two
BETWEEN HONNETH AND RANCIÈRE
Problems and Potentials of a Contemporary Critical Theory of Society
JEAN-PHILIPPE DERANTY
THIS PRESENTATION aims to complement Katia Genel’s introduction by striving to do two main things: to situate the works of Honneth and Rancière in the broad field of contemporary “critical theory” by studying some of the key conceptual points that define and demarcate these authors’ respective positions; and on that basis, to highlight some of the theoretical promises and difficulties harbored by their thoughts. The significant moments these two names represent in contemporary critical philosophy clearly bear the mark of the “traditions” from which their theories have grown. The Honneth/Rancière encounter is thus interesting, among other things, for the new chapter it writes in the complex history that has continuously tied together and opposed “French” and “German” styles of critical theory, ever since something like “French theory” emerged and started to interact with the Frankfurt School tradition.1 More generally, however, the encounter also reveals some key conceptual parameters of any critical theory project. This is made possible in particular thanks to the substantive points on which Rancière and Honneth actually share germane approaches. The third, more implicit task this presentation sets itself is thus to underline some of the key parameters of a critical theory project.
In the first section, I propose a working definition of “critical theory” to identify the field in which the discussions occur. I try to show that the language of recognition imposes itself quite naturally within the kind of inquiry that can be called “critical theory,” even though it is of course not an uncontested manner of speaking. In the following sections, I explore in some detail five important issues I believe the confrontation between Honneth and Rancière raises in particularly interesting ways. First, I focus on some of the issues their discussion evokes regarding the type of “subject-concept” that is required in a critical theory project. I argue that an insufficiently noticed overlap between the two thinkers is their common use of what I call a “hermeneutic of social life,” which I contrast with a phenomenology of social life. I then study some of the implications of their rather unique ways of “grounding” their respective critical philosophies. While most contemporary thinkers don’t see the need to establish a methodological hierarchy between equality and freedom, Rancière and Honneth are original in making one or the other of those concepts the sole foundation of their social and political thought. Finally, I try to show that the historicism embraced by both Honneth and Rancière might lead them into internal difficulties or lead to shortcomings they might want to avoid.
CRITICAL THEORY AND THE LANGUAGE OF RECOGNITION
To begin with, we need to give a broad characterization of the field of “critical theory” or “critical philosophy.” Several types of philosophical critiques of modern society can be distinguished. The first distinction to be made is between politically conservative and progressive critical theories. Conservative critiques of modern society typically bemoan the demise of authority, or of tradition, or of existing forms of particular institutions, like bourgeois marriage or patriarchal authority, or of the nation-state. Or they adopt a defensive position in relation to existing institutions, like the capitalist markets. Another distinction separates purely conceptual approaches from approaches that use the reference to real existing societies to develop their conceptual core. Some forms of philosophical critique of society remain mainly theoretical in their unfolding, that is, they provide analytical theories of the just or the good in methodological separation from real existing societies and with little or no reference to history, except in the shape of abstract principles like “individual freedom,” “modern society,” or “liberal-democratic society.” In this field, the critical moment consists in measuring the gap between existing society and the norms established by the philosopher. A disciplinary subfield—whether in the form of “social philosophy” or “applied ethics”—is entrusted with the task of establishing the application of the normative theory to empirical social reality. Both in the construction of pure normative theory and in its application, the political assumptions of the theorist are supposed to remain extrinsic to the theoretical work.
In contrast with these two types, Honneth and Rancière are two prominent representatives of another style of critical theory, namely, that field occupied by thinkers working mainly with references in European philosophy who conduct their work on social and political issues in direct connection with real existing social and historical phenomena. In that style of “philosophical critique,” theoretical work draws from the empirical realities of social and historical developments; and in turn, one of its main objectives is to provide analytical tools to articulate the criticism of some of these social developments. The substantial methodological connection to social reality and to history distinguishes it from “normative political philosophy.” And this form of critical theory can be distinguished from conservative critique because the work of critique is driven by the desire to change society in order to fulfill a universalistic commitment to “emancipation.” Emancipation consists in the removal of obstacles to the realization of freedom for all individuals, and is generally viewed as a possibility inherent in modern society, whichever way that possibility is then conceived (as an existing normative principle, a utopian potentiality, a defining ethos, and so on). The negative formulation of the goal of emancipation is significant because it provides this progressive form of theory its inherent critical character, namely, to identify the hurdles to freedom or social justice. Generally, one key obstacle that this kind of critical theory focuses on is characterized in terms of social domination.
The characteristic features of that field explain why the notion of struggle for recognition has strong intuitive appeal within it. On any intuitive understanding of the term, a struggle for recognition names the attempt by a group or a class to “emancipate themselves” from particular oppressive social conditions. And so if the theoretical work elucidates the features of recognition and the struggle waged in its name, it thereby also clarifies the important link just mentioned, namely, the link between theoretical analysis and real existing society. Rancière’s initial intervention in the discussion with Honneth shows that there is no problem for him talking about a “Rancièrian theory of recognition.” Indeed, he used the concept himself more than ten years before Honneth, in Althusser’s Lesson.2 Rancière just disagrees with some of the key concepts used by Honneth in his own theory of recognition. Given the strong prejudice in large tracts of the critical theory field against the language of recognition,3 it is useful to establish his in-principle agreement.
We get a sense of the place a concept of recognition can take in Rancière’s political thinking if we adopt a genealogical perspective and recall the strong link between Disagreement, his most systematic book of “critical philosophy,” and the archival research he conducted in the 1970s into the first wave of the labor movement in France. It is fair to say that this archival work constitutes the direct source and the constant inspiration behind the arguments presented in Disagreement. In Disagreement and in all his subsequent political writings, Rancière has constantly returned to the key figures of the labor movement he encountered in this early research. His political ontology appears as a formalization and translation into ontological categories of historical experiences that represent the very paradigm of “struggles for emancipation.”
As he was processing this rich historical material, the young Rancière was ineluctably drawn to the language of recognition, for the reasons just stated. The language of “struggles” and “conflicts of recognition” traverses the texts immediately following Althusser’s Lesson, that is, the introductions to the proletarian texts gathered in La parole ouvrière and some of the early texts of Révoltes logiques published at the same time.4 Just as in Disagreement twenty years later, the central concept in the texts Rancière wrote to accompany the proletarian texts was the concept of “speech,” logos, in the two senses of discursive reason and of reason that can count as such. Rancière argued that the proletarian struggles revolved around the “question of proletarian dignity.”5 This involved not only demands regarding wages or the organization of the labor process, but just as eminently the demand by the proletarians to have their capacity to speak for themselves “recognized.” Proletarian struggle involved “a singular effort of one class to give itself a name, in order to exhibit its situation and respond to the discourse of which it is the object.”6 Already then, Rancière’s interpreted Ballanche’s reference to the Plebeian retreat to Mount Aventine as “a revolt that is to be identified with the capacity to recognize oneself as a speaking subject and to give oneself a name.”7 These texts from the mid-1970s present arguments that seem fairly close to one of Honneth’s earliest texts, “Domination and Moral Struggle,” published at about the same time, in which Honneth sought to reinterpret Marx’s theory of emancipation as pointing to demands for the recognition of proletarian “dignity.”8 This text directly anticipates Honneth’s turn to Hegel in order to find an appropriate, sufficiently complex conceptual grammar, allowing him to explain how political struggles for emancipation can be understood as struggles for dignity.
Similarly, Rancière interpreted the struggle around speech, the struggle to be recognized as having the capacity to speak and for the right to contest the speech of others upon oneself, as a struggle for recognition, as “the desire to be recognized which communicates with the refusal to be despised.”9 Rancière insisted that this effort to be recognized as equal speaking beings was intimately connected to practice, and that “the will to convince the other about one’s right entails the resolution to defend it with weapons.”10
At the time, Rancière analyzed proletarian struggle as a struggle for the recognition of proletarian identity. This early Rancièrian version of the struggle for recognition already exhibited the central conceptual structure of the litige as the core issue of politics. Even if the concepts of “subjectivization” or “parts” were not yet in place, Rancière already made the key distinction between a struggle for the recognition of a sociologically or culturally defined identity, which for him was an incorrect interpretation of the workers’ aims, and a demand to be recognized in one’s identity inasmuch as it underpinned an “equal intelligence.” Rancière’s interpretation at the time was already that emancipatory politics had a two-stage structure so that the disagreement over the injustice of specific social arrangements implied a more radical, preliminary struggle over the recognition of one’s very capacity to take part in dissensus, as a speaking being, a being with logos. Workers, Rancière argued, wanted “to be recognized as something other than the mere strength of numbers and the vigor of working arms; [they aimed] to show that workers can also assert what is just and reasonable, that they have to have their place.”11 What Disagreement added later on was a more general argument, in which the worker/bourgeois dichotomy was transformed into the more formal dichotomies of rich/poor and expert/anonymous intelligence. Bourgeois oppression would become police in general. But the central idea that the heart of emancipatory politics is the struggle for the recognition of one’s capacity to take part in dissensual, polemical conflicts over specific social objects was extracted from the proletarian writings of the nineteenth century.12
It is not by chance then that these continue to provide the paradigmatic examples twenty years later, right until today. Indeed, Disagreement continues to employ something like a logic of recognition in its most important pages. It does this just as in the earlier text, in the sense of a demand for the recognition of assertions proffered by a speaking being as being valid assertions, in other words, as being assertions proffered by a being whose arguments count, that is, who “can assert what is just and reasonable” and, in that respect, has his or her place in society and therefore deserves a “part” in it.
In our present text, Rancière himself highlights key dimensions of Honneth’s model that overlap with his own approach. To begin with, there is the fact that recognition is a social demand, which implies three things. First, it is an expectation on the part of members of society. Honneth would conclude from this that it is a normative claim, but of course Rancière is not comfortable with normative language; in this, he shares the general identification of normativity with oppressive normalization that is characteristic of much contemporary French theory. Second, Rancière agrees with Honneth that this expectation is likely to become more visible, to society and its members, when it is denied, and thereupon in the form of claims for redress, so that demands for justice first emerge as denunciations of injustice. This in turn brings out a third dimension. The demand for recognition stemming from those who are denied it throws a particular retrospective light on the social field, as one that is organized as a particular “recognition order,” a specific “partage du sensible,” in which specific bodies or types of activities or objects cannot be seen and specific voices cannot be heard.13 Rancière agrees that recognition has “operative” and “antagonistic” dimensions that are important to retain. In turn, these dimensions define politics quite specifically as “struggle for recognition,” which can then become broadly synonymous with the litige that defines Rancière’s politics around the “wrong” that is constitutive of every society. Honneth, just like Rancière, sees no end to the presence of such structural wrong: every partage du sensible, or “recognition order,” inherently excludes some bodies, voices, or activities as not counting or as not fully counting. Politics is about highlighting, denouncing, and seeking to redress that “tort.”
On the basis of this shared commitment to the idea of a struggle against injustice, which in some respects can be interpreted as struggle for recognition, some major disagreements arise between Honneth and Rancière. Studying these disagreements, and the assumptions on which they are based, helps to better understand some of the potentials and limits of contemporary critical theories of society.
THE HERMENEUTIC AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF SOCIAL EXPERIENCE
In Rancière’s initial account, the dissensus that is constitutive of politics was articulated in reference to the denial of specific identities, more specifically, proletarian identity. In his mature version, the concept of “identity” becomes negatively loaded as a category belonging to the grammar of the police order, the very grammar that political dissensus seeks to challenge. Rancière famously contrasts “identity,” as a marker of social belonging, with a formal or empty concept of “subject,” as the outcome of a political process of “subjectivization.” Subjecthood is defined in a way that recalls the earlier structuralist emphasis on the Marxist concept of “support,” as a mere function or ontological place holder in a structural field, defined independently of any essential traits.14 This “structural” or “ontological” notion of subjecthood is one feature in which Rancière’s training in structuralist Marxism can still be traced.
However, in the context of the confrontation with Honneth, Rancière in fact objects to the notion of “identity” for the very purpose of developing an adequate theory of recognition. He does not make the mistake of confusing Honneth’s notion of identity with the meaning the concept has in debates in multiculturalism. Indeed, Rancière’s carefulness in this regard points to another overlap, namely, that for the two authors the political process, the struggle for recognition in Honneth and the process of subjectivization in Rancière, contains a key performative power whereby the political subject is transformed by, and in a sense is born out of, the political process.
Nevertheless, even if Rancière acknowledges the plasticity and the dynamic dimensions of Honneth’s concept of identity, it is at this point that he finds the most to object to. Rancière’s criticism is immanent to the problem of recognition: grounding the model of recognition in the norms of personal identity makes the very project of recognition politics untenable. If recognition is to be “operative,” it has to challenge the existing order, since politics is about creating “an original configuration of the world.”15 And if that is to happen, then in turn the struggle for recognition cannot be about re-cognizing stable identities, whether those are already fixed, as in a multiculturalist version, or whether those are postulated as the telos of recognition, as in Honneth’s model. I note that these two forms of recognition, which struggle against social contempt (the classical multiculturalist concern for minority identities and the Honnethian struggle for full personal identity), can be well conceptualized in Rancièrian terms, provided that their description is altered. They should be analyzed as struggles for a new configuration of the common world in which particular bodies, voices, sites, objects, which so far have been excluded from the realm of collective deliberation, become sites and objects for such deliberation.
Identity and subjecthood are two different conceptual appro­aches to subjectivity as critical theories need to include them within their general models. Such subject-concepts are indispensable in many models of critical theory because they are centrally implicated at the different interlocked levels at which these models seek to intervene: at the level of the (more or less developed) theory of society implied by the critical theory; at the level of its implications for political theory, through its (more or less explicit) conception of political agency; in its (more or less explicit) conception of social movements; and of course in its account of social pathologies, or injustice, and their effect on individuals and groups, which usually links up in some way with the previous two levels.16
Given his anti-phenomenological orientation, Rancière’s own brand of critical theory does not operate through the interlinking of levels just suggested. In Rancière’s theory, the subject-concept is there only to specify the kind of agency at play in political action. Given that politics for him is a radical rupture of the police order, the subject-concept must relate only to the political moment. Therefore it does not communicate with other dimensions of subjectivity, such as the sociological or psychological ones. Honneth’s critical theory, by contrast, adheres fully to the suggested layering in separate but connected levels around a central subject-category. In his writings preceding Freedom’s Right at least, personal identity is a subject-concept that plays a role not just in the political-theory side of theory, but also at the descriptive level, in the diagnosis of social pathologies, and at the normative level. Despite clear differences on this point, however, a significant point of contact exists between Honneth and Rancière in relation to this subject-pole of critical theory. Both make a strong appeal in their methods to what might be called the hermeneutic of social experience.17 This common reference to social experience as having epistemic value contrasts with their diverging attitudes toward what I will call the phenomenology of social life.
Honneth’s use of a substantive notion of subjectivity in his early and middle periods is a trademark of the post-Hegelian tradition of critical philosophy. This tradition arguably starts with Hegel himself since his theory of “subjective spirit” proposes a rich anthropological model of human freedom, the “subjective” counterpart and indeed in a sense the platform for what the theory of “objective spirit” exposes at the legal, social, and political-institutional levels. Hegel’s direct successors, Feuerbach and Marx, did not latch explicitly onto Hegel’s anthropology but retained Hegel’s core idea of “concrete freedom,” which they sought to develop in materialist and naturalist terms. This tradition was pursued by the different “generations” of Frankfurt School critical theory, all the way to Honneth.18 What characterizes this legacy is the way in which thick conceptions of subjectivity are integrated at different levels of the theoretical edifice.19 These thick theories of subjectivity are developed as philosophical anthropologies, and provide important planks in normative frameworks, from the mimetically integrated subject in Adorno, to the subject in communication for Habermas, to Honneth’s autonomous subject. In each case, the normative anthropology also provides key elements for the critical, diagnostic side of the theory, both at the conceptual level, in accounts of key concepts such as alienation, reification, and ideological obfuscation, and at the empirical level, in applications of the model to real social phenomena.
After the initial critical reception of his major book, Honneth gradually shifted on the understanding of identity. The subject-concept at the heart of the theory of recognition changed in ways that were not insignificant. In recent years, culminating in his major new work, Freedom’s Right, Honneth has largely abandoned the anthropological grounding of his theory of justice and reinterpreted the fundamental norm of individual autonomy in a historicist and social-theoretical perspective. Autonomy is now considered mainly as a moral achievement of modernity and thereby as secured by modern society’s core institutions. Recognition now names the structure of reciprocal expectations that bind subjects in social life and that represent the conditions for the realization of their intermeshed individual goals. In order to reach individual aims that realize key dimensions of their autonomy, each social subject has to assume that there are others who share with him a similar normative attitude, so that it is only by recognizing one another in that capacity that these interlocked individual goals can be realized. This logic is true for friends, participants in the market, and citizens in the public sphere. The institutions of modernity define modes of social behavior and social roles, which, when endorsed by subjects, allow them to engage in the kind of social action that makes possible the realization of their goals. Recognition therefore continues to play the role of the condition of autonomy, and as a consequence it remains the normative foundation of the model, but its psychological meaning is no longer decisive. Instead, recognition now points to reciprocal expectations that are equally social and functional (without recognition, some key types of social action are impossible) and normative (these forms of social action are conditions of freedom). In this new model, moral expectations linked to reciprocal forms of recognition now constitute a screen, as it were, between the agents’ psychic worlds and social structures. Recognition has become a moral concept in an institutional sense; it is an “ethical” concept, in the Hegelian acceptation of the term. The basic assumption of a need for autonomy provides the ultimate motivational foundation but it is no longer sufficient by itself to delineate the content of modern struggles for emancipation.
In one important respect, there is still a continuity between Honneth’s earlier writings and his new model, namely, the epistemic role played by social and historical experience. Whether recognition is defined anthropologically, as in the earlier writings, or institutionally, as in the new model, a significant implication in all cases is that the social experiences of modern subjects have irreplaceable truth-value. That is, subjective expectations, the normative expectations that are expressed and conceptualized from the point of view of the subjects, when considered from a broad enough perspective (across populations or across time), point to norms that have a significant purchase in reality. These norms form the social glue that helps to account for social reproduction at the level of social theory or social ontology. They are the ground for negative experiences explaining struggles for recognition (the model of social movements in The Struggle for Recognition) or explaining political movements arising from the malfunctions of core institutions (as in Freedom’s Right). And it is by appeal to these norms that a diagnosis of social pathology can be developed. At these different levels, subjective experiences of social life thus provide a decisive theoretical guideline, so that critical theory needs to encompass an important hermeneutic moment, what we might call a hermeneutic of social experience. In building his or her critical social theory, the theorist can trust—in fact it is one of the theorist’s main tasks to do justice to—the contents of social experience and their historical transformations. Critical theory, on this account, has to provide the conceptual vocabulary that will capture the truth-content of historically significant expressions of social experience. Indeed, we should speak of two distinct hermeneutic elements within critical theory: a hermeneutic of social experience undertaken from a synchronic perspective, which represents a form of social ontology rooted in empirical social and historical knowledge;20 and a hermeneutic of historical experience, which implies a diachronic perspective, inasmuch as historical transformations leave their mark on subjective experience and subjects and collectives refer to historical achievements and historical experiences in making normative claims.21
The shift to an institutional, “social-ontological” sense of recognition in Honneth’s recent writings leads to a relative severing of the link between experience and critique, a distancing from phenomenology, if by that we simply designate the whole content of individual experience.22 In the earlier model, the concept of recognition was used simultaneously in phenomenological and normative ways. This multifold aspect of recognition ensured that there was, in principle, overlap between the breadth of negative forms of social experience typical of a given society and the conceptual tools used by the critical theory. In this methodological setup, critical theory could seek to do justice to the full gamut of physical and psychic injuries caused by social structures; it therefore did not just contain a hermeneutic element, looking at social structures from the point of view of subjective actions and expectations, but it could also set for itself the goal of being the representative in theory of the phenomenology of social suffering.23 With the shift to an institutional concept of recognition, the overlap between the hermeneutic and the phenomenological tasks is no longer in place. Injustices and pathologies of recognition are now conceptualized as breaches of moral promises, namely, the promises of social freedom contained in key social institutions. To take the example of modern labor, it is telling that Honneth approaches injustices and pathologies of modern work solely from the perspective of how they contravene the expectations that underpin individuals’ participation in the labor market as an institution. The phenomenology of unjust or exploitative or alienating work practices falls out of the purview of the new framework. Honneth still refers empirically to pathologies of work, but their significance is only indirect: they matter as indices of a failure in regards to a moral promise, failures that can be read off hermeneutically in terms of claims and expectations, but that are no longer significant in and of themselves, for what they actually do to people.
The position Honneth now defends is, in some limited respects, comparable to the one advocated by Rancière, namely, to the extent that both reject full-fledged phenomenological perspectives on social and political issues, but make room for the hermeneutic dimension in another respect. They include this element to the extent that they consider that their social hermeneutics give conceptual shape to the claims made by individuals and groups, and thereby also presume these claims to be epistemically valid. The norms involved in those claims and the manner in which they are endorsed and interpreted by these theories obviously differ: individual freedom for Honneth, equality for Rancière; normative reconstruction versus equality of intelligence. But for Rancière as for Honneth, a key aspect of theory is that it makes room for the actual demands of individuals and groups without distorting, suspecting, or rejecting them, indeed taking them as epistemic and practical guidelines.
By contrast with Honneth, there has always been a notable absence of any reference to the thick “content” of subjecthood, any appeal to psychological reality or phenomenological arguments, in Rancière’s writings. We can note that the tradition in which his work is commonly located, that is, the “post-structuralist” field, is affected by a particular kind of ambiguity in this respect. Poststructuralism borrows some of its most defining traits from the seminal work of Althusser. Among other things, it inherits from Althusser a dismissive attitude toward phenomenological arguments. It is no coincidence that the return to Althusser that is advocated today by a number of writers working within the poststructuralist tradition is often framed in terms of a battle “contra phenomenology” or to announce “the end of phenomenology.”24 The paradox is that the Lacanian reference is also a defining one in this post-Althusserian field.25 Indeed, the most illustrious contemporary critical theorists in that camp, thinkers such as Butler, Žižek, Laclau, or Mouffe, make reference to highly elaborate models of the psyche, usually Lacanian or at least “post-Freudian,” to ground their social and political theories.26 Indeed, despite his decisive rejection of the content of subjective experience as having any relevance in any aspect of philosophical work, Badiou has consistently developed his formal ontology in reference to Lacan.27 Assuming that “poststructuralist” critical theory forms a minimally homogeneous field (which it does institutionally), how is it possible to accommodate the extensive use of thick models of subjectivity, including psychoanalytical ones, while maintaining an anti-psychological and an anti-phenomenological stance? The answer to this conundrum seems to lie in two related assumptions of poststructuralist approaches, which are directly inherited from Lacan and Althusser, namely, that the individual desires are wholly shaped in their mediation through language; and that the social constitution of language makes the subject wholly dependent upon the overarching symbolic order as a result. Radical social constructivism, itself based on a discursivist conception of ontogenesis, makes it possible simultaneously to reject psychological and phenomenological arguments and to refer to thick theories of the human psyche, notably to psychoanalytical schemes, for social and political critique.
Rancière’s anti-psychologism is close to theories with a poststructuralist bent in that respect. In particular, he shares with poststructuralist thinkers the rejection of what he calls with disdain the reference to “flesh and blood,”28 that is, any reference to the somatic or affective dimensions of subjectivity as explanatory or diagnostic principles. Here, we should note in passing that Feuerbach has remained an odd, minor paradigmatic figure for Rancière, in a negative sense.29 But Rancière is squarely at odds with poststructuralist thinkers in relation to the hermeneutic of social experience. A defining Althusserian gesture that can be identified in numerous versions throughout poststructuralist writings, a gesture explicitly associated with Lacan’s own reappropriation of Freud, consists in describing the subject as a surface phenomenon produced by a structure that functions as an “absent cause.” A key methodological implication of this approach is that the many structural factors responsible for the content of subjectivity cannot be accessed by it, making the subject constitutively “mystified.”30 Such thick accounts of subjectivity therefore also provide—indeed they define as their major theoretical goal the ability to provide—an explanation as to why a hermeneutic of social experience not only cannot be trusted, but in fact is to be essentially distrusted. It is this very consequence that is at the heart of Rancière’s rupture with Althusserianism. The core Rancièrian objection to Althusserianism is precisely that the radical distrust of people’s voices and practices leads to theoretical and political elitism, which in the end reproduces the domination and social segregation it allegedly seeks to combat. Rancière defends the reference to experience in his anti-Althusserian charge, to the extent that human beings are speaking beings that can articulate their claims and organize and describe their own practices.31 This combination of antielitism and anti-psychologism leads him to take up a position that is precarious, since it is difficult to see how one can dissociate claims from the experience that these claims arise from, hermeneutics from phenomenology. Political claims arguably arise as claims about aspects of social reality, and since the claims are to be made by the agents themselves, some anchoring of politics within forms of experience appears inevitable. It is revealing that in passages in which the contentful aspect of recognition claims comes to the fore, Rancière names the social agents with the equivocal phrase of “speaking bodies,” a term that acknowledges and hides their “flesh” in the same movement.32
The conclusion that can be drawn from these parallel analyses is that Rancière’s constructivist conception of the political subject leads to a position that is, in some limited sense, comparable to Honneth’s institutionalist, social-theoretic turn in relation to the “subject of critical theory.” Both share the conviction that it is the role of theory to be attentive to the content of social experience, notably as it asserts itself historically.33 An important dimension of critical theory for them is to document and echo at the conceptual level the content of social expressions, notably the forms of the demands for emancipation, as they have manifested themselves through history. Similarly, both believe that it is not the role of critical theory to represent the full phenomenology of social suffering in theory. For both thinkers, social critique concerns contradictions within, or indeed of, the universal, and politics denotes a collective struggle to denounce and redress those contradictions inherent in the universal. Rancière’s argument that “anyone” can make themselves the political subject endorsing the struggle for recognition around a particular “tort” makes it perfectly clear that there is a disconnect between the actuality of a particular experience of injustice and the political demands arising from those experiences. Political struggle, for Rancière, is waged not over a specific form of social injustice, but rather at the second-order level of the capacity of subjects to be heard about that injustice. Ironically, such an emphasis on the discursive aspects of political struggle bears some resemblance with a proceduralist move of the kind Habermas advocated. Rancière famously expressed his disagreement with Habermas for assuming that the stage of communication is always already in place when in fact it is the very existence of such a space that is at stake in politics.34 And yet the distance that Rancière’s model instigates between suffering and injustice, on the one hand, and the contested access to representation and the space of reasons, on the other, is typically one also propounded by Habermas. Rancière’s conception of politics thus oddly but arguably resonates with the core insights of post-Habermasian models like those of Nancy Fraser, who makes “participatory parity” the core norm of critical theory, or the model developed by Rainer Forst, for whom the point of justice and of struggles against injustice is the right of individuals to have their voices count as expressions of reason and is, as a result, their demand to be treated as agents to whom reasons are due.35
One final remark is worth making in comparing the place and structure of subject-concepts in the critical theories of Rancière and Honneth. However paradoxical this might sound, it could be argued that their intellectual trajectories in relation to the phenomenological, “somatic” moment in critical theory are in fact running in opposite directions. In his early writings up to and including The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth sought to ground critical theory anthropologically, in a thick concept of self-realization with strong psychological traits. One aspect of this move was a deliberate critical stance toward Habermas, precisely on the question of the theoretical articulation of negative social experiences. The theory of recognition was developed notably in order to correct what the young Honneth perceived as the danger of overrationalization contained in Habermas’s grounding of critical theory in communication. One of the main points of the first theory of recognition was to allow a distinction to be made between the normative validity of claims of injustice based on an actual experience of injustice and the validity of the public expression of those claims. For the young Honneth, Habermas’s proceduralism, in defining normativity, ran the risk of collapsing the difference between the justification of the content of claims and the justification of the mode in which claims are made.36 The thick concept of self-realization was meant precisely to allow for the whole content of the nondiscursive in social experience (that is, affective and psychological states and embodied modes of social experiences), to receive its full place in the critical enterprise, not only at the descriptive level, but also in the normative grounding of critique. Increasingly however, Honneth has distanced himself from his early criticisms and has realigned his position with Habermas. He now agrees with Habermas about the need for normative claims to be universalizable so they can count as rightful claims.37 This comes across in our text when he now agrees with Rancière that the experience of suffering is not sufficient to ground by itself a valid political claim.
By contrast, in the shift from the historiography of the labor movement to the historiography of modern aesthetics, Rancière has reintegrated, in a certain sense, the somatic and the prediscursive, with direct implications for politics. In many passages in his aesthetic writings, Rancière seems to reinvest his subjects with an organic constitution; the “flesh” makes a reappearance at the heart of the theoretical exercise. This becomes particularly striking in Aisthesis, which extends the aesthetic framework developed over the last two decades into performance and minor art forms. The book can be read in part as a nonexhaustive study into the types of bodies that the modern regime of perception makes not only aesthetically possible but also politically relevant, from the fragmented, to the automated, to the passive body. At first, such an aesthetic taxonomy does not seem to bear on the social and the political. But the aesthetic and the political are intrinsically linked in Rancière. The aesthetic is inherently political since creative and artistic practices (which for him are not restricted to the high arts) are foremost in questioning an extant “sharing of the sensible.”
In fact, read from this aesthetic perspective, the central notion of the “sharing of the sensible” introduced in Disagreement takes on an irrepressible phenomenological dimension. Rancière thinks of social orders as structures in which the perception of and value attributed to “ways of doing, being and speaking” are socially framed and thus socially predetermined. The police is the institutional order that operates on the basis of, and in turn constantly reinstates, such sharing and distributing of what is socially perceptible. The mode of operation of the police thus intervenes directly in perception; it is a form of aisthesis. Rancière defines it as “a distribution of bodies according to their visibility and invisibility,”38 and as “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.”39 The terminology is unmistakably “transcendental.” Since the police designates the (socially produced) “a priori” conditions of perception and indeed anchors them in socially validated bodies, it can rightly be called phenomenological, in the technical sense of the term this time.
Politics, for Rancière, is the attempt to challenge this police-aisthesis and to construct another one, in other words, to install an alternative way to “count” bodies, parts, and their shares. But there are two possible ways to challenge a prevailing aisthesis. In Disagreement, the political contestation of the partage at the heart of the police order is mostly a discursive exercise, the contesting through argumentation of the exclusions from the common “stage.” To use Forst’s central concept, politics in Disagreement is a battle of justifications, mainly a battle about what counts as justification and who is entitled to proffer and expect justifications. In the later aesthetic writings, however, the emphasis shifts away from the exclusive agonism of logos, and the modes of contestation of the partages du sensible become more varied. In Aisthesis Rancière makes a concerted effort to highlight new modes of bodily activity and indeed new modalities of affectivity, made possible by the modern aesthetic regime, to present them as new modes of contestation of the a priori forms of experience that are consonant with bourgeois domination. The anarchistic bodies of clowns, the passive body of Julien Sorel, the automatic body of Charles Chaplin take on a revolutionary charge as they undermine the existing, hierarchical distribution of the sensible.
Even if the reference to these bodies is not psychological or anthropological, it takes Rancière’s framework well outside the poststructuralist model. The bodies in Rancière’s late work escape totalizing discursive and symbolic overdetermination; this is precisely what makes them rebellious bodies. Bodies in these writings enact an anarchistic principle: they literally embody radical equality by just being bodies that show, through their activities and indeed at times through their utter passivity, their resistance to “the big Other” of the partage du sensible, the capacity to escape social overdetermination. Aisthesis in many passages reads like a modernist illustration of Spinoza’s famous dictum—“nobody knows what a body is capable of”—and appears to elevate this to one of the privileged ways in which the utter contingency of every social “arkhe” can be questioned.
AUTONOMY AS FOUNDATIONAL NORM
Rancière resists Honneth’s grounding of critique and politics in the psychologically loaded concepts of integrity and identity. But these two concepts for Honneth are simply synonymous with autonomy or, even more simply, with freedom. Instead, Rancière wants to ground critique in the concept of equality. The discussion between the two philosophers regarding the correct concepts to use in order to “ground critique” is especially revealing of the underlying defining assumptions of each of their positions. It also points to a crucial element in any critical theory project more generally, namely, the “foundational” principle or norm that is to underpin such a project.
To begin with, it should be noted how striking it is that the confrontation between the two philosophers opens up such an alternative between equality and freedom. Radical-democratic conceptions of politics usually hold the two concepts together; indeed, the tension in their “co-originarity” is commonly an important aspect of a critical theory’s specific contribution.40 Such irreducibility holds not just for the European radical-democratic tradition, but also for much Anglo-American political philosophy, whether in liberal versions of egalitarianism,41 or radical versions of egalitarianism,42 or indeed for the capability approach.43 The same is also true for the many contemporary theorists inspired by Hannah Arendt, for whom political freedom both entails and realizes the equality of social participants.44 For most critical theorists, the irreducibility and co-originarity of the norms of equality and freedom are accepted as a basic assumption about modern society.
Honneth’s resistance toward equality as the foundational norm is twofold: it entails a conceptual and a methodological moment.
For Honneth, equality and liberty are not co-originary because demands for equality in fact only express some of the dimensions of a claim that is more fundamentally expressed as the need for autonomy, understood as the capacity for self-realization. Equality therefore has its place in Honneth’s thought, but is not sufficient to ground itself, as it were. It is interpreted by him as a particular way of cashing out the norm that is the one subjects really intend, namely, personal freedom in its multiple dimensions.
This “downgrading” of equality in terms of normative primacy occurs already in the writings of his middle period around The Struggle for Recognition and in the debate with Fraser. Equality in this first model is a valid norm in the second sphere of recognition; it distinguishes the status of modern individuals inasmuch as each and every one is to be considered worthy of respect. It is typically a normative status arising with modernity, linked to the horizontal universality of all agents. It articulates the fact that each and every individual has to be considered morally responsible and, to that extent, equally entitled to contribute to collective legislation, whether in a moral sense, in the constitution of a kingdom of ends, or in political terms, as a participant in citizenship. But in Honneth’s construct, this particular sense of equality only enacts specific dimensions of freedom as autonomy: in particular, the equality of status that is at stake here is a condition for freedom of conscience and civic freedom. Honneth makes full room for this egalitarian moment; indeed, he often highlights the importance of this norm by comparison with others. But the norm of equality is not placed at the same conceptual level as freedom precisely because Honneth defines freedom in a perfectionist way. Equality of status only makes explicit one of the senses in which modern individuals can be free and consequently one of the normative demands they’re entitled to make.
Equality in a distributive sense already comes into play in that second sphere as one of the ways in which equality of status translates into social rights, notably the social rights of full citizens.45 Finally, equality in a distributive sense arises a second time, this time in the third sphere of recognition, inasmuch as the demand for esteem recognition translates into the claims for a fair distribution of social goods as they relate to contributions to social cooperation. Here, Honneth reinterprets “geometrical” equality, an equality that can be unequal but fair inasmuch as it ensures that everyone receives their due in proportion to their specific contribution to social life. In these three senses, the different types of equality make explicit particular dimensions of the singular need or demand for self-realization. Equality in each case is grounded in liberty.
In Freedom’s Right, Honneth makes the conceptual primacy of freedom over equality even more explicit and basic. As he writes forcefully at the start:
I do not address the notion of “equality,” as influential and consequential as it might be, as an independent value because it can only be understood as an elucidation of the value of individual freedom, as the notion that all members of modern societies are equally entitled to freedom. Everything that can be said about the demand for social equality only makes sense in relation to individual freedom.46
Equality can be a normative claim only on the basis of the more fundamental claim arising in modernity, that all must be able to be free. The content of equality does not matter in this respect. Equality only comes into play as a universal demand, and the normative justification for this universality is the Hegelian requisite that “all must be free.” The universality of full freedom (autonomy), in all of its different articulations, is the core of any demand for equality.
Recent writings make explicit another set of arguments that were always in the background, namely, a polemical attack on the “distributionist” paradigm in political philosophy.47 From this perspective, it becomes problematic to make equality a primary norm, as this often leads to a misleading approach in political theory, one that conceives of the subject as an atomic entity that can survey its own goods as possessions and to whom primary goods are to be equally distributed as possessions. In this case, Honneth’s qualm about equality as a primary norm is that it misdescribes what justice is about. Justice from his neo-Hegelian perspective is not primarily about the fair distribution or redistribution of social goods, but about equal access to the conditions of self-realization. Equality does feature there, but in a variety of meanings, not all reducible to distribution. And once again, the conceptual work is done by freedom and the universality imperative. To make distribution, or redistribution, the driving methodological tool, or to express the problem of justice in the grammar of distribution, is to put the theory on the wrong track. And as Honneth asserts, such inadequate conceptual grammar is directly responsible for the disconnection between political philosophy and political reality.
Honneth’s favoring of liberty over equality is of course different from the way in which mainstream political liberalism makes liberty the prime value, lexically preceding considerations of fair distribution or redistribution. This substantial difference relates to the different conceptions of freedom at play in the liberal tradition and in the tradition from which Honneth’s philosophy emerges. Honneth’s concept of freedom, as recalled, is a perfectionist one.48 It is defined by reference to the telos of a state of unhindered individual flourishing resulting from ideal supporting social conditions. We might call it Aristotelian based on the current carving up of the theoretical field in contemporary ethics, but of course this strong perfectionism does not take its roots in Aristotle, but rather in the post-Hegelian heritage, in the tradition stemming from Feuerbach and an anthropologically read Marx, all the way to first-generation critical theory. Placing Honneth’s philosophy in the intellectual tradition from which it emerges is useful because it immediately makes clear what theoretical benefits it is hoped can be drawn from such a strong perfectionist approach in social and political philosophy. The strong perfectionism of the post-Hegelian scene allows theorists to tie normative considerations in moral and political philosophy, with substantive considerations about subjectivity and society. From this perfectionist perspective, it makes sense to favor freedom over equality as the most fundamental norm. Equality is indeed something that can be demanded. As we saw, there is no debate about its importance in real moral and political conflicts. But equality arises as a demand only for beings whose core interest lies elsewhere, namely, in the integrity of their own person. There are two meanings of “justice” from this perspective: a general one, whereby justice is the universal ideal condition allowing for the flourishing of each and every person; and specific senses of justice that spell out the different ways in which that universal demand can be more specifically cashed out in the institutional complexity of social life. Indeed, as Marx’s polemic against equality in the Critique of the Gotha Program indicates, equality can even be a dubious or ambiguous norm for emancipatory politics. In this polemic Marx directly anticipates the complex intricacies that arise as soon as a theory of justice is defined in terms of the correct method for devising fair distribution or redistribution. By contrast, the principle of maximum individual flourishing puts a clear constraint on the rule of equality, thereby proving the methodological primacy of freedom over equality.
Another significant aspect is the scope of social transformation that a particular political-theory paradigm countenances as a result of its very theoretical setup. The emphasis on social relations underpinning the conditions of individual freedom and the consonant rejection of the distributionist and proceduralist paradigms do not necessarily amount to a more “radical” agenda, but at the very least they stem from a more radical tradition of political thinking. This is the tradition within political philosophy, with Marx as its main proponent, which considers that it is insufficient in practical terms and theoretically wrong-headed to consider issues in politics independent of the modality of social relations. Because in this tradition a close connection is established between politics and social relations, a third core value next to freedom and equality also arises as part of the normative fundament, namely, the value of solidarity. Again, this core value runs through the tradition from which Honneth’s model has grown. Honneth explicitly retrieves Hegelian Sittlichkeit in this sense,49 but the value of solidarity, that is, the requisite of reciprocal support and its attendant practical consequences between coparticipants in society, is also a fundamental value in pre-Marxist socialist and Marxist politics.50
Honneth’s critical perspective on the distributionist approach in political philosophy is shared by a number of other critical theorists.51 However, in these other models, freedom and equality are presented as equally important norms, neither of which is reducible to the other. By contrast, the primacy of freedom advocated by Honneth stands out. This appears most strikingly by contrast with the model elaborated by David Miller in Principles of Social Justice. Even though Miller’s writings do not exactly fit within the “critical theory” field as it was vaguely defined at the start, reference to his model is still appropriate since, as Honneth himself has noted, Miller’s theory of justice overlaps with Honneth’s in substantive ways.52 Miller argues, like Honneth, that the norms of justice are to be reconstructed empirically from specific types of social interaction. And he lists three spheres of justice that overlap very well with Honneth’s spheres of recognition. Miller, however, contrasts two independent concepts of equality. The second, social equality, corresponds to the kind of equality Honneth considers a dimension of the social conditions enabling individual freedom. But Miller argues strongly that another, independent concept of equality needs to be distinguished from social equality, namely, equality as distributive justice, equality as receiving what one is due. Using Miller as a germane reference helps us to raise skeptical questions in relation to Honneth’s downgrading of equality: Is justice understood simply as the demand to receive what you are due (whether in material or symbolic terms) soluble in freedom? Is justice in this sense only something people request in order to achieve or assert their freedom or does the norm have authority on its own? Can’t individuals be free and yet suffer from an unjust distribution or redistribution? Are struggles for distributive justice always to be interpreted as struggles for (the conditions of) freedom?
For other critics of distributionist approaches such as Rainer Forst, these questions do not raise any specific problem because the fundamental norm they use is not perfectionist autonomy, but individual dignity, whose political significance is cashed out in terms of a right to justification. From that perspective, the distinction between social equality and distributive equality can be retained but the two concepts can be hypostatized under the more fundamental demand to be treated equally as a being to whom justification and the capacity to engage in justificatory practices are due. Distributive justice from this point of view is just one aspect of the social practices about which justificatory procedures are to be put in place.
For Honneth, however, the independence of distributive equality from social equality is a problem. We are so used to thinking about a human being’s moral status in Kantian terms that we struggle to understand the assertion of that moral status, which translates into the idea that justice is due to that being, in terms other than the recognition of that being’s capacity for autonomy. Honneth’s account of distributive equality through the second and third spheres of recognition rehearses that Kantian background. But Miller’s case for an analytical distinction between distributive and social equality and Rancière’s formal, “ontological” defense of equality both suggest in different ways that it is possible to question this link between equality and freedom, which reduces the demand for equality to an aspect of autonomy. It is conceivable that equality has its own normative authority, independently, in some cases at least, of the recognition of autonomy. If that were true, it would simply be a primitive meaning of justice, independent of the recognition of one’s freedom, to demand to receive one’s due. There might be many possible links between the two norms, but it is conceivable that two interrelated core meanings of justice are simply: to “receive what you are due” and “to give to others what they are due and nothing more.” Indeed, against the dualism of meanings of justice presented by Miller, one could argue that it is in fact distributive equality that constitutes the core sense of justice. This would be distributive equality no longer understood in an economist, or “distributionist,” sense, but understood “social-ontologically,” as the demand expressed by each and every person that they should receive what they are due and should give to others only what others are due.
This question is inherently linked to the problem of historicism. The Kantian assumption regarding the analytical link between equality and freedom functions particularly well in a modernist framework, in which the demand for equal treatment can be presented as one dimension of the horizontal universalism that has become the overarching normative principle. But we can remark that in “premodern” periods, in which social life was not already underpinned by such universalistic concern for equality of status, demands for equality still flourished. Individuals and groups might well have accepted partial forms of differentiated treatment, and yet they often insisted on being treated justly, that is, in term of receiving and giving whatever the symbolic framework at the time deemed “just.” To preempt the example used in the discussion below, what the German peasants rejected in the war of 1525 was not the tithe or feudal justice, but the arbitrariness with which these were administered.53 In their famous “twelve articles,” they were at pains to present themselves as good Christians who understood the necessity for the tithe and feudal justice, and yet they were infuriated by the breach of the agreed code on the part of their rulers. They rebelled against serfdom, and the recrimination against arbitrariness and oppressive taxes can indeed be interpreted as a primitive demand for personal freedom. But these calls were made in the name of justice. Their calls for Freiheit were underpinned by a universalistic principle, namely, the equal moral standing of each and every person, as creatures sharing the same ontological status under God. Freedom in their argument was therefore a consequence of the equal status of all good Christians, a consequence of ontological equality. We might say that the normative basis of their demand for Freiheit was a primitive demand for justice, as a just treatment that anyone should be able to receive. A similar analysis can be conducted regarding many social struggles of the past.54 Because of his historicist filter, Honneth can only interpret equality as a modern achievement. But historical hermeneutics proves that the primitive sense of justice of even the most oppressed has from time immemorial arisen when individuals have felt that they have not receive their due, or have had to give more than was right (in particular their bodily existence through work efforts, or indeed their life itself).
RADICAL EQUALITY
Rancière makes equality the central principle in his own version of critical theory: “Equality is the only universal in politics.”55 From Honneth’s point of view, the only way to describe such a principle, because of the function it has in Rancière’s theory, is that it is a norm. Rancière, true to the “poststructuralist” suspicion toward normativity, wholly rejects this terminology. So how can equality be used as a principle to guide the critique of “postdemocratic” society or of hierarchically organized theories or as a principle to distinguish police from politics without being used in a “normative” way? Strictly speaking, Rancière would probably have to agree that used in the critical diagnosis of postdemocracy or as a critical guideline in responding to the philosophers who presume the existence of “the poor,” equality is used in normative ways, as criterion for critique. But the highly specific way in which Rancière conceptualizes equality justifies his rejection of the term “norm” to designate it.
Equality, for Rancière, is a structural fact of society, a basic building block of any human communal life. Any “arkhe,” that is, any principle (such as age, wealth, or knowledge) behind the hierarchies, which, from time immemorial, have structured societies, is fundamentally contingent, justified by nothing but its own self-given authority and the sheer power attached to it. Underneath the irreducible inequality that organizes all social life, there lurks therefore the ontological equality of anyone with anyone, an equality that is glimpsed at the rare moments of revolt when the contingency of domination becomes visible. At those moments, it becomes clear that anyone could in fact be in the position of anyone else. Equality, for Rancière, is therefore not a norm because it is a structural element of social life. This is what lends it its force, a force that is derived not from moral authority, but from the universal feature of being human and living in a human community: no order of domination, no hierarchical system can ever fully repress this fact of social life.
Equality, in Rancière, of course does have clear social, political, economic, and legal dimensions. In some passages, it almost sounds like the moral equality articulated by Kant, the equality due to every rational being qua rational, an equality of status.56 Rancière’s social equality can even mean something like an ethical equality, in the Hegelian sense of the term.57 It is also an equality of capacities, when Rancière famously endorses Jacotot’s idea of “equality of intelligence.” But all those dimensions are only secondary manifestations of a more primordial sense, which is the “ontological,” formal sense of the term.
Equality, for Rancière, is first of all a structural fact and secondly a method. The “method of equality” arises as a countermethod to the methods used in many areas of (European) political philosophy and the social sciences, in which a key aim of the theoretical exercise seems to be “the verification of inequality.” This designates the circular enterprise consisting in highlighting through conceptual argument and empirical measures how social agents verify for themselves and in themselves, as it were, the multifarious social inequalities already postulated by theory. The method of equality reacts to this by verifying the effects of the opposite presupposition: in theory, it looks at what happens to political philosophy, to conceptions of the social, when the equality of the individuals (for instance, the equality of their capacity for reasoned discourse or for understanding) is posited, rather than their opposite. And in practice, it looks at what happens when people assumed to be incapable of acting or thinking for themselves actually act in such a way as to disprove this.
Rancière’s emphasis on equality does not mean that he reverses Honneth’s hierarchy of principles and grounds the value of freedom in equality. Rather, freedom, in Rancière, is one way to express the value of equality as antithetical, radically universalistic opposition to differential, hierarchical treatment. Freedom is the quality shared by each and every person inasmuch as they are considered from the perspective of equality, both in theory and in practice, both in themselves and for themselves. As a quality shared by all and thus as one that differentiates no one, it grounds no possible judgment of value, it is a nonquality. And it is a capacity that does not have to be attached to any substantial psychological reality.
Freedom and equality, in Rancière, are thus empty concepts. This is clearly another area where the Althusserian legacy has left its mark. His radical anti-subjectivism leads to a purely formal definition of equality and freedom. Equality is what allows different human beings to be compared when every natural difference has been bracketed. What remains is the pure, empty capacity to speak. Indeed, since speech cannot be relevant as the expression of anything natural or subjective, or indeed anything cultural or social, it is the capacity to speak rationally, to “think,” that matters. Politics, for Rancière, is raising a claim in this capacity on the basis of a particular social site or type of experience in which that capacity is denied. But the claim is not about the specifics of that social site. Rather, it is about drawing the consequences that issue once people in that specific position are recognized as having the same empty universal validity as any other.
This formal approach to equality is very close to the one developed by another one of Althusser’s philosophical successors in France, namely, Alain Badiou. Since we have witnessed the rise in recent years of an ontological approach within the broad field of critical theory, particularly in relation to political questions, for the purposes of the panorama this presentation seeks to sketch, it is worth dwelling briefly on some of the similarities and differences between Badiou’s and Rancière’s “critical theories.”
Points of overlap between them are multiple. They share the rejection of cultural, psychological, anthropological, and phenomenological groundings of political claims; as a result, they share the rejection of identity as a relevant category for politics, which puts them at odds with many other currents in poststructuralist thought.58 They both propound a conception of political agency based on the notion of a “subject without subjectivity.” The political subject, for them, is limited to the intellectual and practical responses made by individuals, independent of the contentful aspects of their otherwise existing identities, to the objective demands arising from a radical rupture in the order of things, in other words, the demands arising from an “event.” Only radical politics, politics that radically questions the order of things, merits the name of politics. Any other type of collective deliberation, expression, or self-organization only concerns the organization and reproduction of society in its “parts,” that is, the hierarchically based apportioning of particular beings to specific functions via the specific mechanisms of “police” (Rancière) or “State” (Badiou) institutions. Any other form of social action, as Honneth would say, is for them in fact the negation of politics. It seems fair to say that their thoughts rely on an opposition that is typical of the post-Althusserian intellectual landscape in France, opposing political to social mechanisms.59 Their dislike for psychology extends to sociology and is shared by many of their peers of the same generation.
A number of problems arise from such exclusivist conceptions of politics and such undifferentiated approaches to social reality. I will highlight only two problems that are shared by them to some extent, but in the end distinguish Rancière’s from Badiou’s conception.
To begin with, the relationship between equality and political practice is not entirely clear in their models. Since they both define politics as a radical rupture with the institutional logics that apportion social agents to particular functions, equality cannot be the aim of political action, since that would dissolve politics into social mechanisms. As Badiou writes, equality is “not an objective of action.”60 However, to refuse to make equality “an objective of action” seems problematic for a model of egalitarian politics, especially one that defines itself as being radical, that is, presumably, as intending to produce radical effects in reality. Indeed, in other passages, Badiou clearly has in view precisely those effects when he also defines politics as “producing the same” and “working to produce equality.”61 In this latter case, however, it is hard to see what differentiates in essence, or “ontologically,” the “bad” state of the situation with which the event has produced a rupture and the new state of the situation as the outcome of the production of equality. For, if anything has to be “produced” in the serious sense of the term, if there has to be some truly productive “work” leading to equality, then surely that involves the collective coming together and organizing itself anew, in a mode that would still have to be called a “state of the situation,” in the sense in which Badiou defines it,62 even if that state is intrinsically different in its modalities from the previous one. After all, the ontological “state of the situation” and the political State are related only metaphorically,63 so that it is conceivable that there would be an ontological state that would not be immediately captured in State institutions. Precisely, the new structures produced by the rupture with the existing order would be egalitarian ones, and achieving these would seem to be the point of egalitarian politics. The militancy of truth that defines political agency, that is, the faithfulness to an event that provoked a radical-egalitarian opening in the hierarchical structure of the state (of the situation), surely cannot be all there is to politics. That would reduce the content of politics to its mere subjective aspects; it would reduce politics to an aesthetic and rhetoric of rebellion without content. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how the objective dimension of politics could not involve precisely the kinds of collective expression, organization, and representation that Badiou so thoroughly rejects (indeed, his own movement is called Organisation politique). The universal that politics is intrinsically about cannot merely be the universal address retrospectively implied in a subjective embrace of an event; the universal involved in politics surely has to be also the “object” of politics.
Even though Disagreement seems to shares many assumptions with Badiou in a general sense, Rancière’s model does not fall prey to exactly the same problem. As we saw above, in his definition of politics, Rancière puts the emphasis on the second-order issue of who is entitled to take part in collective deliberation over particular objects, spaces, and forms of experiences. The dissensus cannot directly concern the objects themselves, as this would dissolve politics into questions of “police order.” But the objects, or the spaces, or the forms of experience over which a dissensus arises continue to be linked to the dissensus. Indeed, without them, there would be no dissensus. As a consequence of this, if a litige is truly resolved in favor of equality, the realization of equality in discourse (the recognition of the invisible beings as speaking beings) has to take effect through the realization of equality in relation to the objects or the structure of spaces that were at stake in the litige. “Those who have no part” would then receive their parts. Of course, this might immediately institute a new order of police and new forms of hierarchy and inequality. But the test of politics for Rancière does not just lie in the moment of rupture but also contains, at least as an indirect consequence, the social realization of equality. Indeed, if the proletarian studies of the 1970s are the source of his later ontological analyses, it can be noted that in these studies Rancière was particularly interested in concrete plans for organization. The positive model that inspired his critique of Althusser was the “association of free producers.”64
Another issue concerns the relationship between theory and practice, philosophy and politics. Badiou consistently argues that philosophy is “under the condition” of politics as a specific “truth-procedure.” This means that philosophy, whose specific epistemic fields and methods are ontological formalization and conceptual calculus, can only produce political arguments and conclusions by, as it were, learning from politics in the first place where and how it occurs. Philosophy, for Badiou, is appropriation in thought of the thought that is constitutive of real politics.65 For philosophy to have any (philosophical) relevance, the thought involved in philosophy therefore has to be different from the thought involved in politics. The difference seems to be close to the difference between universal and particular: the thought involved in politics consists in the prescribing of, and following up on, the consequences of the axiom of equality at a particular site. If we take Being and Event as a guide, philosophy on the other hand seems to entail the thought of politics in general, the thinking of the essence or Idea of politics. Philosophy as a matter of fact can define the Idea of politics independently of real politics, that is, in pure formal, mathematical terms. So philosophy is under the condition of politics only in relation to particular political events, not in relation to the Idea of politics. Philosophy can define politics by itself, and in relation to real politics, its task is to “seize” in the form of the concept the thought that is developed there and then by political agents.66
The classical problem of the relationship between theory and practice, philosophy and politics, arises for the political ontology approach in particularly acute fashion. It can be noted that this is precisely the problem that, from the start, forced the Frankfurt School to engage in complex methodological reflections, and that explains many of its defining features, notably its insistent relationship to sociological and psychological scholarship.
Badiou in his philosophical texts on politics always refers substantially to the history of radical emancipatory movements (the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, or the Cultural Revolution in China), to the extent that his reconstructions of the onto-logy at play in those events look like a form of historical hermeneutics expressed in formal language, a translation of “real” radical politics in ontological categories analyzed in axiomatic style. Indeed, this would fit well with the idea that philosophy is under conditions of politics. But this cannot be the case, since philosophy is also able to define politics by itself in pure ontological terms. Indeed, this capacity is necessary if philosophy is to be able to produce philosophical “assessments” of political sequences, that is, judge political sequences armed with the ontological categories and expectations developed by philosophy.67 We can see a circle emerge here regarding the relationship between the philosophical assessment of politics and political practice in the very foundations of philosophical discourse over politics. If the definition of politics as radical egalitarian rupture takes its referent from specific emancipatory experiences, then it cannot claim at the same time to arrive at a definition of politics in strictly immanent fashion, via a process of pure axiomatic deduction. The deduction is in fact only a formalization of real episodes. But if that’s the case, then the highly specific conception of politics that separates true politics from false is justified in a circular fashion—in the end, it hangs only on a subjective decision without real justification: history provides the substance from which philosophy axiomatically deduces a definition of politics, but it is with the help of such formal categories that philosophy is able to extract the political substance from history. A different philosophical outlook, one concerned with other issues of justice, could just as well develop a different circular dance between historical instantiation and ontological deduction.
Rancière’s mode of thinking and writing about politics seems to lead him into the same circle, namely, to project into political history the very categories that philosophy is supposed to learn from history. In the end, however, Rancière’s more explicit hermeneutic dependence on historical movements seems to avoid this apparent circle. Rancière’s “hermeneutic” approach means that, in principle, the evaluation of a real political action occurs from within, out of the immanent unfolding of the consequences of the discursive sequence that is studied and of the militant actions related to it. Indeed, since Rancière steadfastly refuses the language of normative categories, evaluations usually remain ambiguous. Rancière typically lets readers be the judge for themselves of where particular uses of discourse and types of action have led the agents. Or we might say that he lets history be the judge of how a political rupture would have evolved. Despite the superficial similarity of their “axiomatic” styles, Rancière’s political ontology is in fact the explicit product of his critical historical hermeneutics; it explicitly formalizes the results of his long work in the archives of the “proletarian dream.” Key passages of such historical hermeneutics provide direct resources for “ontological” arguments. If there is a process of formalization at play in Rancière, beyond the axiomatic rhetoric, it is a process of generalization from proletarian examples to all egalitarian politics. This is actually different from the practice consisting in formalizing paradigmatic examples, which are then reassessed formally, with history and ontology confirming each other in circular fashion.
THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY
Both Rancière and Honneth take up methodological positions that can be described as historicist. For each of them, however, the historicist dimension of critical theory brings specific problems. Historicism is the methodological position which holds that key moral and political principles, or, as Honneth says, the normative fabric of a given epoch, change substantially over time, so that any relationship drawn between the past and the present, in either direction, is unwarranted. Critical analyses of the present do not apply in the past. And nothing can be deduced from past societies to our own. In particular, essentializing arguments that make normative points on the basis of features of the human that are supposed to be transhistorical are false. As the work of Foucault demonstrates, it takes an arduous work of historical reconstruction to grasp the specificity of an epoch, and that work shows precisely the extent to which the normative fabric of different epochs varies.
This seems to be one of the most commonly shared assumptions in the contemporary humanities in general, and in the different styles of “critical theory” in particular. For critical theorists, however, whose theoretical tasks are supposed to be defined in relation to collective struggles for emancipation, the skeptical consequence of historicism has a serious downfall. It prevents critical theory from establishing any link with “premodern” social movements, even if in some cases these might appear to bear striking similitude with modern ones. Indeed, it is often the case that critical theorists at one point or another in their writings forget the historicist imperative and relapse into continuist arguments between a past collective movement and modern politics. The problem is compounded for critical theorists who want to retain some sort of link, at whichever level that might be, with Marxism. For Marx and Engels were themselves strongly historicist, of course, always emphasizing the specificities of the modern mode of production and therefore also of contemporary politics. And yet, just as for Hegel, this historicism also accommodated a strong continuist line, made possible in particular by a tendency to reconstruct human history in a teleological way. As a result of this, past struggles for emancipation were often viewed by classical Marxists as direct anticipations of the revolution to come, just as past forms of domination and exploitation, however distinct they might have been, were also commensurable to the extent that they entailed social domination based on and expressed in the domination of the owners of the means of production over the workers.68 In a text such as the Peasant War in Germany, for instance, Engels returned to the peasant struggles of the early sixteenth century to develop a political analysis based on a substantive comparison between these ancient social wars and the unfolding and ultimate failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany. Today, Badiou pursues this line of argument, with his anti-Hegelian claim that “history does not exist,”69 combined with the appeal to something like a transhistory of emancipatory struggles, incarnated in the pantheon of the heroes of equality: Spartacus, Thomas Muenzer, Robespierre, Jacquou le Croquant, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Lenin, and Mao, to name but a few of the revolutionary heroes.70
How does Rancière deal with the historicist conundrum? Many passages in his writings appear to give credence to the idea that Rancière’s position on that point is comparable to that of Badiou since there is a direct line running from the paradigmatic example of the Plebeians retreating on the Aventine and the nineteenth-century workers on whose behalf Blanqui was speaking.71 In other passages, Rancière seems to rely on the idea that past proletarian struggles function like “inscriptions of equality” that leave their mark and become references for the struggles that follow.72 These inscriptions are important in several ways. They provide not just historical examples in the exemplary sense of the term. They can also provide the discursive principles or tools that a political struggle requires to argue the case of equality.73 And in many passages, Rancière argues along lines that directly echo Marx and Engels’s famous pronouncement about the transhistorical presence of class domination beyond the diversity of its social forms, that is, the fact that all society obeys “laws of gravity,” as Jacotot metaphorically said.74 Both the police and the interruption of the police by egalitarian interventions appear to be universal features of human societies, at least those in which the rich and the poor, the free and the unfree, are divided. Honneth picks up on this when he repeatedly asks Rancière about the anthropological basis of his claims. For Honneth, this is the most obvious way to understand a categorization of politics that spans the centuries in such a direct and formal way.
On the other hand, Rancière is also explicit in his continued reliance on Althusser in rejecting the idea of history as a continuum, most especially if that continuum is supposed to be one of normative progress.75 Furthermore, the historical material of choice, for Rancière, is obviously the nineteenth century. Rancière’s historicism is most pronounced in his aesthetics, since the delineation of the regimes of the arts, at least in its initial presentation, ties the aesthetic regime substantially to modernity. To say this in a pointed way, Aisthesis might seek to replicate Auerbach’s Mimesis, but while the latter spanned the whole history of realist literature from the New Testament to Virginia Woolf, Rancière’s story starts with Winckelmann and German Romanticism. Rancière does make the point at times that the three regimes are not to be read as three stages in the unfolding of (Western) aesthetics. The ethical and the poetic regimes coexist in ancient Greece, and indeed the three regimes can be found in different modes of articulation in modern aesthetics. Cinema in particular combines the different regimes.76 Nevertheless, the aesthetic regime is definitely specific to postrevolutionary society. Rancière might be antihistoricist in relation to politics, but he generally defends historicism in aesthetics. This might represent a problem for him since his politics and aesthetics are intrinsically related. Literarity, for instance, designates an essential aspect of politics, the availability of “the letter” (signifiers and signified) to everyone, which enables anyone to place themselves in a position to argue for equality, practically and discursively. But literarity is strongly associated with modernity.77 It seems as though the suspicion inherited from Althusser toward transhistorical arguments is actually contradicted in several parts of his writings.
For Honneth, a similar problem arises. His position is unabashedly historicist, beyond the major shifts in his work. The three spheres of recognition as they are presented in The Struggle for Recognition arise from the historical emergence of new normative spheres, resulting from the demise of an obsolete way of grounding status in distinctions that are metaphysically shored up. Liberty, equality, fraternity, in Honneth’s reconstruction, are new norms, without equivalent in the past. He reasserts this explicitly in his dialogue with Rancière.78 In the new model presented in Freedom’s Right, the spheres of recognition now take place in a more complex normative reconstruction, but modernity still represents a normative threshold below which critical theory need not go. Critical theory is the critical theory of modern society, and in order to conduct its critical work, it only need rely on modern norms, norms that allegedly appear for the first time with modern society. These assumptions are also the most commonly shared assumptions in contemporary social and political philosophy, to the extent that it would seem foolish to try to question them.79
In some of his earlier writings, however, Honneth felt the force of an appeal to past struggles. This comes out especially clearly in a text published just after The Struggle for Recognition, in which he sought to present Benjamin’s philosophy of history as recognition of the emancipatory potential of past struggles.80 Chapter 8 of The Struggle for Recognition, in which Honneth draws out the implications of his theory of recognition for the interpretation of social struggles, can be read in a manner that deemphasizes the restriction to “posttraditional society,” so that the model becomes applicable and indeed allows one to make sense of, for example, the sixteenth-century peasant wars.
A significant problem related to historicism for an approach like that of Honneth concerns the normative teleology that is explicitly attached to his theory of modernity. Most if not all critical theory models today are historicist, simply because constructivism is the default position. But in most cases such historicism is combined with a critical stance toward the norms that are supposed to make up the specificity of modernity. Honneth, by contrast, has embraced a full-fledged teleological Hegelian narrative according to which a substantive completion of human freedom is achieved with modernity. This of course relates to the most basic bone of contention in the earlier confrontations between “French” and “German” critical theory models, namely, the normative appraisal of modernity. The model Honneth presents in Freedom’s Right will encounter much criticism, from many corners of the critical field, because of this positive appraisal of the norms and principles of modernity. The criticism will most likely not be limited to Marxist critiques of neoliberal society. Honneth’s analysis of modern society will also be at odds with the many authors who use the work of Foucault as their central inspiration. For these critical theorists, most particularly for Giorgio Agamben, arguably one of the most eminent and influential critical theorists today, the critical task in fact consists precisely in unveiling in Heideggerian fashion the potentials for oppression and violence that are hidden in modernity’s defining categories and institutional principles.81 Another important author to mention in this context, whose work presents theses and assumptions directly opposed to those of Honneth, is James Tully.82 Tully has long been a critic of the methods of the Frankfurt School.83 In recent years he has developed a rich model of “public philosophy,” inspired by the Foucault of “What Is Enlightenment?,” for a political philosophy that would be directly connected to real political practice, an alternative version therefore of the classical ideal of a unity of theory and practice devised by the Frankfurt School. In Tully’s work, the Foucauldian reference is used not just to shore up the methodological features of his historicist and relativist agonistic position. Foucault is also used as a key inspiration for the powerful historical account Tully offers concerning the violence he claims was involved in the imposition of extraneous norms onto the bodies and minds of populations that were forcefully introduced to the institutional worlds of modern citizenship, as well as in the marginalization of populations reticent about these forms of governmental normalization. From the point of view of critical historical and conceptual narratives such as those developed recently by Agamben and Tully, Honneth’s account of the rise of personal freedom in modernity will meet with the similar type of reaction Habermas encountered in the first wave of German versus French theory encounters. Conversely, of course, Honneth can ask of these authors the same type of questions that Habermas and the Habermasians asked of the French poststructuralists a few decades ago, namely, on what normative grounds, and through which articulation of normative criteria and factual knowledge, they base their dismissals of modernity and of its critical defenders. From the Honnethian perspective, it is simply inconsistent to denounce all reference to normativity while propounding a critical theory of society, since only a form of critique that is able to justify its criteria is theoretically sound. On this particular point, given the continued prevalence of the Foucauldian reference in the broad field of critical theory, the lines have not moved much between “normativists” and “anti-normativists” since the first skirmishes with Habermas. This most recent encounter between two eminent representatives of the German and French traditions of critical theory appears to be just a new episode in this well-entrenched debate.