Jean-Philippe Deranty

Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition

This article argues that Axel Honneth’s ethics of recognition offers a robust model for a renewed critical theory of society, provided that it does not shy away from its political dimensions. First, the ethics of recognition needs to clarify its political moment at the conceptual level to remain conceptually sustainable. This requires a clarification of the notion of identity in relation to the three spheres of recognition, and a clarification of its exact place in a politics of recognition. We suggest that a return to Hegel’s mature theory of subjectivity helps specify the relationship between the normative demand for autonomous identity and its realization in and through politics.

What is work? Key insights from the psychodynamics of work

This article aims to present some of the main results of contemporary French psychodynamics of work. The writings of Christophe Dejours constitute the central references in this area. His psychoanalytical approach, which is initially concerned with the impact of contemporary work practices on individual health, has implications that go well beyond the narrow psycho-pathological interest. The most significant theoretical development to have come out of Dejourss research is that of Yves Clot, whose writings will constitute the second reference point in this article. The article attempts to demonstrate that the thick definition of work that Dejours and Clot operate with, as a result of their focus on its psychological function, speaks directly, in substantial and critical ways, to all disciplines with an interest in work, to philosophers, social theorists and social scientists, including economic theorists.

Injustice, violence and social struggle : the critical potential of Axel Honneth's theory of recognition

Abstract Honneths fundamental claim that the normativity of social orders can be found nowhere but in the very experience of those who suffer injustice leads, I argue, to a radical theory and critique of society, with the potential to provide an innovative theory of social movements and a valid alternative to political liberalism.

Work as Transcendental Experience: Implications of Dejours' Psycho-dynamics for Contemporary Social Theory and Philosophy

Abstract This essay discusses four books recently published by Christophe Dejours with the aim of extracting their most significant social-theoretical and philosophical implications. The first two books are two contributions by Dejours in current debates and public policy initiatives in France through the application of his psychodynamic approach to work-related issues (work and violence; work and suicide). Even though these texts are shaped by the specific contexts in which they were written, they also contain broader social-theoretical insights that are quite significant. In the other two books, the two volumes of his major summation Travail vivant,1 Dejours makes explicit the fundamental theoretical foundation upon which his psychodynamic approach is based. I will attempt to demonstrate that these books have significant implications for contemporary social theory and philosophy, notably as they establish the indissoluble continuity between the corporeal and cognitive capacities of the human subject, and the importance of this insight for moral and political reflection.

Recognition or disagreement: a critical encounter on the politics of freedom, equality, and identity

Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth are representative figures of a generation of political theorists who stand under the shooting star of May 1968, the high season of insurrectionary politics in the last half century. The books under review offer a welcome opportunity to consider the lessons they draw from this event and its aftermath at the twilight of their careers. However, taken as a whole these books also reveal the limits of this style of radical democratic theory that only in a very approximate way has registered

Repressed Materiality: Retrieving The Materialism In Axel Honneth’s Theory Of Recognition

Abstract The origins of Axel Honneths theory of recognition lie in his earlier project to correct the conceptual confusions and empirical shortcomings of historical material ism for the purpose of an adequate post-Habermasian critical social theory. Honneth proposed to accomplish this project, most strikingly, by reconnecting critical social theory with one of its repressed philosophical sources, namely anthropological materialism. In its mature shape, however, recognition theory operates on a narrow concept of interaction, which seems to lose sight of the material mediations with which intersubjective relations are imbricated. The paper argues that a circumspect return to this twofold materialist heritage could substantively correct and enrich contemporary critical theory. The paper provides an illustration of this with the paradigmatic example of work.

Hegelian Recognition, Critical Theory, and the Social Sciences

The most obvious way to unite a philosophical model of recognition with programmes of research in the social sciences today is to do so by reference to the work of Axel Honneth. The marriage of philosophical reflection and social-scientific inquiries is precisely what Honneth has sought to develop throughout his writings in the past two decades, in the tradition of German Critical Theory.

Critique hope, power: Challenges of contemporary critical theory

In one of the final texts written before his death, an essay devoted to Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” Michel Foucault defined the ethos of modernity as a “permanent critique of ourselves.” By this Foucault meant a critical social ontology, an attitude of critical experimentation with the established limits of knowledge and social practice. Such a model of critique, Foucault argued, must be understood as an ethos, a “historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.”1 The later Foucault’s qualified affiliation with the critical Enlightenment tradition can be fruitfully compared with the model of philosophical and social critique developed within the critical theory tradition. According to the latter tradition, a critical theory of society not only diagnoses the pathologies of modernity, reflecting upon the experiences of injustice motivating various social movements, but also attempts to offer a positive alternative to prevailing forms of

The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth's Social Philosophy. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty

Abstract This paper analyses the model of interaction at the heart of Axel Honneths social philosophy. It argues that inter action in his mature ethics of recognition has been reduced to intercourse between human persons and that the role of nature is now missing from it. The ethics of recognition takes into account neither the material dimensions of individual and social action, nor the normative meaning of non-human persons and natural environments. The loss of nature in the mature ethics of recognition is made visible through a comparison with Honneths initial formulation of his project. As an anthropology of intersubjectivity combining the teaching of the German philosophical anthropologists and G.H. Mead, his first model sought to ground social theory in the natural preconditions of human action. The last part of the article argues that a return to Meads theory of practical intersubjectivity informed by Merleau-Pontys germane theory of intercorporeity provides essential conceptual tools to enable the integration of the natural and the material within the theory of recognition.

Doing justice to the past: critical theory and the problems of historicism

In this article, we argue that the usual restriction of critical theory to ‘modern’ norms is subject to problems of coherence, historical accuracy and moral obligation. First, we illustrate how critical theory opposes itself to societies designated as pre-modern, through a summary of Honneth’s recognition theory. We then show how an over-emphasis on modernity’s normative novelty obscures counter-currents in ethical life that threaten the unity of the modern era. Those two steps prepare the main analysis: that the ‘exceptionalist’ modernism of critical theory distorts our view of history and ignores normative dimensions of the past. We show how medieval and early-modern societies in Europe experienced many conflicts and possessed institutions that create illuminating configurations with modern norms. As a result, we articulate several kinds of moral and political link to the past that should lead critical theorists to expand the historical reach of their analyses.