NEGATIVITY IN RECOGNITION: Post-Freudian Legacies in Contemporary Critical Theory

This chapter aims to address the ambivalence of recognition by focusing on the problems surrounding the different possible ways to account for negativity in recognition. By recognition, I mean an aspect of social relations through which the identity of a person is established or confirmed, or indeed, is denied, in some of its features, as a result of the attitudes of other persons toward that person. Three main dimensions of recognitive relations immediately emerge from this basic characterization. First, recognitive relationships have a deep impact on the subject involved in recognition. In the Hegelian tradition in particular, the one that