The Trouble with Recognition

Subjectivity, Suffering, and Agency

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2265481
AutoresLois Mcnay (0000-0003-1727-5505, Somerville College, Oxford, autor de correspondencia)
Año2008
Volumen26
Número3
Páginas271-296
Fecha de publicación2008-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSociological Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0735-2751 • E-ISSN: 1467-9558
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-9558.2008.00329.x
OpenAlexW2018236986
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas56
Referencias citadas36

This article focuses upon the disagreement between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth about how to characterize the relation between social suffering and recognition struggles. For Honneth, social and political conflicts have their source in the 'moral' wounds that arise from the myriad ways in which the basic human need for recognition is disregarded in unequal societies. Fraser criticizes Honneth for the uncritical subjectivism of his account of social suffering that reduces social oppression to psychic harm. Fraser therefore redefines misrecognition not as a psychological injury but as 'status subordination' understood as institutionalized patterns of discrimination and value inequality. My central argument is that while Fraser's critique of Honneth's subjectivist construal of recognition is largely justified, she falls into a counterveiling objectivism that prevents her from developing some of the central insights of her own paradigm. Her 'non-identarian' rendering of recognition leads her to abandon an experiential or interpretative perspective that is associated with the idea of identity and, as a result, she cannot explain certain crucial aspects of political agency. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus is used to indicate a way beyond the naturalization of the cluster of emotions associated with social suffering that seems to be the inevitable consequence of Honneth's 'ontology' of recognition (McNay 2007). At the same time, the experiential emphasis of habitus mitigates the objectivism of Fraser's dualist paradigm showing how some of its central insights can be taken further through a materialist redefinition of identity and agency

Epistemology · Habitus · Objectivism · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivism · Subjectivity · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Social Psychology