Article

Love in the private: Axel Honneth, feminism and

the politics of recognition
Julie Connolly
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
E-mail: j.connolly1@uq.edu.au

Abstract Axel Honneth distinguishes between recognitive practices according

to the social domain in which they occur and this allows him to theorise the
relationship between power and recognition. ‘Love-based recognition’, which
suggests the centrality of recognition to the relationships that nurture us in the first
instance, is located in the family. Honneth argues that relationships encompassed
by this category are pre-political, thereby repeating the distinction between the
public and the private common to much political theory. This article explores the
structure of this delineation in his thinking. I argue that Honneth’s analysis
marginalises feminist concerns with how power functions through recognition in
the private sphere. Honneth also robs himself of a rejoinder to recognition sceptics,
who suggest that the desire for recognition is a condition of subordination. The
article argues for an alternative approach to the analysis of ‘love’ within recognitive
theory.
Contemporary Political Theory (2010) 9, 414–433. doi:10.1057/cpt.2009.35

Keywords: Axel Honneth; Judith Butler; Kelly Oliver; Jessica Benjamin;

recognition; feminism

Introduction

Axel Honneth’s theory of social recognition is consistently referred back to the

social structures that instantiate and institutionalise recognitive practices.
These same structures materially mediate the life chances of individuals. In a
recent essay, he explores whether social recognition is necessarily ideological,
serving the interests of the powerful, and concludes that it is not (Honneth,
2007a). Although in his 2003 debate with Nancy Fraser, Honneth (2003,
p. 141) concedes that the achievement principle associated with solidarity-
based recognition was ‘hierarchically organised in an unambiguously
ideological way from the start’. These recent essays are not the first time
Honneth has reflected on power. Since The Critique of Power, he has argued
that even though the ‘exercise of power is asymmetrically distributed’, it is
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 Love in the private

wrong to ‘conceptualise societies as relations of domination’ (1991, p. 303).

Nonetheless, Honneth notes, there are times when practices of social
recognition function to reproduce social domination.
In responses to his critics, Honneth (2007a) proposes that it is possible to
distinguish these instances by examining their implications for the material
well-being of individuals. He suggests that it is possible to note the ‘discrepancy
between [the] evaluative promise’ of social recognition and the ‘material
fulfilment’ of that promise (Honneth, 2007a, p. 328).1 With this clarification,
Honneth continues to argue that an internally differentiated account of social
recognition can function as a critical theory that reveals the normative
foundations for an immanent critique of social injustice, if not outright
oppression (Honneth, 2003, p. 114). The ingenuity of his account is to develop
a concept of recognition with both normative and sociological implications.
As noted by Lois McNay (2008) this is a difficult task, replete with tensions
that may obscure the relationship between power and recognition. This is the
point of departure for this article.
Honneth is not naı̈ve to the impact of power on recognition. Quite to the
contrary, he is cognizant that power shapes strategies of recognition and his
analysis of misrecognition involves examining the stabilisation of power in
socially sanctioned forms of humiliation and exclusion that constitute injustice
worthy of remedial political intervention. The purpose of this article, however,
is to examine whether Honneth’s theory of social recognition does in fact
enable a critique of the way that power works through recognition. Confident
that this analysis is integral to his theory, I will examine whether the conceptual
framework Honneth develops in The Struggle for Recognition allows us to
critically interrogate practices of recognition. In particular, I argue that
Honneth distinguishes recognitive practices into private and public domains.
I argue that to effectively understand how power operates in and through
recognition, Honneth must pay attention to how the public and private operate
in his thinking. Without this analysis, Honneth’s theory not only marginalises
feminism, it fails to adequately critique power.
The article is divided into four parts. First, I examine the relevance and the
utility of employing the categories, public and private, to structure a critique of
Honneth. This analysis suggests a critical interrogation of what Honneth calls
‘love-based recognition’. In the second part of the article I employ feminist
insights to expose the shortcomings of Honneth’s approach. I argue that
Honneth repeats and endorses the distinction between the public and private
common to much political theory, and he fails to analyse how power functions
through recognition in the private sphere. Indeed, making these points was part
of my motivation for writing this article. However, in the end they seemed too
easy to score. My analysis certainly works to challenge Honneth’s implicit
romanticisation of the family by recalling the daily travails of those trapped by
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 Connolly

poverty and domestic violence. But this is not a reminder that Honneth truly
requires. In a number of papers, Honneth (2004, 2007b) has addressed
precisely these problems. Instead and in the third part of the article, I contend
that Honneth’s mistreatment of love obscures a larger problem for his theory:
the possibility that our desires for recognition are contaminated by unhealthy
dependencies and are perhaps even complicit with social domination.
To explore this possibility, I reconstruct three feminist thinkers’ analyses of
the politics of recognition, namely Judith Butler, Kelly Oliver and Jessica
Benjamin. In each instance these feminist theorists pay closer attention to how
recognition and power structure interpersonal relationships. None is shy of
interrogating the mutual imbrication of power and recognition. What this
analysis reveals is that without critically interrogating the function of power in
the private sphere, Honneth robs himself of a rejoinder to recognition sceptics
who argue that the desire for recognition is a condition of subordination. This
is important because Honneth (2003, p. 114) argues that, although socially
structured, our desire for recognition is a resource for political action, pointing
to possibly ‘unthematised’ injustices worthy of political intervention. My
analysis suggests that the persuasiveness of Honneth’s theory requires that we
reconceptualise the political significance of ‘love’. I argue that recognition in
intimate and interpersonal relationships reveals the political importance of
recognising the concrete and embodied particularity of specific others.
Moreover, the ethical sensibility so entailed contains an antidote to the
corruption of recognition by power. In order to rescue love-based recognition
from sociological naivety, Honneth must defetishise2 ‘love’.

Why the Public and the Private in the Analysis of Recognition?

Preceded by deliberation, imagination and memory, recognition both

presupposes and configures possibilities for agency. To act as priest or
politician requires recognition: misrecognition, if the credentials of either priest
or politician were in dispute, would hamper the legitimacy of either marriage or
legislation. In other words, to acquit the responsibilities associated with either
role, to act responsibly, entails a form of socially generalised recognition, albeit
mediated by institutions and traditions. Likewise the recipients of rights, which
confer the possibility of performing particular types of action like voting, must
be recognised first as human and second as belonging to a nationally
circumscribed community. This is not as straightforward as it sounds, as the
delay in obtaining suffrage for women demonstrated. What this means is that
the judgements that precede recognition are evaluative and the practice itself
informs the allocation of social esteem, determining the scope of inclusion,
whether its basis is kinship or citizenship, and thereby the possibilities for
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participation in communities. Recognition then is a ubiquitous social practice

and complex form of social engagement.
For Honneth, recognition is an example of practical intersubjectivity:
recognition circulates like currency between and among individuals. He
understands recognition as a reflexive communicative act that grounds human
subjectivity and fashions identity, revealing our constitutive dependence on the
acknowledgement and affirmation of others. He argues that practices of
recognition supply the social with a normative foundation and rational
structure, explaining how we relate to each other and why this has ethical
content. To accomplish this, Honneth takes three steps. First he undertakes to
supply our desire for recognition with a psychological basis. He then develops
an analysis of the structural features of modern societies that reveals practices
of recognition that distinguish social relations in specific social domains.
Finally he argues that it is possible ‘to explain social change by referring to the
demands that are, structurally speaking, internal to the relationships of mutual
recognition’ (Honneth, 1995, p. 92). This means that struggles for recognition,
born of social unrest, generate social change. To quote Honneth (1995, p. 84):

In every historical epoch, individual particular expectations of expanded

recognition relations accumulate into a system of normative demands,
and this consequently forces societal development as a whole to adapt to
the process of progressive individuation.

Recruiting the psychology of George Herbert Mead and the object relations
theory of Donald Winnicott, Honneth finds a foundation for our desire for
recognition in the processes of personality formation. Accordingly, the human
psyche obtains its distinctive, or individualised, structures through interactions
with significant others. Their capacity to mirror and contain our behaviour
provides the environment, that is, the social cues and emotional security, and
the feedback to initiate a process of progressive individuation. This means that
individual subjectivity, or psychic organisation, has an ‘intersubjective
structure’. The patterns of recognition to which we are exposed form the
basis of a framework that is internalised to produce a reasonably coherent
sense of self capable of action. He argues that the development of human
subjectivity is an ethical process from the outset: only with the assistance of
loving recognition can we come to understand and articulate our needs and
desires without fear of reprisal or humiliation.
Honneth (1995, pp. 128–129) refers to the type of social recognition just
described as love-based recognition, which he distinguishes from the types of
recognition supplied through law and civil society: rights-based and solidarity
or merit-based recognition. Rights-based recognition acknowledges the moral
equivalence of individuals as subjects of positive law. Merit-based recognition
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is evidenced in financial compensation and other forms of social status that

accrue to individuals on the basis of their contributions to civil society. The
elaboration of these distinctions implies that Honneth is not content with the
phenomenological description of social recognition as comprising an attitude
of attentive responsiveness to another person. He argues that social recognition
takes place in specific circumstances that are regulated by norms entailed in
specific social structures. Thus he differentiates between three orders of
recognition: love-based, rights-based and solidarity-based. At this point
Honneth redeems the implicit claim that the sociology of recognition can be
reconstructed to reveal normative presuppositions that can supply critical
theory with a foundation for immanent critique.
Central to the development of these categories, however, is a bifurcation of
social recognition into public and private types. To this end, Honneth makes
two important arguments. First, the ethical particularity of love-based
recognition, which is associated with the intimate sphere of the family,
militates against its usefulness emancipatory social change (Honneth, 1995,
p. 162). Second, and by contrast, Honneth locates the progressive impetus of
modernity in the separation of rights-based from merit-based recognition. He
contends that a further elaboration of these forms of recognition, through the
extension of rights and redistribution, supplies us with some hope that further
emancipation from domination is possible. This is a powerful argument that
deserves further analysis. However, for the purposes of this article, I will
examine the former assertion. I argue both that Honneth’s analysis of the
family is sociologically deficient and his conclusions regarding its normative
potential are thereby weakened. Nonetheless, the social relations and ethical
considerations, entailed by the category of love-based recognition, are central
to the development of a critical analysis of social recognition more broadly.
Since the popularisation of the rallying call ‘the personal is political’,
feminists have expended considerable intellectual energy examining how the
distinction between these categories, public and private, and a series of allied
binary oppositions, function in and through western philosophy to variously
eulogise, explain and justify the seclusion of women in the domestic sphere. In
summary, this analysis has revealed both the resilience and the normativity of
these categories that work to justify precisely what they explain: that which is
thought to be apolitical is labelled private, a theoretical manoeuvre that
depoliticises its subject. In other words, power is liminal to the distinction
between the public and private. Nonetheless, the analysis of the former will not
be exhausted by an analysis of the latter. Moreover, and as the foregoing
analysis suggests, these categories have already been subjected to exhaustive
analysis. So why employ these concepts to inform a critique of Honneth? My
reasons are twofold. First, the simultaneous privatisation and naturalisation of
family life and sexual relationships continues to structure women’s identities
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and opportunities. In other words, the distinction between the public and the
private has ongoing descriptive purchase and normative implications. Second,
the distinction is central to Honneth’s reconstruction of recognition in
modernity and, for the reasons just stated, the continued use of these
categories warrants critical reflection.

Love-based Recognition

Honneth’s analysis of love-based recognition falls short of feminist standards

of social criticism. In the analysis that follows, I will demonstrate that his
insistence on the privacy and apolitical character of love-based recognition
entails a certain sociological naiveté. Moreover, I will address Honneth’s
implicit rejoinder to this suggestion: that the normative significance of love-
based recognition is incapable of generalisation and this distinguishes the
ethical character of interpersonal relationships. None of my arguments
contend that the normative distinction between the public and private
relationships and spheres should be effaced. Instead, I presuppose that
analysing the relationship between the public and the private spheres is
important for a critical theory that attempts to understand social power, our
resistance to it and possible transformations of it. To this end, analytically
separating the private from the public remains descriptively enlightening
and normatively telling. Honneth, however, neglects the impact of the
gendered division of labour that accompanied the historical separation of
the ‘family’ from the state and civil society, the other recognition relevant
domains he discusses. His sociological analysis of the family is truncated and
this allows him to suggest that the only relevant normative consideration
is ‘love’.
The reasons why Honneth (1995, p. 162) treats love-based recognition as
central to his analysis of subjectivity but marginal to his analysis of politics are
evidenced in the following quotation.

Of course the three spheres of recognition do not all contain the types of
moral tension that can set social conflicts in motion, for a struggle can
only be characterised as ‘social’ to the extent that its goals can be
generalized beyond the horizon of individual’s intentions, to the point
where they can become the basis for a collective movement y the initial
implication of this is that love, as the most basic form of recognition does
not entail moral experiences that could lead of their own accord to the
formation of social conflicts. Every love relation does, to be sure, involve
an existential dimension of struggle, insofar as the intersubjective struggle
between fusion and ego-demarcation can only be maintained by

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overcoming resistance on both sides. But the goals and desires connected
with this cannot be generalised beyond the circle of primary relationships,
at least not in a way that would make them matters of public concern.

Honneth’s reasoning is based on four arguments. First, Honneth argues that, in

order to qualify for political analysis, the social relations, and the normative
principles particular to any given social domain, must be able to be generalised:
they must be social. Second, Honneth argues that the social relations of the family
and the normative principles operative there cannot be generalised. Honneth
believes that ‘love’ or care is the only normative principle that is distinctive to this
social domain. Third, Honneth argues that the only relevant conflict that takes
place in the family is existential and relates to the conflict between our
ambivalence about separation from the mother. Fourth, Honneth argues that
the types of conflict manifest in the family do not motivate social unrest.
Honneth’s first argument is defensible. There are certainly interpersonal
conflicts that do not lend themselves to political analysis or remedy. As long as
it does not result in violence, a heated exchange between supporters of
opposing football teams is an example of an interpersonal conflict that is
unlikely to attract political commentary or judicial intervention. Of course, if
this exchange is about the strategic use of racial slurs by football players in
order to obtain a competitive advantage, it might result in a letter-writing
campaign that might produce a change in policy that allows referees to
reprimand players who are racist on the field. I concur with Honneth’s
argument that interpersonal conflicts are unlikely to be championed by social
movements unless it is found that these conflicts are germane to broader
normative principles or social conflicts. Nonetheless, as the above example
suggests, I would not differentiate social and political conflicts from
interpersonal conflicts on the basis of the ‘sphere’ in which they were located
or the exact nature of the relationship between the participants. Even debates
among people that take place in private can be mobilised for political ends.
The three additional arguments, with which Honneth sequesters love-based
recognition and the domain of the family from political analysis, however, are
not defensible. In light of recent history and feminist scholarship they strike me
as bizarre. When Honneth argues that love-based recognition does not operate
with respect to socially generalised criteria, or produce conflicts capable of
generating social change, he reproduces the public-private split that is common
to much western political thought. The structure of his arguments is familiar to
feminists. Judith Butler (2000, p. 8) summarises the chief proposition nicely,
‘kinship conditions politics without ever entering into it’, or more precisely,
love-based-recognition conditions personal identity without ever entering into
the politics of it. Butler argues that political thinkers tend to acknowledge the
family and its reproductive function only to minimise its political significance.
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This is also true of Honneth: the social psychology that Honneth develops is
central to the justification of his theory of recognition. However, neither the
realtionships that promote progressive individuation, nor the ethical con-
sequences are deemed relevant for political analysis. The move beyond
phenomenology to critical theory coincides with a shift of analytical focus to
rights-based and solidarity-based recognition and thereby, to extend the spatial
metaphor, to the state and civil society.
Feminist theory supplies ample rejoinder to Honneth’s reasons for
privatising love-based recognition. First, feminist theory has exposed the
socially generalised principles that operate in the domestic sphere: gender and
power (Fraser, 1989). In other words love is not the only normative principle
that operates in the family. Feminist analysis of the history and the structure of
the modern family unit calls attention to the interpenetration and mutual
constitution of public and private spheres both historically and in contempor-
ary society. This means that the public and private social domains are mutually
implicated. Both state-based interventions into the family unit and the
distribution of income, employment and goods and services, affect the
autonomy of private individuals and the choices and decisions they make in
private. Additionally, the organisation of public institutions reflects assump-
tions about the organisation of the private sphere. For example, the
presumption that the chief bread-winner in any given household is a father
with limited domestic responsibilities is still made by public policy; for the most
part employment practices continue to presume that employees do not have
significant caring responsibilities that would otherwise disrupt their availability
for work. In contemporary society these assumptions reinforce the very
gendered division of labour historically presupposed by the state and
employers (Fraser, 1997). In Honneth’s (2003, p. 139) analysis, however,
‘bourgeois love marriage’ is understood to be a product of history, but not so
much the subject of politics.
Parallel to Honneth’s argument that the normative order of the family
comprises ‘love’ is his assertion that the types of conflict that erupt in family-
like relationships are informed by our internal ambivalence about fusion and
separation from our mothers. The foregoing analysis of the ‘dual aspect’ of
families already suggests that conflicts about distribution, consumption,
sexuality and the gendered division of labour are pertinent to the internal
normative order of the family (Fraser, 1989, p. 122). To the extent that families
function with respect of socially generalised criteria, there is no need to excise
them from politics as Honneth has done with the argument that conflicts
internal to love-based recognition are not of public concern. This means that
conflicts in the family, among lovers, parents and children, and friends do not
only arise because of our ambivalence about recognising the independence of
the other. Material and political interests are at issue. Honneth’s final
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argument is that the types of conflict evident in private relationships are not
matters of ‘public concern’ and that they do not catalyse social unrest is also
disputed by feminism. Feminism itself, and the consequent politicisation of the
private, has been a catalyst for social change; this means that conflict in the
private sphere has led to the formation of a social movement.
An alternative reconstruction of Honneth’s argument could have it that his
attempt to sequester ‘love’ from the kinds of ethical and political analysis
‘rights’ and ‘solidarity’ receive, pertains less to the institutional location of the
associated social relationships, and more specifically to the particular texture
of these relationships. In other words, we cannot expect the state or civil
society to love us, but this is certainly an expectation we have of friends and
family, not to mention the aptly named lovers. The attachment between infant
and caregiver is paradigmatic for Honneth’s category of love-based recogni-
tion. On the basis of an analysis of the intimacy of this relationship, he
concludes that the normative significance of ‘love’ inheres in its capacity to
foster a sense of our individuality, to promote both emotional and corporeal
integrity (Honneth, 1995, p. 107). These are certainly important ends. Here
Honneth’s argument overlaps with that of feminist care ethicists, who argue
that the vulnerability of infants entails ethical obligations that have been
generalised by them to advocate assuming an attitude of care towards all
vulnerable and dependent beings (Held, 1993, p. 31). Honneth (1995, p. 162),
however, argues that the ethics of care is ‘necessarily enclosed within the
boundaries of a primary relationship’. Because we cannot generalise the
feelings we have for intimates, we cannot extend the attitude of care to
strangers or even follow citizens. With this argument, Honneth sidelines the
possibility that perceiving other people in their concrete particularity is central
to moral judgement more broadly. He concludes that love-based recognition
contains no potential for moral development (Honneth, 1995, p. 162). Honneth
(2003, p. 193) has subsequently moderated this position somewhat and in a
footnote concedes that love contains a ‘normative surplus’, that remains
somewhat undefined.
In a more recent paper, Honneth (2004, republished in 2007b) writes to
preserve the ethical significance of the family against its possible reduction to a
set of legal relationships between erstwhile independent parties. Justice is the
term used in the title of the paper to imply the type of recognition operative in
relationships based on the mutual acknowledgement of the rights, rather than
the intimacy of shared affection. Honneth contends that ‘justice’ is only
relevant to the private sphere when its internal normative order has been
disrupted by the outside world in some fashion. Moreover, he argues that
‘caring actions of this kind [associated with love-based recognition] lose their
moral value in these relationships as soon as they are performed not out of the
feeling of love but out of a rational insight into a duty’ (Honneth, 2004, p. 157).
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This statement is somewhat counterintuitive. It is hard to imagine caring for

infants or elderly parents with Alzheimer’s if one’s motivation was ‘love’ alone.
As just stated, however, Honneth perceives a ‘moral loss’ when a discourse of
rights is used to describe interpersonal relationships (Pauer-Studer, 2004,
p. 166). He does not seem to believe that relationships between lovers or
parents and children might be complemented or even enhanced if participants
in these relationships treat each other as in need of both justice and affection.
This exclusion of justice from the private sphere, except as an unfortunate
interloper that reflects the ‘inner emotional disintegration’ of the family, can
only be sustained by Honneth’s reification of the family unit, according to
which structures of privilege and disadvantage are irrelevant to the family’s
internal constitution (Honneth, 2004, p. 144).

Love in the Private

Honneth’s analysis of the ‘family’ is sociologically deficient and this

compromises the persuasiveness of his analysis of the normative and political
significance of love-based recognition. The argument presented above is based
on the assumption that accepting the exclusion of the private from the public is
likely to produce the type of reification summarised in the title of this section:
love occurs in private and politics happens elsewhere or to put the point more
precisely, affection animates close inter-personal relationships and power is
evident in other types of social relationships. However, these censorious points
seemed almost too easy to score, and Honneth is not blind to injustices in
interpersonal relationships, even if the structure of his theory screens them
from view. In this section, I posit that Honneth’s reification of the family is not
a simple problem about the appropriate description of particular social
domains. His analysis of love-based recognition is haunted by the ambivalence
of our desires for recognition and the possibility that they might collapse
intersubjectivity in favour of relationships of domination and subordination,
or merger. To quote Honneth (1995, p. 177):

Patterns of recognition based on law extend into the private sphere of

primary relations, because individuals must be protected against the
danger of physical violence that is structurally inherent in the precarious
balance of every emotional bond.

The precarious balance to which he refers is that between fusion and

demarcation and derives from the conflicts and ambivalences of the maternal
dyad as reconstructed by object relations theory. Honneth analyses our first
struggle for recognition using Winnicott: individuation requires separation
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from maternal symbiosis (Honneth, 1995, p. 101). According to Winnicott

(1971), this blow to narcissism, however disconcerting, provides the founda-
tions for separating reality from fantasy, the intersubjective from the
intrapsychic. As indicated in the quote above, however, Honneth generalises
this dynamic between fusion and separation as constitutive of all the
relationships categorised as private. He also identifies the risks inherent in
these relationships: domination, its inverse and a loss of self. Honneth avoids
the implications of this problem for the theory of recognition by shielding
certain relationships of recognition from political and ethical analysis: close,
filial and sexual relationships, which may be complicit with the troublesome
desires just alluded to, are rendered largely pre-political even if they contain a
‘normative surplus’.
I am not certain that the frustrations of individuation provide a sufficient
theoretical response to the ‘danger of physical violence’. However, my concern
is that Honneth’s seeming disregard for the sociality of love-based relationships
contains a bigger problem for his theory. What happens if the tendencies just
described, the unhealthy desires and dependencies associated with the struggle
for recognition, are not simply the function of pre-political relationships? What
if they permeate the struggle for recognition more broadly? In the following
section of the article I will examine three feminist thinkers that address this
possibility, and in various ways answer yes. In none of these analyses is the
concept of recognition internally differentiated in a manner consistent with
Honneth’s theory. Likewise his advances over phenomenology are not reflected
in Butler, Oliver and Benjamin. Nonetheless, the possibility that our desires for
recognition may be compromised, indeed complicit with, or desiring of
domination, persists in Honneth’s theory, preserved in his apolitical analysis of
love-based recognition. Thus the question arises, can Honneth deflect the
critique of recognition offered by Butler and Oliver given his reservations
about interrogating the structure of our desires for recognition, particularly as
they circulate in close interpersonal relationships? I think so, but only using
Benjamin’s insights and thereby defetishising love.

Feminist Rejoinders

Judith Butler suggests that power permeates recognition from the outset. In the
Psychic Life of Power (1997), she argues that becoming a human subject,
individualised and self-conscious, involves developing a reflexive relationship
with oneself. She argues that this capacity for reflexivity is produced by social
relationships that are internalised and take up residence in the psyche as
melancholic identifications with those others on whom one is dependent and
therefore vulnerable. Indeed, the emergence of human subjectivity relies on a
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constitutive subordination to another. This subordination, however, is

mediated by our interpersonal struggles with recognition. Here her analysis
clearly departs from Honneth.
Butler’s argument takes leave of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Pared of
social complexity, the desire for recognition between individuals was beautifully
and tragically rendered by Hegel’s analysis of the encounter between two
consciousnesses in the section entitled ‘The Independence and Dependence of
Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage’ in The Phenomenology (1977, p.
113). In this account, the desire of each to be recognised as autonomous agents
precipitates struggle and is resolved with the emergence of a master and a slave.
The tragedy of this fable is that neither consciousness understands that
recognition is a social relationship, and instead presumes that recognition is an
exclusive good to be obtained by one or other. In Hegel’s master slave dialectic
desire is blind, largely incapable of acknowledging the independence of the
other to whom it is directed, struggle risks death or domination, and the
conditions that might support mutual recognition are unclear.
Immediately following his discussion of lordship and bondage, Hegel (1977,
p. 119) examines three forms of consciousness from the perspective of a slave
who comes to realise that even if labour can be compelled, thought may remain
independent. These forms of consciousness are stoicism, scepticism and the
unhappy consciousness. According to Hegel, the positions encompassed by the
terms stoicism and scepticism contain contradictions that produce their
negation and instantiate the unhappy consciousness. Hegel traces the
development of these forms of consciousness and shows that they are all
ultimately ‘self-subverting’ (Williams, 1997, p. 3). According to Butler (1997,
p. 32), however, all three forms are ‘permutations of self-enslavement’. She
notes that stoicism, scepticism and the unhappy consciousness are all modes of
relating to otherness in a context of subordination (1997, p. 35). The stoic’s
attempted withdrawal involves a narcissistic erasure of boundaries between self
and other. The sceptic’s penchant for discontinuity and negation sadistically
destroys the relationship between self and other. However, the unhappy
consciousness has ‘realized’, or perhaps recognised, otherness by incorporating
both the position of the master and slave within a single consciousness (Butler,
1997, p. 42). It thereby preserves otherness, in particular the asymmetries of
mastery and servitude, by internalising them. For Butler, the unhappy
consciousness signifies a melancholic instantiation of the self who has been
lost in servitude and dependence.
Butler’s somewhat Kleinian reading of Hegel is also indebted to both
Althusser and Foucault. Both of whom suggest that recognition acts in the
service of power by constituting subjects of the ‘hail’ or the ‘gaze’. According
to Althusser (1971, p. 47), we come to recognise ourselves in the ‘hail’ or ‘call’
of another; he calls this interpellation. Interpellation involves submission
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and thereby reproduces domination. By recognising ourselves as the subject

of the law, for example, we submit to the imperatives and authority of the
law. Although he does not use the term recognition, Foucault too examines
the function of the ‘gaze’ of modern institutions including psychiatry, the
military and the prison system (Jay, 1993, p. 383). He links the gaze of medical
practitioners, prison wardens and other institutions to the ‘capillaries of power’
that circulate within and supplement the social relations of domination within
modernity (Foucault, 1994). Subjects of the gaze are subject to disciplinary
surveillance. Institutions have arrogated to themselves the authority to
recognise us variously as sick or criminal, for example. This type of recognition
sets the parameters for and informs the content of our identities. In Foucault’s
theory, the success of this type of recognition is linked to those same
institutions’ capacity to discipline our bodies. This form of recognition creates
and sustains a sense of subjective interiority that can be both mobilised and
manipulated to serve the forces of domination and exploitation (Foucault,
1995).
Butler’s innovation is to bring psychoanalytic concepts to bear on these
analyses. She is not content to accept that the hail of ideology or the gaze of
institutions interpellates or constitutes subjectivity, without also having an
account of the individual who responds. Here she argues that our ‘passionate
attachments’ to the terms of subordination entailed in recognition can be
explained by the existential promise of recognition: to sure up identity and thus
lend to those so recognised some measure of ontological security about the self
that they inhabit. The strength of Butler’s interpretation of recognition is
twofold. First, she identifies the complexity of our response to social
recognition: our relationship to otherness may involve negation or denial,
effacement or subordination, acceptance and melancholy. Second, by
analysing our constitutive dependence on recognition she exposes that our
desires are formed through regulation and limitation.
Kelly Oliver (2001, p. 65), however, argues that Butler conflates subjecti-
fication with subordination and thereby ‘normalises trauma’ associated with
the latter. By suggesting that the experience of trauma is integral to subject
formation in the first instance, Butler fails to distinguish between ‘productive
and abusive’ power (Oliver, 2001, p. 66). In order to overcome the conflation
that she identifies in Butler, Oliver develops a distinction between trauma and
loss. In her analysis, the loss of narcissism required for becoming a subject is
not equivalent to subordination, and it is the latter category that deserves the
adjective ‘traumatic’. Oliver (2001, p. 223) re-conceptualises intersubjectivity as
a processes of ‘witnessing’ to one another. Witnessing is a form of acknowl-
edgement that she distinguishes from recognition. The choice of language is
deliberate. In her analysis, recognition implies a type of hubris that claims to
know and understand others. Unlike, recognition, which is an act, witnessing is
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a process. It implies presence to and reflection about the unfolding complexity

of identity and experience that exemplifies human life. In her analysis,
witnessing need not imply subordination. In order to understand subordina-
tion we need to look beyond our desires for each other to social structures that
solidify hierarchies in power and distribution. According to Oliver, only when
these limit our capacity for agency, and thereby subordinate us, do we become
locked in a destructive loop characterised by the desire for recognition.
Oliver’s analysis is indebted to Frantz Fanon’s discussion of recognition in
the colonial situation. Fanon argued that in this context recognition is
complicit with domination. This is because the terms of the struggle for
recognition are already determined by hegemonic cultures and dominant
institutions. In other words, in a context where power is distributed
asymmetrically between social groups the demand for recognition reinforces
the dominant group’s capacity to judge inferiors. According to Fanon (1991,
p. 110), social recognition, in the indubitably racist context of the colonies,
served to reinforce the sense of inferiority that has already been inscribed into
‘Negroid’ subjectivity through dispossession and marginalisation (Oliver, 2001,
p. 24). He advocated a violent break with colonial regimes as the only way for
‘natives’ to develop self-respect. In Fanon’s analysis the balm for the injuries
inflicted by misrecognition is not another form, an extension or reformulation
of the social relations of recognition, but a break with recognition. Fanon
(1967, p. 27) argued that the natives must violently evict their colonial masters,
not organise a more equitable relationship of recognition between them. Fanon
(1967, p. 35) is unremittingly derisive towards the ‘native intellectuals’ who
pursue such a strategy of accommodation. Oliver reworks and generalises
Fanon’s theory into the analysis described above.
The most important point of difference between Butler and Oliver is that
Oliver (2001, p. 26) contends that the desire for recognition only surfaces when
we have been robbed of agency. Oliver claims that recognition is not essential
to human personality. In fact she contends that when subjectivity is intact there
is no desire for recognition, even if there is an ongoing desire to relate to others.
Oliver (2001, p. 95) suggests that individual subjectivity is driven by an ‘inner
witness’ that has a capacity for reflection and agency. In her analysis,
dehumanisation, or the abusive application of power, destroys the inner
witness and our capacity to respond flexibly to experience. Subordination locks
us into roles and self-understandings that are dependent and dysfunctional.
Accordingly, subjectivity itself is not dependent on subordination, only the
configuration of subjectivity that desires recognition is vulnerable in this way.
Oliver (2001, p. 15) argues that the desire for recognition only arises following
‘the humiliation, subordination and objectification of the gaze’. In other
words, we desire recognition only when we have been misrecognised and when
that misrecognition dehumanises us.
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Although the conclusions they draw are distinct, both Butler and Oliver
suggest that our desires for recognition are configured by extant structures of
domination. Moreover, such desires have implications for both the develop-
ment of human subjectivity and the politics or struggles for recognition in
which we humans engage. If my arguments are correct, and Honneth’s attempt
to sequester the vicissitudes of love-based recognition from politics and ethics
fails, he is vulnerable to and has little capacity to respond to such arguments.
The debate I have constructed between Butler and Oliver on the one hand, and
Honneth, on the other, leaves us with two alternatives. Either our desire for
recognition is contaminated by dependency, or the specific relationships whose
proximity to ‘love’ and sex means that they are potentially complicit in this way
must be excised from politics. I, however, am not satisfied by these antithetical
propositions.
Jessica Benjamin offers an analysis of recognition that may provide a way
through this seeming antinomy, and provides a foundation to reconsider
Honneth’s categorisation of love-based recognition. Like Honneth, Benjamin
is indebted to Winnicott, and object relations theory more generally. However,
unlike Honneth, Benjamin (2006, p. 121) has consistently explored ‘how
negation/destruction and recognition mutually constitute each other in the
process of breakdown and renewal, so as not to deny the great failures we
witness and suffer regarding recognition’. Her analysis is sensitive to our
recurrent attempts to demarcate and obliterate the difference between fantasy
and reality, self and others. In creating the theoretical space to discuss these
possibilities, and unlike Honneth, Benjamin analyses rather than marginalises
intimate relationships.
Benjamin’s (1988) analysis is buttressed by an explicitly feminist reformula-
tion of object relations theory that gives standing to female subjectivity in its
analysis of the maternal dyad. Thereby she renders the distinction between
fusion and separation in less stark terms than Honneth’s interpretation of
perennial intrapsychic conflict. Like Winnicott, Benjamin argues that the
conflicts of individuation, both its promise and its melancholy, are entwined
with a growing capacity to differentiate fantasy from reality. However, unlike
Winnicott, she explicitly theorises maternal subjectivity as an active component
of the dyad (Benjamin, 1998, p. 9). Her second innovation is to emphasise the
infant’s incipient awareness of her caregiver’s independent subjectivity. This
means rather than explore the vicissitudes of the shift from symbiosis to
separation, which may subsequently collapse; her theory attends to both
resistance and identification, requiring negotiation, from the outset.
Such speculations remain controversial even within psychoanalysis. Of
significance for my argument, however, her reconstruction of the dyad
facilitates a greater awareness of the process mutual recognition, understanding
that negation is an internal moment of realisation for each interlocutor.
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Drawing on Winnicott’s account of the creation and destruction of internal

objects, Benjamin (1998, p. 83) argues that reciprocal recognition is possible
precisely because the other’s subjectivity can survive our attacks, because each
continues to exist despite the other’s fantasies. This emphasis on negation as
integral to interpersonal recognition is absent in Honneth, who interprets
Winnicott’s argument to understand how separation, not recognition, occurs.
Honneth (1995, p. 105) suggests that some emotional ambivalence about
individuation accompanies us throughout our adult lives. He contends that:

The permanence of the ‘struggle’ for recognition stems not from the
unsocialisable ego’s drive for self-preservation, but rather from the anti-
social striving for independence that leads each subject to deny again and
again, the other’s difference. (Honneth, 2002, p. 504)

Here an emphasis on negation is preserved. Honneth identifies the basis of an

ongoing desire for recognition, which he links directly to the struggle for
recognition. He does not, however, explain how mutual recognition is possible
on this basis.
Benjamin’s resolution of this dilemma – recognition via negation – lends
weight to the experiences Butler and Oliver theorise without jettisoning the
normative significance of recognition for interpersonal relationships. Her
discussion of sadism and masochism, for example, locates power as an integral
functionary of desire (Benjamin, 1988). Nonetheless, Benjamin’s emphasis on
recognition inhering in specific relationships, distinguishes her from both
Butler and Oliver who trace the impact of social recognition on individuals.
McNay (2008, p. 48) has argued that by focusing on dyadic relationships,
Benjamin presumes an ‘unproblematic mutuality’ at the expense of under-
standing the structural consolidation of power. My analysis suggests that this is
not the case, although Benjamin’s theory could be extended by further
consideration of the factors that McNay worries she ignores. In my
interpretation, learning to recognise the independence of others, their concrete
particularity, is in no small part the ethical challenge posed by intersubjectivity
and achieved by recognition (Benjamin, 1998, p. 36). The seeming challenges
entailed in this realisation are precisely what Benjamin attempts to explore. She
provides compelling reasons to accept that mutual recognition entails moving
through and beyond negation, or instances when recognition fails, and
relationships require repair.
Juxtaposing Benjamin’s analysis of intimacy with Honneth’s account of
love-based recognition reveals the shortcomings of the latter and thereby
provides a platform from which to reconstruct Honneth’s category of
love-based recognition. Emphasising the sociality of the maternal dyad, by
capturing the significance and independence of maternal subjectivity,
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reconfigures the primary reference point for love-based recognition. Indeed it

strengthens the explanatory power of the generalisation: for example, if the
couple dyad evinces some structural similarity to the maternal dyad, even at the
level of fantasy, the significance of gender, sexuality and the sexual division of
labour cannot be ignored. As argued by this article, gender and power are
relevant to the internal structures of the ‘family’ and thereby the normative
significance of love-based recognition. Accepting the normative specificity of
recognition in intimate relationships does not require that these also be
considered apolitical and thereby privatised. Equipped with this awareness,
Honneth’s theory need not retract its commitment to the promotion and
protection of corporeal integrity through love-based recognition, but will have
at its disposal the conceptual resources with which to ‘defetishise’ this norm, to
understand how power functions in the specification of it.

Conclusion: Defetishising and Reconstructing Love

To defetishise means that a critical theory of recognition must do more than

explain how norms of recognition are immanent in social developments, such
as the separation of the state and civil society. Critical theory should be able to
explain how the social relations of recognition can be manipulated to produce
and maintain inequity and injustice, which returns us to my initial theme.
Defetishising recognition will involve accounting for the way that ideological
distortions inhabit our practices of recognition, including those that take place
in private. Interrogating the notion of corporeal integrity that Honneth
declares a positive consequence of love-based recognition provides an example.
First it is important to note that the corporeal integrity of women is constituted
differently to that of men (Cahill, 2001). The very recent, and not yet global,
recognition that rape can occur in marriage suggests that women’s corporeal
integrity is a historical construction that bears the imprint of political activism.
Likewise, the continuing debate over whether rape and forced prostitution
comprise human rights violations, crimes against humanity and even genocide,
suggests ongoing confusion about the political and ethical significance of the
corporeal integrity of women. These examples serve to illustrate that inhabiting
a specifically female body is in part the product of strategies of legal
recognition. The practices of recognition that sustain a discrete female body are
both public and private. Indeed, sometimes there is confusion as to which
(Young, 1990).
With the category of love-based recognition Honneth placed issues of
concern to feminists, including love, care and sexuality at the centre of his
theory of recognition. However, he proceeds to privatise and naturalise these
relationships, arguing that they are largely irrelevant to politics. In this instance
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Honneth’s privatisation of love curtails his understanding of intersubjectivity

and limits his capacity to effectively dispute claims that our desire for
recognition is complicit with power, and that the struggle for recognition will
reiterate dependencies and hierarchies that ought to be deconstructed by
radical politics. I have argued that love relationships are social and thereby
imbued with power. Only by thinking these relationships through can the
theory of recognition secure for itself foundations that offer a critical purchase
on recognitive practices. This involves recalling women’s agency in intimacy,
and inquiring into what types of social conditions support love. Honneth’s
analysis of the private sphere, however, does not do this work. The arguments
that he offers to separate love-based recognition and the family from the social
and the political are not convincing. By insisting on the limited political
significance of the relationships located in the family, Honneth loses sight of a
significant arena of experience and ethics that informs social movements and
can help explain how power works in and through the social relations of
recognition.
Butler, Oliver and Benjamin are all sensitive to the impact of power on
recognitive practices. So too is Honneth. However, he fails to incorporate this
awareness into his account of love-based recognition. The significance of this
task for Honneth’s theory should be apparent. Unless he accounts for our
capacity to interrogate recognitive practices in intimate relationships, which in
no small part affect our desires and imaginaries regarding recognition, he
cannot forestall the pessimistic conclusion that recognition is complicit with
power. Reconstructing the category of love-based recognition, using Jessica
Benjamin’s work can assist Honneth to avoid this conclusion. She understands
that mutuality is messy but does not despair; that power conditions desire,
including the desire for recognition, without resigning from our capacity for
critique.
This article argued both that Honneth must ‘defetishise’ love-based
recognition and reconsider its normative implications. In other words, I have
pursued two lines of argumentation simultaneously: first pertaining to the level
of sociological sophistication required by theories of recognition, particularly
in the private sphere, and second to their normative implications, which can
only be derived from a persuasive sociology of power. Courting conceptual
complexity is common to critical theories that employ concepts that resonate
on different registers. No less is true of recognitive theories. Honneth’s
internally differentiated account of recognition that operates on numerous
registers is a prime example. This aricle, however, suggests an alternative
understanding of love-based recognition. Its normative implications reside in
understanding that interpersonal recognition is tasked with acknowledging the
independent subjectivity of others with whom we are intimately related. This
requires a more comprehensive ethics of engagement than either caring or
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witnessing implies. Further analysis of recognition is thereby warranted, with

respect to how the personal and the political, the intrapsychic and the social are
entwined. This is a particular area of feminist competence, thus my
recommendation that Honneth no longer postpone engaging with feminist
theory.3

Notes

1 For example, it is all very well to esteem women for caring for children, however, if the social
organisation of childcare leaves women vulnerable to financial dependence and exploitation, or
simply incapable of participating in society more broadly, it can be said that this kind of
recognition is operating ideologically. This, however, is a complicated example. Not only are
there good reasons to value women’s contribution to childcare, it is more than intuitively
plausible that women with caring responsibilities take pleasure in the public recognition afforded
to them for this activity. To suggest that this form of recognition is ideological implies that by
obscuring the reality of women’s experience as careers, those women so recognised are
subordinated. To justify the ascription, ideological, this type of recognition must be thought to
present female or maternal identity too narrowly; or, it must be wielded to impede women from
articulating their experience and/or to justify their exclusion from other professional and social
activities. In this example, recognition is ideological inasmuch as it is allied to the reproduction of
a gendered division of labour that obstructs women’s full self-realisation.
2 I borrow this term from Seyla Benhabib (1992, p. 42), who defines defetishising critique ‘as a
procedure of analysis whereby the given is shown to be not a natural fact but a socially and
historically constituted, and thus changeable reality’.
3 At the beginning of The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth (1995, p. 2) comments that ‘works in
feminist philosophy often lead in the direction that intersects with the aims of a theory of
recognition’. He also states, with due modesty, that he had to postpone engaging with feminist
theory.

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