The re- in recognition: Hegelian returns

Abstract

By using ‘the return’ as a dialectical figure, the author discusses four contemporary appropriations of Hegelian dialectics – as restoration, recollection, repetition, and interpellation – in relation to the concept of recognition in contemporary political philosophy. They are seen in the light of social and political forces influencing European and North American intellectual debates from the events of 1989 to the aftermath of 9/11. By a critique of Charles Taylor's work, it is argued that Hegelian return conceived as restoration sets recognition as an act of self-appropriation through social mediation. Recognition becomes a means for self-unification through identity affirmation, a coming back to oneself as undistorted. The author subsequently sketches out two alternative appropriations of Hegelian dialectics in relation to questions of recognition: as recollection and repetition. The dialectical return understood as recollection turns recognition into an acknowledgement of intersubjective vulnerability. It sets the return to oneself as a peripeteian force, focusing on the unpredictable rebounding effects of one's own actions, a view advocated by Patchen Markell. Recognition becomes a movement toward self-expropriation if it turns on the necessary failures, indeed, on the impossibility of the return. The return as repetition becomes the place-holder for a unity that will never be. Jean-Luc Nancy is seen as an exponent of this perspective. The author ends by arguing for an understanding of the dialectical return as an interpellative force which turns our attention from recognition to recognizability, that is, from the relation between self and others to the social space and practices governing the space in which people appear as recognizable to each other, in line with the latest work of Judith Butler.