Recognition is a key concept in contemporary social and political thought. The fundamental insight associated with this concept is that we cannot really be who we are or who we want to be if others do not treat us in certain ways. We depend on others or, more specifically, on recognition by others, in order to be able to actualize our identities. If we do not find recognition or an appropriate form of recognition in our personal interactions or in the wider society, we are peculiarly constrained in our being. As Charles Taylor observes in his famous 1992 essay, "The Politics of Recognition," with regard to this dependence on the recognition by others: "Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being" (Taylor, 1994, p. 25).In a similar vein, Axel Honneth describes cases of withheld recognition or misrecognition as instances of oppression as the individual concerned is rendered unable "to count as the person which he desired to be in terms of his Ego ideals" (Honneth, 1992, p. 199). As these brief remarks make clear, recognition is generally viewed as something positive. It is good for individuals to be recognized by others and not to be recognized, or not to be recognized in an appropriate way, has serious consequences. In the light of this, it appears self-evident that society should be criticized as to to whether it provides individuals with appropriate relations of recognition.Judith Butler is often referred to as a thinker who disputes the positive view of recognition prevalent today. The general opinion is that Butler advocates a view of recognition according to which recognition is not, or rather not only, enabling-as authors like Taylor or Honneth would have it-but also constraining and oppressive. The standard way of summarizing Butler's view is to say that for her recognition is somehow connected to or intertwined with power.In the eyes of some commentators, this makes Butler a proponent of a "negative theory of recognition," or at least of an "ambivalent account of recognition" (e.g.,
The social-philosophical discourse of the last 20 years pictured recognition mainly as medium of human autonomy. In recent years however, concerns have been raised over whether recognition might not occasionally work in the opposite direction, as means of subjection. This article contends that these concerns rely on a misconstruction of the relationship between recognition and subjection as merely contingent. Developing themes from Foucault's work, it argues that recognition rather always necessarily involves a moment of subjection. In the first part, I show that Foucault, especially in his power-analytic writings, can plausibly be read as theorist of recognition insofar as every relation of power presupposes the recognition of the other as free. In the second part, I elaborate that every concrete relation of power depends on conditions -knowledge and norms -that precede it and that are formed and transformed in complex historical processes, in which the authority of individual subjects is always only a limited one. Against this background, it will become visible that recognition indeed allows us to conduct ourselves autonomously as certain kinds of subjects according to certain norms but as such also always subjects us as it ties our freedom to conditions that we remain largely exposed to.
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