La reconnaissance est-elle un devoir ? Arendt, Cavell et la problématisation d'un concept/Is Recognition an Imperative? From a "Politics of Recognition" to a "Politics of Acknowledgement"

Judging by the quantity and quality of recently published work, the issue of recognition seems currently at the forefront of many debates, and scholars have begun to talk of a general shift away from a "politics of redistribution" toward a "politics of recognition". And yet there is absolutely no clarity on how recognition operates, on the kind of effects which the operation we perform when recognizing bring about. The purpose of this article is to shed light on some of the limits of the normative use of the concept of recognition as employed by Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth. I will do so by drawing some lines of connection between Hannah Arendt and Stanley Cavell. To the identity-oriented normative version of the politics of recognition, I will oppose a politics of acknowledgement (to borough Cavell's term). In this picture (a politics of acknowledgement rather than recognition), justice does not require that all people be known and respected as who they really are. It requires, instead, that each one of us bear our share of the burden and risk involved in the uncertain, open-ended activity of interacting with other people. Sources of injustice lie not in the failure to recognize the true identity of the other, but in the failure to acknowledge our very concept of recognition.