Introduction
This article makes two contributions, to recognition theory and to International Relations (IR) theory. My purpose is to theorise the concept of misrecognition that we seek to bring into focus for the study of world politics with this Special Issue. Recognition theory affords me my starting point for shifting the focus from recognition to misrecognition, which, we contend, better renders the productive force of the negative, Hegel’s most important contribution to contemporary thought. The negative, or negativity, simply put, is the obverse of positivity. It is a category of being and thought. Ontologically, it captures what is not, or not yet; in-becoming. Jean-Paul Sartre illustrated it by way of the space between two points: whereas the two points positively exist, the space between them does not; it is a non-being, a negative.Footnote 1 Epistemologically, this space is the distance of critique. It is what enables taking a step back from what is, from what positively exists, in order to critically appraise it. Hence the negative is the very condition of possibility of all analytical, non-positivistic, and critical thinking. Historically, it predates the positivist modes of thoughts that founded, in the nineteenth century, the social and political sciences from which our discipline hails. It remains a touchstone, I suggest, for thinking through IR’s processes, actors, structures, and concepts. In fact, IR itself is a tribute to the productivity of the negative, insofar as an entire discipline has sprung forth from a negatively constituted concept, from a lack; ‘anarchy’ being the absence (an) of centralised authority (archeia). As the discipline’s founding concept illustrates, the negative is already at work in any systemic theorising that seeks to appraise the effects of structures of interaction that are not visible yet bear out positive effects. Reckoning with the negative would thus move us further along the path IR has been travelling down all this time. Our primary suggestion with this Special Issue, however, is that, as the meta-concept that is poised to capture the liminal, the in-becoming, the negative holds considerable promise for continuing to deploy the constitutive dynamics that lie at the heart of a post-positivist IR. Lastly and specifically for my purposes, the negative is also a category of the human experience, a subjective space. In this article, I will illustrate the analytical purchase of the negative by showing how the lived, affective, experience of misrecognition – of being misrecognised and of misrecognising – is constitutive of human agency itself.
In the introduction to the Special Issue,Footnote 2 we have argued that the dynamics of misrecognition reveal the extent to which political agency is structured by an unattainable ideal, and specifically the quest for what we have termed, inverting the habitual understanding of sovereignty in IR, a ‘sovereign agency’. What is still missing is a theoretical grounding for appraising how, and why, political actors, constitutively and relentlessly, chase after something they will never attain. Still missing, then, and to put it in another way, are the means for understanding this frustration that, we contend, is a key driver of political action. That is a structure of human agency that was originally laid bare by Hegel’s dialectic of the master and servant, and further uncovered by Lacan’s concept of fantasy.Footnote 3 Together Hegel and Lacan reveal a social structure of action, located at the individual level (in a ‘consciousness’, for Hegel, or a ‘psyche’, for Lacan), which is powered by an unattainable ideal. This psychic structure is social, in that it is inter-subjectively, hence discursively, constituted all the way down. That the ideal is unattainable, that it remains an object of fantasy, is precisely what sustains the actor’s capacity to act. This Hegelian-Lacanian model of agency offers considerable purchase for constitutive theorising. It reveals a motivation for human agency that eludes utility-maximising models entirely, which can capture only the positive rewards or punishments that come with undertaking certain actions, rather than those motivations that are negatively constituted, by an unattainable ideal. Desire, rather than interests, are at the heart of this model of agency.Footnote 4 Moreover, Lacan’s concept of fantasy decisively moves the discussion of how an ideal can motivate human agency out of the realm of the normative (political theory’s endless ‘oughts’), and towards actual social logics; towards how they unfold, or indeed – as the dynamics of misrecognition draw out – fail to unfold in the ways that actors would like them to.
To theorise misrecognition, I chart a path through recognition theory back to Hegel and then beyond Hegel to Lacan. In the first part of the article I map the field of recognition theory as it has developed across philosophical, social, and critical theory over the last three decades and through its successive waves of internal critique. I trace the origins of the focus on agency that we seek to expand with this Special Issue in that literature, while also underscoring what prompts the need to move ‘beyond recognition’ in the words of one of its scholars, and towards misrecognition.Footnote 5 I continue down this path in the second part, via the recent Hegel scholarship, which has broadened the focus to the centrality of the negative in social, political, and psychic life, to Hegel’s original account of the master–servant dialectics in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which is the key place where Hegel captured the work of the negative in the subject’s experience. I show that Hegel’s core insight is to have revealed how at the core of all human agency lies an impossible desire to be recognised as the sovereign actor that one never quite is, even when one is a state. Misrecognition, Hegel shows, is constitutive of consciousness itself. In the third part, I show how Jacques Lacan mobilised both the dialectic and the negative in his concept of fantasy to theorise the intimate workings of misrecognition.
Lacan’s ‘fantasy’ is an intra-subjective concept that has been primarily mobilised in contemporary thought, largely under Slavoj Žižek’s influence, to analyse ideology.Footnote 6 The study of ideology has thus drawn out the fruitfulness of this individual-level concept for analysing collective, political phenomena. Moreover, these developments in political and social theory mirror the efforts in the social theoretical-minded IR to find ways to travel the full length of the level-of-analysis spectrum, in order to show how behaviours in the international system are accounted for by mechanisms that unfold at the inter- and at the intra-individual level. This article is inscribed in this tradition. Indeed, my own focus on the ‘subject’ rather than the liberal figure of the ‘individual’ serves to mark my commitment to a thoroughly social, inter-subjective, and discursive ontology; and to move beyond individualist approaches whose persistence in IR has been critiqued elsewhere. The ‘subject’ is the classic category of continental philosophy to which Hegel centrally contributed. It is that which supports (‘sub’), in the sense of a substrate, both ‘identity’ and ‘agency’.Footnote 7 However, with regards to the Lacanian concept of fantasy, in setting out to develop the foundations for the concept of misrecognition, I set the ideological focus aside, and strip ‘fantasy’ back to the individual level, where it was initially developed by Lacan, and which is better suited to considering how it functions as an agency-structuring ideal. Hence the concept’s transitivity, its scalability up and down these different levels of political analysis, is a background assumption for my analysis. Only, to theorise misrecognition, I hone in on its intimate workings in the subject. My epistemological move, to the individual level, should not, however, be read as supporting an individualist ontology, which would be simply incompatible with both Hegel’s and Lacan’s. Mine is an inter-subjective and discursive ontology all the way down.
Recognition theory and its critiques
The concept of recognition was yielded by the revival of interest in Hegel that was prompted by the end of the Cold War and the rising salience of ‘identity’ as a category of political action and thought, including in IR. The year 1992 saw the publication of two of recognition theory’s milestones on either side of the Atlantic by the Hegelian Charles Taylor’s Multiculturalism and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ (1992) in Canada, and Axel Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition (Kampf um Anerkennung) (1992) in Germany. Hegel’s analysis of recognition offered a way to theorise multiculturalism in CanadaFootnote 8 and in Australia.Footnote 9 The stakes in the re-engagement with Hegel, moreover, were considerable. That year (1992), another Hegelian, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed not merely the end of the Cold War but the End of History itself.Footnote 10 Recognition theory emerged as one of the intellectual responses to the triumphing liberalism that Fukuyama exemplified. More broadly, Hegel became the site of a war between liberals and those who sought the tools for critiquing the liberalism that appeared to steamroll, unchecked, through the international system. This is also how Slavoj Žižek turned to Hegel and to Lacan.
In Hegel, recognition theorists such as Honneth and Taylor found an antidote to the individualist ontologies that were sweeping through the social and political sciences in the 1980s and 1990s and that was powered by a rationalist liberalism that had also been justified by reference to Hegel. What Hegel offered, rather, these theorists showed, was a means to shift decisively the basis of theorising onto a thoroughly social ontology, one whose sociality runs all the way down. He provided a guarantee against this persistent rationalist tendency to collapse identities back onto interests and their maximisation. For his dialectic of the master and servant draws out that inter-subjective interactions are not secondary or contingent; nor are they the effect of an original mythical contract or of a fetishised choice. Rather, they are constitutive of the actor’s very ability to act in the first place – and thus to choose. Inter-subjectivity, Hegel shows, is grounded in a fundamental dependence of the self upon the other. In the remainder of this section I map this Hegelian body of thought. No ready-made concept of ‘misrecognition’ has emerged from it, however, for us to lift over to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. What it has produced are, rather, successive waves of internal critique. This self-reflective movement affords my starting point for theorising misrecognition. Recognition theory thus took shape within a broader commitment to foregrounding ontologies of dependence and vulnerability, in order to loosen the grip of a crippling individualism, intellectually and politically. In this, it is mirrored by the poststructuralist critique of constructivism in IR.Footnote 11
A starting point: Theorising misrecognition with Axel Honneth
Axel Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition affords a useful starting point for theorising special issue for the study of world politics, for three reasons. First and pertinently for IR, Honneth foregrounds conflict rather than cooperation as the key driver of social formations and transformations, in line with both the first generation of (non-Habermassian) Frankfurt School from which he hails, and with his earlier engagement with Michel Foucault. Recognition is for Honneth, as for Hegel, a struggle. Second, Honneth begins to shift the focus from recognition to misrecognition, in the context of elaborating his typology of forms of recognition, which I will consider shortly. But third, by way of this typology, Honneth stakes out, for recognition theory, the same levels-of-analysis that are also travelled in IR.
Honneth follows Hegel’s widening concentric circles as he charts a path from the individual, to the inter-individual level (Hegel’s ‘civil society’), and then to the level of the state. For each of these forms of recognition, he identifies a corresponding experience of misrecognition: it is an injury to the self that occurs when the recognition fails to obtain. These experiences are, for Honneth, what fuels social conflicts. Within this social ontology, Honneth thus shows how conflicts always have both inter- and intra-subjective roots. They take place within the self and between selves, insofar as a self-relation always at some level implicates an original relation to another, and vice versa. He draws out this continuity between the sphere of the self and the sphere of social interactions by complementing Hegel’s dialectic with Herbert Mead’s empirical social psychology. What both Hegel and Mead have uncovered, for Honneth, is that individuation, the process by which the self becomes a self, is fundamentally driven by a desire for recognition. Becoming oneself, then, is, in this key sense, a struggle for recognition. Laying out this developmental trajectory of the becoming-individual as a desire for particular forms of recognition enables Honneth to identify the points at which this process can be derailed, moments where failures of recognition turn into lived experiences of misrecognition.
Honneth relates the forms of misrecognition to ‘three ways of relating positively to oneself’ or ‘types of practical relations-to-self’.Footnote 12 The first form of misrecognition is an experience of disrespect that affects the person at the level of their basic self-confidence and physical integrity:
The kind of recognition that this type of disrespect deprives one of is the taken-for-granted respect for the autonomous control of one’s body, which itself could only be acquired at all through experiencing emotional support as part of the socialization process. The successful integration of physical and emotional qualities of behaviour is, as it were, subsequently broken up from the outside, thus lastingly destroying the most fundamental form of practical relation-to-self, namely, one’s underlying trust in oneself.Footnote 13
Honneth, like Lacan, thus sees the effects of misrecognition on the body, on the individual’s very motor capacities: the experience of misrecognition affects her ability to ‘control [her] body’. Only, to pre-empt the Lacanian critique, and in a similar fashion to the constructivist use of ‘socialization’ in IR, he also assumes that a successful outcome to the ‘socialization process’ is the norm.Footnote 14 He thereby posits misrecognition as a deviation from the norm, from what ‘ought to be’ – rather than simply what is. Nonetheless, Honneth remains useful in that he foregrounds the dynamic processes that fashion the sense of self. He is thus consistent focusing upon identification rather than reified identities.
The second form of misrecognition is a moral injury that impairs a person’s self-respect. These include ‘social ostracism’ of various types, by which a person is not being treated ‘as a fully fledged member of the community’, and thus denied, not just the same rights, but the same degree of responsibility for deciding on its future course of action.Footnote 15 The third form of misrecognition is ‘the denigration of individual or collective ways of life’ or ‘cultural degradation’. This type of recognition falling short ‘robs the subjects in question of every opportunity to attribute social value to their own abilities’, because the ‘patterns of self-realisation’ associated with their particular culture or modes of life have been denied any value. In Honneth’s words:
The kind of recognition that this type of disrespect deprives a person of is the social approval of a form of self-realization that he or she had to discover, despite all hindrances, with the encouragement of group solidarity.Footnote 16
These misrecognition injuries, as they ring through individuals, from their flesh to their affects, generate the grievances of which social conflicts are made. Using John Dewey, Honneth then traces a (somewhat tenuous) line from the emotional responses triggered by the experiences of disrespect to political action. His concern, at any rate, is to underscore the fundamentally social nature of such suffering, and thus to draw out both the moral content, and thus the normative potential it holds. It is to underline the ‘cognitive potential inherent in feeling hurt or a shamed’, and that this ‘becomes a moral-political conviction’ that gears individuals and groups into action.Footnote 17
Social and political theoretical critiques
While Honneth began to draw attention to the social fact of misrecognition, our purpose in this Special Issue is to develop it into a concept that illuminates some of the social dynamics of world politics. Here, I elaborate this concept by building upon the limitations to his theory that have been drawn out by a second and a third wave of recognition theorists. These critics have opened up three broad critical axes, the social and political theoretical, the psychoanalytic, and the philosophical. In the rest of this first section I explore each one successively. Along the social theoretical axis, first, Nancy Fraser’s critique of the identity politics of recognition,Footnote 18 which she developed both alone and in conversation with Honneth,Footnote 19 has established another key strand of recognition theory. She underscores the importance of not obfuscating the material dimensions at play in phenomena of misrecognition, which Thomas Lindemann and Minda Holm and Ole Jacob Sending are also concerned with in this Special Issue.Footnote 20 Fraser’s worry is that to frame the contemporary demands for social justice as struggles for recognition cast primarily in symbolic or cultural terms risks obscuring that they are primarily demands to address economic inequalities, and the very real exclusions these effect. She therefore develops ‘redistribution’ as a counterpoint to ‘recognition’, so as not to elude these very material dimensions of contemporary demands for social justice, and to avoid reducing them to identity claims.
Both Honneth and Fraser, in turn, have been critiqued by Lois McNay,Footnote 21 who highlights the limited appraisal of social power at work in their analyses. As a result, in both material and ideational strands of recognition theory, ‘agency is often yoked too closely to unified ideas of identity’.Footnote 22 Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and feminist theories of agency, McNay undoes the automatic link assumed by recognition theorists between identities and social agency. The very idea of recognition ‘tends to frame agency as an unmediated expression of an individual’s desire for recognition’. This, for MacNay ‘is an inadequate understanding of the way in which power constitutes subjectivity and identity finishes by naturalising agency’.Footnote 23 Her stance ‘against recognition’ follows from her diagnosis that this ‘naturalization and universalisation are integral’ to the idea of recognition because of the ‘redemptive force with which it is invested’.Footnote 24 Our wager in this Special Issue is that shifting the focus instead to misrecognition as our guide for our empirical investigations into the workings of world politics loosens the grip of this investment, while enabling us to retain the elaborations of recognition theory insofar as it has begun to exploring the failures of recognition, the dynamics of the inversion whereby recognition turns into misrecognition.
Philosophical critiques I: Whither Hegel’s reason?
The philosophical critique of the first wave of recognition theory has travelled down two paths. First, it has taken issue with the ‘truncated Hegelianism’ at work in the first wave of recognition theory.Footnote 25 Honneth, in particular, writing as a social theorist, has sought to tailor Hegel for a ‘post-metaphysical’ age. Yet the dialectic is inconceivable without his metaphysics, as the Hegel scholar Robert Pippin has underscored in his sympathetic critique of Honneth.Footnote 26 Hegel’s metaphysics is bound up with his very particular understanding of reason as Geist, as an empirically grounded sense-making practice that unfolds in specific locations in history. In his concern to establish Hegel as the figurehead of an agonistic relational social ontology for thinking through contemporary struggles for recognition, Honneth has, in fact, cored the Hegelian system. This move surfaces in the way he carefully circumscribes the Hegel he wants to engage with in his Struggle for Recognition. He carefully tethers it to ‘the young Hegel’ of the Jena period (1801–06), thereby setting off-limits the work where Hegel lays the final foundations of his philosophy of consciousness, the Phenomenology of Spirit, which was drafted in 1807.
The problem is that Honneth’s choice, while it has helped rekindle the contemporary interest in Hegel, has also ultimately curtailed his ability to mobilise, first, the dialectic, which is only fully deployed in the Phenomenology. But the crucial Hegelian concept that Honneth misses as a result, second, and that is tightly bound up with the dialectic, and that in fact (unsurprisingly if we follow Pippin’s line of critique) come to the fore in Honneth’s later work, namely, freedom.Footnote 27 Robert Pippin has shown how this has led Honneth to develop some straightforwardly un-Hegelian points. For example, Honneth posits that that the social actor needs to first feel recognised in order to be able to develop cognitively, that a solid sense of self that develops out of this affective recognition is a condition of possibility for cognitive development. The complaint is not with how he grants priority to recognition. It is, rather, that his developmental scheme misrepresents Hegel’s philosophy of consciousness, where the two cannot be held temporally separate in this way. Cognition is integral to recognition. In Pippin’s words: ‘this sort of separation of issues (affective vs. cognitive) [is] typical of the philosophy of understanding Hegel is working to reject’Footnote 28 in Kant’s wake. Honneth’s attempt to build upon him while bracketing Hegel’s reason led him to rehearse some of the naturalistic or essentialist fallacies underlying early modern social theory, that, Pippin shows, Hegel’s dialectics had carefully steered us away from.
[W]ithout this ‘frame’ Honneth seems to be depending on a variety of claims in so-called ‘philosophical anthropology’ or developmental psychology, or a reversion to claims about human nature, reformulated as claims about ‘social ontology’. These seem to include claims about what we supposedly now ‘know’, thanks to Winnicott or various sociological studies, about what people as such ‘need’ or require.Footnote 29
Without being able to deploy the dialectic fully – metaphysically – Honneth slides back onto a naturalist ontology that ultimately limits his ability to wield a Hegelian freedom, whose realisation is necessarily social (and thus historical) through and through. This Hegelian freedom is a far cry from ideas of freedom constituting an innate property of human nature, as we will see. For Pippin, then, the dialectic is the linchpin to Hegel’s concept of liberty, and his critique will serve to lead us back to the next section.
Philosophical critiques II: Agency and incompleteness
The second critical philosophical path has centred upon the notion at the heart of this Special Issue, agency. In drawing attention to the relations between identity and agency, McNay’s critique of Honneth and Fraser echoed a critique of recognition theory’s other founding figure, Charles Taylor, developed by Patchen Markell with his Bound by Recognition.Footnote 30 Only Markell’s concern was with how this under-theorised nexus of identity and agency impairs the appraisal not of social power, but rather of agency and what he calls, in Hannah Arendt’s register, the human condition. From this critique emerged a key notion for this Special Issue and that we have borrowed from Markell, ‘sovereign agency’. Markell coined the notion specifically in the context of critiquing the first wave of recognition theory, and he did not intend it for the study of states. Taking it to states is precisely what we propose to do with this Special Issue. This requires unpacking the critique that begat it.
The main problem for Markell, as for McNay,Footnote 31 lies in having apprehended recognition largely as an ideal. This is more pronounced in Taylor than in Honneth,Footnote 32 precisely because of Honneth’s effort to shift the focus from recognition to misrecognition. Yet Patchen shows that, in doing so, Honneth had in fact left intact the normative aspirations that had been initially projected onto the concept of recognition. For misrecognition, for Honneth, is not a descriptive category, it is a normative one. It designates a wrong, something people and groups should have received but did not. He apprehends recognition as ‘the respect or esteem [people] deserve in virtue of who they really are’.Footnote 33 Hence while Honneth ‘devotes a great deal of effort to reconstructing the suffering of misrecognition’, for Markell, he misses the drivers underpinning the demands for recognition, by virtue of the fact that he does not consider the basic form of agency that they reveal.Footnote 34 This idealisation, in both Honneth and Taylor, has led to conjuring a ‘mythic past’ wherein to project ‘the pleasures of a successful recognition’; a kind of happy recognition moment that we can hope to be able to replicate in the future.Footnote 35
This normative investment has curtailed recognition theory’s ability to wield the very concept it had held up in response to individualist ontologies to full effect, namely, identity. Identity thus suffers a similar fate in recognition theory as in IR constructivism: it is reduced to a given, a fixed variable (fixed sometime in the past); it is emptied of its dynamism and of its constructedness. This occurs for two reasons for Markell. First, instead of really parsing the relation between them, the first wave of recognition theory simply relied on ‘the assumption that identity precedes action’; which, in turn, has the effect of collapsing history onto identity understood ‘as an antecedently given set of facts about who we are’ that ‘both precedes and governs our action’.Footnote 36 Markell adds that, ‘together these assumptions about the nature of identity and its relation to action make it possible to imagine successful recognition as a source of profound empowerment’.Footnote 37 Because of the ways it strung together identity, agency and history, the first wave was posed to apprehend recognition as a success.
Second, the idealisation of recognition stems from an idealised conception of human agency. Markell tracks the ‘images of agency’ at work in this first wave and shows how agency functions as ‘the aspiration to be able act independently, without experiencing life among others as a source of vulnerability, or as a site of possible alienation or loss’.Footnote 38 This way of apprehending agency ultimately foreshortens the ability to render the dependence and vulnerability that had motivated recognition theorists’ turn to Hegel in the first place. In Markell’s view, what Taylor misrecognised are ‘the basic conditions of human agency’, by which he means the uncertainty and the ‘finitude’ that characterise the horizon upon which human agency unfurls, and that, in turn, account for the open-endedness and fragility of identities.Footnote 39 In Markell’s words:
While Taylor concedes that identity is inevitably incomplete …, he does not let his fact challenge his basic portrait of action as rooted in identity: its upshot, he suggests, is simply that we need to pay attention not only to ‘where we are’ but to ‘where we are going’, to project ourselves into the future on the basis of the best available understanding of who we are and have been. In other words, he does not consider the possibility that the phenomena of change and becoming themselves – and the corresponding uncertainty and incompleteness they introduce into our lives – might require us to take a different sort of stance toward the future, one that involves not just projecting ourselves confidently into it on the basis of who we know ourselves to be, but also preparing ourselves for, and opening ourselves to, the surprises that, as it were, it will project into us.Footnote 40
What Taylor misses, then, is that human agency is inextricably mired in becoming, in incompleteness, and in failure; that being in control remains more often than not but an aspiration rather than what the social actor actually experiences. Taylor’s oversight, for Markell, mirrors that of the political actors demanding recognition. The struggles for recognition, he shows, are ultimately not struggles for what they seem to be about.
Theorising sovereign agency with Patchen Markell
Agency is not control; it is, rather, shaped by ideals of control; Markell terms these ‘fantasies of sovereignty’.Footnote 41 Mobilising Hannah Arendt, he shows how they are constitutive of human agency. Markell, however, means ‘fantasy’ in a straightforward, untheorised sense: the idea of that sovereignty functions as fantasy is what stands to benefit from turning to Lacan, as I will show in the article’s third part. But, to dwell for now with Markell’s productive critique a little longer, what has ultimately eluded the first wave of recognition theory is the possibility of understanding the nature of the desire that drives the struggles for recognition that it had (rightly) sought to foreground. The first wave of recognition theory has largely taken the desire for recognition that surfaces in these struggles at face value, considering them as self-evident and transparent to the actors. The ‘lens of sovereignty’ that Markell introduces to parse this desire draws out how the political demands for recognition are driven by a desire for an ultimately unattainable form of agency.Footnote 42 For Markell, ‘the pursuit of recognition expresses an aspiration to sovereignty’ and ‘the idea of state sovereignty is only one manifestation of the broader idea of sovereign agency’.Footnote 43 The desire for sovereign agency, Markell draws out, is both what pushes the political actors into the struggle where they put forward specific recognition claims, but it is also a cover-up. It both sustains their action and hides the impossibility of obtaining the sovereign agency that all actors want, including, we contend, those who already have it, states.
Markell’s insight, on which we build with this Special Issue, is that ‘the desire for sovereignty is impossible to fulfil, because it is itself rooted in a misrecognition of the basic conditions of human activity’.Footnote 44 Seen in this light, demands for recognition are bound to fail, even when they have successfully yielded a state (say, in independence struggles). If modern political agency is inherently shaped by a desire for a sovereign agency, as we contend, with Markell, then actual sovereignty will never be enough to satisfy this desire. Only Markell arrives at sovereignty by starting from this political agency, and then uses the former as a heuristic to reveal the workings of the desire that underwrites the latter. As students of the international system, sovereignty is instead our starting point. Hence rather than proceed outwards, from the ‘sovereign self’ to the collective ideal that underwrites it, in the manner of the critiques of liberalism that, Markell underlines,Footnote 45 have ultimately left this illusory unitary self largely unscathed, and that, we have shown, was echoed by the early poststructuralist critique of sovereignty in IR, we start the other way around, from sovereignty.Footnote 46 To put it in another way, we proceed from the inter-subjective; from the organising principle underwriting the international system, to the intra-subjective. My purpose is to appraise how this collective structure grips into the individual. Doing so requires first returning to Hegel and then to Lacan.
Paradoxically, then, the first wave of recognition theory has ultimately replicated the same failure ‘to acknowledge our basic condition of intersubjective vulnerability’ than that manifested in the quests for sovereign agency.Footnote 47 This has led Markell, in a move characteristic of this second wave of recognition theory, to seek to move ‘beyond recognition’.Footnote 48 ‘Acknowledgement’ is the concept Markell puts forward. Misrecognition is what we propose instead with this Special Issue, which, we suggest, hews closer to the Hegelian dialectic, and better renders the work of the negative it aimed to foreground.
Psychoanalytic critiques: Recognition, misrecognition, and the formation of the subject
Markell’s focus on human agency begins to take us towards the level at which Hegel originally deployed the master–servant dialectic, the intra-subjective. For the Phenomenology of Spirit is a dramatic account of the formation of the subject, bildungsroman, to borrow Rebecca Comay’s term.Footnote 49 While the scheme has been extensively deployed to analyse inter-subjective relations, as we have seen, the inner world of the subject – of consciousness – is where Hegel had initially cast it. The master and servant constitute two positions that the same subject occupies in the course of the roleplay that constitutes it qua a subject; or, to put it in the terms of the Hegelian Judith Butler, in the course of its ‘subjectivation’ (understood as an active process).Footnote 50 The third and final axis of critique, the psychoanalytic one, takes us back all the way down to the level where Hegel first conceived the dialectic.
This path back down to the intra-subjective was travelled within recognition theory by Kelly Oliver. Oliver has drawn out the limitations of the first wave of recognition theory in both its ‘intellectual’ (with Taylor) and ‘moral’ (with Honneth) dimensions, to use her terms. She takes issue with the emphasis on confrontation that the resort to Hegel has entailed, not just in Taylor and Honneth but in Butler as well, who she assimilates to the recognition literature, and in Jessica Benjamin;Footnote 51 but she does not consider Lacan. ‘As different as the discourse of critical theory and poststructuralist theory seem to be, they are both populated subjects warring with others, … subjects struggling to deny their dependence on others.’Footnote 52 Consequently, she calls for shifting the focus from ‘recognition’ to ‘witnessing’. Oliver seeks a different way of positioning oneself in relation to the key tension that she identifies ‘at the heart of contemporary recognition theories’, namely ‘the tension between recognizing the familiar in order to confirm what we already know and listening for the unfamiliar that disrupts what we already know’.Footnote 53 She seeks to steer away from the familiar mechanisms of ‘othering’ or ‘objectification’ by which this tension was (mis)handled; that is, forms of rejection that begin within the self, but lead to want to either dominate, or deny the existence of the other altogether. To this end, Oliver also reworks the notion of ‘the gaze’ to shift it towards a more welcoming, less objectifying form of seeing: a witnessing.
While Oliver’s explorations are helpful for starting from the misrecognised subject, rather than from inter-subjective interactions that freeze the subject into a misrecognised identity or desire, in this Special Issue we do not share this purpose of moving beyond the agonistic dimension that Hegel’s dialectic does indeed capture. Our own wager with this Special Issue, rather, is that it has not been mined enough. Engaging with Lacan’s reading of the master–servant affords a foothold for doing just that. Nonetheless, the psychoanalytic lens Oliver honed usefully draws out another set of limitations to a Honnethian misrecognition. To be fair, Honneth does travel some distance up the intra-subjective road. Not, however, when he resorts to Mead’s empirical psychology, however. Indeed, among all accounts of the formation of the subject, Mead offers arguably one of the least agonistic. Mead’s ‘I’ and ‘me’ present two neat entities that seem at odds with the messiness that the dialectic captures. They ultimately replicate a kind of atomism within the psyche. But Honneth does take a step further into the psyche; he explores the ‘absolute dependency’ between self and other that is laid bare by object-relations theory, via the work of the Donald Winnicott.Footnote 54 Yet there are two problems with the path he carves out. The first is his starting point. Honneth justifies his turn to Winnicott as an antidote to the excessively naturalistic emphasis that he claims the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud, places upon the drives (Triebe) underpinning human behaviours. On his own terms, then, his oversight of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is puzzling, since, first, reading Freud as anti-naturalist was Lacan’s project, and he explicitly drew on the Hegelian dialectic to do so. Moreover, contra his commitment to this anti-naturalism, when he turns to Winnicott, Honneth accounts for the ‘absolute dependency’ experienced by the mother by way of the most naturalistic of resorts, namely, her ‘pregnancy’.Footnote 55 The bigger concern here, however, and second, is with how Honneth’s typology of misrecognition collapses the descriptive onto the normative, the epistemological onto the axiological. Honneth apprehends misrecognition as a ‘disorder’.Footnote 56 It is a deviation to the norm of the successful socialisation that occurs when the individual or group that has received the recognition it seeks, and implicitly, for Honneth, deserves. Both recognition, and the socialisation whose workings it oils are loaded with implicit positive normative valuations. To put the point in another way, Honneth’s analysis of the struggles for recognition is underwritten by a binary that distinguishes neatly between ‘the normal’ and the ‘pathological’.Footnote 57
Misrecognition ultimately remains the lesser concept in Honneth’s analysis, the second fiddle to the ideal of recognition. Our suggestion with this Special Issue is that misrecognition is the normal, of the subject’s experience, and of international politics. The psychoanalytical perspective is useful to theorise misrecognition because it begins from the point of view of the subject that has been socialised, not from an idealised socialisation that is deemed necessary to being able to live together. It is thus poised in a way that the social theoretical or sociological perspective is not to capture the hang-ups and knots that have formed along the course of the subject’s actual socialisation.Footnote 58 Misrecognition may hurt, but not (only) because it is a moral injury. It points to something constitutive in the subject, in the way her desire is gripped at the point of entry into sociality. This is what Lacan’s concept of fantasy captures, which builds on Hegel’s parsing of the human desire by way of the dialectic. It is to Hegel and the dialectic that I now turn.
Returning to Hegel to think through misrecognition
The productive force of the negative
While recognition theory was the initial site for the revival of the interest in Hegel in the 1990s and the place where dynamics of misrecognition that we seek to bring to IR were first appraised, the most recent interdisciplinary return to Hegel has centred more broadly on the productive force of the negative. As Andrew Hass nicely put it, ‘Hegel is on the move again. Or, Hegel is again circling back on himself. Or Hegel is making a beginning – again.’Footnote 59 This movement is what we seek to bring to IR with this Special Issue. One of the crucial places where Hegel circumscribes it is his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, to which I will shortly turn: it is the second moment, or anti-thesis, of the dialectic of becoming-conscious he deploys in that work. But it is also the dialectic’s engine, what causes its restless motion, since the initial negating of the first positive moment – the thesis – that prompts the Aufhebung, the moving beyond the contradictions that this negating set into play in the first place. Hegel’s crucial insight is that reason, or sense-making, sometimes works in not just counterintuitive, but in actively counter-productive ways.Footnote 60 Reason sometimes destroys what it has created; it undoes itself in order to do itself. This is Hegel’s cunning of reason, as it has come to be known. What appears senseless from one point of view suddenly falls into place when shifting perspectives. Apprehending the productive potential contained in this destruction requires moving out of the realm of positivity, where only the ruins will remain apparent, not what lies in gestation under them. However, mining the productive force of the negative also requires bracketing the third moment of the dialectic, the ‘synthesis’, a term of art in Hegelianese that is not in fact Hegel’s, as Duncan Forbes reminds us.Footnote 61
For all the misguided temptations of a happy synthesis, evidenced in liberal thought and its IR constructivist offshoots (and their bent towards ‘progress’),Footnote 62 ‘the persistence of the negative’ in being and in thought accounts for an insisting and recurrent interest in Hegel.Footnote 63 In Hegel’s wake one of the first to mobilise its productive-cum-destructive force was the most anti-Hegelian of Hegelians, Friedrich Nietzsche.Footnote 64 Alexandre Kojève’s well-attended lectures on the Phenomenology the following century then laid the foundations for a broad twentieth-century French Hegelian tradition that has drawn out ‘the work of the negative’ through a broad range of domains of thought, from literature to economic theory (in Georges Bataille’s work) to psychoanalysis.Footnote 65 For Jacques Lacan, who concerns me here, what Freud had discovered, with the unconscious, was nothing short of the locus of the negative in the human psyche.Footnote 66 The latest wave of interest in Hegel has once again converged upon the Phenomenology from political and social theory, critical theory, literary theory, religious studies, and philosophy.Footnote 67 Across all of these fields there is a sense, once the turn-of-the century moment of triumphant liberalism had passed, of a new urgency to mine the creative force of the negative;Footnote 68 to work with, rather than stiffen up against, the chaffing of its twin, resistance;Footnote 69 to apprehend the radical conception of time, the all-destroyer, that it is bound up with, and the extent to which this profoundly unsettles the basis for positivist, foundationalist thought beyond a point of no return.Footnote 70 In sum, the negative brings into focus for political, social, and psychoanalyses a domain of being, thinking, and doing, which, by definition, has eluded the positivist epistemologies to which an empirical political science and a positivist IR in particular have remained wedded. One of its purchases for a post-positivist IR is that it undercuts foundations for ahistorical analyses insofar as, with the negative, Hegel ‘bars any philosophical appeal to anything construed as atemporal’.Footnote 71
The Hegelian foundations for theorising agency
The Phenomenology of Spirit lays the founding stone of Hegel’s entire project. His starting point is a critique of the theories of knowledge put forward by Hegel’s predecessors. For Hegel, the epistemological question that Kant had formulated – what can we know? – provides the wrong foothold altogether into thought; so long as it remains abstracted from a living, breathing, knower. That is, the problem of knowledge must be posed, not in the thin air of the Kantian noumenon, but in the phenomenon, and in the subject’s relation to it. ‘To think does not mean to think as an abstract I’, writes Hegel.Footnote 72 Hence the foundations of knowledge must be sought in the thick of the human experience, and, to begin with, in the subject’s awareness that it is experiencing this knowledge, which is to say, in its consciousness. Enter the Hegelian subject, who is coextensively the subject of consciousness and of knowledge.
The Phenomenology is an account of the formation of the subject steeped in concrete experiences. It is, as Robert Pippin put it, ‘an entire meditation on self-consciousness, on the becoming self-conscious of Geist [spirit]’ as it experiences the world ‘as an engaged, practical being’.Footnote 73 It is staged as a drama of self-discovery and follows the consciousness as it moves towards the world and discovers its place in it. Crucially, it is an account of the construction of the subject’s autonomy, of its becoming a self-conscious, autonomous being endowed with a capacity to act in the world: a self. The subject’s original experience, prior to it being conscious, is one of complete sensory immersion in the world, of its immediacy to the world, of unseparateness. Consciousness itself emerges at the point where the subject begins to tear itself away from its primordial, sensory symbiosis and discovers it separateness, that it is a subject standing before a world made of objects. Der Gegenstand, the German for ‘object’ is unrenderable in its topological precision. It is, literally, that which stands (-stand) before, against or opposite (gegen). At this point, where the subject seizes the object before it, consciousness and cognition begin. Indeed, consciousness is always of something, just like to know is always to know something. The subject-object relation provides the basic scheme by which consciousness seizes its objects, and, subsequently, itself as an object. Hence to think, Hegel continues, ‘has the meaning of being an object to itself’.Footnote 74 This subject-object topology is central to the Hegelian dialectic.
With this subject-object scheme in hand, Hegel, through the first four chapters of the Phenomenology, charts the progression of consciousness as it moves through the stages of its formation; from the initial experience of sense-certainty, when the subject first grasps the object that stands before it through the senses; through to perception; then understanding, and self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is a relating to, and a moving towards, oneself. ‘The I is the content of the relation, and the relating itself.’Footnote 75 But it is also a moving beyond oneself, and here lies the work of the negative. Hegel’s crucial insight regarding consciousness is that it is a dynamic relation steeped in negation. Second, consciousness always operates on some modality of the subject-object relation. Self-consciousness (Selbstbewüßtsein) is the reflective turning back upon itself by which consciousness (Bewüßtsein) takes itself as its object.
The relationality at the core of self-consciousness is the crucial and durable purchase of Hegel for social and political thought. It is the bulwark against the temptation of individualism that has reared its head, time and again, in the history of our discipline. The solipsistic individual at the heart of rationalist theories that jumps, fully-formed, out of a pseudo-Hobbesian state of nature (that has never been Hobbes’ in the first place, as I have shown elsewhere)Footnote 76 simply has no place in this thoroughly social ontology. The Hegelian subject is always relating. What is more, it needs this relating to become itself. In Pippin’s words: ‘from the minimal sense of being aware of … being conscious at all … to complex avowals of whom I am, of my own identity … Hegel treats self-consciousness as a practical achievement’.Footnote 77 Second, this achievement ‘necessarily involv[es] a relation to other people, as inherently social’.Footnote 78 Hegel’s work on self-consciousness thus reveals a constitutive, ontological, dependence that runs all the way down through the full-length of the human experience – and that is never resolved or simply relegated to the past once and for all.
But we do not yet have a self: let us return to the developmental drama that will yield one. Consciousness’s moving towards itself is a fraught process. Which is to say: it is steeped in the negative. Consciousness’s first experience of autonomy or ‘self-sufficiency’ (Selbständigkeit) lies, not in itself, but in coming up against the object – against its ‘appositeness’ or even ‘oppositeness’, uniquely rendered in German by the prefix gegen. In the object it discovers a self-containment, separateness; and a manner of prelude to the autonomy it senses it does not yet have. But the encounter with the object is also an original experience of otherness (Anderssein). When ‘I know something’, writes Hegel ‘the object is my object, it is other and at the same time mine.’Footnote 79 The object is the not-self: simply by virtue of this, the subject experiences it as pushing back – gegen – as resisting.Footnote 80 Here is where the negative plays a key role. Indeed, ‘consciousness is not simply absorbed into (“identified with”) its contents’.Footnote 81 It also ‘takes up a position towards what it thinks’.Footnote 82 This positioning is a negation, ‘of the world’s independence and otherness’.Footnote 83 Consciousness ‘negates what it is presented with’, in order to overcome the ‘indeterminacy, opacity, foreignness, potential confusion and disconnectedness’ it experiences.Footnote 84 And with the intensity with which Hegel puts it, consciousness must ‘destroy the self-sufficient object’.Footnote 85 It will come to exist ‘absolutely for itself’, as a self-consciousness, ‘only through sublating (aufheben) the object’.Footnote 86 This negating is a moving beyond, but also a standing above (this is another sense of the Hegelian Aufhebung). Consciousness comes to seize the object by negating it. This negating, in turn, is what tips it into the next stage of the dialectic, of the movement towards itself. Hence this self-relating that Hegel lays bare is not the smooth or neutral process that has tended to be implied in the notion of ‘socialization’. The subject-object relation is an agonistic relation from the onset.
Negating the object is what triggers the looping back onto oneself: the subject is ‘present only in opposition to [the object]’.Footnote 87 Here, the negating continues – it is the motor of the dialectic. The subject negates itself as it had the object. Hence, to sum up this movement of becoming the self, the subject must objectify itself, and then negate this objectification to become a subject. Self-consciousness, then, for Hegel, is a self-relating, a reflective looping steeped in the negative that never stands still. For Pippin, ‘such a relation must be understood as the result of an attempt, never … as an immediate presence of the self to itself, and it often requires some sort of striving’.Footnote 88 Self-relation is always a struggle. This agonistic and relational model is, then, what undergirds agency and identity all the way down, in a Hegelian perspective.
The struggle for recognition
Self-consciousness proper, however, only emerges in the encounter, not with an object, but with another consciousness. ‘Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.’Footnote 89 Here is where the agonistic dimensions to Hegel’s model are fully born out. Here is also where recognition enters into play. Hegel writes that ‘self-consciousness exists in and for itself because and by way of its existing in and for itself for an other; that is, it exists only insofar as it is recognized’.Footnote 90 This ‘turning point’, at which consciousness becomes self-consciousness, is the beginning of sociality.Footnote 91 What is so unique about Hegel’s problematisation is the profound entwinement of the intra-subjective logics of cognition, and the inter-subjective logics of recognition. Recognition (anerkennen) is profoundly bound up with cognition (erkennen), and together they fashion the self. Contra contractual theories, Hegel has offered an account of the entry into sociality that is thoroughly non-individualistic yet that remains agonistic. Here is its purchase for IR.
Recognition is what is at stake in the encounter between the two consciousnesses. And the stakes are high, since recognition by another is the means by which self-consciousness emerges in the first place. Hence why Hegel stages it as a struggle to the death. The party that prevails and submits the other to serving it, the master, is the one that can show it is willing to stop at nothing to win the fight; not even at its own life. Hegel’s master and servant have been extensively drawn upon to parse relations of domination and unequal social structures. Its crucial purchase for social and political analysis is that these roles are undetermined prior to the confrontation. Which of the two protagonists comes to occupy the position of the master is not decided a priori but negotiated, and constantly renegotiated, in action, through social practices, as Kojève drew out.Footnote 92 This captures a permanent instability to relations of domination. In Hegel’s aftermath, these roles have been read as being located within the same subject, in psychoanalytical readings of Hegel,Footnote 93 or between subjects, in these social and political analyses, or both; Honneth typically travels the full range of levels-of-analysis, as we have seen.Footnote 94 This scalability is consistent with Hegel, since his purpose was to underscore the original indeterminacy, the unseparateness, in which the subject dwells prior to its grasping itself as ‘self’ standing before the world; and thus prior to it having an inner world being separated from an outer world. This separating is the process by which consciousness develops. To put in another way what Hegel captured, it was the process of individuation that staked out the original distinction between the intra-individual and the inter-individual. The development of consciousness is a (in fact, the original) boundary-drawing process. Originally, however, the struggle for recognition was conceived as a key episode in the making of a single consciousness; which is sometimes lost from sight when the dialectic is simply lifted out of Hegel and applied in social or political analyses.
Human freedom is what is at stake in the struggle. Freedom, for Hegel, is the enjoyment of one’s autonomy, of one’s sense of being a self-directed being, of ‘the satisfactions of self-consciousness’.Footnote 95 The two figures that emerge from the confrontation, the master and servant, reorganise the initial subject-object relation. The consciousness grappling with the object’s material ‘thingness’ becomes the servant. It is a figure of ‘non-self-sufficien[cy]’.Footnote 96 The servant is faced with two forms of self-sufficiency: on the one hand, the kind of basic, in-itself, material self-sufficiency, or evidentness, that it comes up against in the object that we have seen. But the central purpose of the episode is to introduce another kind of non-material self-sufficiency, that of the master, who is Hegel’s first figure of human freedom.
The master has conquered its freedom by overcoming its most basic instincts, including and crucially the natural drive to want to stay alive, that classical trope of modern political thought. It has proven that it is willing to stop at nothing, not even at its own life, to win the fight. What it has mastered, first and foremost, is its own fear of death. Unlike the servant, it is ‘is not shackled to life’.Footnote 97 Its self-sufficiency is both moral, since it has unfettered itself from its natural determinations, and practical, since it has acquired a servant who now caters to its natural needs. Hence the master’s relation with the object is now mediated by the servant. The servant, by contrast, has failed to achieve this freedom because of its attachment to life. As a result, it is left ‘not … recognized as a self-sufficient self-consciousness’.Footnote 98 Unlike the master, the servant contends with the ‘thingness’ of the object. Its relation to the object is one of labour. ‘The thing is for him [sic] self-sufficient [and] … he [sic] cannot through his negating be over and done with it, cannot have eliminated it’; whereas ‘the master now succeeds in being over and done with the thing’.Footnote 99 The outcome of the struggle is that the master consumes, while the servant labours for the master.
From the struggle to the desire for recognition
What the servant is deprived of, in having to labour for the master, is not just of the possibility of working for itself economically, but far more fundamentally, at the level of consciousness (the one that Hegel explores), of the possibility of putting its labour to work towards what is the real prize of human toil, namely, an autonomous sense of self. The servant remains without the satisfactions of self-consciousness. Hegel’s crucial point is that this autonomy is not ‘given’, it is not an innate property of natural man. Autonomy is acquired; laboured for; and at great expense of suffering. But how victorious is the master, really? Has it achieved the autonomy that the servant has not? While it appears to have asserted a moral superiority over the servant by overcoming its natural fears, it has also become entirely materially dependent upon the servant. However, we may also assume that the master is the protagonist who is less attached to this practical, material level – to ‘life’ – since it proved capable of overcoming its natural impulses to win the struggle. The spoils it sought were not of a material sort, since it was prepared to die, hence to forsake the possibility of enjoying these altogether. Hegel’s staging of this formative moment as a struggle to the death is what shifts the analysis of consciousness beyond the level of biological needs, and onto the plane of meaning. This properly is the realm of human desire. What the master ultimately seeks, then, that for which it was prepared to risk everything, was recognition. And so acute is this desire that it would rather die than live without it. Hence this desire is what, for Hegel, establishes humans in the realm of signification, which is also the realm of freedom. Here lies the possibility of experiencing one’s autonomy and an agency freed from determinations, natural or social. This promise of freedom is what the desire for recognition is geared towards.
Moreover, the episode closes, once both roles have been reintegrated into the same consciousness (by another movement of Aufhebung), on the figure of the unhappy consciousness. Why has the master ultimately failed to obtain the recognition it so badly wants? Because the consciousness recognising it is unfree. Recognition of its mastery was wrenched out of the servant in exchange for its life. In negating the servant’s freedom, it has also negated that which is required for it to obtain the recognition it desires. The unrecognised servant cannot be the recogniser the master needs in order to feel adequately recognised. This is the master’s dilemma. What it desires is to be recognised by another who desires to recognise it. The master’s desire is directed at the desire of another autonomous self-consciousness, which the servant is not. What the master wants is recognition; what it experiences is misrecognition. Misrecognition is where the servant dwells. Hence why, we contend, misrecognition, rather than recognition, is the pertinent, de-idealized, concept in Hegel.
The dialectic of the master and servant is a model for conceptualising the central role of desire as the motor of human agency. Desire is the defining trait of the Hegelian subject: ‘self-consciousness is desire itself’, Hegel writes.Footnote 100 This desire comes into being, reveals itself to itself, through a constant play of negations and self-negations, as Pippin has underscored.Footnote 101 The consequence of foregrounding desire, and the central role of the negative in fashioning it, is that Hegel develops a conception of agency that radically challenges the positivist study of international politics. Hegel’s agency is fundamentally at odds with the agency as intentionality that has prevailed in rationalist approaches, where it has been largely lifted from rational choice theory, but also in constructivist approaches.Footnote 102 Agency as intentionality is conceived as largely transparent to the actor. It is the straightforward alignment of the actors’ ‘desires and beliefs’ that become ‘reasons for [its] behaviour’.Footnote 103 It rests upon fully transparent, unproblematic self-relation. This is the model of self-relation that Hegel profoundly troubles. The Hegelian subject is a desiring subject, and what it desires is to be recognised qua a desiring subject – however tautological this may sound; that the human experience is messily tautological is precisely Hegel’s point. The recognition she wants is impossible to obtain in this inter-subjective structure he uncovers. This is the key purchase of the Hegelian dialectic. Recognition is what the subject wants, misrecognition is what she obtains. In addition, Lacan, to whom I now turn, shows that misrecognising what she wants is key to the subject continuing to want and thus to act in the world.
Fantasy in Lacan and in the international system
Our wager with this Special Issue is that the behaviour of states and other international political actors is driven by an ideal of sovereign agency. Jacques Lacan’s concept of fantasy reveals how such an agency-structuring ideal actually works. Lacan’s is an individual-level ontology centred upon the speaking subject that is also ‘radically inters-subjective’, in that it is rooted in language through and through. In this it is fundamentally Hegelian and political, as Slavoj Žižek has extensively drawn out.Footnote 104 Its purchase for political analysis is that it lays bare the psychic mechanisms by which the individual is hooked into political and social structures at the most intimate level of their being.Footnote 105 Lacan shows how these structures grip into the subject’s intimate functioning; how they shape her actions; without, however overdetermining her agency. Hegelian freedom is held intact by this decisive shift from agency to desire, a proximate but not quite overlapping notion, and this disjuncture is key. Desire, in Lacan’s ontology, mediates between agency and structure. It is where the speaking subject – the actor shaped by the structures of signification that pre-exist it – irrupts into the agency-structure dyad. It thus opens it up in ways that are highly productive for the analysis of political action. It moves this analysis, first, beyond the two pitfalls of excessively individualist or structuralist political ontologies; that is of, respectively, ascribing this behaviour to an agency unmoored from and unconstrained by any context, and consequently reduced to interest-maximisation on the one hand, or of eclipsing agency by over-emphasising structures, on the other. In addition, the non-alignment, indeed, even disconnect, between agency and desire opens up the analysis to behaviours that run exactly counter to interest-maximisation. Understanding this disconnect requires how desire is structured by fantasy.
Fantasy in Lacan is the primordial frame that organises the speaking subject’s relation to the world. As Žižek puts it: ‘fantasy does not simply realise desire in a hallucinatory way … . [It] constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates; that is, it literally “teaches us how to desire”’.Footnote 106 Let us consider our working hypothesis, of sovereignty as the key agency-structuring ideal of international politics, in these terms. International law affords any political entity aspiring to statehood the coordinates of what it is to seek after (and acquire) if it is to become a state, namely, a territory, a population, and mutual recognition. It teaches this entity exactly how to desire.Footnote 107 This also accounts for one of the constitutive paradoxes of what Vivienne Jabri has termed the ‘postcolonial international’.Footnote 108 In the era of decolonisation that reshaped the international system in the wake of the Second World War and yielded a wave of new states, the independence leaders quickly found that simply standing up against the colonial oppressor was not enough to shake the colonial yoke. The successful decolonial fighters like Kwame Nkrumah, whom Julia Gallagher considers in her contribution to the Special Issue,Footnote 109 were those who rearticulated the anti-colonial desire with these coordinates, into a collective project of statehood. This explains the profound attachment to sovereignty, or rather, in a Lacanian perspective, to the very desire that was shaped by these coordinates. This desire for a state of one’s own is a feature of postcolonial statehood more generally, particularly those that were born of fierce independence struggles. To return to Žižek and a more trivial example (initially developed by Freud): ‘to put it in somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality I fantasize about it eating it; the problem is, rather: how do I know I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me.’Footnote 110 That their cake was sovereignty is what the grammar of the international system had taught aspiring states, and still does.
$ ◊ a: Lacan’s formula for fantasy
Fantasy is a key component of Lacan’s analysis of desire. Lacan develops a specific formula for fantasy as part of his broader formalisation of the mechanisms of desire in what is known as his ‘graph of desire’.Footnote 111 The formula for fantasy is: $ ◊ a. Let us consider each of its components. ‘$’ is the divided subject. It captures psychoanalysis’s founding insight, that the individual is split between a conscience and an unconscious, to which their regular access is barred by a series of repressive mechanisms that developed during the course of their socialization. This repression (Verdrängung) is first and foremost a defence mechanism aimed at protecting the subject’s (illusory) sense of the cohesiveness of her self. Here lies the work of the Hegelian negative in the human psyche; in this ‘pushing under’ the bar of consciousness, Freud’s Verdrängung, which Lacan represents by ‘barring’ the subject, $’. It is the line that separates the domains of positivity and negativity that the subject’s psychic life straddles. Lacan, with his topology of subjecthood, does not so much complicate Hegel’s scheme of consciousness as map the place of the negative onto it, as André Green has underlined.Footnote 112 Hegel’s cunning of reason is but Lacan’s unconscious’s deceits; both ultimately feature a beguiled, restless, non-unitary subject that cannot quite seize the tricks of its own mind.
Fantasy is the product of this ‘primal repression’ (Urverdrängung), or indeed this original negativation, this pushing under, into the negative.Footnote 113 Only what is in effect a leftover from an incomplete process of socialisation comes to hold a fundamental, foundational even, truth about the subject.Footnote 114 ‘Phantasy is really the “stuff” of the “I” that is originally repressed’, writes Lacan.Footnote 115 This truth is the structure upon which the subject’s primordial relation to the world rests. It is born in and of the negative, and steeped in misrecognition, its handmaiden. With access to only half of themselves in the normal circumstances of everyday life, the divided subject is bound to misrecognise herself. In fact, misrecognition is the divided subject $’s regular dwelling-place. Moreover, misrecognition plays out at several different levels in the human psyche. Méconnaissance, which Alan Sheridan translates as a ‘failure to recognise’ or ‘misconstruction’, is a crucial notion for Lacan.Footnote 116 It is not just the obverse of connaissance (knowledge). Rather, it is inextricably bound up with it: its negative. Lacan underlines how me-connaissance, knowledge of oneself, is predicated on méconnaisance: misrecognising oneself is the starting point to knowing oneself; which, in turn, is a necessarily lengthy, lifelong process that involves what is known as traversing the fantasy – deconstructing one’s foundational fantasy and revealing it for what is, a phantasmatic construct that regulates one’s life, which is the endpoint of the psychoanalysis.
What the divided subject misrecognises, first and foremost, is her object of desire. The letter ‘a’ designates any particular thing that the subject wants – whether the strawberry cake or indeed sovereignty. But it also references objet a, which is the object-cause of desire and a key element of the Lacanian ontology. The diamond ‘◊’ that links the subject $ to ‘a’ signifies ‘desire of’.Footnote 117 Only the conjoining it captures is also a disjoining. It is another place where misrecognition plays out. A crucial Lacanian insight is that not obtaining what one wants is key to the workings of human desire. It is what enables this desire to keep working as the motor of human agency. This is the mystery, irrationality, even, of desire, that is bound to defeat attempts to account for human action in terms of utility-maximisation, and that is especially apparent when compared with the instrumental needs of other species. As Žižek underlines:
The often-noted experimental difference between humans and apes acquires here all its weight: when an ape is confronted with an object beyond its reach that it repeatedly fails to obtain, it will abandon it and move to a more modest object (say, a less attractive partner), whereas a human will persist in its effort, remaining transfixed by the impossible.Footnote 118
The subject does not obtain what she wants, in two ways. First, because of the sheer difficulty of knowing what one wants. This is what being a divided subject (hear: a human being) entails. In addition to his broad use of méconnaissance, Lacan coins the term ‘nescience’ specifically for desire, to evoke ‘the state of nescience in which man [sic] remains in relation to his desire’.Footnote 119 The subject thinks she wants a piece of cake, but she may often want something else as well; a set of meaningful associations or memories it conjures. Say, because in her childhood she was rewarded with a piece of cake by her parents, or because they watched her with love and relish as she ate her cake. The piece of cake, or indeed a piece of land, becomes a stand in, or signifier, for a broader constellation of significations folded into her childhood experiences, or indeed into the idea of sovereignty.
Second, the subject misrecognises what objet a is. As the object of desire, it is any particular desired object, from the strawberry cake to sovereignty. But is also the cause of desire, the engine that keeps the subject desiring, hence for our purposes in this Special Issue, that which sustains its capacity to act in the world. The subject wants this ‘a’, but she also wants to be able to keep wanting many an ‘a’, and she wants this ‘a’ to nurture this wanting. This entails not being completely satisfied, or not being satisfied once and for all. Hence unsatisfaction is an inherent part of the mechanics of desire. But this is not all. A crucial twist is that, by virtue of that it can designate every object of the subject’s pursuits, ‘a’ points to something that is not there. Here is the negative, again. Objet a is a ‘hole in reality’, a ‘point of impossibility’ that these objects – a piece of cake, a sexual partner, money, sovereignty – come to fill temporarily.Footnote 120 It is where the subject comes up against the negative most intimately. Misrecognition holds up the entire edifice. Fantasy turns on the subject seeing only the particular object ‘a’ (partner, cake or … sovereignty), not the hole it is designed to fill.
The subject’s experience is of a missing; of something of herself that was lost somewhere in the nether regions of her past. This sense of loss is expressed, even, by the ‘I miss you’ of the everyday language of love. But the ‘I miss you’ also captures something else, namely, objet a’s transitivity, the fact that it simultaneously functions as a lost piece of the subject herself, but as something that is located in the other. It is that je ne sais quoi that the other has and that will make me complete. Here is where the ‘a’ (rather than the traditional ‘x’) takes all its meaning: ‘a’ stand for autre, ‘other’, or rather Autre, ‘Other’. It is that missing piece that connects me to the other, in the case of the lover, but also to the big Other, the symbolic order. It is also where the subject’s (mis)recognition of its desire, and its desire for recognition interconnect. ‘The original question of desire’ as Žižek puts it,Footnote 121 is not directly ‘What do I want?’ but rather ‘What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?’ Desire is always ultimately, for Lacan, directed at the other’s desire – at, say, the parent’s ravishment.
In sum, object a is thus that missing piece of itself that the subject pursues in order to reclaim something from the original loss/repression that marked her entry into the symbolic order, her socialisation, and that, in actual fact, designates what can qualify for her as something she desires, according to the terms of its idiosyncratic fantasy. This is the circle that runs from the object of desire to the broader fantasy, now understood as the generative structure that affords the individual the grammar with which she pursues her desire in the world. To work, the circle must not be broken. It is precisely what the psychoanalysitic practice seeks to interrupt. Fantasy is a structured impossibility; and what it structures is desire, but not in such a way that it attains the object it has designated for it, but rather, such that it cannot. Hence it is a ‘formal symbolic structure’ centred upon an impossibility.Footnote 122 What is more, object a, the ultimate negative, or non-being structuring the human experience, is also what confers the subject its consistency, its sense of being. Though desire:
shifts from one object to the other, through all these displacements … desire nonetheless retains a minimum of formal consistency, a set of phantasmatic features which, when they are encountered in a positive object, makes us desire this object – objet a as the cause of desire is nothing other than this formal frame of consistency.Footnote 123
Sovereignty as fantasy
We are now in the position to revisit our earlier notion of fantasies of sovereignty. Or rather, with Lacan, we can now consider how sovereignty functions as a fantasy, that is, as a compensatory structure by which international actors – states, but also ‘wannabe’ states – chase after an imaginary ‘wholeness’ projected onto an idealised past; and that this chasing after is a key driver of international politics. Just as Lacan’s formula illuminates the subject pursuing a succession of objets a, so sovereignty reveals a similar, collective hence political, structure of action underwriting the international system. Sovereignty affords a ‘generative grammar’ by which a state identifies its objets a, those specific undertakings that will restore it that which it has ‘lost’ and ‘requires’ (by the terms of this compensatory script) to recover in order to return to its former grandeur.Footnote 124 Objet a is a placeholder. It may be piece of territory (Crimea, for Russia), a technology, or a weapon: it is whatever a particular state has invested to assert an undisputable sovereignty, one that cannot fail to be recognised by other states, even if they are reluctant to grant such recognition. The purchase of apprehending sovereignty in these terms is, first, that the specific ‘object’ charged with achieving this purpose (and that is desired for that reason) is determined by a given state’s history. Moreover, this past grandeur is always necessarily, structurally, imaginary; regardless of how actually powerful the state in question is or has been; even for the most powerful state setting out to ‘Make America Great Again.’ What it taps into is an imaginary wholeness, the fantasy of a lost unity that is lodged at the individual level. Second, to understand that it is imaginary is to understand exactly where the promise lands, regardless of the prospects of its realisation. The promise works when it reactivates, for every supporter, a deep-seated, nostalgic, and perhaps ultimately unshakeable aspiration to restoring a foregone imaginary oneness of the self, which constitutes an important motivation for us doing the things we do. This affords tools for apprehending the enduring appeal, not of ‘populism’ (per a recently popular term), but, I suggest, of sovereignty itself.
What the series of objets a ultimately hide, however, is the intractable – because logical, structural – dependence that underwrites Westphalian sovereignty as a structure of mutual recognition.Footnote 125 This dependence is not a material vulnerability. The difference is illustrated by an exemplary objet a of sovereignty, nuclear weapons. The most destructive weapon in the history of humanity is designed to mark the state that owns it (or the state that aspires to owning it, and for the same reasons) as possessing what we have called an absolute ‘sovereign agency’.Footnote 126 The weapon’s (negative indeed) power is perceived by nuclear-armed states as affording the foolproof guarantee that their sovereignty will be respected by other states.Footnote 127 The weapon is desired because it is thought to compensate for all other vulnerabilities; including in cases of states whose material capabilities are less developed or their sovereignty is less assured, North Korea being a case in point.Footnote 128 The dependence, then, is symbolic and constitutive; it harks to the intractably social structure of the Westphalian system. This guarantee is necessarily fanstamatic, in the simple sense that it is projected, by the actor, onto the futureFootnote 129 – another negative. But this guarantee also taps into the workings of fantasy in the more theorised sense of a compensatory structure that both designates what the actor wants, and compensates for it not actually being able to have it. A state armed with such agentic, destructive capability does not demand but rather commands the recognition from other states (rivals or not) that its sovereignty is incontestable.Footnote 130 Only this ‘wrenching’ is also acknowledged, by policymakers themselves, to mark the failure of other forms of interaction equally founded on mutual recognition, in particular, of commerce (which rests upon the partners having recognised each other as legitimate partners and is precisely what is suspended by sanctions). This was the diagnosis underwriting the so-called 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which has sought to shift the basis of the interactions between Iran and the group of world powers to a commercial, and away from this security, logic. The latter, then, is a dynamic of misrecognition. Nuclear weapons are founded in a logic of misrecognition that then feeds upon itself.Footnote 131 They presuppose, and then continue to uphold, the impossibility of being recognised in one’s sovereignty (since they constitute the ultimate weapon designed to guard against such prospect: other states will recognise me as a state whether they like it or not if I have a nuclear weapon). They turn a desire to be recognised into a demand, or even a command, for recognition. They are also, however, an implicit acknowledgement of the impossibility of this desire that nonetheless continues to power the costly quest for, or maintenance of, nuclear weapons.
Conclusion
I have sought to theorise the concept of misrecognition that we bring to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. To do so I began by mapping out the field of recognition theory as it has developed through its successive waves of internal critique, identifying the places where the seeds were planted within that scholarship for shifting the focus from recognition to misrecognition, especially in Axel Honneth’s work. I also showed how sovereignty already surfaces in this scholarship, via the question of political agency and with Patchen Markell. Remarkable though it has been for these movements of internal critique, this scholarship has fallen short of theorising misrecognition and of fully bearing out the work of the Hegelian negative. Hence I then returned to Hegel’s original struggle for recognition that had spawned this scholarship. Unpacking the dialectic, I showed that the actual experience of misrecognition, rather than an idealised recognition, was already Hegel’s primary concern. This focus, I then showed in the third and final part, is further developed by Lacan’s concept of fantasy.Fantasy reveals a compensatory structure whereby political actors – individual and collective – are always chasing after what they do not have, their particular objets a, in the hope of being recognised as who they want to be. For example, an invincible state whose sovereignty and identity stand beyond possible doubt or contestation. Lacan shows that self-misrecognition is the initial condition of possibility of acting in the world and of constructing oneself. It is the initial (but not the final) condition of identity constructions.
The misrecognised, desiring, subject that both Hegel and Lacan foreground brings a completely different starting point for apprehending agency than the intentionality that has long held currency as the discipline. Opening up the discipline beyond interest-maximisation to identities has left this model of agency untouched. Hegel and Lacan’s misrecognised, desiring subject offers us a place to start rethinking agency in international politics. In contrast with transparent desire that features in rationalist analyses, he underlines instead how it is only progressively revealed through a convoluted play of self-negations and misrecognitions. Misrecognition, then, is the owl that takes off at the dusk of recognition theory.
Acknowledgements
For their feedback on earlier drafts and their help in improving the manuscript I am grateful to the 2015 EISA Rapallo workshop participants; to the journal’s reviewers; to Benoît Pelopidas, and to Hegel’s favourite animal, ever my companion.
