Repressed materiality: Retrieving the materialism in Axel Honneth's theory of recognition

Critical Horizons

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 113-140

  Deranty, Jean Philippe ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Dejours; Feuerbach; Habermas; Honneth; Marx; Materialism; Recognition; Work

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846372999     PISSN: 14409917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/156851606779308224     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. My sincere gratitude to Danielle Petherbridge for all her help with the final version of this paper.
2. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson, London, Polity, 1995;
3. and Nancy Fraser & Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, London & New York, Verso, 2003.
4. Jürgen Habermas, "Labour and Interaction. Remarks on Hegel's Jena Philosophy of Mind" in Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel, London, Heinemann, 1974, pp. 142-169.
5. See also chapter three of Knowledge and Human Interests, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987, pp. 43-64.
6. Indeed, the two texts referred to in the previous note already contained the suggestion that Hegel's Jena model of a 'struggle for recognition' could serve as the mechanism of social integration by contrast with the integration through material reproduction.
7. "Geschichte und Interaktionsverhältnisse. Zur strukturalistischen Deutung des Historischen Materialismus in Theorien des Historischen Materialismus, eds. U. Jaeggi and A. Honneth, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1997, pp. 405-464.
8. Reprinted as "History and Interaction: On the Structuralist Interpretation of Historical Materlialism" in Althusser: a Critical Reader, ed. Gregory Elliott, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, pp. 73-103.
9. A. Honneth, "Domination and Moral Struggle. The Philosophical Heritage of Marxism Reconsidered" in The Fragmented World of the Social, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 2-14.
10. This is obviously one of the most striking self-reflective assessments in the polemic with Fraser, see Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, London & New York, Verso, 2003, p. 157.
11. A. Honneth, "Work and Instrumental Action: On the Normative Basis of Critical Theory" in The Fragmented World of the Social, pp. 15-49.
12. This is obviously the main thread of the critique of Habermas in Honneth's, The Critique of Power, trans. K. Baynes, Cambridge, MA, & London, MIT Press, 1991.
13. See the end of A. Honneth & H. Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. R. Meyer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 162-167.
14. See A. Honneth, "Moral Consciousness and Class Domination. Some Problems in the Analysis of Hidden Morality" in The Fragmented World of the Social, pp. 205-219.
15. See especially Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 70.
16. Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 1.
17. Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 3.
18. See T. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, London, Hutchinson, 1978, pp. 110-126.
19. See also the classical article by Joel Whitebook, "The Problem of Nature in Habermas," Telos, Summer 79, pp. 41-69,
20. reprinted in Minding Nature. The Philosophers of Ecology, ed. D. Macauley, New York, The Guilford Press, 1996, pp. 283-317.
21. See also the revisiting of these problems from the point of view of recent Schelling scholarship in Peter Douglas, "Habermas, Schelling and Nature" in Critical Theory after Habermas, eds. D. Freundlieb, Wayne Hudson and John Rundell, Leiden & Boston, Brill, 2004, pp. 155-180.
22. A good study was to be found in Stephan Vogel, Nature in Critical Theory.
23. And an especially careful and detailed study in Stéphane Haber, Critique de l'Antinaturalisme, Paris, PUF, 2006, Chapter Three.
24. Honneth, The Critique of Power, p. 218.
25. See Jean-Philippe Deranty, "The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth's Theory of Recognition. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty" in Critical Horizons, vol. 6, 2005, pp. 153-182.
26. The present article contains some passages of the latter article, as well as passages from the following article: "Les Horizons Marxistes de l'Ethique de la Reconnaissance," Actuel Marx, no. 38, 2005, pp. 159-178.
27. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston, Beacon Press, 1989, p. 63.
28. See Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. B. Fowkes, London, NLB, 1971
29. and Emanzipatorische Sinnlichkeit: Ludwig Feuerbach's Anthropologischer Materialismus, Munich, Hanser, 1973.
30. Indeed, Schmidt emphasises the importance of Feuerbach's anthropological arguments within the critique of political economy itself, Emanzipatorische Sinnlichkeit, p. 21.
31. Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 15.
32. See Gÿorgÿ Márkus' classical study, Marxism and 'Anthropology': The Concept of Human Essence in the Philosophy of Marx, Assen, Van Gorcum, 1978.
33. See Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. M. Vogel, Indianapolis, Hackett Publications, 1986, p. 40.
34. See Schmidt, Emanzipatorische Sinnlichkeit, pp. 45-50.
35. See Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot, New York, Harper, 1957, p. 112.
36. This notion of human perception as 'universal' and thus essentially different from the instinct-bound perception of animals is of course directly appropriated by Marx in the Paris manuscripts.
37. Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 166.
38. Emmanuel Renault, L'Expérience de l'Injustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de l'Injustice, Paris, La Découverte, 2004.
39. See for example, Axel Honneth "Invisibility. On the Epistemology of Recognition", in Supplement to the Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society, vol. 75, 2001, pp. 111-126.
40. Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 155.
41. Axel Honneth, Verdinglichung. Eine Anerkennungs-theoretische Studie, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2005.
42. The shift was already well flagged in "Grounding Recognition: A Rejoinder to Critical Questions," Inquiry, 45, 2002, pp. 499-519.
43. Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 61.
44. Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 61.
45. See especially Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1997,
46. and Mark Rowlands, Exernalism: Putting Mind and World Back Together Again, Chesham, Acumen, 2003.
47. Too many references present themselves here. In yet a different discipline, we can note that in William James already, to quote a tradition that is dear to Honneth, the self 'extended' well beyond skin and skull and encompassed all personal objects constitutive of selfhood itself. See Principles of Psychology, New York, H. Holt and Company, 1890, vol. 1, pp. 291-293.
48. Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 17.
49. See Feuerbach, Principles of a Philosophy of the Future, § 32.
50. See also Schmidt, Emanzipatorische Sinnlichkeit, p. 44.
51. One thinks notably of the first section of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason.
52. See in particular Bernard Stiegler's reflections on the anthropogenic aspect of technologies, in Technics and Time, trans. R. Beardsworth & G. Collins, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998.
53. See also Bruno Latour's idea that action-networks encompass at the same level of processing, both human and non-human entities.
54. In the already quoted Honneth, "Work and Instrumental Action."
55. See the authoritative reflections by Manuel Castells in The Rise of the Network Society, vol. 1, Oxford, Blackwell, 2nd edition, 2000, especially for the purpose of this paper, chapter 4: "The Transformation of Work and Employment: Networkers, Jobless, and Flexi-Timers."
56. I am using the description of the service industry by Jean-Pierre Durand in La Chains Invisible. Travailler Aujourd'hui: Flux Tendu et Servitude Volontaire, Paris, Seuil, pp. 207-227.
57. See Christophe Dejours, Travail, Usure Mentale, Paris, Bayard, 2000, especially the 1993 Addendum, pp. 201-249.
58. Dejours, Travail, Usure Mentale, p. 213.
59. See also Christophe Dejours, Le Facteur Humain, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1995, pp. 43-44.