant
gender norms— a case of particular importance for Butler’s
work.15 Therefore, while it is true that Butler conceives of rec-
ognition as the identification of an individual as X by others,
she does not do so because she equates recognition with
interpellation, which is the background assumption underly-
ing PI 1.
be rejected: neither Althusser nor Butler hold the view that the
recognition by others makes persons ontologically into X, that
is, into particular subjects who understand themselves in certain
ways.
However, given the confusion surrounding interpellation and
recognition, it is easy to see how one might come to embrace PI2.
In the passage already quoted at length, Althusser continues:
“Assuming the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in
the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere
180-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why?
Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to
him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed.’ ”23 If one mis-
takenly construes the hail or interpellation as an act of recogni-
tion, one might interpret this quotation as stating that the
passerby—who is said to “become . . . a subject”—is made into a
subject or has an identity imposed on him by being recognized.
Some passages from Butler’s work lend themselves to such a
misinterpretation.24
Let us now ask whether it would at least be correct to say that
the hail or interpellation, in contrast to recognition, makes indi-
viduals into particular subjects, or Xs. In my view, even claim-
ing that interpellation makes individuals into subjects or imposes
identities on them is not entirely correct. Yes, it is true that the
passerby in Althusser’s scene becomes a subject after having been
hailed or interpellated, insofar as he recognizes himself in the
hail. But, strictly speaking, this happens because the passerby is
susceptible to the hail and turns around. That is, the passerby
actively responds. His becoming a subject does not happen auto-
matically simply because he has been interpellated. As Butler
writes, interpellation is only the “demand to align oneself with
the law,”25 so that “the turn towards the law is not necessitated
by the hailing.”26
How Should We Understand the Ambivalence? Z 137
PII2. Let us now turn to premise PII2, which states that both
Althusser and Butler believe that self-understandings or identi-
ties can be subordinating or subjecting. Again, let us first unpack
this premise a bit further. Honneth interprets Althusser’s point
as stating that there are self-conceptions that “conform . . . to
social expectations” and are “seamlessly integrated into a system
based on the prevailing division of labor.”58 By this Honneth
means more specifically that individuals might “voluntarily take
on tasks or duties that serve society,”59 that is, work primarily for
the good of others, because of their self-understandings. In a
similar vein, according to Allen’s reading of Butler, there can be
“identit[ies] based on subordination” 60 or “subordinating mode[s]
of identity.” 61 Allen explains what she means by this with refer-
ence to feminine gender identities. Feminine gender identities
are identities that involve “attachment to pernicious and subor-
dinating norms of femininity” 62 which prescribe, among other
things, docility, a caring attitude toward others, and a feminine
appearance.63 As I understand Allen, such gender identities are
subordinating or subjecting because they lead one to act in ways
that are primarily directed to what others think and to what
is good for them, that is, because they are fundamentally
other-directed.
According to Honneth’s and Allen’s readings of Althusser and
Butler, therefore, self-understandings can be subordinating or
How Should We Understand the Ambivalence? Z 145
From the discussion in the first and second sections of this chap-
ter, an alternative interpretation of the link between recognition
and subjection in the works of Althusser and Butler has emerged.
Let me recapitulate what this alternative interpretation involves
by also stating it in the form of an argument:
NOTES
I am grateful for the many discussions of this chapter’s theme I have
had in recent years with Axel Honneth, Martin Saar, and Tobias Wille.
Sanford Diehl, Sally Haslanger, Mirjam Müller, Tommie Shelby,
Titus Stahl, and Tobias Wille read an earlier draft of this chapter and
provided helpful feedback, for which I would like to thank all of them.
I am also grateful for a discussion of this paper at MIT’s WOGAP in
September 2019, and for the insightful suggestions and questions of
the participants. I would also like to thank Ciaran Cronin for his help
with copyediting this chapter.
1. See, among others, Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Patchen Markell, Bound
152 Y Kristina Lepold
Bertram and Celikates think that such an account leaves too little room
for practical criticism and struggles (Bertram and Celikates, “Towards
a Conflict Theory of Recognition,” 844–45).
36. See, e.g., Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 236,
267– 69; Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 10–13, 28.
37. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 118; emphasis mine.
38. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 119.
39. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 119. It should be noted that, in these pas-
sages, Butler is in fact offering an interpretation of Althusser, albeit
one which seems to be deeply indebted to her own account of how the
(gendered) subject comes into being through manifold performances
(see Butler, Gender Trouble, and Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Dis-
cursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 2011)).
40. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 118.
41. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 269.
42. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 262.
43. Butler, Gender Trouble, 33.
44. See Honneth, “Recognition as Ideology”; Allen, “Recognizing Dom-
ination,” and “Dependency, Subordination, and Recognition.” On
some views, the first and second interpretation that I distinguish in
this chapter might actually be connected in such a way that recogni-
tion is conceived as producing subordinate subjects (see, e.g., Bertram
and Celikates, “Towards a Conflict Theory of Recognition,” 843–44,
who seem to suggest such a reading). I cannot explore this interpretive
option here.
45. Honneth, “Recognition as Ideology,” 325.
46. Honneth, “Recognition as Ideology,” 323; italics mine.
47. In light of two very recent texts by Honneth—namely, his exchange
with Butler in the present volume and his most recent book Recogni-
tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)—I now think
that Honneth is in fact defending the first interpretation of Althusser
and not the interpretation according to which the prospect of recogni-
tion can motivate individuals to become certain kinds of persons. His
earlier text, “Recognition as Ideology,” from which I am quoting here,
is less clear in this respect.
48. Allen, “Dependency, Subordination, and Recognition,” 206.
156 Y Kristina Lepold
REFERENCES
Allen, Amy. “Dependency, Subordination, and Recognition: On Judith But-
ler’s Theory of Subjection.” Continental Philosophy Review 38 (2006):
199– 222.
Allen, Amy. “Recognizing Domination: Recognition and Power in Hon-
neth’s Critical Theory.” Journal of Power 3, no. 1 (2010): 21– 32.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In On the
Reproduction of Capitalism, translated by G. M. Goshgarian. London:
Verso, 2014.
158 Y Kristina Lepold
In Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social
Theory, edited by Bert van den Brink and David Owen, 33–56. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Jaeggi, Rahel. “Anerkennung und Unterwerfung: Zum Verhältnis von neg-
ative und positiven Theorien der Intersubjektivität.” Unpublished manu-
script. Goethe University Frankfurt, 2009.
Lepold, Kristina. Ambivalente Anerkennung. Frankfurt: Campus, forthcom-
ing in May 2021.
Lepold, Kristina. “An Ideology Critique of Recognition: Judith Butler in
the Context of the Contemporary Debate on Recognition.” Constellations
25, no. 3 (2018): 474–84.
Markell, Patchen. Bound by Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2003.
McBride, Cillian. Recognition. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
McQueen, Paddy. “Honneth, Butler and the Ambivalent Effects of Recog-
nition.” Res Publica 21 (2015): 43– 60.
McQueen, Paddy. Subjectivity, Gender and the Struggle for Recognition. Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001.
Petherbridge, Danielle. The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth. Lanham, MD:
Lexington, 2013.
Stahl, Titus. “Anerkennung, Subjektivität und Gesellschaftskritik.” Deutsche
Zeitschrift für Philosophie 62, no. 2 (2014): 239–59.
8
RECOGNITION, CONSTITU TIVE
DOMINATION, AND
EMANCIPATION
Titus Stahl
T
he claim that recognition is ambivalent is best under-
stood as meaning that social recognition is both a pre-
condition for individual freedom, and a source of
freedom-undermining domination. The first part of the claim
entails that we can only be truly autonomous, or realize ourselves,
once we receive a certain kind of recognition from other people.
The second part of the claim— at least on what I view as the
dominant reading— entails that recognition (necessarily or at
least potentially) constrains our freedom as we need to seek rec-
ognition not on our terms, but on those of others. Recognition
can therefore also be a source of domination.
The worry about the entanglement of recognition and
domination—the second part of the claim—becomes urgent
only once we accept its first part, that is, once we assume that
recognition is a nonoptional condition of emancipation. The
idea that such a link exists has received not only its canonical
formulation but also its most subtle analyses in one particular
philosophical tradition: that of Hegelian and post-Hegelian
continental philosophy. This tradition has historically been
read in a way that downplays the ambivalence of recognition.
While it is certainly admitted by the positive approach toward
162 Y Titus Stahl
So far, I have argued that the fact that recognition must be seen
as the social ascription of a desirable status, the meaning of which
can never be completely up to the recognized subject, indeed
entails the vulnerability of the recognized subject toward the
wider community. We can describe these others as having a dis-
tinctive form of constitutive power over us. Constitutive power is
the capacity of an agent to determine the conditions under which oth-
ers can acquire the status of being a subject (in general, or of some
specific kind, as in a legal subject, a gendered subject, and so on).
If the members of a community collectively have the power to
determine the meaning of norms which govern the ascription of
desirable social statuses, that is, recognition, and if to be an
Recognition, Domination, and Emancipation Z 171
EMANCIPATION
NOTES
I am grateful to Kristina Lepold for helpful comments on a draft of
this article.
1. For versions of this claim, see Heikki Ikäheimo, “Making the Best of
What We Are: Recognition as an Ontological and Ethical Concept,”
in The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,
ed. Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch and Christopher F. Zurn
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 343–67; Robert B. Pip-
pin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Terry P. Pinkard, Hegel’s
Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996); Robert B. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating
Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
2. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism and
“The Politics of Recognition,” ed. Amy Gutmann and Charles Taylor
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25– 74; Axel Hon-
neth, The Struggle for Recognition (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).
3. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy.
4. Robert B. Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint by Norms,” American
Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1979): 187– 96.
5. Titus Stahl, “Verbrecher, Revolutionäre und Schöne Seelen: Hegel
über die Pathologien sozialer Freiheit,” Momente der Freiheit: Beiträge
aus den Foren des Internationalen Hegelkongresses 2011, 2015, 47– 69.
186 Y Titus Stahl
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Amy. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in
Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press,
2007.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays, 127–86. New York: Monthly Review, 2001.
Brandom, Robert B. “Freedom and Constraint by Norms.” American Philo-
sophical Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1979): 187– 96.
Brandom, Robert B. Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009.
Brandom, Robert B. “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel:
Comparing Empirical and Logical Concepts.” Internationales Jahrbuch des
Deutschen Idealismus 3 (2005): 131– 61.
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005.
Butler, Judith. Kritik der ethischen Gewalt: Adorno-Vorlesungen 2002. Trans-
lated by Reiner Ansén and Michael Adrian. 4th ed. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2007.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997.
Celikates, Robin. Critique as Social Practice: Critical Theory and Social Self-
Understanding. Translated by Naomi van Steenbergen. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (July 1,
1982): 777– 95.
Recognition, Domination, and Emancipation Z 189
A
xel Honneth’s book Reification is an important
attempt at rehabilitating a central concept in the left-
Hegelian tradition, an attempt that nevertheless
remains curiously left aside in Honneth’s subsequent work. Per-
haps discouraged by a somewhat negative reception of the book,
perhaps by internal problems in it, or perhaps both, Honneth
seems to have abandoned the project.1 In my view there is much
to recommend in the book in particular, and in the attempt to
rehabilitate reification as a critical concept in social philosophy
in general. What I wish to do in this chapter is, first, to provide
a conceptual map on issues central to the discussion of reifica-
tion as a philosophical theme—both for general clarification, and
for locating Honneth’s particular approach on the map. I will
then concentrate on one particular dimension of reification,
which is Honneth’s main focus—reification of persons— and
make further conceptual suggestions for a clarification of this
topic. Thirdly, I will concentrate on Honneth’s treatment of the
theme in Reification, focusing especially on an issue that Judith
Butler rightly puts her finger on in her critical discussion of Hon-
neth: what exactly it means to “take over” the perspective of the
other person, and how exactly such thinking, or refraining from
192 Y Heikki Ikäheimo
PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATIONS
REIFICATION OF PERSONS
One of the reasons why many readers may have been disap-
pointed and perhaps confused by Honneth’s approach to reifi-
cation is that it involves a shift of focus away from what those
who are familiar with the theme through the Marxist tradition,
and especially Lukács, would expect. That is, whereas in this tra-
dition the primary focus is on the social and institutional world,
or “objective spirit” to put it in Hegel’s terms, Honneth’s primary
focus is on persons, or “subjective spirit.” Though it would be
obviously wrong to say that reification on the Lukácsian account
did not concern persons at all, or that Honneth has no interest
in the social and institutional world, there is undeniably a shift
in focus, to do with Honneth’s embrace of the intersubjective
turn in Frankfurt School critical theory instigated by Habermas.
In what follows, I will focus on the reification of persons,
abstracting from the connections that it has to reification of the
social and institutional world, or of nature. In my discussion of
the first issue, I will argue that there are aspects of interhuman
relations that are “purely intersubjective” in an important way,
namely in that they are not a response to norms, whether insti-
tutional or informal. One only needs to be very precise about
Return to Reification Z 197
HONNETH ON (SUBJECTIVE)
REIFICATION OF (OTHER) PERSONS
RECOGNITION, REIFICATION,
AND PERSONHOOD
NOTES
I thank Cinzia Ferrini, John Ganz, Vuokko Jarva, Christopher Yeo-
mans, and the other participants of an academia.edu session on the
draft version of this chapter for helpful questions and comments.
1. In Honneth’s own words: “now, having written the book, I have come
to the conclusion that perhaps the concept of reification does not add
too much to our understanding of the world and capitalism.” Daniel
Gamper, “Interview with Axel Honneth,” Barcelona Metropolis, Spring
(April–June 2010), https://www.academia.edu /30326708/ Interview
_with_Axel_Honneth.
2. In writing this paper I have learned enormously from Titus Stahl,
Immanente Kritik: Elemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken (Frankfurt:
Campus, 2013), chapter 8, which is perhaps the single most useful text
on reification I know of.
Return to Reification Z 217
51. Butler grasps the axiological side of this in terms of “grievability,” and
emphasizes the framings in terms of which the lives of some individu-
als and groups appear as grievable and those of others do not (see Judith
Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009)).
Conceiving of love (or respect) as “purely intersubjective” phenomena
in my sense is compatible with their being affected by frames in But-
ler’s sense.
52. This is how I propose to spell out Dewey’s important idea that the sig-
nificance “man” (or “human”) is a moral significance. See Honneth,
Reification, 39–40.
REFERENCES
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Elder-Vass, Dave. The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure
and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Gamper, Daniel. “Interview with Axel Honneth.” Barcelona Metropolis
Spring (April–June), 2010. https://www.academia.edu /30326708
/ Interview_with_Axel_Honneth.
Honneth, Axel. Reification. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition. Translated by Joel Anderson.
Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
Ikäheimo, Heikki. Anerkennung. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014.
Ikäheimo, Heikki. “Globalizing Love: On the Nature and Scope of Love as
a Form of Recognition.” Res Publica 18 (2012): 11– 24.
Ikäheimo, Heikki. “On the Genus and Species of Recognition.” Inquiry 45,
no. 4 (2002): 447– 62.
Ikäheimo, Heikki. “Recognition, Identity and Subjectivity.” In The Palgrave
Handbook of Critical Theory, edited by M. J. Thompson. Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2017.
Ikäheimo, Heikki. “Recognizing Persons.” Journal of Consciousness Studies
14, nos. 5– 6 (2007): 224–47.
222 Y Heikki Ikäheimo
T
his chapter aims to address the ambivalence of recog-
nition by focusing on the problems surrounding the
different possible ways to account for negativity in
recognition.
By recognition, I mean an aspect of social relations through
which the identity of a person is established or confirmed, or
indeed, is denied, in some of its features, as a result of the atti-
tudes of other persons toward that person. Three main dimen-
sions of recognitive relations immediately emerge from this basic
characterization. First, recognitive relationships have a deep
impact on the subject involved in recognition. In the Hegelian
tradition in particular, the one that is commonly mobilized to
discuss issues of recognition, human persons are largely defined
by their involvement in processes of recognition, in terms of their
very sense of self and the worth they attach to their existence
and features of their identity.1 Secondly, the notion of recogni-
tion helps to focus on particular dimensions of social relations,
notably those dimensions that establish the value frameworks
within which individual existences unfold. Thirdly, because of
the impact of recognitive relations on the lives of subjects, there
is a political dimension to recognition. If forms of injustice or
224 Y Jean-Philippe Deranty
desire for the desire of the Other. As that Other captures the
desired object, the mediation via the Other is also what makes
the object inaccessible. This “third,” which embodies the sym-
bolic realm, becomes the placeholder for suprasubjective forms
of power and domination on which the subject remains utterly
dependent, since the subject owes her identity to the place she
takes within these power relations.
These two features (the constitutive object as intrinsically
lacking, and the capture of the subject in the nets of symbolic
power) give negativity a very specific meaning and function in
such an approach. First, negativity becomes the structural law
of subjective formation itself, in an absolute, unresolvable sense.
Identity becomes synonymous with absolute self-loss or radical
splitting. Recognition is negative here first of all in the sense that
relationships with significant others, rather than starting a pro-
cess of subjective formation at the end of which the self might
be minimally in touch with itself, or might be able to “appropri-
ate” itself, in fact lead to a radical “misrecognition” of the self by
itself. Relations of recognition on that model produce a wholly
negative form of self-recognition, or méconnaissance.11
Secondly, the indefinite longing for an impossible object is
accompanied by modes of aggression that are directed against
the absent object, or against Others whom the self thinks have
captured the object. Or, indeed, violence is directed against the
self itself, to the extent that the loss of the object is imputed to
the self itself, in forms of guilt and melancholy.12 On such a
model, negativity therefore implies aggression. Aggression in
this version of subjective negativity is not just a consequence of
recognition, it is inherent in the structure of recognition.13
Other theorists, like Cornelius Castoriadis, Axel Honneth,
or Amy Allen, do not follow this Lacanian approach. Instead,
the key insight in these alternative appropriations of the Freudian
Negativity in Recognition Z 231
NEGATIVE SOCIALIT Y
NEGATIVE POLITICS
NOTES
1. See Heikki Ikäheimo for a particularly lucid exposition of all the con-
ceptual and normative dimensions entailed in this fundamental claim,
“Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel’s Social Ontology,” in
Recognition and Social Ontology, ed. H. Ikäheimo and A. Laitinen
(Leiden: Brill, 2011), 145– 210.
Negativity in Recognition Z 247
Transitional Subjects: Critical Theory and Object Relations, ed. Amy Allen
and Brian O’Connor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
15. The classical appropriation of object-relations theory is now of course
Axel Honneth’s in Struggle for Recognition (in particular, 95–107), and
subsequent texts in the second half of the 1990s. See a recent proposal
for a shift in Honneth’s object-relations theory by Richard Ganis,
“Insecure Attachment and Narcissistic Vulnerability: Implications for
Honneth’s Recognition-Theoretic Reconstruction of Psychoanalysis,”
Critical Horizons 16, no. 4 (2015): 329–51.
16. See, for instance, Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of
Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 294– 301.
17. See Axel Honneth, The I in We, 229.
18. Axel Honneth, “Appropriating Freedom: Freud’s Conception of Indi-
vidual Self-Relation,” in Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical
Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 126–45.
19. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace & A. V. Miller,
revised with an introduction by Michael Inwood (Oxford: Clarendon,
2007), 96: “the world throws its threads so far into the subject that what
the subject is for itself in truth only consists of these very threads.”
20. S. Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” in Standard Edition, vol. 19 (London:
Hogarth, 1961), 3– 69; Sigmund Freud, Inhibition, Symptom and Anxi-
ety (New York: Norton, 1959).
21. S. Freud, “Negation” (1925), Standard Edition, vol. 19, 235– 39: “Judging
is a continuation, along lines of expediency, of the original process by
which the ego took things into itself or expelled them from itself,
according to the pleasure principle. The polarity of judgment appears
to correspond to the opposition of the two groups of instincts which
we have supposed to exist.”
22. See in particular Harold Searles, The Nonhuman Environment in
Normal Development and in Schizophrenia (New York: International
Universities Press, 1960); and André Green, Propédeutique: La métapsy-
chologie revisitée (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1995) and Key Ideas for a Con-
temporary Psychoanalysis: Recognition and Misrecognition of the Uncon-
scious (London: Routledge, 2005), notably 119– 22.
23. Stéphane Haber, Freud et la Théorie sociale (Paris: La Dispute, 2012),
68–115. See also L’Aliénation: Vie sociale et expérience de la dépossession
250 Y Jean-Philippe Deranty
36. See a similar kind of criticism by Hartmut Rosa in relation to the accel-
eration thesis: recognition is certainly a central conceptual and nor-
mative concern for a critique of contemporary society, but it has to be
complemented by a consideration of the frames of experience in which
demands for recognition are formulated, which significantly alter their
meaning and structure. Weltbeziehungen im Zeitalter der Beschleunigung
(Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 279–83.
37. Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher, Ýiĥek and Politics: A Critical
Introduction, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
38. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 163– 64.
39. Emmanuel Renault, L’Expérience de l’Injustice: Reconnaissance et
Clinique de l’Injustice (Paris: La Découverte, 2004); Jean-Philippe
Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, “Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of
Recognition,” Thesis Eleven 88, no. 1 (2007): 92–111.
40. See in particular Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power,
Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), as well as Seyla Benhabib, Judith
Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A
Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1992).
41. Axel Honneth, “The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society:
The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Light of Current Debates in Social
Criticism,” in Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory
(Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 49– 62.
42. Axel Honneth, “Facets of the Presocial Self: A Rejoinder to Joel
Whitebook,” in The I in We, 217– 31.
43. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Psychical and Social Roots of Hatred,” in
Figures of the Thinkable (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007),
chapter 6. Amy Allen, “Are We Driven?”
44. See Stéphane Haber, Penser le néocapitalisme: Vie, capital et aliénation,
(Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2013).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Amy. “Are We Driven? Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis Reexam-
ined.” Critical Horizons 16, no. 4 (2015): 311–28.
252 Y Jean-Philippe Deranty
Allen, Amy. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Con-
temporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Allen, Amy, and Maria Ruti. Critical Theory between Klein and Lacan: A Dia-
logue. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays, 121– 76. New York: Monthly Review,
1971.
Baynes, Kenneth. “Freedom and Recognition in Hegel and Habermas.” Phi-
losophy Social Criticism 28, no. 1 (2002): 1–17.
Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. Femi-
nist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Prob-
lem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
Benjamin, Jessica. Transitional Subjects: Critical Theory and Object Relations,
edited by A. Allen and B. O’Connor. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2019.
Boucher, Geoff, and Matthew Sharpe. Ýiĥek and Politics: A Critical Intro-
duction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: The Politics of Performativity. New York:
Routledge, 1996.
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005.
Butler, Judith. “Longing for Recognition.” In Hegel’s Philosophy and Femi-
nist Thought. Beyond Antigone?, edited by Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija
Pulkkinen, 109– 29. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1997.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. “The Psychical and Social Roots of Hatred.” In
Figures of the Thinkable, chapter 6. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2007.
Comay, Rebecca. Mourning Sickness. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2011.
Dejours, Christophe. Le Corps, d’abord. Paris: Payot, 2003.
Dejours, Christophe. Travail Vivant. Paris: Payot, 2010.
Negativity in Recognition Z 253
T
he claim that individuals need recognition seems
intuitively plausible and has acquired the character of
a commonplace in recent philosophical discussions. For
example, it is often argued, in a broadly Hegelian spirit, that
agency—being an agent—has to be understood not as a given,
but as a status or an achievement, in any case as something that
depends (in both its social-ontological and normative dimen-
sions) on social conditions of possibility among which relations
of recognition take pride of place.
In the existing literature on both recognition and needs, how-
ever, the claim that there is a basic need for recognition is rarely
explicitly spelled out and defended. In what follows, I address
some of the problems that contemporary theories of recognition
face in explaining the link between needs and recognition in
terms of conditions of agency. The chapter has three parts: I will
first sketch how this link can be conceived of, and discuss the
extent to which recognition itself can be understood as a basic
human need. Starting from an idea that is prominent in the work
of Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, namely that recognition
is a basic human need in the sense that it is something that it is
necessary for human beings to have, I will then discuss the
258 Y Robin Celikates
MISRECOGNITION: TOWARD
A NEGATIVE, MINIMALIST, AND
PROCEDURALIST APPROACH
In this way, the need for recognition points beyond the realm of
needs since the ability to participate in social and political prac-
tices in which needs are attributed, articulated, and interpreted,
and these attributions, articulations, and interpretations are con-
tested, is essential to recognition1.
Relations of recognition turn ideological if they deny their
essentially conflictual character, for instance in claiming to
respond to, or realize, presumably ahistorically given needs. For
this reason, it is often precisely the denial of their conflictual
character that struggles for and over recognition have to target
in the first place. These conflicts, in turn, play an important heu-
ristic and epistemic role in that they can serve as the starting
point for a critical theory that is not formulated in the name of
a substantial account of human needs. They can also serve as a
reminder that the struggle for recognition should not come to
a premature end, a false reconciliation—indeed, in Jim Tully's
words, “struggles over recognition, like struggles over distribu-
tion, are not amenable to definitive solutions beyond further
democratic disagreement, dispute, negotiation, amendment,
implementation, review, and further disagreement. Recognition
in theory and practice should not be seen as a telos or end state,
but as a partial, provisional, mutual, and human-all-too-human
part of continuous processes of democratic activity in which citi-
zens struggle to change their rules of mutual recognition as
they change themselves.”54
NOTES
I presented earlier versions of this chapter at talks and conferences in
Basel, Évian-les-Bains, Budapest, Dublin, Strasbourg, Lund,
Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Beijing, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam;
282 Y Robin Celikates
25. For a discussion of related problems, see José Brunner, Die Politik des
Traumas: Gewalt, Gesellschaft und psychisches Leid in den USA, in
Deutschland und im Israel/Palästina-Konflikt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2014); and Robin Celikates and Daniel Loick, “Die Diagnose als
Symptom: Zu José Brunner’s Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen
2009,” in WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7, no. 1 (2010):
171– 74.
26. This ambivalence is also present in the otherwise clarifying discussion
in Anderson and Honneth, “Autonomy, Vulnerability, Recognition,
and Justice.”
27. Patchen Markell, “The Potential and the Actual: Mead, Honneth,
and the ‘I,’ ” in Recognition and Power, ed. Bert van den Brink and
David Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
105– 6.
28. On the compensatory function of recognition provided by certain
countercultures to those who suffer from misrecognition by society at
large, see the remarks in Axel Honneth, “Brutalization of the Social
Conflict: Struggles for Recognition in the Early 21st Century,” Dis-
tinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 13, no. 1 (2012): 16–17. This
compensatory function, however, is not necessarily politically
empowering.
29. Veit Bader, “Misrecognition, Power, and Democracy,” in Recognition
and Power, 259n60. On this trap and how agents can avoid it, see also
Estelle Ferrarese, “ ‘Gabba-Gabba We Accept You, One of Us’: Vul-
nerability and Power in the Relationship of Recognition,” Constella-
tions 16 (2009): 604–15.
30. See Bader, “Misrecognition, Power, and Democracy.”
31. Bader, “Misrecognition, Power, and Democracy,” 260.
32. See Emmanuel Renault, “A Critical Theory of Social Suffering,” Crit-
ical Horizons 11 (2010): 221–41.
33. Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition?, 45.
34. Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses on Need,” Adorno Studies 1, no. 1 (2017):
102– 3.
35. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), chapters 7 and 8.
36. Fraser, Unruly Practices, 146.
286 Y Robin Celikates
37. Fraser, Unruly Practices, 156. On the centrality of the interpretation and
political evaluation of needs, see also Hamilton, The Political Philoso-
phy of Needs, chapters 2– 3.
38. Obviously, the less one agrees that needs claims are usually disputed,
the less one will think their contestability should be centrally acknowl-
edged in both theory and practice. For the position according to
which needs claims are self-evident, see Gillian Brock and Soran
Reader, “Needs-Centered Ethical Theory,” Journal of Value Inquiry 36
(2002): 425– 34.
39. See Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), chapters 1 and 7.
40. See Axel Honneth, “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination,”
Praxis International, 2 (1982): 12– 24.
41. Adorno, “Theses on Need,” 102.
42. On such an interpretation of the tasks of critical theory, also see Robin
Celikates, “Systematic Misrecognition and the Practice of Critique:
Bourdieu, Boltanski, and the Role of Critical Theory,” in Recognition
Theory and Contemporary French Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Mir-
iam Bankovsky and Alice Le Goff (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 2012), 160– 72; as well as Critique as Social Practice (London:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).
43. See Georg W. Bertram and Robin Celikates, “Towards a Conflict
Theory of Recognition: On the Constitution of Relations of Recog-
nition in Conflict,” European Journal of Philosophy 23 (2015): 838– 61.
44. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 25.
45. Hegel can be interpreted as making a similar point in his analysis of
the tragedy of ethical life in the Phenomenology of Spirit: it is not just
that Creon and Antigone cannot mutually recognize each other; they
cannot even, in general, in the proper sense, recognize anyone, because
in their doing they are immediately attached to certain values and con-
ceptions of achievements—they are therefore also unable to enter into
a proper conflict, and thus end up in a mere “collision” that cannot be
worked through.
46. See Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries Into the Construction of Social
Forms (Leiden: Brill, 2009), vol. 1, chapter 4; and Robin Celikates,
Beyond Needs Z 287
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor W. “Theses on Need.” Adorno Studies 1, no. 1 (2017):
101–4.
288 Y Robin Celikates
Celikates, Robin, and Daniel Loick. “Die Diagnose als Symptom: Zu José
Brunner’s Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2009.” WestEnd: Neue
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7, no. 1 (2010): 171– 74.
Copp, David. “Rationality, Autonomy, and Basic Needs.” In Being Humans,
edited by Neil Roughley, 334–55. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001.
Ferrarese, Estelle. “ ‘Gabba-Gabba We Accept You, One of Us’: Vulnera-
bility and Power in the Relationship of Recognition.” Constellations 16
(2009): 604–15.
Fraser, Nancy. Unruly Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989.
Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? London:
Verso, 2003.
Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007.
Hamilton, Lawrence. The Political Philosophy of Needs. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003.
Hamilton, Lawrence. “Power, Domination and Human Needs.” Thesis
Eleven 119, no. 1 (2013): 47– 62.
Honneth, Axel. “Brutalization of the Social Conflict: Struggles for Recog-
nition in the Early Twenty-first Century.” Distinktion: Scandinavian Jour-
nal of Social Theory 13, no. 1 (2012): 5–19.
Honneth, Axel. “Facets of the Presocial Self: A Rejoinder to Joel White-
book.” In The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition, 217– 31. Cam-
bridge: Polity, 2012.
Honneth, Axel. Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Honneth, Axel. “Grounding Recognition.” Inquiry 45, no. 4 (2002): 499–519.
Honneth, Axel. The Idea of Socialism. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
Honneth, Axel. “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition.’ ” Pro-
ceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 75 (2001),
111–26.
Honneth, Axel. “Is there an Emancipatory Interest?” European Journal of
Philosophy 25, no. 4 (2017): 908– 20.
Honneth, Axel. “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination.” Praxis Inter-
national 2 (1982): 12– 24.
Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social
Conflicts. Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
290 Y Robin Celikates
W
ithin the broad field of philosophical reflections
on recognition, we can distinguish two orienta-
tions to struggles of recognition: the teleological
and the agonistic. The first, running from Rousseau through
Hegel to Honneth, focuses on attempting to articulate philo-
sophically the norms of recognition that are required to support
and sustain the achievement of social freedom. Whether worked
out through appeal to a philosophical anthropology, or by means
of an immanent historical reconstruction, the role of the philoso-
pher is to diagnose forms of social pathology that arise from
nonrecognition and misrecognition, and to specify the forms of
recognition requisite to a just and good society (thereby also dis-
tinguishing genuine claims to recognition from false or ideo-
logical claims). The second, running from Nietzsche through
Foucault to Tully and Rancière, sees the role of philosophy not
in terms of specifying principles of recognition, but rather in
terms of redescribing the social and political practices in which
participants are situated in order to enable them to free them-
selves from the grip of these current norms of recognition, which
results in helping participants subject the norms to critical
appraisal or contestation. The first of these orientations has
294 Y David Owen
They have speech like us, they dared tell Menenius! Was it a god
that shut Menenius’s mouth, that dazzled his eyes, that made his
ears ring? Did some holy daze take hold of him?. . . He was
Freedom, Equality, and Struggles of Recognition Z 299
briefly, the point could be put thus: in stepping back from gen-
eral or specific struggles with the current police order, Rancière
aims to reorient our relationship to the terrain of political strug-
gle as such by identifying democracy with the agonistic contes-
tation of hierarchy and differential entitlements to rule in the
name of an equality that cannot be codified, whereas in engag-
ing in general or specific struggles, Tully aims to enable and enact
“civic freedom,” that is, agonistic contestation of the contempo-
rary police order. To substantiate this claim, I want to consider
two issues. The first is the understanding of “democratic citi-
zenship” in the contemporary police order. The second concerns
the normative or evaluative differentiation of police orders with
respect to equality.
The dominant picture of “democratic citizenship” can be
cashed out in terms of a “mode of citizenship”—where this
phrase refers to both “a distinctive language of citizenship and
its traditions of interpretation” and “the corresponding prac-
tices and institutions to which it refers and in which it used”29—
which sees citizenship as “a universalisable legal status under-
pinned by institutions and processes of rationalisation that
enable and constrain the possibility of civil activity.” 30 On this
view, civil action necessarily presupposes an institutional struc-
ture of legal rules, and civil citizens’ stand toward themselves
as persons who are at liberty (i.e., free from subjection to the
will of another) in virtue of their enjoyment of the civil rights
and duties that compose the office of citizenship under law, to
take up opportunities to participate as political equals in deter-
mining the law to which they are subject as subjects of a given
political institution of governance. The citizen/governor rela-
tionship is pictured as an hierarchical institutional relationship
which specifies, in broadly contractual fashion, a set of rights
Freedom, Equality, and Struggles of Recognition Z 311
NOTES
I am grateful to the editors for their invitation, encouragement,
comments, and patience in respect of this chapter. I owe a particular
debt to Clif Mark, who gave me very acute and detailed comments
on the whole chapter, which I have tried to accommodate as far as
possible.
1. Samuel A. Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2014), 136.
2. James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 306. For a clear articulation of this rejection
of finality orientations, see David Owen and James Tully, “Recogni-
tion and Redistribution,” in Multiculturalism and Political Theory, ed.
A. Laden and D. Owen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
3. Honneth partially recognizes this concern in his discussion of ideo-
logical forms of recognition. However, I don’t think that the account
that he provides is compelling (Axel Honneth, “Recognition as Ideol-
ogy,” in Bert van den Brink and David Owen, eds., Recognition and
Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press), 323–47; David Owen, “Reifica-
tion, Ideology and Power: Expression and Agency in Honneth’s The-
ory of Recognition,” Journal of Power (now Journal of Political Power)
3, no. 1 (2010): 97–109. The wider issue is also pointedly raised in Amy
Allen, The End of Progress? (New York: Columbia University Press,
2016).
4. For a fuller account of the way in which Wittgenstein’s analysis of see-
ing aspects shed light on Rancière’s theory, see Jonathan Havercroft
and David Owen, “Soul-Blindness, Police Orders and Black Lives
Freedom, Equality, and Struggles of Recognition Z 317
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Amy. The End of Progress? New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Chambers, Samuel A. The Lessons of Rancière. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014.
Dunn, Adam, and David Owen. “Instituting Civic Citizenship.” In On
Global Citizenship: James Tully in Dialogue, edited by James Tully. Lon-
don: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982):
777– 95.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited
by P. Rabinow, 32–50. London: Penguin, 1984.
Havercroft, Jonathan, and David Owen. “Soul-Blindness, Police Orders and
Black Lives Matter: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Rancière.” Political The-
ory 44, no. 6 (December 2016): 739– 63. doi: 10.1177/0090591716657857.
Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2003.
Freedom, Equality, and Struggles of Recognition Z 319
Honneth, Axel. “Recognition as Ideology.” In Bert van den Brink and David
Owen, eds., Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Crit-
ical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 323–47.
Owen, David. “Political Philosophy in a Post-Imperial Voice.” Economy and
Society 28, no. 4 (1999): 520–49.
Owen, David. “Tully, Foucault and Struggles of Recognition.” In Recogni-
tion Theory and Contemporary French Moral and Political Philosophy, edited
by M. Bankovsky and A. Le Goff, 88–108. Manchester: Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 2012.
Owen, David, and James Tully. “Recognition and Redistribution.” In Mul-
ticulturalism and Political Theory, edited by A. Laden and D. Owen. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie
Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Tully, James. Public Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2008.
Tully, James. Strange Multiplicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995.
CONTRIBU TORS
David Owen is professor of social and political philosophy within the School
of Economic, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Southamp-
ton. He has published widely on Nietzsche and post-structuralism, multi-
culturalism and migration, and democratic theory. He is the author of What
Do We Owe Refugees? (Polity, 2020), Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (Acu-
men, 2007), Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (1995), and Maturity and Moder-
nity (1994). He is the coauthor of Prospects for Citizenship (Bloomsbury,
2011), with Gerry Stoker and others. He has coedited, amongst others, the
collections Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge University Press,
324 Y Contributors
2007), together with Anthony Laden, as well as Recognition and Power (2007),
together with Bert van den Brink.
achievement principle, 262– 64 162, 171– 75, 177– 78, 182–84, 235,
address, 29, 50–51, 66, 133, 136, 198, 237– 38, 243, 282n4
280 ambivalence: and gay marriage,
Adorno, Theodor, 90, 202, 273 102, 119, of love relations, 44,
agency, 16, 39–40, 241, 257, 102, 108, 113, 205, in primary
260– 61, 265, 268– 72, 280, 315; relational experiences, 106, 108,
individual and collective, 15, 112, 123n37, 244–45, of
261, 268– 72, and subjugation, recognition, 3– 7, 9, 11–14, 16,
39, sovereign, 77, conditions of, 102, 120, 131, 161– 63, 165– 67, 169,
257–58, 269– 70, individuality 171–80, 184–85, 187n30, 192,
and, 260, 268, autonomous, 204–5, 211, 219n32, 223, 258,
267 285n26, 294– 95, 315–16, and
aggression, 10, 50, 82, 104–8, 112–14, subject formation, 44
203, 230– 31, 237, 244 antisociality, 105– 6, 264
agonism, 16, 71, 164, 293– 95, 302– 3, Arendt, Hannah, 302
310, 313–15 ascription, 24– 25, 48, 164; of needs,
Allen, Amy, 12, 143–145, 148, 174, 273, 276, and social identities,
230, 244, 248n10 10, 57–58, of a status, 166,
alienation, 2, 240; self-alienation, 169– 70
231– 32 asymmetry, 49, 76, 83, 106– 7, 145,
Althusser, Louis, 5, 9–10, 13, 22– 23, 177, 260; and gender, 76, 84–85
25, 28, 34, 36, 39–43, 55, 57, 63, attachment, 76, 79, 82, 99–100, 106,
66, 129–50, 154n35, 155n39, 112, 143–44, 176, 220n50, 240,
155n47, 156n51, 157n71, 157n78, 245
326 Y Index
discourse, 2, 8, 10, 32, 40, 43–44, 46, empowerment, 76– 77, 180
56, 58, 65, 192– 93, 231, 296; equality, 16, 33, 46–47, 49, 52, 66,
needs, 275, 279 68, 70, 81, 264, 295, 300–1, 305,
discrimination, 11, 32, 37, 241 310, 314. See also inequality
disrespect, 2, 3, 6– 7, 260– 62 esteem, 11, 43, 58, 62, 73, 101–2, 110,
distribution, 78, 86, 228, 274, 281, 205, 259, 262– 64, 266, 268, 272;
296. See also redistribution self-esteem, 259, 262, 268, 272
division of labor, 144, 149; exclusion, 40, 66– 67, 116, 117–18,
gendered, 79–80, 85–86, 262 120, 182, 184, 234, 236, 241, 261,
domination, 3, 5, 7, 32, 34, 66, 275
81–82, 85–86, 91, 114, 118, 161– 63, existential, 202, 204–5
166– 67, 169, 172– 73, 176– 77, 179, experience, 1– 2, 7, 12, 16, 38, 70, 74,
185, 186n7, 230, 236, 294, 299, 76, 78, 90, 103–5, 107–8, 110,
304, 307–8, 316; and aggression, 112–13, 116–17, 123n37, 124n39,
113, 114, 125n51; constitutive, 138– 39, 193– 94, 199, 205, 209,
162– 63, 171, 177– 78, 181, 184 214, 220n37, 224, 226, 231, 233,
drive, 50, 71, 72, 105, 108, 110, 112, 240, 245, 251n36, 265– 67, 272,
113, 124n39, 233, 244, 263 275– 76; gendered, 37, 70
duty, 78, 82, 86, 144, 200, 206– 9, exploitation, 86, 123n30, 149, 240
244, 263, 310, 313
Fanon, Frantz, 64, 287n54
economy, 87, 259, 262, 283n8 family, 12, 70, 72, 76, 78–87, 115,
egalitarian, 86, 275, 295– 96, 299, 125n55, 259, 263– 64, 284n19
301, 311, 314–15 femininity, 38, 41, 144–45, 148
ego, 103, 232 feminism, 11, 12, 36– 37, 87, 91, 274
“ek-static” character of the subject, Fichte, Johann, 17n1, 24, 42, 220n42
the (Butler), 35, 51 form of life, 74, 162, 168, 172
emancipation, 8, 14, 74, 86, 161– 65, Foucault, Michel, 40, 43, 63, 89,
176, 179–81, 184–85 175, 177, 235, 293, 296, 302–4
embodiment, 41, 75 Frankfurt School, 2, 71, 118, 188n30,
“enslavement” (Nietzsche), 10, 48 196, 217n3, 248n14, 259. See also
ethical life (Sittlichkeit), 7, 110, 116, critical theory
259, 286n45, 305 Fraser, Nancy, 5, 72, 68, 209, 225,
ethics, 43, 67 227, 262, 273– 74
emotion, 58–59, 66, 79–80, 82–83, freedom, 4–5, 13, 16, 24, 32– 34,
101, 108– 9, 201– 3, 206, 212, 37– 38, 42, 57, 64, 68, 71, 89,
219n36, 220n50 161– 63, 165, 175, 178, 180, 184,
Index Z 329
happiness, 207–8, 211–15 ideal, 5, 33, 75, 77, 79, 84, 109, 112,
“happy slaves” (Althusser), 22– 23, 194– 95, 198, 203, 212, 215, 232,
37– 38 241, 246, 276, 316
330 Y Index
intelligibility, 26, 43, 46, 56, 62– 64, Lear, Jonathan, 110, 121n1, 203,
118, 134, 143, 297; 220n45, 220n46
unintelligibility, 22, 46, 118, 143, learning process, 75, 111, 284n20
151 legal, 11, 115, 117, 119, 261– 64, 310;
interdependence, 10, 45, 48, 50–52 recognition, relations, 259,
intersubjectivity, 14, 65, 77, 100, 261– 62; respect, 11, 59, 259, 264;
106, 109–10, 117, 164, 196– 98, rights, status, 261, 310–12;
201– 3, 206–10, 213–14, 219n36, subject, 166, 170
221n51, 233, 238–40, 245, 261, 265, legitimacy, 16, 22, 25, 57–58, 78, 116,
268, 302, 305– 6, 309 181, 209–10, 274– 75, 277, 280,
intimacy, 32, 65, 67, 73, 78–80, 82, 295, 299– 300, 311, 316
84–85, 115–16, 199, 239, 259– 60, Lepold, Kristina, 13, 186n10
262, 307 lesbian, 39, 119
interpellation, 10, 22, 25, 132– 39, Levinas, Emmanuel, 10, 27, 29, 49,
141, 156n57, 173, 174, 182, 186n10, 52, 55
235 LGBTQ , 11, 31– 34, 65
iterability, 40 liberalism, 70, 79, 182–83, 243, 305;
neoliberal, 69, 85, 89, 245;
Jaeggi, Rahel, 135, 138, 154n35 nonliberal, 188n30
justice, 32, 65– 66, 68, 70, 243, 305 liberation, 7–8, 57, 271
justification, 168– 70, 184, 300 liberty, 24, 310, 313
“life and death struggle” (Hegel),
Kant, Immanuel, 9, 24, 43, 52, 56, 45
111, 124n45, 238 life form, 65, 168, 170
Klein, Melanie, 45, 50, 122n14, lifeworld, 73, 75, 77, 84, 202,
123n31, 244 219n30
Livius/Livy, Titus, 298
labor, 86, 87, 240. See also division love, 11–12, 44, 58–59, 67, 73, 76, 82,
of labor 99–102, 106–10, 112–16, 119– 20,
Lacan, Jacques, 23, 33– 34, 41, 103, 205, 207–11, 214, 219n29, 219n35,
225, 229– 31, 233– 35, 237– 38, 241, 219n36, 221n51, 232, 259– 61,
243, 248n9, 248n10 263– 64, 266, 268, 272, 284n19;
law, 32, 65, 73, 132– 33, 136– 37, “democratization of,” 78;
220n41, 229– 30, 234, 236– 37, self-love, 9, 24
259, 261, 268, 306, 310–13; Lovibond, Sabina, 182
interrogative, 139, 145 Lukács, Georg, 193, 196, 212
332 Y Index
male, 56, 82, 134, 140, 143–44 motivation, 119, 172, 212, 220n39,
market, 77, 85, 87, 115, 259, 262, 261; and conflict, 277; for
283n8 emancipatory action, 205; and
marginalized, 65, 205, 264, 270, the individual, 5, 105, 110, 143,
307 146, 151, 155n47; and love, 207–8,
Markell, Patchen, 4, 225, 270 214; and recognition, 105, 156n51,
marriage, 78, 85, 115–16, 118–19, 213; and struggle, 2– 3, 120, 265;
125n55, 266; gay, 12, 78, 102, and subject formation, 172,
115– 20 175– 77, 188n30
Marx, Karl, 157n78, 184, 196, 217n11, multiculturalism, 2, 8, 262
240 mutuality, 49, 51, 68, 79, 86, 102,
masculinity, 38, 82, 148 262– 63, 304; and care, 72, 86,
master/slave relationship, 220n47, 123n37, 264; ethical, 76, 78, 81,
236 87; and recognition, 3, 10, 55–57,
McNay, Lois, 5, 11–12, 247n4, 62, 77, 101, 106, 109–10, 116, 120,
283n12, 284n19 163, 174, 180–81, 239, 281, 286n45,
McQueen, Paddy, 144, 156n57 304, 306, 309; and reification,
méconnaissance, 230 198, 215
melancholy, 230
migration, 87, 262, 264 narcissism, 33, 103–4, 108, 122n14
minority, 33, 65, 116, 219n36, 262, narrative, 3, 76, 81, 83–84, 88, 90,
305– 6 168, 176, 179–80, 283n7
“mirror stage” (Lacan), 33 nationalism, 241
misrecognition, 2– 3, 16, 33– 34, 74, nation-state, 283n7, 313. See also
85, 224, 230, 232, 236, 240, state
242–43, 245, 258, 260– 62, 265, nature, 118, 157n82, 195– 96, 203,
268, 270– 73, 279, 285n28, 287n51, 250n23, 262, 268; human, 72– 73,
293 264, 276
modernity, 12, 72, 75– 77, 80–81, naturalization, 38– 39, 74, 140,
88, 115–16, 168, 227, 235, 157n82
238, 241, 258–59, 306–8, 311–13, needs, 15–16, 39, 45, 51, 71– 73, 83, 85,
316 101– 2, 104, 112, 181, 203, 231,
moral autonomy. See autonomy 257– 62, 264, 266–81, 286n38
morality, 77 neediness, 10, 116, 261
moral realism. See realism negation, 32, 35, 90, 216, 224,
“mother”-infant-relationship. 233
See infancy negativism, 16, 90– 91, 271– 72
Index Z 333
negativity, 7, 10, 14–15, 50, 90, standards, 111, 172; status, 24– 27,
105, 108, 109, 223– 28, 230– 34, 29, 42–43, 55–57, 62, 64, 75, 174;
236, 238, 240–41, 244, structures, 100, 138, 173, 277– 78;
246 theory, 69, 89, 110, 114, 216, 303.
neoliberalism. See liberalism See also authority; conflict;
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 34, 48, critique; development; ideal;
178, 293, 302 progress
nonrecognition, 293 normativity, 49, 91, 110–13, 120,
norm, 8, 13, 16, 33– 34, 36, 39, 41, 124n45, 125n48, 182, 242, 246.
57–59, 68, 71, 77, 79, 83, 86, 111, See also heteronormativity
113–14, 116, 118–19, 130– 31, 134, nurture, 83, 87
137, 139–41, 143, 145–50, 164– 65,
168– 77, 180–84, 187n18, 187n21, objectification, 4, 193– 203, 206–8,
196, 198, 204, 206–10, 214–15, 211–12, 214, 217n3, 217n12,
219n36, 220n37, 220n39, 226–27, 218n15
235– 39, 277, 287n54, 293– 95, 302, self-objectification, 199
304– 6, 309, 313; abnormal, 234; “objective spirit” (Hegel), 196
and gender, 38, 40, 48–49, 134, obligation, 22, 65, 78, 82–83, 115,
144, 151 209, 304, 311
normalization, 22, 64, 72, 235– 38, Okin, Susan, 85
282n4 omnipotence, 103–4, 108
normative, 4, 7, 12, 24– 28, 42–43, ontogenesis, 72, 99, 227, 248n9
45–49, 52, 56, 58, 66, 69, 74– 76, ontology, 12–13, 71– 74, 76, 88, 129,
79, 83–85, 87, 90– 91, 100–1, 131, 134– 36, 141, 224, 228, 246;
107–10, 112–13, 115, 120, 125n47, deontological, 208–13; social-
139, 164, 168, 172, 174– 75, 177, ontological, 3, 35, 51, 73, 172, 175,
180–82, 204, 206, 208– 9, 217n3, 177, 188n30, 217n3, 257
220n37, 224– 25, 227– 28, 235, oppression, 66, 81, 85, 91, 119, 149,
237– 39, 242–43, 246, 246n1, 238, 277
251n36, 257, 265, 270, 277– 78, optimism, 5–10, 12, 78, 99–101,
287n54, 310, 314; constraints, 113–14, 119, 125n55, 203, 287n49
167, 169; frameworks, 8, 13, 166, other, the, 2, 14, 24– 25, 27, 29, 33,
245; metanormative, 101, 109–10, 35, 42, 45–46, 49, 51, 58–59, 66,
112–13, 120; normativism, 238; 100– 2, 135, 175, 198, 201, 203–4,
order, 11, 287n54, 296; thinking 206–15, 219n32, 230– 31, 236– 37,
and reasoning, 6, 69– 70, 91; 244, 264; uncontrollability of,
reconstruction, 81, 88, 115; 105
334 Y Index
original position, the, 203 power, 6, 9, 15, 21– 23, 25, 28, 35,
overdetermination, 234, 236 39–43, 46–47, 50, 57, 63, 65– 67,
72, 76– 77, 79, 84–85, 91, 113,
parent-child relationship. See child, 167– 72, 174– 77, 180, 186n10, 230,
infant 234– 37, 240–41, 247n4, 270,
particularity, 91, 118 277– 78, 285n28, 313
participation, 42, 137, 149, 151, 241, precariousness/precarization, 52,
273– 75, 278, 281, 310, 312–13 67, 89, 240
participatory parity (Butler), 5, 227 proceduralism, 16, 258, 271, 273, 276
pathologies, 32, 79, 164, 193, 200, production, 62– 63, 76, 149, 239
220n47, 231, 237–41, 243–45, progress, 7, 12, 72–81, 83–84, 88– 91,
293 109, 111, 115, 117, 119, 260, 263,
patriarchy, 81–82, 119 265, 283n12, 307
performativity, 10, 37, 39–40, 235, proletariat, 149, 311
237, 241, 299– 300 property, 22– 25, 27– 29, 37, 56, 198,
personality, 77– 78, 111, 200 277, 279, 301
personhood, 66, 116, 135, 192, psyche, 10, 39, 100, 235– 36
197– 201, 214–15, 217n10, 267, 270 psychoanalysis, 23, 38, 44–45, 49,
philosophy of history, 111 99, 101–105, 108–109, 121n12,
police, 22, 81, 132– 33, 135, 137, 241, 122n14, 229, 233, 236– 37, 245,
296– 97, 300–1, 307–8, 310–11, 247n9, 248n14, 264
313–15 psychology, 75, 88, 99, 103, 108, 269,
politics, 2, 8, 15, 32, 45, 66– 67, 119, 272, 284n20
184, 224, 226, 241–45, 258, 274,
276, 295– 97, 300– 2, 308– 9, queerness, 39, 116
314–15 queer theory, 33, 120
political, 4–5, 8, 34, 66– 68, 87, 115,
118–19, 120, 182, 218n15, 223– 25, race/racism, 11, 46, 48, 63– 64,
228, 240–43, 245–46, 247n4, 258, 219n36, 227
268, 274, 275, 277, 285n28, 287n51, Rancière, Jacques, 16, 293– 301, 306,
305; action, 278, 300– 2, 309, 315; 308–15, 316n4
life, 9, 16, 77; practices and rationalisation, 310, 312
institutions, 15–16, 80, 280–81, rationality, communicative, 227
293, 310. See also struggle rational universal, 71, 89– 90
postcolonial, 4, 243 reality principle, 108, 248n9
poststructuralism, 15, 40 realism, 111, 195, 217n7
Index Z 335
reason, 78; instrumental, 220n50; reproduction, 5, 22– 23, 36, 40, 67,
reasoning, 69– 70, 72, 91 80, 82, 150–51, 235, 299
reciprocity, 32, 45, 49, 52, 76– 78, resignification, 36, 40, 44
86–87, 103, 181, 227, 237, 303, 313; resistance, 7–8, 10, 15, 39, 44, 48,
nonreciprocal, 81, 83; reciprocal 100, 105– 6, 119, 163, 173– 74, 177,
self-subjection, 78, 81, 83; and 184, 241
recognition, 3, 7, 31, 42–43, respect, 86, 110, 174, 204–5, 207–12,
47–48, 57, 66, 142, 180, 260, 265, 220n37, 220n41, 221n51, 261– 63,
272, 306 266, 268, 272; disrespect, 2– 3,
recognition: legal, 65, 78, 115, 117, 6– 7, 260– 62; legal, 11, 59, 259,
119– 20, 264; mutuality, 264; self-respect, 259, 261, 268,
nonrecognition, 293; norms of, 272
165, 168, 172– 74, 176, 180, 209, rights, 25, 48, 58–59, 65, 73, 87, 99,
287n54, 293– 95, 303– 6, 309; 101– 2, 112, 168, 180–81, 197– 98,
reciprocity, self-recognition, 36, 200, 206–8, 217n11, 220n41, 241,
143, 214–15, 230. See also 259, 261, 263, 277, 287n51, 310,
ambivalence; critique; desire; 313; marriage, 115, 119;
marriage; misrecognition; procedural, 279; and sexual
needs; struggle freedom, 32– 33. See also
recognizability, 8, 11, 14, 34, 46, 63, LGBTQ
65, 116, 120, 138– 39, 144, 146, 151, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17n1, 293
170– 71, 177, 181–83, 187n18,
187n21, 219n36, 277, 279; same-sex relationships, 12. See also
unrecognizability, 46, 118–19 gay marriage
reconciliation, 16, 281 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3–4, 282n4
redistribution, 264. See also self, the, 2, 4, 15, 35, 45, 199, 225,
distribution 228– 33, 239; self-conception, 2,
regress, 80, 84, 111 142, 144; self-confidence, 102,
reification, 14, 39, 100, 140, 191–205, 116, 259– 60, 268, 272; self-loss,
207, 210–16, 217n3, 217n8, 217n11, 230, 236; self-realization, 71, 74,
217n12, 218n15, 219n30, 220n50, 76– 77, 82–83, 85, 164, 199, 267,
225; self-reification, 199 294, 316; self-understanding, 35,
relationality, 43, 51, 77, 226, 237, 239, 75, 130, 142–44, 146–47, 167, 276,
245, 250n23; nonrelational, 87 280, 304, 313
relativism, 74, 88–89, 215, 275 sexuality, 32– 33, 36, 78, 83, 115–16,
repression, 91, 202, 233, 248n9 118, 143
336 Y Index
Sittlichkeit, 183, 259. See also ethical subject, the, 15, 24– 25, 35, 40, 45–48,
life 51, 56–58, 62– 67, 77– 78, 82, 90,
Skinner, Quentin, 302 105– 6, 109–10, 112, 117, 124n39,
slavery, 62, 197– 98, 211–12, 218n15 129, 131, 135, 140, 142, 145–46,
social freedom, 70, 78, 82, 87, 149, 155n39, 155n44, 162– 68,
115–16, 293 170– 79, 181–83, 186n10, 187n18,
social integration, 117–18, 181, 265 188n30, 193– 96, 202, 209, 223– 27,
socialization, 73, 82, 105, 107, 206, 229–41, 243–46, 249n19, 261– 63,
228, 234– 35, 237, 239, 243–44 266– 67, 280, 295, 310; formation,
solidarity, 99, 112, 183–84, 187n30, 40–41, 43–44, 46, 62– 64, 67,
259 135– 36, 138– 39, 141, 175, 177, 238,
spirit, 180, 196, 226, 232, 248n9 244, 246
state, the, 25, 86, 115– 20, 263, 311–12; subjection, 9, 13, 34, 123n30, 129– 31,
apparatuses and institutions, 138–48, 151, 157n71, 176, 236– 38,
175, 235; intervention, 87; law 310; self-subjection, 78, 81, 83
and, 259, 261; stateless, 48, 67; subjectivation, 24, 41–42, 46–47,
welfare-, 274. See also 169– 70, 172– 73, 177, 182, 184,
colonialism, nation-state 186n10
Stern, Daniel, 102–4, 121n12, subjectivity, 56, 140, 149, 164, 173,
122n15 175, 179–80, 182, 184, 199, 224,
structuralism, 15 229, 231– 32, 235, 246, 267,
struggle, 2–4, 8, 15–16, 32, 67– 68, 71, 302
112, 155n35, 225, 227, 231, 237, 274, subjugation, 9, 39
281, 284n20, 303–4, 306–8, submission, 5– 6, 173
310–11, 315; for freedom, 71; for subordination, 24, 41, 90, 123, 130,
individuation, 50; life and 142, 144–48, 155n44, 166– 67, 171,
death, 45; of and over 173, 175, 271; gendered, 70, 82,
recognition, 16, 224, 242, 293, 85–86, 89
295– 96, 304– 6, 308– 9, 313–15; for suffering, 2, 90, 224, 237, 239, 242,
recognition, 2– 3, 8, 12, 33, 44, 268, 271– 72, 275, 285n28
46, 48, 50, 105, 108–10, 112–13, survival, 23, 39, 118, 144, 280
120, 169, 175, 224, 228, 231, 236, symbiosis, 102– 3, 112, 231, 264
242, 245, 258–59, 263, 265, 270,
272– 73, 276– 79, 281, 287n54, 305, Taylor, Charles, 1– 2, 6, 164, 257–58,
308, 315. See also class 305
sovereignty, 77, 307 teleology, 33, 75– 76, 88, 89, 113, 265,
subconscious, 233 293– 95
Index Z 337
telos, 112–113, 120, 265, 281 vulnerability, 51, 76, 82, 85, 86, 89,
trans issues, 37, 39 116, 123n30, 166– 67, 170, 172, 177,
transcendence, 4, 16, 64, 68, 71, 84, 237–40
89, 242, 294, 308, 315–16
“triangulation,” 201, 207–8, 210–11, Waldron, Jeremy, 280
213–14 well-being, 207–8, 211–15
Tully, James, 16, 225, 227– 28, 281, Winnicott, Donald, 43–45, 50, 102,
293– 95, 301–16 122n15, 233
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 296, 301– 2,
unconsciousness, 22, 28, 38– 39, 236 316n4
uniqueness, 112, 117 women, 27, 36– 38, 62, 70, 72, 76,
universalism, 89, 215, 307, 310 79–83, 85–87, 89, 140, 148,
150–51, 274, 305
violence, 37, 45, 49, 64, 113, 224, 230, worker, 87, 135, 149, 198, 240
236– 37, 241, 243–45, 272;
domestic, 81–82, 89, Young, Iris Marion, 85, 91
nonviolence, 45, 50
visibility, 23, 24, 274, 279, 296– 97, Ýiĥek, Slavoj, 229, 237, 243,
300, 307, 309; invisibility, 72, 86, 248n9
239, 279, 296, 308 Zurn, Christopher, 100–1, 108– 9
NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY