The re- in recognition: Hegelian returns

Abstract

By using ‘the return’ as a dialectical figure, the author discusses four contemporary appropriations of Hegelian dialectics – as restoration, recollection, repetition, and interpellation – in relation to the concept of recognition in contemporary political philosophy. They are seen in the light of social and political forces influencing European and North American intellectual debates from the events of 1989 to the aftermath of 9/11. By a critique of Charles Taylor's work, it is argued that Hegelian return conceived as restoration sets recognition as an act of self-appropriation through social mediation. Recognition becomes a means for self-unification through identity affirmation, a coming back to oneself as undistorted. The author subsequently sketches out two alternative appropriations of Hegelian dialectics in relation to questions of recognition: as recollection and repetition. The dialectical return understood as recollection turns recognition into an acknowledgement of intersubjective vulnerability. It sets the return to oneself as a peripeteian force, focusing on the unpredictable rebounding effects of one's own actions, a view advocated by Patchen Markell. Recognition becomes a movement toward self-expropriation if it turns on the necessary failures, indeed, on the impossibility of the return. The return as repetition becomes the place-holder for a unity that will never be. Jean-Luc Nancy is seen as an exponent of this perspective. The author ends by arguing for an understanding of the dialectical return as an interpellative force which turns our attention from recognition to recognizability, that is, from the relation between self and others to the social space and practices governing the space in which people appear as recognizable to each other, in line with the latest work of Judith Butler.

Keywords:

• Butler
• difference
• Hegel
• identity
• Markell
• Nancy
• recognition
• Taylor

Notes

1. Taylor has in quoting Hegel's passage, symptomatically or purposively, reversed the sequence of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’.

2. The problem with Taylor's politics of recognition is therefore not, I claim, that it is too Hegelian, a view put forward by Nancy Fraser among others. Fraser wants to rescue the notion of recognition from Hegelian ethics by relating it to Kantian morality. I argue that Taylor's politics of recognition is too little Hegelian, in the sense discussed above, as he leaves out the radical potential in Hegelian thought, e.g. the notion of alterity. Few of Taylor's critics, among them Fraser, question which version of Hegel Taylor actualizes. When Fraser claims that the problematic Hegelian assumption at the heart of Taylor's politics of recognition is a dialogically mediated identity, where recognition from the other is a precondition to attain ‘an undistorted relation to oneself’, she reproduces Taylor's appropriation of Hegel instead of questioning it (Fraser 2000, 110).

3. Cf. Maeve Cooke's elucidatory critique of what she sees as Taylor's ‘ambivalence with regard to the ideal of autonomy’ (Cooke 1997, 270). Cooke argues that Taylor's ideal of authenticity as distinct from, and as an alternative to, the ideal of autonomy is in fact more interrelated with the latter than Taylor accounts for: ‘the politics of difference, no less than the politics of equal dignity, selects autonomy as that which is worthy of recognition: it, too, focuses on the individual's power to determine for herself a particular understanding of the good life’ (Cooke 1997, 261). Cooke does not, however, question autonomy as the ideal human agency and as the basis for a politics of recognition.

4. When using Sartre to argue for the logic of the rebound as an ethical force of mutuality, it is crucial, however, to underline the non-Sartrean way of understanding recognition as revolving around my relationship to myself, profoundly dependent on my relationship to others. The idea of recognition as first and foremost a relationship to myself is not to be understood as Sartre framed it, implying the two persons’ ‘ontological separation’ (Sartre [1943] 1956, 243). When Sartre writes that ‘due to the very fact that he [the other] is an object, the Other-as-a-mirror is clouded and no longer reflects anything’, he rejects not only the possibility of any mimetic situation, but also reciprocal self-expropriation, which here is situated in the very center of a recognition theory (Sartre [1943] 1956, 242).

5. The following section is a shortened version of my article ‘Hegel and exposure’, forthcoming at Södertörn Philosophical Studies (Fareld 2012).