Regiane Lucas de Oliveira Garcêz

Recognition, feelings of injustice and claim justification: a case study of deaf people's storytelling on the internet

This paper argues that Honneths theory of recognition opens promising venues for exploring the role of emotion in politics, particularly when issues of injustice are at stake. While endorsing Honneths view that ‘feelings of injustice’ are an important source for intelligibility of injustice, and that disadvantaged individuals need to build a ‘shared interpretative framework’ in struggles for recognition, this article contends that a more nuanced account of discursive justification is required to deal with dissent and moral disagreement. As a response to this problem, we suggest that Honneths approach of subjective reaction to injury as violation of conditions to practical identity can be brought together with notions of discursive justification in the Habermasian fashion. Through an empirically based analysis – using storytelling of deaf people gathered in two virtual environments: (a) the website of the main Brazilian organization for deaf persons (FENEIS), and (b) Orkut, an online social network – this paper evinces that subjects not only articulate feelings of injustice or claims for recognition in everyday experience, but also usually engage in interpretation, judgment and justification of such claims. Results show that Honneths theory of recognition, when articulated with a notion of discursive justification, can better equip scholars concerned with practices that aim to overcome injustice.

Recognition, Feelings of Injustice and Claim Justification: Deaf People’s Storytelling on the Internet

In the recent upsurge in research on the role of emotions in politics, ranging from cognitive science to philosophy to the social sciences, several scholars have demonstrated the importance of understanding how emotion affects the cognition and reasoning capacities that underlie political behavior (Marcus, Neuman, & Mackuen, 2000; Thompson & Hoggett, 2012). Emotion helps create group identity and mobilization (Barnes, 2012; Nussbaum, 1995, 2003) as well as engagement in deliberation (Krause, 2008; Mackuen, Wolak, Keele, & Marcus, 2010; Maia, 2012d; Steiner, 2012b). In this chapter we draw on Axel Honneth’s work to explore the sensitive dimension of suffering and issues of injustice. We argue that his political philosophy helps to deepen and refine the understanding of subjective reactions to injuries, without assuming that emotions are a kind of individual “property.” Despite claims to the contrary, we contend that Honneth’s attempt to establish a link between a normative dimension in “feelings of injustice” and collective action opens promising paths through which empirical studies of emotion could be expanded and reconceptualized.