Misrecognition and the Indian state: the desire for sovereign agency

Catarina Kinnvall,Ted Svensson

doi:10.1017/s0260210518000311

Abstract

AbstractA focus on misrecognition allows us to move between levels of analysis in a holistic fashion. If misrecognition works through the conscious and the unconscious we can account for the many overlapping insecurities and securities believed to exist at the individual, group, or state level – and thus felt. These insecurities also present themselves through the categories used to describe them and the policies through which they become materialised, technologised, and depoliticised, often by closing down discursive boundaries. Lacan’s concepts of desire, real and lack are here important for understanding the impossibility of recognising something that cannot be recognised. Hence, a perspective that takes misrecognition not as an end result or as failed attempts to reformulate the exceptional as the normal, has the potential to rethink the political subject. In empirical terms, the article discusses how this process of misrecognition has been shaped in the Indian context of postcolonial state formation and articulations of sovereignty. We show how the Indian state is being rethought, restructured, and reimagined through Hindu nationalism and how the concept of misrecognition accounts for desires for sovereign agency and group cohesiveness, but also for resistance to various reimaginations of the Indian state.

Highlights

In this article, we proceed from the description provided in the introduction to this special issue regarding Hegel’s concept of misrecognition to discuss in detail how a closer reading of Lacanian and postcolonial analysis can develop this concept
We examine how the Indian state is being reimagined through Hindu nationalism and how misrecognition is at the heart of this process
In the case of India, we find that the desire for sovereign agency and international recognition has been trapped in a double bind of misrecognition

Summary

Introduction

We proceed from the description provided in the introduction to this special issue regarding Hegel’s concept of misrecognition to discuss in detail how a closer reading of Lacanian and postcolonial analysis can develop this concept. The editors of the special issue suggest that we start from the impossibility of recognition to advance our thinking about the ways in which the desire for recognition shapes the international system As they put it, ‘the international system is defined by a symbolic structure organised around an always unrealisable ideal of sovereign agency’; an ‘ideal that operates at all levels of analysis’.1. Lacan’s concepts of desire, the real, mirror images and lack are here important for understanding the impossibility of arriving at a stage or state of attained and fully achieved recognition, both on the level of the self and in terms of mutual recognition In those instances, such as postcolonial India, where the desire for ‘collective political agency’ takes the form of a most violent suppression of ‘the structural impossibility of actors being recognised in the ways they want to be’.2. The political subjectivity of India – qua a state – is defined in relation to at least two contradictory imaginaries, with far-reaching implications for how we should understand India’s political agency internally and vis-à-vis other states as performed through colonial and precolonial imaginings that are both privileged and resisted

Moving from relational to Lacanian psychoanalysis in search of misrecognition

Moving from Lacanian analysis to the postcolonial in search of misrecognition

Misrecognition and the Indian state

Conclusion