Vulnerable recognition: recovering Hegelian agonism

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I argue that a conception of vulnerable recognition addresses both the shortcomings of conventional understandings of recognition and Patchen Markell’s provocative critique (and abandonment) of recognition theory in Bound by Recognition. First, I outline Markell’s critique of conventional recognition theory and his call for the politics of recognition to be replaced by a politics of acknowledgement that turns toward the self and welcomes contingency. Second, I propose a reframing of recognition as vulnerable in response to conventional recognition theory’s limitations. This more agonistic conception of recognition recaptures the dynamism of Hegelian recognition that has been lost in recent decades. It draws attention to the desires, structures, and practices that underpin misrecognition and calls for an embrace of vulnerability, ambiguity, and political risk.

KEYWORDS:

• Patchen Markell
• recognition
• vulnerability
• acknowledgement
• misrecognition
• identity
• rationalism
• epistemic certainty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example, Honneth’s “transcendental” account of recognition, which maintains that we are fundamentally attuned to one another but that dominant social structure and ideology foster a “forgetting” of this primordial stance (“‘recognition’ in its most elementary form”) that he terms “reificiation” (Honneth 2008, 37).

2 See also McNay’s (2012, 242) criticism of Honneth’s account of recognition for promoting a reductive ontology that “results in a psychologically simplistic account of power where social relations are persistently viewed as extrapolations from a primary dyad of recognition.”

3 I do not have time to develop this argument further in this short dialogue piece. For more detail, see the discussion in (Schick 2018), which draws on Gillian Rose’s work to proffer a deeply relational and vulnerable understanding of reason as “full of surprises” (Rose 1993, 9) contra the impoverished (rationalist) conception of reason that strips it “both of its difficulty and of its bounty” (Schick 2018, 95).

4 For concrete examples of vulnerable recognition powerfully unsettling a politics of certainty in the context of indigenous politics and border politics, see Simpson (2007), Squire and Darling (2013), Rainey (2018), Schick (2020, 155–157).