Progress?
Progrès?
Fortschritt?
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Colloquium 2004: Sociality and Recognition |
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20th Colloquium 2014
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The
Colloquia
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The 2004 French-German Philosophy colloquium will be devoted to the question of sociality. What is sociality? What forces bind a society together wherever social structures develop? Is sociality anything more than intersubjectivity, and if so, in what way? How should sociality be explained? The concept of ‚recognition' has recently become popular as a basic concept for reconstructing social contexts. ‚Recognition' is taken to clarify the mechanism by which ‚sociality' is created, i.e. social bonds, social fields and socialized subjects. In other words, the concept of recognition is used to explain the performative production of social cohesion by which modern subjects are constantly involved in the processes of individualizing socialization. Use of the notion of mutual recognition to refer to a genetic principle of sociality goes back to the motif of the ‚struggle for recognition' in Hegel's Jena writings. There, on the basis of analyses by Fichte, Hegel attempts to explain the dialectic of the individual (the subject) and the general (society) and hence to sort out the aporias of modern contractual theories of the social (Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau). Not only the modern subject, but also the ethical progress of society is constituted in the struggle for and the experience of receiving the recognition of others. In the context of the Frankfurt School, Juergen Habermas and Axel Honneth have expanded on these issues, bringing them together with the insights of American social pragmatism (George H. Mead). The issue of recognition has also achieved prominence by way of the French reception of Hegel by Alexandre Kojève, albeit with a different, critical element. For Kojève, recognition is a matter of the existential self-alienation of an individual who is ‚sub-jected' to his or her own desire for recognition. Many French thinkers, Hyppolite, Derrida, Lévinas, Ricoeur and Nancy among them, have taken up this line of thought, but above all Lacan and Althusser. For the latter, the notion of recognition is precisely not the genetic principle of sociality, but rather an ideological reflex of dominant social structures; hence in every ‚recognition' (reconnaissance) there is also a ‚misrecognition' (méconnaissance). In the American context, on the other hand, recognition plays a central role in questions of justice, freedom and equality. In the framework of his critique of liberal universalism, Charles Taylor invokes the concept of a ‚politics of recognition' of cultural difference. From a feminist perspective, Seyla Benhabib has criticized the implicit androcentrism of a universalizing model of ‚recognizing' and ‚recognized' subjects, arguing instead for a radicalized recognition of the genuine differences of others. Last but not least, there is a neo-Hegelian tendency in some post-analytic philosophy in which the concept of recognition plays a central role (Brandom, McDowell). The
discourses of recognition open up an intensive and complex set
of perspectives on the phenomenon of sociality. For this reason,
the colloquium will focus on the question of the constitution
of sociality by taking up these discourses and asking to what
extent sociality can be conceived as constituted in and by structures
of recognition. We hope to exploit the potential of the concept
of recognition and to establish its limits with regard to understanding
sociality. What does the concept of recognition contribute to
the reconstruction of social contexts? Is ‚recognition' to
be seen as a crucial concept here and what other concepts might
be equally important? Other potential concepts to be considered
in this context might be, for instance, MacIntyre's concept of
community, Fraser's concept of redistribution, Nietzsche's and
Foucault's notion of power, or Bourdieu's theory of the constitutive
misrecognition of the social order. We explicitly welcome submissions
that suggest alternatives to and raise questions regarding the
usefulness of the concept of recognition as the foundation for
explaining sociality. We invite submissions that focus on the
question of sociality by probing into the concept of recognition
and exploring the multifaceted controversies surrounding it.
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