Sang Ong-

Recognition and Vulnerability - 2010.


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This essay introduces us to central issues in contemporary social philosophy. Honneth considers recognition as a normative requirement in social relation, and also as a critical concept supporting the social struggles against misrecognition and social vulnerability. Butler thinks of recognition as a power relation, and builds a notion of « apprehension », as a critical instrument to think in a different way about recognition. The vulnerability of the body and the precariousness of life are never fully recognized but can be apprehended. Their discussion focuses on a concept of subject, produced in the context of intersubjectivity, and socially provided with decentered autonomy, especially with Butler’s conception of a permeable subject, grounded on an reinterpretation of a spinozist account of the conatus .