Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity

THE FIRST moment of the encounter between Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière was the exchange of critical readings, through which each of the philosophers addressed questions to the other on his key work of political philosophy. The encounter then unfolded in a live discussion that took place in June 2009 in Frankfurt, inside the mythical building of the Institute for Social Research. This live encounter was moderated by Christoph Menke, whose line of questioning provided the framework for the debate reproduced in this section.

From Rancière’s perspective, the key question revolved around the category of identity and the implications of using it as founding category for thinking politics. The reverse question that Axel Honneth asked Jacques Rancière concerned the idea of equality and how it could itself take up such a position. In each case, the two thinkers first had to react to the other’s critical readings and the questions arising from them, and establish to what extent these were accurate representations of their thought. In each case, however, the critical questions also let interesting overlaps and proximities appear, leading to other, more constructive questions.

Throughout the exchange, it appears that the interpretations and presentations of the two thinkers’ models stem from divergent perspectives relating to different models of critique as well as different understandings of what might be called the “political order of domination.” Clearly a deep form of mésentente separates the models. As Christoph Menke suggested, this disagreement is also reflected at the level of method and style. Whereas Honneth uses what can be termed a “hermeneutic model,” it might be said that an aesthetic model is at work on Rancière’s side. Honneth’s politics of recognition is “hermeneutic” in the sense that the political process for him consists in struggles around the interpretation and application of key normative principles. Rancière’s model of politics is also based on a certain type of duality, but this time it is an aesthetic duality between the extant “sharing of the sensible” and activities that challenge that order and propose an alternative one. In both models, however, the political process is not centered on the claim of an emancipatory potential inscribed within reason itself. Rather, the very possibility of an exchange of reasons over particular aspects of the social order is at the heart of the political struggle for both thinkers. This might explain the overlaps that also appear during the discussion. The critical discussion between Honneth and Rancière unfolded on these key questions, as reproduced below. Christoph Menke invited Honneth to begin the discussion by responding to Rancière’s concern that the critical potency of recognition theory was weakened by its reference to identity. Was there a place for the notion of dis-identification in his theory of recognition?

AXEL HONNETH: I think there was a certain tendency in my thinking to describe the struggle for recognition in terms that assumed the positive affirmation of a certain identity—an already given identity. And I think this is not a completely correct description of what is going on in such a process, because it would presuppose something that we can’t empirically presuppose, namely, that those who are fighting or struggling for recognition already have a full-fledged idea of their own personal or collective identity. In that sense, I would agree to a description of the—I wouldn’t say the goal, because it has too much to do with intention—but the main result of a struggle for recognition, as being mostly a de-identification (or a dis-identification) in the following sense: that, by fighting and trying to reformulate the existing principles of recognition, we are losing the established categories of identification framing our own group, our own personality. In that sense we overcome our fixed identities. Let us take housewives as a typical case today: women who are struggling against their description as being housewives and nothing else, as being naturally inclined and disposed to do just the work that is conducted in the private realm of the house. To struggle for recognition does not mean to struggle for an already existing identity of a group. But I’m describing these struggles, like Rancière, mainly with the help of the notion of injustice: the experience of an injustice marks the beginning of the struggle, namely, the injustice entailed in a fixated description with reference to the existing normative principles. What happens in the struggle is the overcoming of that injustice, the reaction to that injustice, which then includes, I agree, a process of dis-identification.

THE TELOS OF RECOGNITION

HONNETH: I would say that this issue is independent from the question of what the normative background of these struggles is. I continue to believe that in the normative background, what we can call the architectonic or the grammar of those struggles can be defined only in terms of self-relationships, which means of undistorted self-relationships. So the first experience of an injustice is the experience of a distorted self-relationship. I can’t refer to myself sufficiently or completely with the help of the categories that exist in the political social order in which I live. In that sense, self-relationship is—normatively seen—the reference point of the struggles that I’m describing, and in that sense, something like the telos of an undistorted self-relationship is still what should be introduced here.

So Rancière is right in suggesting that I’m presupposing something: I’m presupposing a distinction between incomplete and complete self-relationships. But I agree that we are not able to describe what a complete undistorted self-relationship would ever be. In relation to this reference to an undistorted and complete self-relationship as the telos of the movement toward emancipation, my idea here is that even if we use the word “complete” as a kind of description of the telos, we are not forced to define what we mean with “complete.” All we have are instances of distorted self-relationships. And distorted self-relationships are simply given when the social categories that are enacted in a political order do not allow the subject to perform a kind of self-identification. In my opinion, we simply cannot do without the notion of an undistorted and complete self-relationship, even if there is only ever going to be a negative or indirect access to it. We simply have to posit the ideal of an intact relation to self as counterfactual reference, against which distorted forms of self-relations appear as such. This ideal is what is meant by the norms of fulfillment, or self-realization, even if they are not the same. But in both cases we are also fully aware that we can’t ever give a full factual description of what that would include. So it’s a kind of “regulative” idea (this notion probably puts me in other difficulties), but as a kind of telos without which we can’t describe the aims of these processes, movements, or political struggles, even though we know that we can never really establish the meaning of that complete self-relation once and for all.

A political struggle in that sense, as an internal struggle for recognition, normally starts with the experience of injustice indicated by an incomplete self-relationship, or (if we go into political psychology) by emotions of a specific kind. These emotions indicate the uneasiness with the existing categories of political recognition, which you then have to overcome. This overcoming can be described as a process of dis-identification and it leads to a reidentification. This process can be observed continuously. The telos of recognition—the ethical telos—would still be a kind of complete undistorted self-relationship. That is the way I would defend my proposal.

THE STATUS OF EQUALITY

JACQUES RANCIÈRE: Concerning equality, I must say that I disagree with the idea that I make equality a kind of anthropological property. Honneth assumes that my position necessarily presupposes a “deep-rooted desire for egalitarianism.” I don’t think that I ever referred to such a desire. It’s not a matter of desire. From my point of view, the fact is not that human beings desire in general, or desire equality. I don’t know what human beings desire in general. I know that there are many ways in which what is possible for human beings and how they react to this framing of the possible can be structured. What they desire in general, I don’t know.

Basically, my idea is not that there is politics because human beings desire equality. My idea is that the very definition of politics entails equality. In the definition of the political subject since Aristotle, the political subject is the one who takes part in the fact of ruling and being ruled. This is something extraordinarily precise. Whereas there is a dissymmetry in all other relations, what is very important is that politics has to be thought as based on a symmetrical relationship. This is what makes the specificity of politics. Whenever the government is to be given to those who are superior because of their birth, their science, their age, or any other form of distinction, in short, whenever it is to be given to those who are entitled to rule because they have specific dispositions, there is no politics, which means there is no definition of a specific political identity. I wouldn’t call it a norm: what comes first is not a norm, it’s the idea of an entitlement, or the idea of a competence, quality, and so on. And it may be too much to call it an “idea.” It imposes itself as sensory evidence preceding any judgment. So I think there are basically two logics: either those who rule are entitled to rule because they already exert a certain form of legitimate domination; or there is no entitlement. And there is politics in general when there is no such entitlement—in other words, when there is no dissymmetry. If the king governs because God entitled him to it, there is no problem, but there is no politics…. And of course, when the experts govern, there is also no problem, but there is no politics either. The basic idea of the political is this idea of a kind of shared competence that can’t discriminate between those who are destined to rule, and those who are destined to be ruled. This is what I designated as the democratic principle: the absence of any criterion distinguishing those who are destined to rule from those who are destined to be ruled. If we read it in the reverse way, this means the presupposition of a competence of those who have no specific competence, a competence that is shared by everybody. This means for me that the democratic principle is not the principle of a specific government. It is the principle of politics itself. This principle comes as a supplement to all those that ground the exercise of the government in the capacity belonging to a specific category. There is politics to the extent that there is a political subject that implements the equal capacity of anybody. The existence of subjects like these is not necessary for a government to exist but it is necessary for politics to exist.

For me, the main point is the implication of equality in inequality itself. The point is not the normative distribution, and those who are outside; in a certain way the outside is inside. Politics has to be defined as the competence of those who have no specific competence. This is the basic ground, a kind of dialectics of politics, where disorder has to be included in order at a certain level. Our governments must legitimize themselves as the government of the people, the government of those who are not entitled to govern. They must declare equality as the principle of their action. But at the same time those who rule always try to get rid of that disorder. So there is the declaration that “it is a government of everybody,” and yet at the same time, it is exerted by an oligarchy that legitimizes itself by its knowledge, its capacities, and so on. This means that political action is not necessarily the intervention of the outside: those who are not counted interrupting the whole system. To the extent that it is political, a social order has to include in some place, in some respect, this power of those who have no power, this power of those who are not included. I never said that politics only exists as an insurrection against the existing order. There are multiple forms of political subversion that don’t imply a “global insurrection.” And this is possible because the normative order has to include the contradiction in itself. For instance, the normative order of Republican France under the Revolution has to include the declaration of the rights of man. And the whole question then is: well, what about women? The declaration does not mention them as included. But it does not mention any exclusion. From this point on, the whole issue is about how you articulate the police principle of separate competences and the political principle of nondistinction. On the one hand, the police order locates them in the domestic sphere, which is a sphere of subordination. Consequently they cannot deal with the affairs of the community. On the other hand, there is this kind of declaration of equality that does not include any principle of exclusion; hence there is the possibility for women struggling for equality to say: “as women, we are men.” In French, the word “man” has this equivocation, as both inclusion and partition. Women can say: as women, we can write a declaration of the rights of women. And they write this declaration, copied on the declaration of the rights of man. On the one hand, this is a form of subversion, but at the same time it’s taken from the very letter of the text that is supposed to ground the normative order of the community. That would be my answer on the point of equality and on how equality is enacted in the political and in the action of politics. Precisely, the action involved in politics is a way of seizing the inner contradiction of the political order.

HONNETH: I understand the point, but I’m not sure whether it convinces me. The strategy is to say that all political orders as such, whatever they are, have as one or even probably as their constitutive component an egalitarian idea, namely, they have to describe what constitutes human beings.

RANCIÈRE: Not what constitutes human beings, but what constitutes those human beings as members of a political community. And of course it may be more or less related to an idea of man or human being in general. My main point is that to the extent that it is political, it has to rely on some principle of equality.

HONNETH: I think I would deny that one should call that equality. I agree that all kinds of political orders have to give a certain description or legitimation for who is included in the political community. Normally it works, as we said, through notions regarding who is excluded, so that they have to define those who are included in the political community. And the normal way of describing those included especially in the case that Rancière mentioned, namely, the case of the police, is to attribute to them certain human capacities like speaking or reasoning. I think I would deny that this would include any kind of reference to equality. For me, it is simply something like a definition of what is universally shared in that community, whereas the idea of equality would add something to that kind of original definition of the political community: namely, the idea that because we are sharing those attributes, like reasoning or speaking, we should have—only then can the conclusion come—the same kind of power to “political authorization,” or something like that.

But if we don’t make the second normative step, we can’t speak of egalitarianism or equality as the constitutive trait of a political order. I can see why Rancière must stress this point, in order to avoid what I called an egalitarian desire. Because once you have established the point that all political communities are characterized by reference to equality, then you can say: everyone can draw upon this inbuilt reference to equality and can mobilize it in order to describe their own mode of existence as being unequal to those that are privileged according to this specific normative principle dictating the political order. So in your description, all government, all political orders have a certain tension between the reference to equality and the specific normative principle on which they base the legitimation or justification of their own form or government; this is an inbuilt tension.

We probably differ on this point because I don’t see that there is this tension. There are other tensions and I would describe them differently, for example, with the help of the notion of inclusion and a social basis of exclusion. All kinds of political orders must refer to the idea of inclusion, so that there is an internal problem for them to justify forms of exclusion, and so on. But I don’t exactly see that they must refer to the idea of equality in the normative sense, which Rancière has to make use of in order to overcome inequalities. That may be a point of difference between us.

AESTHETIC MODEL VERSUS HERMENEUTIC MODEL

After the exchange centered on each author’s reactions to the interlocutor’s critical readings and questions, the two philosophers discussed the methodological contrast highlighted by Christoph Menke, between hermeneutic and aesthetic models of politics.

HONNETH: I’m not sure whether the distinction between hermeneutic and aesthetic models for the description of a political order of domination really convinces me. I agree that there are certain hermeneutic elements in my descriptions—elements that Jacques Rancière probably wouldn’t include in his own description. But I don’t see why it would prevent me from describing that political order which I approach in a hermeneutic way also in terms of a warranted sensible world, or as sensible world in which the order of domination has been entrenched. I find it extremely convincing to say that our way of perceiving the world is regulated by certain existing normative principles, so that our way of perceiving the world, of being able to see what “is the case” in the social order, is structured by the pregiven political categories and normative principles that allow the justification of inequalities and asymmetries. So perceiving is part of the fixation of the sensible; my gaze is part of what constitutes political order. In that sense, calling into question a specific interpretation of such normative principles also includes calling into question a way of perceiving things. This means, for example, that the housewife has to give a completely different description of what is perceivable in the social world of the household in order to make the claim she wants to make, namely, that the interpretation of an existing normative principle is misleading or wrong or incorrect. That includes always a new way of perceiving or of describing the sensible world. So I don’t exactly see why there has to be a contradiction between these two models. The other way of formulating this is to say that I don’t see why the aesthetic model of the normative principles or the political order, which I describe as an order of established normative principles that justify the asymmetries and exclusions in a society, why such an aesthetic model prevents us from seeing the interpretative possibilities underlying those principles. They are open for interpretation; they can be reappropriated. The aesthetic model does not exclude such redescription of the structure of those normative principles.

RANCIÈRE: In my view, there is no hermeneutics without an aesthetic, because aesthetics is about the construction of the stage and the construction of the position of the speakers. So it is about who is able to give an interpretation. The problem of interpretation concerns who is able to interpret, and in what respect he, or she, is able to interpret. In relation to the specific speech acts involved, the problem is not so much that the language does not exist for a particular social category and can’t allow that category to identify itself. The problem is that the name of a subject names a position of speech that doesn’t exist. So interpretation is made by people who are not allowed to interpret. For instance, in nineteenth-century France, when the universal suffrage is instituted for men and not for women, there is an important discussion about women’s place, and many convincing arguments are put forward saying that if women are given the education of the sons, an education that must make them belong to the community of free equal men, then it is a contradiction to keep them out of that community. So many “scientific” justifications are given for an improvement of women’s place. Indeed, there are even women who are scientists and who argue from a scientific point of view about women’s civic capacity. Those arguments can even be borrowed from the normative principles at play in the police order. Many arguments in favor of feminism were borrowed from hygienist and eugenicist discourses. But it is one thing to interpret an existing principle as allowing for a possibility, or a capacity inherent in a category; it is quite another thing to allow a collective subject to “authorize” as such. Or simply to allow one woman to say: there are all those scientific arguments about the dignity of women, so I decide that I am a candidate for this election. The case arose in France in 1849:¹ one woman decided that she was going to be a candidate in the elections. She was not allowed to do so, but she still ran as a candidate. This was true subversion; precisely, the scientific arguments, however many, were not enough. The real question is about who is able to make the point and to say what those arguments bear, what conclusion can be drawn from those arguments. That’s the main point for me: who interprets and in what respect we are located in the political community, as those who are concerned by the collective decisions or as those who take part in those decisions.

IDENTITY, NORMS, AND SUBJECTIVITY

These last considerations regarding the identity of the political subject forced the two thinkers to return to their initial point of divergence, namely, the form that the categories of subjectivity and identity should take in social criticism and in political theory. This part of the discussion also led them to reconsider one of the most fundamental issues at stake in their encounter, namely, the methodological question of the status of normativity, whether critical theory is forced to make its normative assumptions explicit or whether the language of normativity is to be avoided. Their diverging attitudes to normativity also informed their disagreement regarding the reference to suffering and social pathologies in the critical model.

RANCIÈRE: I am far away from any conception in terms of the normal, normality, and pathology, because what disturbs me is the idea that the telos is some kind of good relation to oneself. I think it’s a certain model of the subject, as defined by a good relation to oneself. For me, a subject is first of all a process of alteration. Similarly, social relations, interpersonal relations, are first of all operations of alteration. For me, it’s quite dangerous to propound this idea of a kind of normativity defined in terms of the good relations to yourself: it generates an idea of struggle for recognition as a kind of reaction against a state of frustration. For me the point is not pathology and how to heal this pathology; the point is that we have conflicting ways of describing or constructing a common world. Of course, we can prefer one of those constructions to the other. But from my point of view, I would say that the construction in terms of completion of self-relation, of relation to oneself, is certainly not the way I would prefer to go about it. When Jeanne Deroin made this claim to be a candidate, she didn’t need to run as a candidate in order to respond to a state of frustration or to a bad relation to herself. She did it in order to construct another world, another relation between the domestic and the political space. In the same way, Rosa Parks insisted that if she sat at that particular place in the bus, it was not because she was tired after a day at work. It was because it was her right and the right of all her sisters and brothers. For me, that’s the point: what we have is not the normal and the pathological; in these cases we have a conflict of norms, or rather a conflict between two ways of framing a common world.

HONNETH: I’m not sure whether I would like to go on to the discussion on the exact status of the notion of pathology. The status of pathology in my thinking is very specific, and I’m not even sure it relates to the debate we’re having here. I would not describe a person who is suffering from a certain infliction in his or her self-relationship as a person being in a pathological state. The idea for introducing modes of self-relationship as reference points for forms of injustice is to be able to give an explanation for different kinds of suffering under politically institutionalized forms of inequality or injustice. It means I have to explain why people are suffering. I think that Rancière also has to give an explanation for why people suffer from being excluded from a political order that intends—according to his description—to be an order of equality, but whose own established principles mean that it excludes a part or even the majority from the political community. One has to give an explanation for why there is suffering as a result of that state of affairs. We can’t simply take it as a simple, phenomenologically describable situation. We have to build a bridge between subjectivity and the political order. And this, in my way of thinking, is made possible by introducing self-relationships as a reference point allowing me to build a bridge between forms of social and political order and forms of existing subjectivity. The core idea is to be able to give an explanation for the different forms of suffering. And they have to do with inflections of self-relationships. The notion of pathology, once again, is a more difficult case.

That allows me to come back to the redescription of love that Rancière made. I want to make it short. I found this description extremely illuminating. I’m not sure whether Rancière made one or two points. Let me describe what I take to be two separate points: The first point is about the poetic imagination that is included or is at the basis of all love relationships. You already said that. Even in taking Winnicott as a reference point, it is possible to see such imagination as a basic element of all kinds of love relationship, since the love of the child, of the infant, already starts with the fiction of a unity. In that sense, one could say that all love relationships start with the aesthetic fiction of a multiplicity of relationships, with a poetic fiction of some representable characteristics, with an aesthetic fiction. The fiction is about the loved one, the other; it is a fiction and part of that fiction is a fiction of unity. That’s the first point.

The other point is that every love relationship is a relationship of relationships (I find this idea extremely interesting and I have to say that I was not sufficiently aware of that). In all loving relationships, we deal not only with one person but with a number of persons. You can also redescribe it psychoanalytically. But the point I want to make is the following: a pathological form—in my use of the word—of a loving relationship is when the poetic or the aesthetic fiction of the beginning is not “taken back” by the lover. If this poetic fiction remains, then there is a certain tendency to what I would call pathology of love. I think I’m in agreement here even with Proust, who would agree with that kind of description. If there is no frustration of that kind of fiction, then there is no recognition of the independence of the other, and in that sense there is not a “fulfilled” loving relationship. But that is another notion of pathology. I only wanted to agree with the fact that I’m using this vocabulary myself, I’m not nervous when somebody is using it, and I’m also using it with reference to all states of society, not only to individual states of affairs, even if, in the case I just reconstructed, I referred to an intersubjective relationship. In any case, my main point here is that in Rancière’s theory as in mine, there has to be a reference to suffering. He himself uses the term of suffering. I myself would not have attributed it to his writing, but you can actually find it.

RANCIÈRE: Not so much…

HONNETH: Yes but still, you are using it. In introducing that word, “suffering,” don’t you have to establish a relation by yourself between the political order and the individual psyche in a very broad sense?

RANCIÈRE: Well, I resist precisely the attempt to think the relations of politics to subjectivity in those terms, because my point is that a political subject is not a suffering subject. A political subject is an invention; an invention has no self. The political subject has no self, so that you cannot account for the construction of the political subject out of the suffering of the individuals who are involved in the creation of this subject. In this sense, it is the same idea as in Proust’s argument: you cannot account for the construction of a fiction from the needs, frustrations, and experiences of the individual. This is what I would call a process of subjectivization (and what is meant is a process of dis-identification). For me, there is no homology, no continuity from the suffering of the individuals in a given situation to the construction of a subject as such. This also means that it’s not only a question of suffering; it’s the question of the construction of different universes, giving a different perceptual status and also different capacities to those who are included in this world. What’s important for me is the affirmative aspect: we perform on a stage that was not made for our performance. The stage is not the stage on which we have to bring our suffering and try to hear it. That’s why, as I said, it’s very important for me not to have a general theory of the subject from which you could deduce what a subject in politics is.

HONNETH: I’m not completely satisfied with this idea. I see the danger of an overpsychologization of the political. And I also agree that political action in Rancière’s terms—and I would partly take over those terms and that proposal—should probably be better described not with reference to the existing political order, but as a kind of interruption, or intervention into the political order and the existing social order. But given Rancière’s way of describing an existing political order as police, he somehow has to build the notion of suffering into it, which means that he can’t give a complete description of the political order without referring to the actual suffering of those not counted in it. In my view, Rancière owes us a tighter and more rigorous account of the relationships at stake here. It’s not sufficient to say that there is a miscount, that some are not counted. One has to add that the miscounted also suffer from it; otherwise, it becomes unclear why they act as they do, why they perform “de-identification” and undergo the “subjectivization” process. Becoming a political subject means overcoming the status of an uncountable excluded subject; but as I like to put it, the motivational force for wanting to overcome this status has to stem from some form of suffering, which is therefore part of the political order Rancière and I are describing. It seems to me an added explanatory element is required at this place.

SUFFERING AND POLITICS

RANCIÈRE: When I say that the political is grounded in equality, this means that equality itself is more than just a negative principle. There is no reason why some people should rule and others should be ruled. In a certain way, this defines the political subject in subtraction from all the relations that are relations of asymmetry. In that sense, equality appears as mere contingency, and politics appears as the form of community constructed on the contingency of domination and not on the justification of domination by some quality. But on the other hand, this kind of absence, of lack, can be filled, because it’s possible to transform this absence of a specific capacity into a new capacity itself. The idea is that there is a potential included in the very notion of a capacity that is a capacity of anyone, the capacity to act as anyone, to act precisely in the name of the capacity, which is not the capacity of the teacher, of the doctor, and so on. The idea is a negative determination and at the same time opens a field of exploration into the potential within the capacity of anyone. What does it mean to act precisely in the name of a capacity that is a capacity of anyone, of those who have no specific capacity? In a way, you have the same kind of dialectic in art. In art, it is precisely a matter of doing something in person, reaching a capacity that is no longer your capacity as an artist. In politics, there is a possibility to explore the potentiality of what it means to act as equals. In this sense, it is a kind of open potentiality. But it has the benefits of not being normalized by certain ideas of the good self-relation. It’s true that it defines some form of endlessness, so it means that we are not starting from mutilation or frustration to some kind of integrity, but we are starting from the mutual implication of inequality and equality and trying to handle it in a certain way, to make it bring about some effects. This is what I tried to say in distinguishing three terms: “the police,” “politics,” and “the political.” I said that what we call the political—the fight for power, the action of the governments, lawmaking, the discussion about collective issues, and so on—consists in the tension between the police order that assigns groups and individuals to their place with their function and their capacity and the enactment of the egalitarian principle regarding the capacity of anybody. This means that political action is not simply the negative interruption of the police domination. It is a positive practice that concretely tips over the balance of equality and inequality. It inscribes effects of equality in our laws and our practices. And those inscriptions, in turn, allow new political conflicts and actions.

Another issue was raised by Stefan Gosepath in relation to this, namely, whether subjectivization is an individual or a collective process. He made the point that subjectivization is always thought by Honneth in dualistic terms, through the opposition between individual and society. What about subjectivization for me, and how do I think about the objective standards through which individual and society can be thought together, which Honneth articulates in terms of individual suffering and social pathology? In relation to this question whether it means that the people have to be thought as a whole, I would say that precisely you don’t have, on the one side, the individual and, on the other side, the community, but politics is about the construction of collective subjects. At the same time, those collective subjects are not subjects defined by an identity. Instead, they are defined by the kind of reconfiguration of the given world that they can create. Again, I don’t think that taking suffering as a starting point gives you a normative platform; it can only give you a normative platform in relation to a certain idea of normality. We all know that taking suffering as a starting point really doesn’t mean that we start from anything that would be objectively given, since suffering precisely is also a kind of configuration of the situation. In the current situation, it is a tendency of the police order to interpret everything in terms of pathology: “there is a problem here, you have to heal it, to find the good solution.” In cases where there is in fact a conflict of two worlds, they try to define a certain disease and find the good doctor. Precisely, in “something is wrong,” the wrong cannot be defined in pathological terms. For me, it’s the logic of police to define the wrong on a pathological basis. It’s not necessarily because people are suffering that they act politically; acting politically, very often, comes because some forms of ruptures appear possible. I think it is a matter of reconfiguration of the field of the possible. It is very rare that suffering produces politics by itself. And we all know that the sociologists of suffering, for instance, present to us precisely a kind of world that cannot change. If you think of Bourdieu’s Weight of the World,² in a certain way the suffering is always described as indefinitely self-reproducing. If we want to do something against “la misère du monde,” precisely we have to remove it from this characterization as suffering. In other words, I think that we cannot break with the logic of the reproduction of suffering if we don’t also break with the very language of suffering in approaching society and individuals.

Taking injustice as a starting point is not the same as starting from suffering. What is at the core of politics and emancipation is the invention of other ways of being, including even other ways of suffering. When I was working on the texts of workers in the movements of emancipation, it appeared clearly that in a certain way they had to invent a new kind of suffering. What mattered in those texts was not suffering from a lack of money, from the living conditions, and so on, but suffering from the denial of certain capacities; not suffering from hunger, but suffering from the fact of experiencing a broken time, things like that…. If we are thinking of this bridge between individual experience and collective subjectivization, I have in mind a letter of the joiner Gauny to one of his friends telling him he had to learn a new way of suffering. He recommends literature, because literature is the invention of another kind of suffering. He recommends to his fellow worker to read the romantic novels, Chateaubriand’s René for instance, which means that the proletarian has to appropriate the kind of suffering that is the suffering of those sons of the bourgeoisie who do nothing, who have no place in society, precisely because they have a place in society. The point is the appropriating of the suffering of the other, and it is through the appropriation of the suffering of the other that there is an overcoming of the situation. If you suffer from hunger, low wages, and so on, it’s not enough to get out of the situation of suffering. You also have to exchange your suffering against another, which at this point is precisely a kind of symbolic suffering, which concerns the symbolic partition of society between those who are counted as capable of this suffering and those who are not counted as capable of this suffering. The point is not being counted or not, but in what respect you are counted. It was very clear at the same time with the quarrels about the worker poets. Many workers were doing poetry, and all the bourgeois and also the great writers were saying to them: that’s fine, but this is not proletarian poetry. You should make verses about work, songs for popular entertainment. What you do, instead, is write about high poetic feelings expressed in noble forms. But the point for those workers was precisely to take over those noble feelings that were not supposed to be theirs. This was also part of the process of de-identification at the basis of their political subjectivization.

HONNETH: I will only make two short remarks. I completely agree with what was just said, namely, that the reference to suffering can’t present in any way a kind of normative argument. I agree with that: reference to suffering gives us nothing in the end to make normative claims. I think the reference to suffering is more necessary in my own view because of the need for explanations, not for normative justifications, that is, in order to explain why specific groups do dissent or do start to rebel. I think we can’t do without a certain notion of suffering, which will allow us then to introduce emotions and political feelings in the framework of political explanation. I think that is a necessary step we have to do, because without that, you can’t describe what is really going on. So that is the place of suffering in my own kind of conceptualization.

This brings me to a short remark about the question of subjectivization. I think it’s necessary to think of subjectivization not only in terms of the individual but also in terms of community or groups. But in order to do that, we have to think of a group at least in a certain homology with the individual subject, which means we have to attribute to collective communities and groups the kinds of reactions and actions that we normally only reserve for the individual. That means we have to think of groups as first being able to make communal experiences when they suffer from the same kind of exclusion, and therefore aim at a collective subjectivization in your sense. I would defend the need for a certain kind of—I hesitate to say political psychology, because that is so inflected by the established disciplines we have under that name. But we are in need of something like that, let’s call it political psychology, in order to be able to explain why certain groups do rebel under certain circumstances. I think you can probably avoid all that disciplinary investigation because I still suspect that your notion of the political is constructed from a completely external perspective. Even the fact that you tend to describe the political, the enactment of the political, as being a state of exception, which means…

RANCIÈRE: No. I don’t think of it as a state of exception.

HONNETH: No? I thought so. The enactment of politics is the bracketing or the epoche of the existing normative order. In that sense, it is no longer internal, it probably gets its driving force from a reference to the promise of equality, which is inbuilt, according to your description, in all political communities. But politics only gets its driving force from it; the enactment of politics is itself a step outside of the normative order, and everything you are saying about that step and the way in which politics is enacted means that we are no longer like those political actors who are subjectivating themselves, as it were; we are no longer members of the existing society, we are acting outside of it. Therefore we have to be observers of ourselves; we have to bracket the existing normative order, and therefore I thought you would say that the situation is a situation of “exception”—“exception” is probably a word you should avoid anyway—but I thought you were going in that direction.

The exchange between the two philosophers ends on this “disagreement” between them over the forms of critique and, in the end, over the forms of politics.