A Politics of Disgust by Eleonora Joensuu

Author:Eleonora Joensuu [Joensuu, Eleonora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, Teaching Methods & Materials, Arts & Humanities, Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9780429574979
Google: HUagDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-07-03T04:56:51+00:00

“The name of the game”: breakdown of recognition

What distinguishes Benjamin’s understanding of recognition is her acknowledgement that breakdowns of the tension between asserting the self and needing the other occur repeatedly. For Benjamin (2009), breakdown and rupture are characterized by a “reciprocal lock of complementary relations,” or a structure of “split complementarity” (p. 442). It is important to keep in mind Benjamin’s critique of Hegel to understand what she means by complementary relations and split complementarity.5 The split complementarity refers to the polarization of positions that is created by Hegel’s model of recognition: be recognized or be the one recognizing, life or death. This, however, is not just a conceptual or theoretical phenomenon; Benjamin emphasizes that it is a phenomenological one where we feel and experience other minds through a kind of “split.” Benjamin (2004, 2009) argues that this complementary dynamic expresses itself in daily interactions in various ways: doer and done-to, accuser and accused, good and bad, victimizer and victim, and so on. At the foundation of each of these expressions is a split between me/you, or a relation of “twoness.” Twoness results in impasse because there is no opportunity to co-construct reality as each subject feels the need to defend their own reality, feelings, and thoughts (Benjamin, 2018). This is due, in part, to twoness being founded on a relation between subject and object, and not subject and subject. A relation of twoness is like Hegel’s master– slave dialectic in that there seem to be only two options in how to relate to an other: submit to their demands or resist them (Benjamin, 2018). Importantly, the phenomenological experience of this complementary structure is that each person feels their perspective and reality to be the right one (ibid.). Consequently, any admission or acknowledgement of the other’s perspective and reality come to be experienced as a denial and negation of one’s own reality as there is no conceptual or experiential space for both to exist at the same time.

For Benjamin, breakdown into complementary structures does not need to be understood as irreparable failure. Rather than “signifying failure, the emergence of breakdown and rupture can be resignified as the opening of possibility” (Benjamin, 2006, p. 136). This is not a mere reversal of terms or a romanticization of breakdown and failure, but rather a change in understanding where “failure becomes the condition for reparation” (ibid.). This conceptualization of breakdown opens the possibility of addressing the real consequences of domination, oppression, aggression, and violence that occur when recognition fails.

Consequently, for Benjamin the paradox of recognition is “resolved” (as much as it can be given that it continually repairs and breaks down), not through a final break down, but through the continuation of “constant tension” (original emphasis, Benjamin, 1988, p. 36). This tension is a “practice in the sustaining of contradiction”: self and other, independence and dependence, fantasy and reality, assertion and recognition (Benjamin, 1990, p. 44). Tension is necessary because without it, the encounter between self and other becomes domination and aggression.

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