Recognition or Disagreement by Axel Honneth

Author:Axel Honneth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI040000, Philosophy/Movements/Critical Theory, PHI019000, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

SUFFERING AND POLITICS

RANCIÈRE: When I say that the political is grounded in equality, this means that equality itself is more than just a negative principle. There is no reason why some people should rule and others should be ruled. In a certain way, this defines the political subject in subtraction from all the relations that are relations of asymmetry. In that sense, equality appears as mere contingency, and politics appears as the form of community constructed on the contingency of domination and not on the justification of domination by some quality. But on the other hand, this kind of absence, of lack, can be filled, because it’s possible to transform this absence of a specific capacity into a new capacity itself. The idea is that there is a potential included in the very notion of a capacity that is a capacity of anyone, the capacity to act as anyone, to act precisely in the name of the capacity, which is not the capacity of the teacher, of the doctor, and so on. The idea is a negative determination and at the same time opens a field of exploration into the potential within the capacity of anyone. What does it mean to act precisely in the name of a capacity that is a capacity of anyone, of those who have no specific capacity? In a way, you have the same kind of dialectic in art. In art, it is precisely a matter of doing something in person, reaching a capacity that is no longer your capacity as an artist. In politics, there is a possibility to explore the potentiality of what it means to act as equals. In this sense, it is a kind of open potentiality. But it has the benefits of not being normalized by certain ideas of the good self-relation. It’s true that it defines some form of endlessness, so it means that we are not starting from mutilation or frustration to some kind of integrity, but we are starting from the mutual implication of inequality and equality and trying to handle it in a certain way, to make it bring about some effects. This is what I tried to say in distinguishing three terms: “the police,” “politics,” and “the political.” I said that what we call the political—the fight for power, the action of the governments, lawmaking, the discussion about collective issues, and so on—consists in the tension between the police order that assigns groups and individuals to their place with their function and their capacity and the enactment of the egalitarian principle regarding the capacity of anybody. This means that political action is not simply the negative interruption of the police domination. It is a positive practice that concretely tips over the balance of equality and inequality. It inscribes effects of equality in our laws and our practices. And those inscriptions, in turn, allow new political conflicts and actions.

Another issue was raised by Stefan Gosepath in relation to this, namely, whether subjectivization is an individual or a collective process.

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