Struggling over the meaning of recognition: A matter of identity, justice, or freedom?

European Journal of Political Theory

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 277-289

  Kompridis, Nikolas ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Agency; Critical theory; Disclosure; Freedom; Gustice; Identity; Public reason; Recognition; Voice

Indexed keywords

EID: 38849204210     PISSN: 14748851     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474885107077311     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. RR refers to Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (2003) Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso.
2. Here I am trying to supplement Tully's reformulation of the struggle for recognition as a struggle over the norms of recognition. Even when actors challenge a norm of (typically legal) recognition because they experience it as unbearable, they are not only challenging the specific harm that the particular norm facilitates, they are also implicitly attempting to redefine what recognition is or should be. I am indebted to Tully for helping me with my own (ongoing) struggle over the meaning of recognition.
3. Charles Taylor (1994) 'The Politics of Recognition', in Amy Gutman (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, p. 25. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
4. Nikolas Kompridis (2004) 'From Reason to Self-Realization? On the "Ethical Turn" in Critical Theory', Critical Horizons 5(1); repr. in John Rundell, Danielle Petherbridge, Jan Bryant, John Hewitt and Jeremy Smith (eds) (2004) Contemporary Perspectives in Critical and Social Philosophy. Brill: Leiden.
5. James Tully (2006) 'The Practice of Law-making and the Problem of Difference: One View of the Field', in Omid Payrow Shabani (ed.) Multiculturalism and the Law: A Critical Debate. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
6. For complementary criticisms of Fraser and an illuminating view of misrecognition and suffering from an Adornian perspective, see Jay Bernstein (2005) 'Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory', International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Special Issue on 'Rethinking Critical Theory', 13(3): 303-25.
7. See Nancy Fraser (1991) 'From Irony to Prophecy to Politics: A Response to Richard Rorty', Michigan Quarterly Review 30(2): 259-66.
8. Stanley Cavell (1990) 'The Conversation of Justice', in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, p. 112. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
9. On the 'world-disclosing' role of reason, see Nikolas Kompridis (2006) Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
10. I make this point in greater detail (n. 4), pp. 346-9.
11. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1990) 'Self-Reliance', Essays: First and Second Series. New York: Vintage. Friedrich Nietzsche (1969) On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage. Martin Heidegger (1962) Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, part I, ch. 4. New York: Harper & Row. For elaboration of this point, see part II of Kompridis (n. 9) and (forthcoming) 'Intersubjectivity, Recognition, and Critique'. Now this is another reason why I think Fraser is wrong to dismiss outright approaches which focus on the self, on identity, and on so-called experiences of 'prepolitical' suffering. The dichotomy between self and society has surely outworn its welcome. It is an effect of a metaphysical picture that is based on questionable and prejudicial distinctions between inner and outer, subjective and objective, private and public. For one line of critique of this picture, the writings of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Taylor, and Cavell are exemplary.
12. Cavell (n. 8), pp. xxxi-xxxii.
13. Wendy Brown (1995) 'Wounded Attachments', in States of Injury, pp. 52-76. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
14. This medicalizing tendency is especially pronounced in Honneth. See Kompridis (n. 4) for criticism of this tendency.
15. Nikolas Kompridis (2005) 'Normativizing Hybridity/Neutralizing Culture', Political Theory 33(3): 318-43. On the issues raised in this article, see Seyla Benhabib (2006) 'The Claims of Culture Properly Interpreted: Response to Nikolas Kompridis', Political Theory 34(3): 383-8, and my reply (2006) 'The Unsettled and Unsettling Claims of Culture: Reply to Seyla Benhabib', Political Theory 34(3): 389-96.
16. I should add that I find the application of the idea of 'nonreformist reform' to redistribution far more promising.
17. Tully (n. 5).
18. In addition to the work of James Tully, here I am thinking of the work of Wendy Brown (n. 13) and Patchen Markell (2003) Bound by Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. See also James Tully (2006) 'On Reconciling Struggles over Recognition: Toward a New Approach', in Avigail Eisenberg (ed.) Equality and Diversity: New Perspectives Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, pp. 15-33 (2004a) 'Exclusion and Assimilation: Two Forms of Domination', in Melissa Williams and Stephen Macedo (eds) Domination and Exclusion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 191-229 (2004b) 'Recognition and Dialogue: The Emergence of a New Field', Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 7(3): 84-106. In this vein of counter-discourses of recognition, see also Andrew Schaap (2004) 'Political Reconciliation through a Struggle for Recognition?', Social and Legal Studies 13(4): 523-40.
19. For a systematic statement of this alternative conception of critical theory see Kompridis (n. 9).