Axel Honneth - Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity

Recognition or Disagreement

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

Amy Allen, General Editor

New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections.

Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, Mara Pa Lara

The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen

Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Nolle McAfee

The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara

Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero

Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser

Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth

States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Ngritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones

Democracy in What State?, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensad, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancire, Kristin Ross, Slavoj iek

Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller

For a complete list of the series see

KATIA GENEL

A BRIEF ENCOUNTER

To this effect, a meeting was organized in June 2009 in Frankfurt am Main, in the historical building of the Institute for Social Research. Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancire initiated a discussionmoderated by the German Philosopher Christoph Menkearound the key theses of their best-known books, The Struggle for Recognition and Disagreement. Each thinker began by reconstructing the theoretical position of his interlocutor. This issued in a debate on the underlying principles of the critical theory that each represents, a clarification of their methodological approaches to society and politics, and, finally, a discussion of the possibility of overcoming injustice and of a political transformation of society. Indeed, their discussion centered on the very meaning of critical theory. It is a specific task of this volume to help elucidate this meaning.

This book is the result of this short and intense encounter between the two thinkers. What is published here are the texts presented by Honneth and Rancire, the theoretical exchange that took place between them, and a supplementary text from each author intended to provide a deeper understanding of their thinking, their theoretical orientations, and their methods. Honneths method has a strong Hegelian spirit. It is marked by a specific way of discussing political issuesand here, more specifically, the political concept of freedomthrough an approach he refers to as social philosophy, that is to say, a philosophical type of analysis that takes society as an object and relies on the results of the social sciences. Rancires method is a radical political questioning based on the principle whereby the social order is contested by any act that presupposes the equality of anyone with anyone and that verifies it (a method of equality). I believe that the short yet substantive discussions between the two thinkers represent a model and an excellent starting point for comparative studies into the possible ways of exercising social criticism, and that such comparative work is particularly apt to develop fruitful perspective onto many significant theoretical issues. Each of these practices shows important deficits in the other approach. One focuses on the need to transform society by the advent of social orders of recognition, the other on the affirmation of politics, assuming the irreversible division of the social. Thinking this divergence enlightens the reference to a critical approach in a large sense. This introduction discusses the texts published in this volume, and frames the confrontation between the two authors in relation to the main coordinates of their thinking. Jean-Philippe Derantys discussion, by contrast, takes a broader focus and seeks to situate the two models in the overall theoretical landscape, highlighting problems and potentials that each of the two models raises in relation to the general project of a philosophical critique of contemporary society. A substantive bibliography with a specific focus on the confrontation between the German and the French traditions is provided at the end of the volume to assist students and researchers in comparative studies in critical theory.

TWO CRITICAL THEORISTS?

While Honneth refers to the concept of freedom and Rancire uses equality as his central concept, both authors share the same fundamental concerns: they both question contemporary societies by asking about the conditions of justice. They both develop tools that are intended to help us understand the social mechanism that prevents the realization of justice and develop a theory to overcome injustice. Indeed, if we consider the appellation critical theory in a very broad sense, both authors can be linked to this tradition. But what is a point of connection between them is also a problem or a set of problems.