Recent writings on recognition and ambivalence highlight the limits of narrowly dyadic and teleological accounts of recognition. In this article, I extend the work on ambivalent recognition by proffering a conception of recognition as vulnerable. I emphasise the need to come to know the self as part of the journey toward recognition and to interrogate the role of the privileged in the dance of recognition. I illustrate vulnerable recognition with reference to literature that highlights this more complicated reading of recognition in practice, including calls for white settlers to come to understand the way settler culture shapes relations with others and Indigenous refusal of recognition. I maintain that a vulnerable and processual conception of recognition takes seriously the demand to re-cognise or to ‘know again’, which is at the heart of Hegel's agonistic account of recognition. A vulnerable conception of recognition enables us to better understand our interconnectedness and the place we occupy in particular histories and structures, with their ongoing legacies of privilege and oppression. 

From ambivalence to vulnerability: Recognition and the subject

Beginning with Margaret Somers and Christopher Roberts’ review of the sociology of human rights and Bryan Turner and Malcolm Waters’ debate therein, the author presents some of the questions which have been so far been the focus of this sociological sub-discipline. This review raises the question of ‘rights’ as a subject of study, and the normative consequences therein. From here, the author introduces recognition theory as a potential participant in these discussions around human rights. The author traces recognition theory from its Hegelian origins to the work of Axel Honneth, and the critiques of Nancy Fraser, Frantz Fanon, and Glen Sean Coulthard. Despite Fanon and Coulthard’s critical accounts, they reinforce the value of recognition within any sociology of human rights. Lastly, the author briefly engages with Alasdair MacIntyre as both a dialogical participant, and a means towards dialogue in the first place between recognition theory and human rights. Concluding, the author argues that the normative and descriptive nature of recognition theory offers a useful tool to aid in sociological theorizations of human nature and rights, while addressing some of the problems raised by early theorists of the sub-discipline and preventing siloing of the sub-discipline within a universalist or particularist vein.

‘Recognizing’ Human Rights: an Argument for the Applicability of Recognition Theory Within the Sociology of Human Rights

Anerkennung bei Sartre

According to Max Horkheimer, a critical theory of society has to fulfil two tasks: the elimination of social injustice and the critical reflection of its own conceptual means. Based on this definit...

Misrecognising Recognition. Foundations of a Critical Theory of Recognition

The social-philosophical discourse of the last 20 years pictured recog­nition mainly as medium of human autonomy. In recent years however, concerns have been raised over whether recognition might not occasionally work in the opposite direction, as means of subjection. This article contends that these con­cerns rely on a misconstruction of the relationship between recognition and sub­jection as merely contingent. Developing themes on Foucault's work, it argues that recognition rather always necessarily involves a moment of subjection. In the first part, I show that Foucault, especially in his power-analytic writings, can plausibly be read as theorist of recognition insofar as every relation of power pre­ supposes the recognition of the other as free. In the second part, I elaborate that every concrete relation of power depends on conditions - knowledge and norms - that precede it and that are formed and transformed in complex historical pro­cesses, in which the authority of individual subjects is always only a limited one. Against this background, it will become visible that recognition indeed allows us to conduct ourselves autonomously as certain kinds of subjects according to certain norms but as such also always subjects us as it ties our freedom to condi­tions that we remain largely exposed to.

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Steffen Herrmann

Papers

Misrecognising Recognition. Foundations of a Critical Theory of Recognition

Anerkennung und Abhängigkeit: Zur Bindungskraft gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheitsverhältnisse nach Hegel

Populismus als Politik der Herabsetzung