A new bridge

From a historical perspective, Allen’s courageous and beautiful book is a weight-bearing pillar of a new bridge that stretches across what has been perceived as a major rift on the Continental philosophical plateau since the 1960s. This bridge is barely a decade-old construction which, by connecting the topography of a split territory, will help foster the cross-fertilization between the German tradition of critical theory, at one end, and French poststructuralism, at the other. In my comments on this expansive and elegantly argued book, I will first briefly contextualize its contribution to the building of this bridge. Then, I will sketch its basic structure, bring into focus its theoretical scope and isolate some of the principal nodes in the complex network of exchanges that it establishes with major voices in contemporary philosophy and feminist theory on both sides of the Atlantic. Lastly, I will turn to Allen’s reworking of the concept of mutual recognition that she pursues through a combination of Judith Butler’s and Jessica Benjamin’s approaches. Allen’s project is to provide a feminist account of the structure of subject-formation, which she describes as constituted by power, but also able to constitute itself in emancipatory ways. While I find Allen’s version of mutual recognition the most enticing and provocative aspect of her book, it also lends itself to some substantive and epistemic questions that need to be answered if her project is to succeed. At the end of my comments, I will pose these questions and offer suggestions as to how to answer them.

T. W. Adorno first charted what I have called the Continental rift in 1964. In The Jargon of Authenticity, he called attention to ideology’s dependence on language and denounced Martin Heidegger for his aesthetic use of it. Adorno’s claim was that Heidegger’s ‘jargon of authenticity’ was a prime example of complacent cooperation between philosophy and free market capitalist ideology. According to Adorno, since Being and Time Heidegger’s ambiguous reinvention of language would not only have ignored social injustice but let the feelings of contemporary meaninglessness glow in a linguistic and ahistorical aura. Such aura, however, far from being elusive and magical in the original Benjaminian definition, was recognizable enough to lend itself to being reproduced and sold according to dominant marketing strategies.

In his 1981 response to Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 pamphlet, The Postmodern Condition, Jürgen Habermas reopened and updated Adorno’s polemics against Heidegger. In his essay, ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, Habermas re-charted the Continental rift in terms of the debate on the political legacy of the Enlightenment and used the opposition between modernity and postmodernity to distinguish who was in line with it and who was not. While Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were branded as young conservatives in that somewhat occasional essay, it was not until 1985, with the publication of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, that Habermas provided a detailed account of the elements that he thought exposed the French critics of reason to the risk of political nihilism. The recipients of Habermas’ attack either did not have time to respond fully, which is the case of Foucault who died prematurely in 1984, or decided to provide only oblique answers, which is the case of Derrida who disseminated them in long footnotes to a couple of his texts.

Allen and I came of age while the Franco-German battle was still raging. Interestingly enough, though we did not know each other at the time, neither of us took the validity of that battle at face value. This reticence prompted us to develop two independent but parallel projects. On the occasion of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, I pursued a rapprochement between Derrida and Habermas. After they appeared jointly for the first time in my book, Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003), not only did they make their voice as public intellectuals heard jointly in praise of the mass demonstrations against the war in Iraq of 15 February 2003, but, and perhaps even more poignantly for me, they became friends. Allen, in this book, pursues the rapprochement between Foucault and Habermas around the compatibility of their critiques of power. She then examines the resources that such compatibility offers for feminist thought. Had Foucault been alive in 2008, the date of publication of The Politics of Our Selves, his relationship with Habermas might have changed dramatically, and perhaps they would have become friends too.

Yet, the parallel course of our work does not stop at the structural pairing of Habermas, the champion of the transcendental role of discursive rationality, with a French theorist, committed to the dissolution of permanent structures of discourse. Strikingly, Allen and I, again independently, turned to Kant to retrieve the roots of a possible conversation between Habermas on the one hand, and Foucault and Derrida on the other. Both of us sought to rethink Habermas’ relation to poststructuralism from the perspective of the understated significance of Kant and the Enlightenment for both Foucault and Derrida. This is to say that Allen could not find a more sympathetic reader than me, with respect both to the mission of this volume and the appreciation of the difficulty it entails. Discussing Habermas and Foucault from the balanced and non-partisan perspective she takes in The Politics of Our Selves presents a challenge that can easily intimidate the most navigated and versatile scholar. Being able to shuttle, as smoothly as she does, between conceptual vocabularies and styles of argumentation that have been represented as incompatible by three decades of mutual misunderstanding is certainly no easy task.

Both Allen and I have underlined Foucault’s and Derrida’s debt to the Enlightenment. I undertook to engage Derrida and Habermas on a broad re-evaluation of the legacy of the Enlightenment after it had been transformed into an ideological fetish by the extremist public statements of Al Qaeda and the Bush administration’s response to them. Allen’s engagement of Foucault and Habermas crosses over a specific aspect of the Enlightenment still affecting both critical theory and global justice: the entanglement between gender and power. How do critical theory and the Foucaultian critique of power intersect feminist reconstructions of the impact of gender norms on the agency of individuals, institutions, and communities? But also: How should we conceive and promote resistance to the repressive character of these norms? Allen’s claim is that reliable answers to these questions cannot be found without formulating a model of subjectivity that acknowledges the performative power of the forces immanent in the social field while preserving the ability to express normative standards in judging and acting. The politics of ourselves, an expression Foucault used to designate the possibility of resisting oppressive dominant norms, not only gives Allen’s book its title but names the model of subjectivity that she thinks can support her version of mutual recognition. Such model emerges from the dialogue that she sets up between two male thinkers, Habermas and Foucault, and two female thinkers and feminist theorists, Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler. The result of juxtaposing these two pairs is highly productive because they reveal a number of unexpected convergences. Their cross-examination serves as background to Allen’s own contribution that seeks, along a path opened by Nancy Fraser,

to envision subjects as both culturally constructed and yet capable of critique, and to think through the implications of this for how we understand subjectivity, power, critique, and autonomy. But this analysis also goes beyond Fraser to think through the difficult issues of how our cultural construction mires us in modes of subjectivity that attach subjects to their subjection and thus threaten to undermine the motivation for autonomous self-transformation. … The general conceptual philosophical problem that emerges from these debates is the difficulty we have in thinking through power and autonomy simultaneously. (21)

Allen is aware that her inquiry follows Fraser only up to a point. For Allen’s real interest is in exploring perhaps the most unsettling question in feminist, moral, and political theories: ‘What,’ she asks her reader bluntly, ‘if knowing the “truth” about, for example, the subordinating nature of the gender norms that constitute your identity does little or nothing to loosen their grip on you?’. (10) This question, variously but never sufficiently or satisfactorily answered by a number of feminist theorists, has never received as rigorous a survey and as insightful an assessment as in Allen’s book. To explain why knowledge of injustice is oftentimes not enough to beat its oppressive effects seems to me the dilemma that captures most profoundly Allen’s sensibility as a philosopher and a feminist. This is a question that benefits greatly from her native-like fluency in the various disciplinary languages that she speaks in the book, spanning political theory to psychoanalysis. Allen deploys the backbone of her argument by showing how Foucault and Habermas, while offering two very different models of critique, work within a modified Kantian space similar to what Thomas McCarthy has defined as the ‘impurity of reason’. To substantiate her argument, Allen provides comprehensive critiques of both Habermas and Foucault, which she does with fluidity and analytical rigor.

In a way that originally reworks elements of both Benhabib’s and Maeve Cooke’s readings of Habermas, Allen sees the need for a more contextualist and pragmatic interpretation of normativity, especially in the late Habermas. Whereas in his earlier ‘and more psychoanalytically engaged work, Habermas recognized that there is a key motivational component to the achievement of autonomy’, thereby presupposing that ‘engaging will and desire is necessary for the true realization of freedom with respect to existing norms’ (12), ever since A Theory of Communicative Action, and even more acutely after Between Facts and Norms, Habermas defends that inner nature can be communicatively disambiguated, or purified, on cognitive rational grounds. By the sheer force of supporting arguments with reasons we should thus be able to remain open to criticism and recognize each other as rational agents. If this is the case, Habermas does not fully succeed in avoiding the empty formalism of Kant’s moral theory, which prompts Allen to challenge Habermas at the level of the contextual and concrete aspects of moral and political deliberation. These moves set the preconditions for thematizing the motivational component of autonomy.

By contrast, Foucault readily embraces all sorts of impurities of reason at the expense of its normative dimension. Foucault, like Butler, offers a wealth of empirical insights into how power operates but offers ‘no ontologically intact reflexivity, no reflexivity that is not itself culturally constructed’ (6), to use Fraser’s concise statement cited by Allen. Habermas’ charge against Foucault is to have dissolved the normative edge of critique by endorsing one of the staple postmodern moves: the death of the subject. If this were true, there indeed could not be any continuity between Foucault and Kant, especially the political Kant of ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ to whom Foucault offers a direct response in ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ After reading Allen’s book it is going to be hard for anyone to hold Habermas’ original position. For she proves, I think beyond any reasonable doubt, that Foucault does not negate the subject tout court, or even advocate its reduction to a fiction or an illusion, but instead ‘proposes a historical investigation of the ways in which the subject has been constituted’ (46). In this respect, Foucault’s calling the subject into question is not aimed at negating the subject as such, but rather at submitting to critical scrutiny the specific philosophical use made of it both by Kant’s transcendental critique and by Husserlian phenomenology. This is what brings Allen to claim, very lucidly, that:

Foucault’s work is best understood as an immanent rather than a total critique of the Kantian Enlightenment project. … Foucault’s inversion of Kant’s notion of transcendental subjectivity constitutes a critique of critique itself, a continuation through transformation of that project. (24)

Allen offers a wealth of subtle arguments on Foucault’s relation to Kant that I cannot do justice to in this limited space. However, it is essential to note that her analysis of Foucault’s ‘critique of critique’ is indispensable to correct Habermas’ overly rationalistic reading of Kant. Without the Foucaultian input we could not explain how power works intersubjectively to shape and constitute our subjectivity. In a complementary fashion, Allen levels Habermas and his own use of Kant against Foucault, by suggesting a modified account of autonomy, broadly construed along Habermasian lines. Her claim is that without some account of autonomy Foucault ends up by overlooking the constituted subject’s ability to critically reflect and implement self-transformation.

Like a master director of the new French cinema of the early 1960s, Allen films the same scene from a multitude of angles that illuminate the unity of the core issues not by essentializing them into a definitive formula, but rather by multiplying the questions that radiate from them. The reason why Allen turns to the debate between Benhabib and Butler, and to their critiques of Habermas and Foucault respectively, is to canvass her own feminist account of the politics of ourselves, which she intends as a theoretical diagnostic model as well as a practical strategy of resistance.

Allen endorses Benhabib’s more Hegelian version of discourse ethics: ‘The problem is not that Habermas stresses the rational potential implicit in processes of argumentation, it is that he overemphasizes this potential while simultaneously underemphasizing the other – non-rational, bodily, affective, concrete – aspects of ourselves’ (153). Yet, by making gender into a narrative, Benhabib’s own ‘narrative conception of subjectivity’ commits her to a fundamentally ungendered view of the self that reveals, in Allen’s mind, a rationalist bias that is incompatible with an earnest feminist agenda. In order to tap into ‘the motivational capacity to change who we want to be’ (183) as women and oppressed recipients of gender norms, we simply cannot afford to think of ourselves as ungendered selves. Rather, it is precisely by reconstructing, on the score of Foucault’s immanent critical model, the ways in which we have been and are still being constituted as subjects that we may at once take stock of the contingency of oppressive practices and cultivate the motivation to change who we want to be.

In the same way that Allen agrees with Benhabib’s critique of Habermas but disagrees with Benhabib’s narrative conception of the self, she agrees with Butler’s intervention on the Foucaultian project with the toolbox of psychoanalysis, but disagrees with Butler’s purely performative conception of subjectivity. In Butler’s mind, Foucault’s account of the constitution of the subject through ever more comprehensive processes of normalization, implemented by the disciplinary apparatus of modern institutions, is limited by the fact that Foucault ‘does not elaborate on the specific mechanisms of how the subject is formed in submission’ (73). Without an answer to this question there remains an explanatory gap between the social dimension in which the process of normalization occurs and what Butler calls the individual ‘psychic form that power takes’ (ibid.). Allen agrees with Butler’s psychoanalytic extension of Foucault’s theory of power as subjection, according to which subjection ‘refers to the ambivalent process whereby one is constituted as a subject in and through the process of being subjected to disciplinary norms’ (72). But Allen aims to push Butler further when she asks: Why do victims of oppression have a tendency to remain attached to the agents of their own oppression, whether discursive, institutional, collective, or individual, even after they have been ‘rationally demystified’? This is a theoretical keystone in feminist theory, as Allen recognizes, but also, I may add, a crucial policy question, on which depends the feasibility of progressive politics in national and international settings: from welfare state programs supporting inner city and impoverished populations to international NGOs’ activities around the world, from large financial incentives for economic development bestowed by world actors such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to microcredit projects.

One of the most illuminating among the thick web of well-reasoned arguments that Allen offers in this book is, for me, what she calls Butler’s collapse of dependency and subordination, which causes Butler to remain ambivalent on the possibility of mutual recognition. Allen’s critical appraisal of Butler on this point does not come as a surprise, for she had already warned her reader that ‘what is missing from Foucault’s account is an appreciation of the role played by non strategic relations with others in the constitution of autonomous selves’ (48). ‘Absent some understanding of social interaction in nonstrategic terms,’ she writes, ‘Foucault cannot make sense of how individuals cooperate with one another in collective social and political action to agitate for progressive change’ (69). Butler does go further than Foucault, however, by using the psychoanalytic language of dependence and attachment, which illustrates what a model of non-strategic social interaction could be. But even if Butler is closer than Foucault to where Allen wants to get, she is not quite there. The reason is that, by collapsing dependence and subordination, Butler’s position vis-à-vis the possibility of non-strategic social interaction remains ambiguous. ‘Butler’s account of resistance – specifically her ability to differentiate critical and subversive reinscriptions of subordinating norms from faithful ones – suffers as a result of this ambivalence’ (74). In my favorite chapter of the book, which is dedicated to Butler, Allen is careful to point out how in her more recent work Butler

… invokes a recognition of our common humanity, grounded in our common corporeal vulnerability, that structures the individual pursuit of recognition. Butler suggests that our common human vulnerability is the basis for both political community and collective resistance. The fact that our primary sociality thus calls attention to the ‘ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence. … Can this insight lead to a normative reorientation of politics?’ (88)

Since Butler’s words clearly imply the possibility of distinguishing more subordinating from less subordinating forms of recognition, Allen detects in Butler a normative commitment to non-strategic possibilities in social interaction. Butler cashes it out in terms of recognition of our common humanity, understood as vulnerability, which in turn becomes the basis for the recognition of mutual interdependence. Yet, Butler’s open-ended question regarding ‘the normative reorientation of politics’ testifies to her ambivalence toward validity and normativity in general. Contra Butler’s ambivalence, I agree with Allen that we positively need a normative standpoint in order to distinguish between more oppressive and less oppressive reinscriptions, and that such standpoint should lead to a normative reorientation of politics. I also agree with Allen that mutual recognition plays a role in it. However, I am not sure I fully understand what Allen has in mind both substantively and epistemically by mutual recognition.

I wonder, for example, how extensive is Allen's agreement with Butler’s appeal to vulnerability and dependence as the key phenomenological experiences of mutual recognition. And especially what Allen’s position is on Butler’s more recent formulations such as they appear in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, which is dedicated to the symbolic, political and psychic effects of the second Iraq War. Here, in spite of her ambivalence toward recognition, Butler states clearly that others appear to us as truly living, or recognizably human, only if their lives are framed as vulnerable, which means at the risk of being lost. The acknowledgement of this risk determines which lives we are allowed to grieve and which we are not. Since the possibility of mourning determines the condition of recognition, Butler seems to suggest that there should be a way to separate normative humanization from distorted dehumanization. Where that boundary falls, is the pivotal question, since the existence of that boundary determines the feasibility of the project of immanent critique, which is another name for the bridge that Allen and I have been contributing to building between critical theory and French poststructuralism. Moreover, setting that boundary seems essential to engage foundational questions in democratic theory: the role of the media in the formation of public opinion, freedom of expression, the nature of political participation, all which have again taken center-stage in the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001.

In my own recent work, I have offered an assessment of Butler’s argument. In the end, I think that Butler’s ambivalence is not a principled position but the genuine posing of a question for which she has not yet found an answer. I believe the answer should be articulated from a discussion concerning the representation of vulnerability, which includes communicative as well as aesthetic dimensions. If Habermas has provided us with some guidelines for settling normative questions in the communicative domain, especially if tempered by Allen’s critical appraisal of them, the aesthetic realm remains largely terra incognita. Yet, this is too crucial a question to be left to the empirical studies of sociologists, political scientists, and media theorists. The notion of ‘framing’, which Butler raises but does not sufficiently elaborate at the normative level, entails the possibility of critically assessing whatever is discursively or visually represented in the public sphere, from television to blogs, from marketing strategies to political campaigning. A discussion of framing appears to me a promising avenue to distinguish humanization from distorted dehumanization.

The question of the human underlies Butler's suggestion that others are recognizable as humans only if they are presented to us as potentially grievable. Since Butler's stance seems central to Allen's line of argument, I wish she would elucidate the following: on a kind of hyperbolic ethics in the Levinasian mold, one that privileges an interpretation of agency as responsiveness to the vulnerability of the other? Or does it fit the Foucaultian reversal of the Kantian conception of agency as autonomy? Whereas for Kant autonomy, as Allen writes, is ‘the property the will has of being a law to itself’ (65), whether law is interpreted ethically or juridically as a set of rights and duties,

For Foucault, autonomy does not consist in freely bounding oneself to a necessity in the form of the moral law; instead, it consists in freely calling into question that which is presented to us as necessary, thus opening up the space for a possible transgression of those limits. (65)

Lastly, I wish Allen could clarify for me the epistemic status of mutual recognition in her critical-theoretical model. In taking a safe distance from Habermas’ rationalist emphasis, Allen suggests that:

Mutual recognition, then, can be thought of as an ideal that is immanent to social life; it provides a foothold within social practice for normative critique. It is only a pernicious illusion if we posit an end state of social life from which power has been expunged and in which social relations are structured by mutual recognition alone. (179)

While acknowledging the irreducible entanglement between power and validity, Allen wants to preserve the possibility of mutual recognition as an ideal ‘immanent to social life’. I would like to know more about what Allen means by this formulation, and also how she coordinates what she means here with what she states earlier in the book, where mutual recognition ‘clearly implies that non-subordinating, or at least, less subordinating forms of recognition are possible, at least in principle, at least as a regulative ideal’ (88). So, I wish to ask her whether mutual recognition an ideal immanent to social life or a regulative ideal in the Kantian sense?

We could understand mutual recognition not as a possible state of social relations from which power relations have been permanently and completely expunged but as a permanent though temporally fleeting possibility within dynamically unfolding human relationships. (179)

Allen suggests, very acutely from my perspective, that mutual recognition cannot be conceived as a state, but rather as part of the temporal dynamic in which human relationships constantly unfold. I wonder whether, in the face of the ever more accelerated pace of social change and the fragmentation of civil society at the global level, understanding mutual recognition as an ideal, whether immanent or regulative, is the right way to go. Alternatively, I wonder whether Derrida’s idea of the trace would serve Allen’s argument better.

Let us take the Enlightenment as an example. For Derrida, the Enlightenment does not describe a finite historical experience, political event, or set of self-evident moral values. The Enlightenment is, rather, the trace of a promise that has never been exhaustively fulfilled or realized. In this sense, it is always still ‘to come’. For Derrida the Enlightenment does not represent an ‘ideal’ that can never be fully realized, but rather designates the fragmentary legacy of a past that never took its full course, which needs to be discussed, explored and implemented. The sense in which Derrida states that the Enlightenment has not been fully actualized is not incompatible with Habermas’ claim about the ‘incomplete project of modernity’. And yet for Derrida, as it was true for Walter Benjamin, it is important that all political projects and values remain grounded in their historicity, for if they are assumed as descriptions of abstract constructs we run the risk of crystallizing them, essentializing them, causing them to lose their critical force.

I wish to submit to Allen the possibility that not only subjectivity but mutual recognition too might be better understood if its historicity, its corporeal and material constitution are preserved in some form. My suggestion is to apply the notion of critique of critique, which she invokes to describe Foucault’s relation to the transcendental philosophers of the subject, Kant and Husserl, to the conception of mutual recognition. I think that the Derridean notion of trace could capture mutual recognition as always already embodied. If mutual recognition is to be truly theorized beyond Habermas’ rationalistic and cognitive definition, it would simply ‘happen’ in a fragmentary and not always predictable manner. Recognition would thus emerge, whether intersubjectively or intrapsychically, as an event rather than a paradigm, whose normativity is that of the memory of a past that itself keeps calling for recognition.