Theoria

A context of protracted postcolonial misrecognition and social injustice brought most of the contributors to this special issue together. This context raises an acute awareness of the ideological limitations not only of the dominant normative frameworks of recognition, developed by social and political theorists such as Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, and Charles Taylor, but of the African philosophical conceptions of recognition represented by ubuntu. What is the ethical or normative status of the insights into social ontology that we find in theories of recognition? The authors acknowledge the entanglement of norms of recognition in contested relations of power that influence the formation of subjects and the normative ambivalence of recognition which enables and constrains subjective agency. Ongoing inequality and social injustice makes palpable the practical effects of norms of mis/recognition. The authors reinterpret the concept of recognition to allow for normative ambivalence and ideological sensitivity in the current postcolonial setting.

Axel Honneth's earlier conception of recognition as an ethical ideal has received significant critique from feminist Foucauldian critical theorists, such as Judith Butler, Lois McNay and Amy Allen, for undermining how recognition can often be a conduit for subordination. As a result, there has been an increasing ambivalence about the nature of recognition in the critical theory literature. Seeing that the ambivalence critiques may engender scepticism around the utility of recognition in critical theory, this article seeks to counteract this scepticism. However, rescuing recognition from a terminal scepticism requires that we move away from Honneth's insistence on a normative reading of recognition to a strictly functionalist conception of recognition. This functionalist account of recognition, derived through an exegetical revisiting of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, takes recognition as a tool for or a means of attaining actuality that can be appropriated in various and often conflicting ways.

Frantz Fanon's revolutionary psychiatry aimed to help constitute a postcolonial Algeria that recognised the humanity of all its members and, more widely, a Third World liberated of the shackles of colonial misrecognition. Fanon offers us an account of how a politics of misrecognition can give way to a politics of recognition. However, the violent means by which he thought a society guided by the ideal of mutual recognition could be achieved from the remnants of a colonial order cannibalised his democratic aims. I contrast Fanon's views with Hanna Arendt's on the role of violence and her republicanism. I argue that her views are more promising than Fanon's because they foster mutual recognition if adequately embodied in the political sphere. However, tragically, colonial Algeria did not present the conditions for a new democratic order to thrive, mainly due to France's protracted and uncompromising brutality.

In this article, I examine the marginalisation of women, specifically in African philosophy, with the aim of cautioning and inspiring a reconfiguration of African philosophy that takes seriously the discourse of gender as it does the discourse of race. I employ Charles Taylor's notion of recognition to understand some of the effects of a lack of recognition, which I then extend to the lack of recognition of women in African philosophy. I present this understanding against the background of the ongoing debates and efforts of decolonisation by illustrating how the marginalisation of women in African philosophy places the discipline at odds with decolonisation and its emancipatory objective. African philosophy, in the process of legitimising its existence, has adopted a male-centred framework which has not only undermined the existence of women but also failed to recognise their contributions. This has influenced the practice and discourse of African philosophy, resulting in the underrepresentation of women therein.

This article discusses Charles Taylor's analysis of the ‘politics of recognition’, which reveals that the major versions of the latter share an ideological conception of Eros as a binding, unifying force. Such striving for oneness is seen as key to forming harmonious, just communities and nations, and ultimately global cohesion. I refer to this as the ‘ideology of Eros’. However, Taylor highlights an ironically divisive opposition concerning how to realise such oneness, based on incompatible foundational principles: ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’. Instead of a choice, Taylor opts for the demanding political task of ongoing negotiation between them. I augment Taylor's analysis by re-evaluating the figure of ‘non-recognition’ arising from Lacan's critique of the ‘ideology of Eros’, which is centred on Socrates’ encounter with Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium and to which he adds his notion of genuine love, which affirms an ethic of healthy ‘non-recognition’. I argue that this ethic supports the difficult political task that Taylor rightly calls for.

As biological taxonomists have only recently begun to acknowledge, humanity is stuck in a tension between its myriad social, cultural, political and religious cosmologies – its various umwelten – and the desire for rational, scientific classification. What does it mean that the rational logics of classifications that we so readily employ to recognise the reality before our eyes cannot account for the passionate attachments that exceed any categorical identifications and actually make us who we are, because these are the lives we live beyond our ability to define them? What our focus upon the politics of recognition often misses is that intimate connections between persons – what we might call a more authentic form of recognition, a true seeing of the other – often goes beyond recognition, beyond any classifications that society foists upon us. I explore this question directly, pointing to possibilities for better recognition of this tension and how such recognition can reform society.

In this article, I explore the potential of reciprocal relations of recognition of epistemic agency to respond to calls to transform pedagogical practice in the South African academy and, in particular, to disrupt ongoing epistemic injustice in the academy. First, I put forward a picture of recognition as a practice underpinned by an attitude of playful self-discipline and spend some time elucidating what this attitude involves. Second, I turn to a description of epistemic agents as socially and historically situated knowers with normative status. Third, I bring these discussions together to speak about the practice of recognising our own and one another's epistemic agency. And, finally, I explore how intentionally engaging in this practice might serve to respond to calls to transform pedagogical practice and address epistemic injustice in the academy.

Animal pain and suffering is mostly caused by humans, particularly by the human use of domestic animals. This calls for the recognition of animal pain and suffering. My focus is on pain-related suffering. I argue for recognition in the phenomenological sense of giving adequate regard to pain experience in animals and their capacity to express it in their own species-specific terms, in a way that will motivate us to prevent it. My advocacy for the recognition of pain in animals consequently includes a consideration of moral and political action to avert their suffering.

While the Euromodern model of the nation-state has been the subject of unremitting, exhaustive and merited political criticism, this article advances an anti-anti-statism. Oriented by warnings of theorists who have advanced plurinational states, creolising the nation, separating states from nations and abolishing the state, I turn to Fanon's insistence that states be re-envisioned beyond Cold War alternatives and narrowing nationalisms; Cabral's modelling of political unity on an effective football team; and Gyekye's suggestion of deliberately forging meta-national states. I argue that we need the institutional rejection of states reliant on racialised enslavement and colonialism as the exclusive custodians of bestowing and withholding political recognition. We must also premise rightful belonging not only on historical group identities but on how these are expressed in records of political activities demonstrating commitment to the cultivation and extension of national consciousness or the meta-state as the basis of political legitimacy.