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CRITICAL QUESTIONS ON THE THEORY OF RECOGNITION

JACQUES RANCIÈRE

AT THE outset of our discussion, it might be important to recall a sentence that can be found in the foreword to Disagreement: if the invitation to debate is to bear any fruit, the encounter must identify its point of “disagreement.”¹ Accordingly I will try to identify the kind of disagreement between recognition and disagreement that can make the discussion fruitful. The problem is further complicated by the fact that we are discussing concepts in translation. “Dis-agreement” renders the untranslatable term mésentente, which plays on the relation between entendre, to “hear,” and entendre, to “understand.” This relation between the two meanings of sense (sense as meaning and sense as perception) tends to be erased in the term “disagreement,” which is less aesthetic and more juridical, and which presupposes relationships between already constituted persons regarding an object of disagreement. I suspect that the term “recognition” might also emphasize a relationship between already existing entities. So our joint intention to agree about our disagreement will be mediated by the relationship between three languages—German, French, and English. I think we must not deem it incidental. We have to take into account the distortion that is inherent in any process of communication. An act of communication is already an act of translation, located on a terrain that we don’t master. This is also what is entailed in the notion of mésentente: the distortion at the heart of any mutual dialogue, at the heart of the form of universality on which dialogue relies.

It is important to raise this point in order to discard an issue that is often raised in the German-French philosophical discussion, namely, the issue of “relativism.” On the German side, there is frequently the fear that if you take into account the distortion of the relationship along with the asymmetry of positions, you take on a “relativist” position and invalidate any claims of universal validity. For my part I believe the opposite might in fact be the case. Taking distortion and asymmetry into account leads to a more demanding form of universalism—a form of universalism that is not limited to the rule of the game but designates a permanent struggle to enlarge the restricted form of universalism that is the rule of the game, the invention of procedures that make the existing universal confront and supersede its limitations.

Now I come to the main point: how do recognition and the struggle for recognition fit with this idea of universality? As Axel Honneth puts it to work, the concept of recognition supposes a distancing from the usual meaning of the term. “Recognition” usually means two things. It means, first, the coincidence of an actual perception with a knowledge that we already possess, as when we recognize a place, a person, a situation, or an argument. Second, from a moral point of view, recognition means that we respond to the claim of other individuals who demand that we treat them as autonomous entities or equal persons. Both meanings are predicated on the idea of a substantive identity. In this sense, what is crucial is the “re-” of recognition. Recognition is an act of confirmation. By contrast, the philosophical concept of recognition focuses on the conditions behind such a confirmation; it focuses on the configuration of the field in which things, persons, situations, and arguments can be identified. It is not the confirmation of something already existing but the construction of the common world in which existences appear and are validated. In this case, recognition comes first. It is what allows us to know, to locate and identify anything in the first place. In the usual sense, recognition therefore means: I identify this voice, I understand what it tells me, I agree with his or her statement. But in its conceptual meaning, recognition is about something more fundamental: What exactly happens in my perceptual world and in my capacity to make sense with the sounds being issued by that mouth? How does it happen that I hear this voicing as an argument about something that we share, about a common world? When Aristotle distinguishes logos and phonè, this is a structure of recognition or, in my terms, a distribution of the sensible. This structure opens a field that is at once a field of identification and a field of conflict about identification, since it is always controversial whether the animal mouthing a voice in front of me is saying something common about the common. Speaking of recognition in terms of the struggle for recognition, as Axel Honneth does, clearly echoes this polemical idea of recognition. The point I would like to make here is this: How far does the concept that makes recognition the object of a struggle depart from the two presuppositions entailed in the usual meaning of the term, namely, the identification of preexisting entities and the idea of a response to a demand? How far does it depart from an identitarian conception of the subject and from the conception of social relations as mutual?

The question is worth asking because, at the heart of Axel Honneth’s construction, there is a notion of the subject that has a strong consistency as a self-related identity, and there is also a strong emphasis on the community as a nexus of interrelations based on a model of mutual recognition. His theory of recognition is two things at once. It is a theory of the construction of the self, showing that the three requirements for this construction—self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem—are dependent on the mediation of an other. And it is a theory of the community asserting that the existence of a common world is a matter of intersubjective relationships: a community isn’t a utilitarian gathering of individuals who need cooperation with other individuals for the fulfillment of their needs and legal regulation to be protected against their encroachments. It is made up of people who construct themselves to the extent that they construct, even through struggle, relations of confidence, respect, and esteem with other people. In that way an antisolipsist view of the individual chimes with an antiutilitarian view of the community. The tripartite division of love, rights, and solidarity is grounded in a similar principle. A common element can be found in a multiplicity of relationships: the child with his mother, the lover with the loved one, the juridical subject making contracts, the civil subject obeying the common law, or the political subject constructing a world of mutual recognition. The question is, do we need this common principle? Do we need to construct a theory of the subjective entity grounding the homology of all those relationships? And what is the cost of this homology? From my point of view, the cost might be the overstatement of identity, thinking the activity of a subject mainly as an affirmation of self-identity—even if, of course, it is quite different from many other discourses on identity.

Second, I think there may be an overstatement of the importance of the dual relation in the thinking of the community. For me, there is a risk here of losing sight of the operative aspects of the work of recognition. Axel Honneth openly starts from Hegel, that is, from a construction of the community around the notion of person: the person as an autonomous entity, able to identify itself as autonomous and knowing that the others identify him or her as such. At the same time, the person, of course, is able to answer for her acts, to account for them, to take on responsibility for them. I think the Hegelian schema is constructed around a juridical definition of the person. It seems to me that Axel Honneth’s own contribution in this respect has two main aspects. First, he wants to enlarge this conception of personality by linking it to the givens of the anthropological construction of human individual identity. Second, he wants to supersede it by placing it in a dynamic construction of the community. My question is whether the latter, the dynamic construction of a community of equals, is not endangered by the former, the conception of personality as a kind of anthropological construct. This is why I think that the superseding may require a thinking of the subject that does without the anthropological-psychological model of the construction of the human self in general. It is not a question about the details of Axel Honneth’s theory. It’s a more general concern about the very idea of a general theory of the subject: for instance, the idea that if you want to develop a good model of politics, grounded in good normative presuppositions, you have to construct a general theory of the subject. I think there is a cost to pay for it, which is sometimes too expensive.

For instance, if we look at the place of love in the construction of the spheres and forms of recognition, Axel Honneth says at the beginning of the chapter “Patterns of Intersubjective Recognition: Love, Rights, and Solidarity” in The Struggle for Recognition: let us not get bogged down in the romantic idea of love as the sexual relation between two persons. As a response to this potential danger, he focuses on the relation of the baby to the mother, mostly through Winnicott. But can we really construct a general idea of love on the basis of the baby-mother relationship, which of course restricts it to the dialectic of dependency and independency, of symbiosis, separation, and mutual recognition? Can we attribute the traits of that relationship to love relationships in general? For the baby, his or her relationship to his or her mother is something given. Can we attribute the same traits to what we are used to calling love, which is, on the contrary, a matter of election, the construction of an object of love, the construction of a singular relationship among a multiplicity of possible relations?

Let us, for instance, suppose—and of course it’s a foolish supposition—that instead of relying on Winnicott and the baby-mother relation, we rely on Proust. If we rely on Proust and the relation of the narrator to Albertine in À la recherche du temps perdu, love does not appear as the relation of one person to another. It is first and foremost the construction of this other. What appears at the beginning is the confused apparition of a multiplicity, an impersonal patch on a beach. Slowly the patch appears as a group of young girls, but is still a kind of impersonal patch. There are many metamorphoses in that patch, in the multiplicity of young girls, through to the moment when the narrator personifies this impersonal multiplicity, gives it the face of one person, the object of love, Albertine. He attempts to turn the multiplicity into an individual entity and to capture this entity, and to capture along with it the inaccessible world enclosed in her. He holds her captive, eventually she escapes. The escape of the prisoner is not the betrayal of a person by another person. The fact is that Albertine, the object of love, is a multiplicity of people, set up in a multiplicity of relationships and located in a multiplicity of places.

You might well say that this is pathological, that it is not love, or that it is bad love; and the novelist himself shows us that this love is a disease, a mistake. What the narrator was looking for, in the imagination of love, is what he will find in literature only. Writing alone will be able to do the right thing with the patch, while love is a bad choice or a disease. But what this work of art about the pathology of love tells us is that love entails a multiplicity of relations, most of which are asymmetric relations, and that it concerns the construction of a multiplicity of entities. Love is not exactly a relation between two people, but a relation between two multiplicities. And it is also a kind of construction, the construction of a landscape, of a universe that can include these multiplicities. So in a certain way it’s a work of art. The loving subject is an artist, and I would say the subject in general has to be thought not simply as a self-related identity but as an artist. Subjectivity is a matter of operations, and those operations are alterations. There is a becoming-other in the very constitution of the other as an object of love.

Now this artistic, operative moment is also at work in the baby-mother relation as it is analyzed by Winnicott and by Axel Honneth after him. Let us think, for instance, of the role of the transitional object. Why is it a solution to the relation between the mother and the child? Because it opens a space of play, allowing the baby to work already as an artist, to construct himself, as he deals with objects that are both real and fictional. Even the baby is a builder of identity and alterity. Subjectivation in general entails this superseding of the “me and you” relationship. In a certain way, the creation of the space of play, as a space of alterations, supersedes the “me and you” relationship.

I focused on love first, but of course this tension between the subjective operations of alteration and the dual model is crucial in the conception of the political subject. We know that the struggle for recognition may be understood—and has often been understood—simply as the demand made by a subject already constituted to be recognized in his or her identity. For instance, there is a conception of the claims of minority groups as claims for the respect of their identity. But we can also conceive of them—and I think it is at the heart of the dialectics of recognition—as claims to not be assigned that identity. A minority claim is not only the claim to have one’s culture and the like recognized; it’s also a claim precisely to not be considered as a minority obeying special rules, having a special culture. It can be viewed as a claim to have the same rights and enjoy the same kind of respect or esteem as anybody, as all those who are not assigned any special identity.

I think this is important in the conception of the “struggle for recognition.” Because if recognition is not merely a response to something already existing, if it is an original configuration of the common world, this means that individuals and groups are always, in some way, recognized with a place and a competence so that the struggle is not “for recognition,” but for another form of recognition: a redistribution of the places, the identities, and the parts. Even the slaves were recognized a competence, but it was of course the other side of an incompetence. When it comes to slaves, and to the relation of slaves to language, Aristotle says that they understand language, of course, but they don’t possess language. This shows that there is a form of recognition, they are recognized, they use language, they can use language in expert ways, and nevertheless they don’t fully possess it. We also know, for instance, that during the French Revolution, there was a distinction between active and passive citizens. Only active citizens could vote and be elected. What was the principle of this distinction? An active citizen was not a citizen who did many things—usually they did nothing. An active citizen was a person who was able to speak for him- or herself, an independent person, which means an owner, somebody who doesn’t depend on another person for his living. Of course, workers who had no personal property, who needed to ask masters for a job, were not independent people, they were not true persons. In a similar way, women were not true people, because they were dependent on their father or husband. Both were recognized, they were respected in a certain way. Workers could be praised for their technical ability and their courage at work; women could be and were in fact extolled as housewives, as mothers giving birth to babies, educating the future citizens, and so on. But this respect was precisely the flipside of a form of disrespect: both were coupled; since they were recognized in this specific respect, they were not in all other respects. So the respect of an identity may in fact signify a statement of incapacity.

To quote one last example, since it became topical again in France recently: in the French colonial system, the natives of the colony were French, but they were French “subjects,” not French “citizens.” In Muslim countries in particular, the argument was as follows: they are Muslims, and in Islam, there is no distinction between civil law and the religious law so we cannot impose a form of personality that contradicts the way they construct their individuality and their social relations. As we know, this colonial argument has often been taken up in recent times as a valid multicultural argument. This shows all the ambiguity of recognition. All those in my generation who were involved in political activism know how much workers could be extolled as fighters and as militants. As people trying to have their own say, however, it was a very different thing.

I am fully aware that in response to this problem the concept of the struggle for recognition proposes a dynamic model of the construction of identities. It’s not a mere question of having one’s identity recognized. As Axel Honneth states, the struggle itself creates new capabilities, and these capabilities need to be recognized. So there is a process of progressive integration. In a way, what is important is not identity but the enrichment or enlargement of identity: adding new capabilities, new competences. Those new qualities or capabilities are not recognized and this initiates a new struggle; it is inherently a principle of movement. The question that arises here is, what exactly is the telos of this movement? Axel Honneth says that we need some kind of faith in progress. Since the idea of progress is not so popular in our times, this is a courageous and militant assertion: “we need some kind of progress.” We need it because the dynamic of struggle is a dynamic of enrichment, a dynamic of progressive integration of new capabilities. So the process has to be guided by a telos, which is a telos of integrity. I think, however, that, if the dynamic of enrichment is clear, it is not so clear what this “integrity” entails.

At this point, the question is: is it not the case that this process requires a concept of the subject that questions the identity model more radically, a concept of subject calling into question the wrong done by all forms of inclusion in terms of identity? This is why, instead of a progress toward an enriched form of integrity, I propose the model of the subject as self-constructed in a process of “subjectivization,” and think of subjectivization first as “dis-identification.” What disidentification means is first of all a certain kind of enunciation. In a political declaration, in political action, when a collective subject says, “We, the workers, are (or want, or say, and so on),” none of the terms defines an identity. The “we” is not the expression of an identity; it is an act of enunciation which creates the subject that it names. In particular, “workers” does not designate an already existing collective identity. It is an operator performing an opening. The real workers who construct this subject do it by breaking away from their given identity in the existing system of positions. This entails from my point of view a twofold excess with regard to this identity. First, it’s a matter of affirming an equal capacity to discuss common affairs. It’s a matter not only of claiming this capacity but of asserting it by enacting it. Those who make those statements do not protest against the denial of capacity; they enact the denied capacity. Again, they act as artists who make exist in a new configuration what doesn’t exist in the present configuration. The key point is that they do not enact it as their capacity as a group, as the capacity possessed by the group of “the workers,” but as the capacity possessed by those to which the capacity is denied in general. So they affirm the common capacity, the universal capacity as the capacity of those to whom it is denied in general, or the capacity of anybody. My point is that the dynamic comes from the enactment of this capacity which is beyond all specific capacities, that is, beyond any capacity that is recognized as being specific to particular social places, positions, or identity. It is the capacity of anyone or the capacity of the whoever as such. The society of inequality itself could not work without that capacity. Inequality has to presuppose equality. At the same time, it has to deny it. Political subjectivization enacts this capacity, which is denied by all distributions of social competences and identities. It constructs the stage of its own enacting. It’s an asymmetrical construction because it constructs a world that at the same time exists and doesn’t exist. So it is a way of locating the presence of equality within inequality in order to handle in the opposite way the relation of equality and inequality. Or, going back to the beginning, it’s a polemical configuration of the universal. The issue is not relativism versus universalism, or universalism versus particularism. The fact is that in human relations, heretofore, universalism has always been particularized. So what is at work in political subjectivization is a polemical singularization of the difference of the universal in relation to itself. It’s a way of breaking the closure of the universal, of reopening it. I think that it is probably the same problem Axel Honneth and I are trying to solve: how do we deal with asymmetry, or how do we deal with the nexus of equality and inequality? The difference between us lies in the way I make equality and not integrity the crucial concept and the motor of the political and subjective dynamic. If you choose some kind of integrity as your central concept, you have to presuppose some kind of historical telos. In a way, you can say that this solution is better, that it’s more satisfactory since it allows you to use the idea of a global process and a global process is better than these “ups and downs” of political subjectivization. I’ve often been reproached for the fact that politics for me is only insurrection, so that, when no insurrection is taking place, there is no politics, everything is lost, and so on. But I think we can easily escape this presentation of the dilemma: it’s not a question of uprising—or spontaneity—on the one side, and slow process on the other. The question is: how do we identify the motor behind the process of spreading the power of equality? Axel Honneth doesn’t really like to use the word “equality.” This is because he wants to construct a certain idea of the subject, and a certain idea of the relation between subjects, and a certain idea of the movement that allows this subject and this kind of relation to tend toward a full achievement, an achieved fulfillment. My problem with this is that in this case we have to presuppose some kind of telos, an orientation toward the future, some kind of motor of history. From my point of view, there is no motor of history: history does nothing. I know that, in a way, it is not very satisfying; but I think that it is the only way in which we can think equality, not as a kind of dream in the future, but as the power that is already at work in all our relations.

That was my attempt to reconstruct a kind of “Ranciérian” conception of the theory of recognition. Certainly that construction is open to all forms of disagreement.