Images of vulnerability have populated the philosophical landscape from Hobbes to Hegel, Levinas to Foucault, often designating a sense of corporeal susceptibility to injury, or of being threatened or wounded and therefore have been predominantly associated with violence, finitude, or mortality. More recently, feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero have begun to rethink corporeal vulnerability as a critical or ethical category, one based on our primary interdependence and intercorporeality. However, many contemporary theorists continue to associate vulnerability with (...) violence and finitude rather than providing an account of the normative theory that might underpin vulnerability as a critical category. In this article, I explore an alternative notion of vulnerability in relation to both a theory of power and a normative account that draws on recognition theory. My aim in this article is twofold: first, to examine the complexity of vulnerability and how it relates to forms of recognition; second, to outline how the notion of vulnerability can operate as the basis for critiquing objectionable forms of vulnerability. This is to consider vulnerability not only as an ethical or ontological question but as a political one, and shifts arguments about its abuse and entanglement with power and violence to the public political sphere. (shrink)

The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth provides a comprehensive study of the work of Axel Honneth, offering a critical reconstruction of his project in relation the themes of power, critique, and the intersubjective paradigm. It traces Honneth's theoretical trajectory from his earliest writings on philosophical anthropology to this development of a normative theory of recognition, and critical examines his attempt to reconstruct the intersubjective paradigm as the basis for social criticism.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the question of whether recognition relations are based on trust. Theorists of recognition have acknowledged the ways in which recognition relations make us vulnerable to others but have largely neglected the underlying ‘webs of trust’ in which such relations are embedded. In this paper, I consider the ways in which the theories of recognition developed by Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, not only point to our mutual vulnerability but also implicitly rely upon mutual relations of trust. (...) The paper first offers a novel examination of the relation between recognition, vulnerability and trust in Habermas’ account of communicative action with the aim of arguing that such a consideration helps to elucidate important features of recognition. My claim is that a consideration of the dynamics of recognition and vulnerability in language-use, leads to an acknowledgment of the forms of trust that not only underpin communicative action, but recognition more generally. I conclude by considering the elements that are underplayed in Habermas’ account by turning to an examination of Axel Honneth’s alternative affective theory of recognition, specifically considering the interrelation between vulnerability and recognition. In doing so, I also turn to a consideration of the kind of trust that must be assumed in Honneth’s account of mutual recognition and point to a recognitive notion of trust. (shrink)

_Axel Honneth: Critical Essays_ brings together critical interpretations of the work of Axel Honneth, from his earliest to his most recent writings, together with a comprehensive reply by Honneth that provides significant insights and clarifications into his project overall.

Examines the lived experience of social encounters drawing on phenomenological insights.

ABSTRACTThis paper brings together a phenomenological and vulnerability-theoretic approach to dementia. The paper challenges the view that subjects with dementia can simply be understood in terms of diminished cognitive capacities or that they have lost all vestiges of personhood or the capacity for meaningful interaction. Instead, drawing on vulnerability theory and the phenomenological work of Kristin Zeiler and Lisa Käll, an alternative view of persons with dementia is offered that is based on intersubjective and intercorporeal relations and accomplishments. A vulnerability (...) approach to dementia is developed that not only provides the basis for empathetic responses to illnesses such as dementia but also points to the intersubjective constitution of subjects more generally. The argument developed is that the notion of vulnerability designates a form of openness to others and that such openness is a precondition for empathy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What does it mean to practice a theory of recognition within the discipline of philosophy? Across an initially acrimonious French-German divide, Axel Honneth’s effort to recognise the value of contemporary French philosophy and social theory suggests that philosophy is a self-critical, outwardly oriented, and cooperative discipline. First, mobilising the idea of recognition in his own philosophical practise has permitted Honneth to notice non-deliberative aspects of social interaction that Habermas had overlooked, including the need for self-confidence and the need for (...) self-esteem. Second, although Honneth’s ascription of value to contemporary French theory also involves mis-recognition, his practice of recognition has nonetheless prompted philosophical cooperation among theorists who would not otherwise have engaged, encouraging French-influenced critical theorists to extend Honneth’s theory in ways that he had not anticipated. What emerges is an interpretation of philosophy as an ongoing intersubjective pursuit that attempts to respond to its own limitations through cooperative critique. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer some compelling reasons to think that issues relating to vulnerability play a significant – albeit thus far underacknowledged – role in Jürgen Habermas’s notions of communicative action and discourse. We shall argue that the basic notions of discourse and communicative action presuppose a robust conception of vulnerability and that recognising vulnerability is essential for making sense of the social character of knowledge, on the epistemic side of things, and for making sense of the possibility of (...) deliberative democracy, on the political side of things. Our paper is divided into four principal sections. In Section 1, we provide a basic outline of Habermas on communicative action and discourse. In Section 2, we develop an account of vulnerability and communication in the context of speaker/hearer relations. We specifically focus on distorted communication, vulnerability and speech. In Section 3, we focus on elaborating epistemic pathologies in the context of epistemic oppression and testimonial injustice. In Section 4, we focus on explaining how Habermasian resources contribute to vulnerability theory, and how introducing vulnerability theory to Habermas broadens or deepens his theory of communication action and his discourse ethics theory. (shrink)

The question of civil disobedience has preoccupied philosophical discourse at least since Thoreau's articulation of disobedience as a form of non-compliance and Rawls' classic definition outlined in the wake of the civil rights and student protest movements of the 1960s. It has become increasingly clear, however, that these classic definitions are being challenged and rethought from a variety of traditions in the wake of contemporary protests. These articles engage with the most recent debates surrounding civil disobedience and conscientious objection, opening (...) up original new paths for thinking about forms of protest. They also reveal disagreements about how to understand civil disobedience and about the place of conscience in political protest, inviting further discussion on these questions and issues. (shrink)

Within contemporary debates on civil disobedience, Hannah Arendt’s work offers an alternative to both moral and legal approaches by offering a political view of disobedience based on what she terms a principle of dissent at the heart of constitutional democracies. In this sense, she separates disobedience from the moral claims of individual conscience as well as the restrictions imposed by legalistic conceptions. In this article, I first consider Arendt’s views on conscience and the arguments she makes for a Socratic notion (...) of conscience understood as a by-product of thinking, as well as her arguments against conscience-based versions of disobedience such as that developed by Kimberley Brownlee. Second, I consider Arendt’s defence of a political notion of disobedience and her arguments against legal approaches such as those advocated by John Rawls and William Scheuerman. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between perception, invizibilization and recognizability in the work of Rancière, Honneth and Butler. Recognizability is the term employed here to indicate the perceptual process that necessarily occurs prior to a normative or ethical act of recognition and that provides the conditions that make recognition possible. The notion of recognizability points to the fact that perception is not merely a disinterested surveying of the perceptual field but indicates that it is already evaluative in the sense that (...) others are immediately distinguishable from other objects. When a failure of recognizability occurs, it is not due to the fact that the other has not been seen in a literal sense but instead that she has been intentionally ignored or invisibilized. The suggestion made here is that despite their different approaches, a comparison and dialogue between these three thinkers highlights the importance of this constellation of issues for critical theory. (shrink)

Recognition, Work, Politics includes a range of essays in contemporary French critical theory around politics, recognition, and work, and their philosophical articulations. These issues are addressed from directions that include post-structuralism, the paradigm of the gift, recognition theory, and post-marxism.

This paper employs a phenomenological approach to examine the centrality of embodied habit in both the proliferation and the transmission of COVID-19. The analysis focuses not only on the difficulty of amending embodied habits but on the question of the ethics of social distancing and the role of human agency in the amendment of such habits. To this effect, the relation between passivity and activity in the uptake of habit is emphasized and the active and agential aspects of embodied habit (...) are highlighted. In contrast to the predominance of more negative accounts of social distancing, the paper considers the kind of ethical reorientation that is required to amend embodied and social habit in the face of the mutual vulnerability evoked by COVID-19. This analysis is distinguished from more far-reaching government measures in relation to COVID-19; instead, it offers a consideration of the kinds of responsibility towards one another at the level of everyday life. (shrink)

There has always been a tension between a critique of ‘real existing conditions’ and meta-theoretical paradigms through which the tasks of critique can both be anchored and images of humankind explored.

Axel Honneth’s development of a theory of recognition is aimed at an intersubjective reconfiguration of social philosophy grounded on normative and anthropological premises. Honneth attempts to extend Jürgen Habermas’ communicative paradigm beyond its linguistic formulations and challenges the social-theoretical separation of system and lifeworld, whilst offering important insights towards an intersubjective theory of power and analysis of social action. In this sense, Honneth seeks to investigate the normative, intersubjective relations underlying all social spheres, including the market and state bureaucracy. However, (...) despite his early insights into an alternative analysis and critique of power, in his subsequent development of a theory of recognition, Honneth does not adequately account for power as a constitutive factor in relations of recognition. It might be argued that Honneth’s intersubjective theory requires a consideration of power not only in terms of domination, but also as an ontological category constitutive of identity and social formations. This paper investigates the problems that result from Honneth’s attempt to bring together a theory of intersubjectivity, normative theory and the project of critique, and considers the resulting loss of insights regarding an intersubjective theory of power. (shrink)